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How Even A Value-Priced Game Can Be Of High Quality
On Saturday evening, as we were driving back home from an art festival where my wife had sold her artwork, we picked up some fast food because we were too tired to cook dinner. We decided to go to McDonald’s because my wife likes their Southwest Grilled Chicken Salad. Bad decision! Although there were only three cars ahead of us in the drive-thru, it was ten minutes from the time we ordered until we drove up to the pick-up window, which unfortunately has not been unusual of late at this particular McDonald’s location. Once we arrived at the window, the employee then asked us to pull up into a waiting area because it would be another five or ten minutes until the salad was ready. Our food actually came about three minutes later, but before driving away I asked my wife to double-check her salad because the last two times I picked one up for her, either there was no chicken in the salad or they gave us a Bacon Ranch Chicken Salad instead.
Meanwhile, the In-N-Out Burger across the street had a line of about ten cars in the drive-thru, but it managed to deliver each car’s order quickly. How I wish we had gone there instead! In-N-Out has never messed up my order, and their food is always delicious, and with each bite I appreciate how their food is made from fresh ingredients, just as they advertise — unlike my similarly priced McDonald’s burger, which was greasy and bland tasting. There is a substantial difference in quality, both with the service and the product, of the two establishments, and for in my experience, In-N-Out has the highest quality fast-food experience around.
That’s not to say that In-N-Out is the finest dining experience I’ve ever had. I’ve been lucky enough to eat at many fine restaurants around the world, and the best eating experience of my life was a week my wife and I spent in New Orléans, a highlight of the trip being dinner at the Commander’s Palace, which has been listed by some restaurant critics as one of the best restaurants in the America for its exquisite haute Creole cuisine.
Both In-N-Out and Commander’s Palace serve high quality food, but the difference between them is properly called grade. In project management, the term “grade” represents a level or ranking system which can be used to differentiate between items that serve the same essential function, but have different attributes which result in different standards of quality output. Thus, in the food industry, fast-food restaurants are low grade while fine dining restaurants are high-grade; in retail merchandising, Wal Mart is a lower grade than Nordstrom’s; and in video games, value-priced games are a lower grade than AAA games.
The grade of a product or service largely determines its price. That’s why I will spend less than $10 for a meal at In-N-Out and more than $100 for a meal at Commander’s Palace. Similarly, a value-priced game is sold for lest than $20, while a AAA game is typically priced at $60 or more.
However, a high-grade game still can be of low quality: haven’t you played a AAA game where you found the gameplay to be unengaging, the code to be buggy, or the customer service to be poor? Conversely, a low-grade game like Angry Birds or Plants and Zombies can be of very high quality.
The moral of the story: don’t think that because you are developing a casual game, advertgame, or value-priced game that you can’t produce a game of quality. Here are some basic tips to follow:
- Clearly identify who your target players are and what they looking for in a game.
- Study the competition and determine what can make your game stand out.
- Define the player experience that will appeal to your target players and stand out from the competition.
- Manage your game’s scope to ensure that it doesn’t go beyond the limits of your budget, schedule, or team’s capabilities.
- Continually playtest your game with some of your target players and continually iterate until you achieve the desired player experience.
- Bug test your game with quality assurance testers who are not part of your team, and use them to verify that bugs have actually been fixed.
- Make sure that your marketing materials convey the actual player experience without over-promising.
- Listen to your customers and follow up on the problems they report.
If you take pride in your work and aim to be the In-N-Out of your game niche, you can have customer lined up around the block too.
Innovation On Display At IndieCade 2016
The IndieCade Festival is the country’s biggest event dedicated to celebrating games made by independent developers (those not supported by game studios). Last weekend was the ninth Festival, and this year it was held at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, which is home to USC Games, the most prestigious educational program for game design in the country. I was only able to attend IndieCade on its last day, Sunday, but as always, I was impressed by the imagination and passion behind the games on display.
Gaming Is For Everyone
Diversity remains a hot topic in the game industry, and Intel supported this issue by sponsoring the Gaming Is For Everyone exhibit. This was my first stop of the morning, and I could have easily spent the rest of my time in this one room.
Games for Change (G4C) is a non-profit organization promoting and facilitating the development of games for social impact, which includes learning, civics and health. G4C hosts public arcades, funds game design challenges, workshops, and produces the annual G4C Festival, which highlights games for good and brings together developers, social innovators and funders to further develop the field of impact games. Through G4C Lab, it consults with organizations on social impact game strategies and often pair game developers with cause-related organizations to executive produce games. . Among the more fascinating games at its table was We Are Chicago, developed by Culture Shock Games. In this first person narrative-driven adventure game using real stories, you play a high school kid from Chicago who’s best friend has disappeared, is threatened by gangsters at school, and finds the shootings on your block to be the only constant in your life. As you explore your relationships to uncover what really matters, you learn the important of friends and family sticking together to keep each other safe. We Are Chicago has earned a number of honors and received IndieCade 2016’s Developer Choice Award.
I’ve long been an enthusiastic supporter of women in game development, and so I had to stop by the GirlsMakeGames table. Girls Make Games is a series of international summer camps, workshops and game jams designed to encourage girls to explore the world of video games and development. The camps are run by LearnDistrict, an educational company based in San Jose, CA. We are committed to providing students with access to knowledge through our games and programs like Girls Make Games workshops. Their goal to teach 1 million girls around the world how to make games by 2020, and if anyone can do it, they can.
One gentleman I especially enjoyed talking to was Marcelo Viana Neto, an artist, educator, and game designer who also shares an interest in games and education. While earning his Master’s Degree in Digital Arts and New Media at University of California, Santa Cruz, he developed a curriculum for an introductory course on video game game design and development for youth ages 12 and up, with little-to-no game-making experience. The explicit nature of Radical Play is to expose students to a variety of design methodologies, diverse array of game development software, and novel game play experiences to encourage student self-expression through video game design. His course also aims to develop students’ sense of autonomy, by using a variety of classroom management techniques, and allowing students to choose their game-making tools and creative path.
Innovative Input Devices
I decided to put one of the exhibits I visited at the Gaming Is For Everyone pavilion under a separate header for some of the innovative input devices I saw at the Festival. XTH Sense calls itself the world’s first biocreative instrument and next evolution in sensory expression. The XTH Sense harnesses the power of your body to let you interact with connected devices, musical and video software, games and virtual reality in a highly personalized and engaging way. Using multiple biophysical sensors, the XTH Sense captures various sounds from your body, such as muscles contracting, blood flowing, the heart beating, as well as your motion data and temperature. These sounds and data represent your expressive signature. With the XTH Software Suite you can use your expressive signature to control musical parameters, create digital drawings, interact with game mechanics and play in virtual reality (VR). It also makes for a cool wristband.
I was feeling a bit peckish when I game across the most delicious game to satisfy my IndieCade appetite. The Order of the Oven Mitt is a tabletop, completely edible game for all ages that will get you laughing and strategizing while you satisfy your sweet tooth. Created by game designer Jenn Sandercock of Inquisment, this non-competitive game’s components, other than the Sacred Tome, are edible. This includes the main board and the edible-ink pens used to decorate and personalize your Knight. This design choice means the entire sacred space can be eaten, so that there is no evidence left of it. This yummy game is designed foster friendship, curiosity and challenge, and as the cherry on top, it won IndieCade 2016’s Interaction Award.
They say you reap what you sew, and this was never truer than it is with Threadsteading, a two-player game for a modified quilting machine. The quilting machine is a computer-controlled longarm quilting machine, which moves a sewing head around a 12′ x 2.5′ area to stitch 2D paths. Players act as competing commanders of a team of royal scouts tasked with exploring a hex-gridded domain of varying terrain difficulty. Gameplay is turn-based and designed around the unique constraints of the platform. Because the output is essentially a single “pen” position over time, each turn must pick up where the previous turn left off; because the final artifact is a quilt, the rules should encourage an even spread of lines across the surface—ideally, a quilt has neither large unsewn portions nor multiple stitched lines on top of each other. This truly unique game, created by Disney Research Pittsburgh, deservedly won IndieCade 2016’s Technology Award.
However, the most, um, intimate input device I’ve ever used in a game came courtesy of Infinite-0: Dreams of Space. The video game is a conceptual portrait on the life & influence of three generations of women artists: Eugenia Butler, Eugenia P. Butler, and the game’s designer, Corazon Del Sol. The central character is a pair of three legs that the player uses a controller in the shape of a vagina to navigate a series of planetary vignettes, with theme elements that oscillate between absurd dreaminess and narrative vehicles that explore the archetypes of woman-hood. The player scampers through the territory of a creative self, attaining material signifiers that raise her stature in the world, but she also holds power to destroy what she’s created for herself. Dreams, which seeks to embrace the absolute freedom to succeed creatively in respective cultural paradigms, won IndieCade 2016’s Visual Design Award.
Tabletop and Live-Action Roleplaying Games
I spend so much of my time involved with video games that when I go to events like this, I am attracted to the non-video games. Here are a few that caught my eye.
Fracture is a competitive tabletop game where each player strives for diversity. The game is played using a set of smart hexagonal tiles called AutomaTiles by its inventor, Jonathan Bobrow, that communicate with one another to determine the board state. The tiles simulate a population of different colors that simply “want” to be around colors different from themselves. Each player is assigned a color and is given the goal to keep the population together, but make their own color touch only other colors. Players quickly realize they need to manage their ability to prevent others from winning while moving themselves forward. I learned this a bit to late when, just as I was about to make my winning move, I lost to another player.
Keeping the Candle Lit is is a live-action freeform game inspired by blackbox theater techniques and abstract play. Designed by Shoshanna Kessack, who drew her inspiration from being raised as a Conservative Jew, the game immerses players in a story about three generations of women in one family fighting as partisans during the war. Having escaped the grasp of the Nazis, they have taken to the woods of Europe to fight back in armed resistance. The women are from a traditional Jewish background and have spent their lives steeped in their culture and religion. Confronted with this wide-open world fraught with danger, they must decide what part of their past traditions they wish to preserve, and what legacy they will carry with them to be passed down to future generations. A session runs for four hours, requires three players and two facilitators who will also play supplemental roles.
Bad News is an installation-based game that combines procedural generation, deep simulation, and live performance. Set in the summer of 1979, gameplay takes place in a procedurally generated American small town with over a century of simulated history. When an unidentified body is discovered in the town, a mortician’s assistant—the player—is tasked with tracking down a next of kin to inform him or her of the death. To do this, the player explores the town and converses with its residents to discover the identities of both the deceased and next of kin, as well as the current location of the latter. Whenever the player encounters a town resident, an improvisational actor reveals himself to perform the character live, adhering to the character’s generated personality, life history, and knowledge. Created by a team of PhD students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Bad News is designed to showcase the humor, drama, and tragedy of everyday life, and the game won IndieCade 2016’s Audience Choice Award.
Luck: When Planning Meets Opportunity
IndieCade is not just about the games developed by independent game developers, but the indie game spirit. And no one embodied that more at IndieCade than two of my Los Angeles Film School students, Robert Rose and Josh Weston. Although the game they had submitted, Nightmare, was not selected by IndieCade, the two received free passes for their efforts. By accident they walked into a meeting room where a representative from Oculus Rift was being pitched game ideas. Instead of backing out of the room, they decided to pitch the game they had developed in class and were rewarded with the promise of a follow-up discussion. I was thrilled to see their indie spirit paying off.
David Mullich 