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Playing Games On Your Phone Is Good, Actually
I’m a handheld video game enthusiast. I’m sure of this, because people in the office make fun of how much I use and love the PlayStation Vita (hi, CNET!). The first console I owned was a Game Boy, and I’ve owned and loved every Nintendo and Sony portable released since (even the PocketStation). I have a long commute, so I always have a dedicated gaming device in my backpack. But lately, I’ve been spending an exceptional amount of time on a platform I had previously written off: an iPhone.
Now that your eyes have rolled, I want to clarify that I’m not talking about the kinds of games you might traditionally associate with being “phone games,” though I do love those–I’ve played far more than a healthy amount of Marvel Puzzle Quest, and I love playing the cool stuff that crops up in the bespoke iOS scene: Florence, Reigns, Threes, 80 Days, and anything by Zach Gage. Instead, my recent revelation involves the kinds of video games that I would have previously preferred to play on a home console or PC.
Here’s an obvious statement: There’s never been a better time to be a handheld gamer. The 3DS is filled with great, unique first-party Nintendo titles. If you like Japanese RPGs, 2D platformers, and revisiting the finest titles in the original PlayStation library, the Vita is incredibly good, I promise (that OLED screen! That d-pad!). And of course, the Nintendo Switch is a fantastic hybrid console that redefined what kinds of games I could expect from a portable system.
Now, thanks to my phone, I’m getting that same Switch-style buzz once again. I recently took a vacation, and as usual, I packed my three portable consoles to entertain me during periods of extended downtime. The thing is, you can’t always prepare for when or where extended downtime happens. For one reason or another, there were a few times where I felt like playing a video game, didn’t have a console on me, and eventually was content to see what was on my phone so I could stop looking at the ocean or whatever for 15 minutes.
Tired of what I already had installed, I browsed the App Store for anything that caught my eye, and a free demo of Sid Meier’s Civilization VI was what did it. I’d been thinking about picking it up again on Switch, and was now morbidly curious to see how it ran on an iPhone. As it turns out, pretty well. It was visually impressive enough to pop on the small screen, ran smoothly with a smartly adjusted UI, and didn’t appear to have any feature concessions compared to the PC version. It was also the perfect game to play on a portable device: slow-paced and turn-based.
That experience was a turning point for me, and I learned a bunch of things at that moment. One: 30 bucks is too much money to pay for a second copy of Civ VI, especially when it doesn’t have the expansions. Two: Phones are capable of surprising technical performance. Three: The best console is the one you have with you. Four: The convenience of being able to download games wherever is very good. Five: I don’t have five things.
I’m very aware that all the people I see playing PUBG and Fortnite on the train, as well as the entirety of China, are eager to tell me how late to the party I am. But ever since then, I feel like I’ve reconfigured the part of my brain that decides what kind of games would be more suitable as a PC, console, or handheld experience. For certain titles, I’ve managed to overcome the mental hurdle that stops me from tackling my pile of shame with a newfound curiosity that wants to see how differently they play on a phone.
I really enjoy playing short, focused games. But I’ve missed out on a bunch because I’ve always believed that I needed to dedicate a good chunk of time in front of a monitor in order to get through one, and often by the time I get home from work, all I want to do is play more Tetris 99 or, you know, spend time with my family. But ever since I got over myself, I’ve managed to play and finish a bunch of 2018 games I’d put on hold in a week’s worth of public transit rides–games like Donut County, The Stillness of the Wind, and The Gardens Between. I recently picked up Whispers Of A Machine after resolving myself to the fact that I was never going to find the time to sit down at a PC to play it, and as it turns out, my phone is perfect for the point-and-click adventure games I love so much. These more technically conservative titles also perform virtually like-for-like with their desktop versions, which helped eliminate my fears of opting for a “lesser” experience.
Even more graphically demanding titles can impress: I already own two different versions of challenging puzzler The Witness, but never found the courage to finish it. I then bought it for my phone, and I was surprised by how decent it looked. More importantly, I found myself building a different kind of relationship with it–one that I hope will finally help me see the end. If I’m stuck on a particularly hard puzzle, I can easily put it away and mull over it while I do something else. And, because it loads right where you left off, I can take another quick stab at it while I wait for a coffee.
However, I’m not completely abandoning my other handhelds–Persona Q2 and Cadence of Hyrule just came out, after all. I’ll absolutely chase after any game that gets me excited, but I’m finding that the convenience of form factor also plays a big part in what I now choose to pull out. If it’s standing room only on my train, or I want to lie sideways in bed, I’m less hesitant to pull out a Switch. The Switch is great, but it’s a little too big in these instances. It really isn’t a big deal to pull out a phone. Certain games, like The Gardens Between, Elder Scrolls Blades, and various Dragon Quest ports, have the option to be played with one hand in portrait mode, which I am incredibly thankful for.
The relatively lower price points for the iOS versions of games (unless you’re 2K or Square Enix) takes the sting out of having to buy some of these titles for the second time. I’m happy to throw down a few bucks to give myself a portable version of something I know I liked, but want to find more avenues to play. The convenience of being able to download the games over a cellular network instantly helps, too. I had a sudden hankering to play a good tactical strategy game on the way to work the other day, so I redownloaded XCOM: Enemy Within on iOS. It’s not as good as XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen, but it was available and ready to be downloaded as soon as I had that impulse. I saw GameSpot’s Tamoor Hussain tweet about Pocket Cities, so I gave that a try (I liked it). While I was walking, I heard Giant Bomb talk about Brawl Stars on a podcast, so I downloaded that too (I didn’t like it). Everyone is still talking about The Outer Wilds, but it’s a game that I can’t find a spare few hours in front of my PC to download and actually play. The ability to quickly feed my whims on a phone is incredibly useful.
I came to another realization while thinking about my new habits. When the Apple Arcade game subscription was announced in March, I thought it sounded interesting, but outside of a few games that I was already planning to play on other platforms, it didn’t think it was for me. I’m not an Xbox Game Pass subscriber, nor an Origin Access person. I don’t want to pay a monthly fee for access to a bunch of games I’m not going to play. I’m a Nintendo Online subscriber, but I rarely play the included library of NES games because I forget to download them until I’m browsing the library on a bus.
Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick recently expressed a similar skepticism over video game subscription services on an investor call, saying “people do consume video games differently than they consume linear entertainment.”
He explained: “In the case of video games, it is possible that the average user in those 45 hours might be playing one, two, maybe three titles; certainly not 70 titles. In that event, if you play one, two, or three titles and you play them for months in a row–which often happens in [the video game world]–then a subscription model may not be such a great deal for the customer.”
I’m beginning to change my mind, however. I’ve installed and played over two dozen games on my phone since my revelation, most of which I can access on different platforms–but I haven’t. It’s been a pretty positive experience that’s been assisted by the ability to easily jump between games on a whim and download them anywhere I am.
Apple Arcade is currently poised to include a bunch of games that I was already keen on–Sayonara Wild Hearts, The Pathless, Beyond A Steel Sky, Klei’s Hot Lava, and ustwo’s Repair–and if they’re all going to be readily available on my phone there’s a way better chance I’ll actually play all of them. I’ve already got early access to tactical survival game Overland on PC, but I’ll be damned if that isn’t a perfectly-suited portable game. I can totally see the reasoning behind Apple’s big push into the video game space now–they likely want to stay competitive with the likes of Microsoft and Google, of course, but they’re also capitalizing on a different kind of gaming behavior which I’m only just cottoning on to.
An Apple Arcade subscription will also give you access to these games on MacOS and on Apple TV, which seems handy for when I actually have a chance to sit still for a while. Additionally, Apple recently launched the ability to connect Xbox One and PS4 controllers to iOS and Apple TV, which suggests that they’re interested in keeping their platform as flexible as possible. That’s a nice touch, because if there’s one thing I still haven’t come around to, it’s playing complex action games with a touchscreen interface–I don’t know how the people who play PUBG on the train do it.
I’m surprised at how much I’ve come to genuinely appreciate my phone as a portable gaming device. The convenience of accessibility make it incredible for catering to whims, it runs a variety of the games I personally love to play (and in some instances, ones that can’t be found on any other platform), and I can use it in situations where it’d be too uncomfortable to use any other portable. I can’t believe it took me so long to take it seriously–I could’ve actually finished The Witness and become a genius by now, instead of embarrassing myself with a PS Vita for years.
(I’m sorry, PS Vita. I didn’t mean that. You’re still cool, no matter what anyone says.)
from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/playing-games-on-your-phone-is-good-actually/1100-6467947/
Journey To The Savage Planet’s Lets You Make Your Own Laughs With ‘Interactive Slapstick’
Getting humor in video games right is tough. While games share a lot with the medium of film in terms of visual storytelling, the presence of a player introduces an unpredictable variable that can totally blow a joke. You never know if they will miss the gag, look the wrong way at a crucial moment, or ignore a punchline because they’re too busy running, shooting, jumping, or looking for their next challenge.
Humor is a big part of Journey to the Savage Planet, the first-person “explore-’em-up” and freshman offering from Typhoon Studios. Savage Planet puts you in the role of a space explorer hired by the fourth-best space company in the universe, Kindred Aerospace, and dumps you on a strange world where it’s your job to explore and catalog the flora and fauna. The creatures are all a bit goofy, like orb-shaped Dodo-like birds that eat slop and poop valuable resources. Interacting with them elicits one-liners delivered by your AI–which is eager to help you explore, but more eager to warn you about limits to Kindred’s legal liability should you meet a horrific demise.
The writing is part of the humor of Journey to the Savage Planet, but it’s not Typhoon’s main focus in getting you to laugh. The game primarily leverages what creative director Alex Hutchinson calls “interactive slapstick,” where Savage Planet’s systems let you create moments that turn out funny, whether on purpose or by accident.
“I think the problem with humor in video games traditionally is people have tried not to embrace the player,” Hutchinson told GameSpot in an interview during E3 2019. “You know, they basically see it as a movie. So all the humor is in the dialogue. And we have what we hope our witty one-liners happening there as well. But I think the true humor in the game is in the actions the player performs, and it’s kind of an interactive slapstick where the player can launch a joke that ends up paying off on themselves. If we get these systemic collisions, then I think it’s a new form of humor, because it’s based on decisions you made as a player and the wacky consequences that float out of it.”
Hutchinson was previously creative director for Far Cry 4, a game known for its in-game systems sometimes interacting in unexpected and hilarious ways. Moments like those served as inspiration for what Typhoon is trying to do in Savage Planet.
“In Far Cry 4, there was nothing funnier than seeing a bear on fire rush into the camp and kill your friend after you’d thrown a molotov cocktail 30 seconds earlier, and it was a joke you created,” he said while appearing on GameSpot’s E3 stage. “So we’re trying to get that sense of interactive comedy into the game, because one-liners and things are funny, but they’re funny once.”
Making A Bet On Laughs
While those moments feel random or unexpected for the person playing, they’re not completely emergent from the design side. Hutchinson said the process of creating interactive slapstick is partially about iterating unexpected moments, and partially about working systems into the game that the team knows will lead to funny moments.
Hutchinson described filling an encounter with explosive pods, for instance, knowing that one stray shot could turn a battle with a dangerous creature into a deadly fireworks display that could kill the player, or trigger other interactions they might not see coming. But the player’s options are finite, as are the behaviors of creatures and other elements in the game–so from a design standpoint, the team knows how things are going to work, and therefore, is often looking to set up ridiculous situations.
“I think there are some [mechanics and level designs] where you make a bet,” Hutchinson explained. “…You bet this is what can happen, and then we have to work on it and iterate to make sure it sort of happens. And then other [funny moments] just start to emerge and when they emerge, you can reinforce them, you know? Then you can make them happen elsewhere in the game, or encourage the player to do them.”
Mechanical jokes might be the focus of its humor, but there also is plenty in the way of comedic writing in Savage Planet as well. Kindred’s position as the fourth-best aerospace company means that it’s perpetually strapped for cash, so despite the fact you work for the corporation, you’re also bombarded with its ads.
Those commercials are largely gags–they look like those old TV infomercials in which some hapless actor catastrophically tears open a bag of chips or slams a hammer through a wall, then mugs for the camera to show us how frustrated they are with their own foibles. But the ads shown in Savage Planet’s E3 preview, for things like gross space food Grob or a mall for sea monkeys, double as world-building. They set up a satirical universe where even on a distant planet, you can’t escape the ever-present force of someone trying to sell you something.
The Gravitational Pull Of The Gun
Several of Savage Planet’s in-game ads focus on the items you wield in your left hand as you explore. Those items are meant to yield clever ways to solve problems and deal with the hazardous life you encounter–as opposed to the gun in your right hand, which provides a more straightforward solution.
Hutchinson said he had hoped to keep that gun out of your hand in favor of goofier, nonviolent solutions to problems, like using bait to draw creatures toward other things that might eat them, or planting springy pads in their paths that might send them over cliffs.
“The biggest challenge is always to rise above the noise and to offer something compelling and unique that will hopefully resonate with people,” Hutchinson said. “So, you know, we chose to be optimistic and upbeat and colorful and humorous, and also to try and get you to use different tools, you know, than just the gun. Because we’re never going to be the best shooter on the planet.”
Despite Hutchinson’s best efforts, though, Typhoon couldn’t manage to keep a gun out of Journey to the Savage Planet, he said. But the studio is still working on making it possible to avoid firing it if you don’t want to when the game releases in 2020.
“We tried really hard to emphasize that stuff, but this sort of gravitational pull of a gun was too much to bear,” he said. “A player, after playing, was like, ‘I love these tools, but sometimes I just want to shoot him in the face.’ … So the goal for the game is to say that you don’t have to use the gun, but obviously you can–we’ll see how it pans out. At the moment, we haven’t figured out a way to make it so you can beat the bosses without the gun. But that would be the goal.”
“I have a very soft spot for nonviolent approaches in video games,” Hutchinson also said on the GameSpot stage. “There’s a joke at the start of Far Cry 4, which is, essentially, if you just listen to [Pagan Min] and wait, he lets you do the thing you came for without having to murder anybody. So these things, I’ll sneak it in as much as I can–I wanted to do it again on this game. It’s very tricky but we’re getting closer and closer. I can’t promise that there will be a purely nonviolent way through the game, but there’s often a way to avoid [using a gun] if you want.”
from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/journey-to-the-savage-planets-lets-you-make-your-o/1100-6467979/
The Hard Costs Of Making A Game Alone
Game development is a risky endeavor. Between designing, programming, QA testing, and all the other steps involved, you can spend years working on the same project. There’s no guarantee that what you’ll make will be well-received when it’s released and, even if it is, a lack of exposure could still spell financial loss. There’s a lot of pressure to succeed, and failing to meet expectations might mean there’s not enough money for a next time.
And yet, despite this pressure, there are some people out there who choose to shoulder this burden alone. There are over a dozen success stories of indie developers who forged ahead with little to no outside help, managing to achieve both wide-spread critical acclaim for their work and earn enough money to make a living. It’s not a very common occurrence though, and asking those who’ve managed to do it reveals plenty of reasons as to why that could be the case. Developing a game can already be a fairly mentally and emotionally taxing process, and doing it solo without a support system can exacerbate the stress and feelings of self-doubt. Some appreciate this challenge, but others do not.
Jonathan Blow, Derek Yu, Lucas Pope, and Joakim Sandberg each has a history of going it solo in developing at least one indie game that caught traction and went on to be both a critical and financial success. Blow is commonly cited for inspiring the indie game boom that started in late 2008 with Braid, before going on to design the critically acclaimed 2016 puzzle game The Witness. Yu’s initial open-source Spelunky is also a part of that pre-2010 indie boom, and Yu is now working on its sequel, Spelunky 2. Pope made a name for himself in 2013 with Papers, Please and then went on to wow the industry again with 2018’s Return of the Obra Dinn. Sandberg delivered the well-received metroidvania-inspired Iconoclasts in 2018.
Each of the four, as it turns out, express similar experiences of the emotional and mental toll associated with developing a game solo. Pope and Yu had more positive things to say about the process, while both Blow and Sandberg expressed more instances of pressure and stress that accompanied the development of their respective breakout hits Braid and Iconoclasts.
“[You] get mowed under by the sheer amount of stuff there is to do to finish a game,” Blow said when asked about the hardships he had to overcome to finish Braid. “And so, you have to believe that you will be able to finish eventually, which sometimes is hard to believe… If you start believing it’s too much to ever do, and your motivation starts falling, then you get less done every day. And then [you believe] there might be too much to do because your rate of progress toward the goal is not so good. And when you see that, you might get upset about that or depressed about that, and then it gets worse… There just is something fundamentally, mentally hard about working on a game where you’re the main person.
“[It’s] actually easier in a bigger company,” Blow continued. “Because I think you can rest a little bit and you can at least, even if not everybody else is working hard, you at least feel like other people are doing something and that you’re allowed to relax a little bit and the whole thing won’t collapse. Whereas, if it’s your project and without you it won’t go forward, then it’s very easy to feel like it’s just going to die at any minute and that you don’t have the luxury of relaxing when you need to relax. And it’s just a bad combination.”
Blow’s primary motivation for using Super Mario Bros. as inspiration for Braid is that Nintendo’s game is simple and thus fairly easy to emulate. “3D games are a lot of work,” he said. “I told myself, ‘Look, I’ve done all these technical projects that were super ambitious, and I never finished them. So let’s make a project that is technically as easy as we can make it, but put all the effort into the design because the design seems more finishable.” Both Yu and Pope similarly went as simple as they could right from the start. “Yeah, I started small and I just kind of kept the scope to something that I could really do by myself,” Yu said.
All four developers endorse some level of personal restriction at the outset of making a game. On the surface, this can look counterproductive, but it ensures the game is completed in a reasonable time frame–which, in the long run, can curb a lot of the pressure and self-imposed stress to finish. It’s something Blow, Yu, and Pope learned through their experiences prior to their major breakout hits, as all three were members of game development teams before going it alone with Braid, Spelunky, and Papers, Please respectively. As a counterexample, Sandberg placed few restrictions upon himself when he started on Iconoclasts in 2010 (when he was in his early 20s) and the game continued to evolve and grow more complex for years, ultimately releasing when he was in his 30s and more appreciative of the wisdom found in self-imposed restrictions.
“You just have more people, and as a result, more people are struggling.”
Despite the process allowing him to produce one of the more well-known indie gems of 2018, Sandberg hopes that no one ever emulates what he did. “People shouldn’t follow in my footsteps,” he said. “Working this hard solo and giving all their life, essentially, all their time to a project and ignoring everything else… Being that antisocial and not interacting with people enough depletes tetralin in your brain–it creates depression. If you do it for that long you’re going to get depression, regardless if you have genes for it. You need to actually take weekends off, you need to not let friends disappear, you definitely need to be able to support yourself because you shouldn’t go into debt making a game–which I luckily didn’t.”
“I kept telling myself, ‘When the game is done, I can get a life again,'” Sandberg continued. “Instead I kind of collapsed afterward. Yeah, it was entirely my own fault for pushing myself that hard, but it’s easy to fall into that trap. You keep saying, ‘As soon as this is done, it’s going to be great.’ Then your body realizes that you worked a little too hard.”
Sandberg also had to break into an indie game landscape that looks very different than how it was a decade prior. None of the four believe the industry is heading towards some indie game apocalypse that will see the market implode on itself, but they agree the space has been saturated with a lot more titles in recent years–making it far more difficult for individual indie creators to find their audience and thrive. It’s a problem that wasn’t as nearly as big back in 2008. “You just have more people, and as a result, more people are struggling,” Yu said. “I could certainly see from the perspective of people who are trying to enter the space and struggling, it does feel like there’s an indie-pocalypse and they’ve got to work extra hard to be seen, and I do feel some of that pressure myself. And even though I know I have a leg up just having some visibility and being in this industry for a while now, everything still feels a little tenuous, even for me.”
To be noticed and garner some level of critical and financial success, your best bet is name recognition from a previous success. “For someone who’s just starting out?” Blow said, “I don’t know, because you know, the biggest problem is just getting attention for your game. How do I get players to care that we released this game? I have that problem less than a lot of people simply because I’m already established.”
“But then again, if I had made a bunch of smaller games, maybe no one would’ve noticed them. I wouldn’t have been able to financially support myself. You can never guess.”
Without the name recognition, you need to find a well-known publisher, such as Trinket Studios’ Battle Chef Brigade with publisher Adult Swim, or build something that creatively explores a theme in a way that hasn’t been done much (or at all) before, like Matt Makes Games’ Celeste. Regardless of which strategy you go for, both are far more achievable–and thus less stressful to aspire for–when working within a team. As Sandberg can attest, you can do it alone, but it will probably take you much longer and likely lead to hours of crunch. Not ideal if you want to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
Even Pope, who enjoyed his time working on both Papers, Please (which took him nine months) and Return of the Obra Dinn (which took him five years), admits that crunch is just a part of his process now as a solo developer. “I crunched for thousands of hours on Obra Dinn but it was all self-imposed and in the end, I’m happy with how the game turned out,” he said. “I consider long grinds and moments of intense crunch a necessary part of my game development process.”
Blow, Pope, Yu, and Sandberg don’t hate game design. They wouldn’t still be doing it if that was the case. But the pressure to make something that people are willing to spend money on (while maintaining the original vision they’re proud of) can make the process more stressful than they like.
“Some days I sit and think, ‘How many games could I have made instead of Iconoclasts,'” Sandberg said. “But then again, if I had made a bunch of smaller games, maybe no one would’ve noticed them. I wouldn’t have been able to financially support myself. You can never guess.” On this topic, Yu said, “I think if you’re making a commercial product, it’s a lot easier to work on a team to shoulder that burden a little bit… Once money becomes involved, it’s not just that it changes your expectations, you know it’s going to change everybody’s expectations. Because people are going to have to spend money on it and you know that reviewers are going to take it more seriously. You’re thinking about Metacritic. All kinds of stuff come into play that don’t when you’re working on freeware.”
As it stands, in today’s indie scene, it doesn’t seem very probable you’ll create an indie breakout hit when you’re still operating solo.
Since their breakout hits, Blow and Yu have returned to working as part of a team, though they maintain control over the overall design of their games. “Having more people just really helps,” Blow said. “The Witness is a way bigger and more complex game than Braid, and part of the reason that could happen is that we had other people building the engine and making the art. If it had been mostly me, it just would not have been possible to make a game that big.” Yu is currently working with BlitWorks–the studio responsible for porting Spelunky to PSN–to develop Spelunky 2. Blow and Yu’s transition back to working with others is becoming a more widespread standard in recent years, as more indie developers see that a team can stave off some of the stressors that are predominantly associated with indie game development. When Eric Barone decided to put his newest project on hold to work on more updates for Stardew Valley, for example, he wrote in a blog post that he would be hiring help to “take some of the workload off,” and Undertale‘s Toby Fox has explicitly stated he will only make the follow-up chapters to Deltarune: Chapter 1 once he’s put a team together because continuing to make the game on his own is “actually impossible.”
This makes Pope and Sandberg, who have continued to operate solo after their breakout hits, part of a dwindling breed. Though Pope has found success with his follow-up to Papers, Please–Return of the Obra Dinn was met with widespread success and is one of our top 10 games of 2018–he still had to scale back in terms of visuals and number of gameplay mechanics. Though, he admits he does “personally enjoy” the challenge of scaling back a game’s scope far enough so that he can make it himself. Sandberg has adopted a similar approach for his next game, making a plan for something that’s manageable as opposed to trying to design something that’s as big as he can make it. “I don’t hate the idea of [making a game] alone, but I have to start properly,” Sandberg said. “I’m going to prototype [my new game] and see what happens. It’s going to be an action game and smaller [than Iconoclasts], something that I can do alone and add onto later if need be. Which means, no story. The story is what makes a game huge.”
As it stands, in today’s indie scene, it doesn’t seem very probable you’ll create an indie breakout hit when you’re still operating solo. Trying to do so certainly seems emotionally and mentally unhealthy as well, as there’s a good amount of crunch you have to deal with on your own. Which isn’t to say it’s an impossible task, but if you’re planning on following in the mainstream successes of popular indie games such as Dead Cells, Outlast, Into the Breach, Hollow Knight, Doki Doki Literature Club, and Gone Home, then recruiting a well-structured team (or at least finding a good partner) seems to be a far more practical course of action.
from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-hard-costs-of-making-a-game-alone/1100-6467927/
