Intelligent Design

Zuma Blitz is a game of skill, speed and precision in which players must shoot balls at other like-colored balls with the objective of making clusters, thus making them disappear. Sometimes these balls will have bonuses on them, and eliminating them nets you the specified bonus.

Quick! Get those multipliers!

These bonuses disappear rather fast, which means that you have to act quick if you want to get those extra points. It also means that sometimes you spot a bonus, shoot a ball at it and watch it disappear before the shot reaches it.

So unfair!

Except it’s not. The game has the incredibly good sense of letting the bonus linger invisibly on the ball for a small period of time, so that the player will still get the bonus if it disappears while the shot is in mid-air – or if even if it it disappears just before the player takes the shot. The bonus might not be visible, but the audio and visual feedback remain.

No doubt that the spirit behind this mechanic is to be extremely forgiving with players in the social space. PopCap knows that there is no room in that space for unforgiving mechanics, and they clearly design their games (especially the Facebook versions) with that in mind. In turn the player, instead of feeling cheated, feels a sense of accomplishment for making the shot in the last possible second.

¡Quiero y tu mamá en pantaletas!

Let’s start with an exercise: imagine a game. It’s a card game. A card game you’re supposed to play in teams of 2 vs. 2, where points are wagered and each match, which consists of several independent games, is played to 24 points. A match can end in one game just as likely as it can end in 5, 8 or 15. It’s a game where cheating is allowed, and getting caught costs you points. It’s a game where you’re supposed to shout, where you’re allowed to curse your opponent’s whole ancestry, question his intelligence and mock his inability to beat you, bang your hands on the table and throw your cards face up when you’ve won a hand. It’s a game where the winner is the toughest, the smartest, the quickest and wisest. If you’re actually attempting this exercise, then most probably your imagination has imploded by now. Unless you’re from Venezuela or some other Latin American country – because in that case you know very well that I’m talking about Truco.

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Spoiler Alert: Probably not safe if you care about the character development in Dragon Age: Origins and, to a smaller degree, in Chrono Trigger. Although, to be fair, the whole point of the article is that you shouldn’t care.

Bow in hand, my super hot archer-chick was standing there, looking at her adventuring party. A mix of races, classes and personalities. These weren’t just any characters, these were the dudes and girls that had stood by her as she kicked butts across all corners of a an entire continent. Her friends, her allies. And I could not care less about most of them. (more…)

Today I attended the introduction class to a week-long seminar on iPhone development (one year and half too late, probably) which will be in charge of several representatives of Mobivery, a Barcelona-based mobile content development company which currently has 190 applications in the Apple App Store.

Besides from a very informative fly-through of the whole process of getting an app into the App Store – starting with “you need a Mac” and going all the way to “you can choose from different pricing tiers” – the representative presented us with some data from different case studies taken directly from the apps they have developed and put up for sale or download. (more…)

People all over were talking about it and, to boot, I was in the process of applying to Zynga for a summer internship so the only logical choice at the moment seemed to be to just go to my Facebook profile and enroll in Mafia Wars. Four months later, with a slightly nostalgic look in my eye, I clicked my last Mafia Wars button. I felt, above all, relieved.

Mafia Wars is defined all over as a glorified spreadsheet. An evil glorified spreadsheet, if I may say so. There’s not much more to it than a messy UI, heavy on the black and yellow, and a lot of stats. Which is, of course, enough to hook me for eternity.
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I had been wanting to play Henry Hatsworth for a while before I finally got the chance, and so when I did I realized that I had a lot of things to say about it. First I talked a bit about the flow of the game and then I posted a note about its starting screen. After the latter got featured in Gamasutra, I received a surprise email from none other than Kyle Gray himself.
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I have been playing Henry Hatsworth for a while now, and have been somewhat enjoying it, though it definitely has its ups and downs. Something I cannot stand, however, is the starting screen.

Don’t put anything in your game that goes against the player’s wish to play. That’s a good rule to design by. And the very first thing you encounter when you turn Henry Hatsworth on seems to go against that.

It’s a very simple flaw: the start menu is located in the bottom DS screen, the one we are accustomed to interact with using the stylus. But for some reason the screen won’t take stylus input, so you must use the D-pad and buttons no navigate it. It looks like a minor detail, but the game definitely sends some mixed messages by not letting players interact with it in the most intuitive way.

The complete antithesis of this is Rhythm Heaven. That game is all about using the stylus to touch and flick, touch and flick. And the starting screen won’t even let you play them game unless you prove you can flick with the stylus. After you turn it on a little icon appears, prompting you to flick it. Want to play this game? You better learn how to flick!

I find it hard to believe that Henry Hatsworth‘s starting screen was playtested much, if at all. True, it’s just a starting screen. But it’s precisely the first thing your players will interact with, so you better take good care of it.

This weekend I finally got to borrow a copy of Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, a game designed by Kyle Gray, an ETC alum, when he was still working at EA.

I had the pleasure to meet Kyle last year at the ETC when he came and gave us a very good talk on how he successfully pitched Henry Hatsworth to the EA higher-ups and got it green-lit. Right then I made a mental note that I should play this game as soon as it came out, and it wasn’t until now that I actually got the chance.

Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure is, as the title cleverly points put, a puzzle-adventure game: think Bejeweled meets Super Mario Bros. Since the game is made for the DS, it’s very convenient to have the Sidescroller Platformer on the top screen and on the bottom one the Puzzle, where the stylus is most helpful. (more…)

Below are spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for the Nintendo DS. Though nothing from the story is spoiled, be warned that a whole temple is.

In my opinion, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is an amazing game. I’ve been a Zelda fan for a long time, however I had never played a handheld Zelda before. I expected to be overwhelmed by a full scale Zelda experience and in turn was pleasantly surprised with a much more streamlined, to-the-point adventure. This is not, however, the point of this post. For in this great game there was one thing, one amazing thing, that I just could not take: the Temple of the Ocean King.
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Magic: the Gathering is largely responsible for my first steps to becoming a game designer. I started to look games seriously in the eye around the same time that I discovered Magic, and have come to cherish the process of assembling a 60-card deck as a sort of ritual. When I get an idea for a deck, I go into a trance. Even now, several years after I bought my last Magic booster pack, Magic stays constant as my foremost example of design excellence. But now the rules are changing and I find myself lost in the confusion. (more…)