It is a well known and widely accepted thing amongst game designers that extensive playtesting is important. In fact even if you thought you already knew this, there's a fair chance that playtesting is more important than you think it is. But there's another aspect to playtesting which is less often discussed.
First, let's have a King Machine screenshot:
It's changed quite a bit since I last posted here. The actions available to the player have changed a bit and the interface to them has changed massively. Also, the player's robot now has cute little feet. That last is by far the least important change. But still… CUTE LITTLE FEET!
So here's the thing about playtesting: everyone knows you have to do some. Most people know the testers have to be people not on the design team. But what isn't nearly so widely recognised is that if you testers flag up a problem you have to fix it. Or more precisely, you have three options:
- Fix it.
- Decide not to fix it because different testers disagree over whether it's a problem or not.
- Ship a bad game.
Maybe you're laughing at option 3, but it's a lot more popular than you might think.
A big problem with playtesters is that they're often too polite. They say "I had some difficulties" when then mean "this stinks" or "perhaps it would be better if" when they mean "the current approach is beyond terrible". Fortunately there is a known fix for this problem: watch people play.
About five months ago, I spent some time watching people play King Machine as part of the UI redesign. What I learned was that the game was really annoying. Players mostly knew what they were trying to do quite quickly, then spent literally several minutes fighting with the game to let them do it. At the time I'd been thinking the game needed a better help system, but that wasn't really it. The problem was that even the redesigned UI was too fussy. It was very precise, but it was the bad kind of precise that forces you to care about exact control and play extremely patiently. Players seemed excited by what they could do in the game, but the act of doing it wasn't much fun.
What I did about this was simple: I rebuilt huge sections of the game. It took about six months, on top of the UI redesigns I'd already done.
The problem with this sort of thing is that it's enormously expensive (taking a long time), not very sexy (I haven't been blogging about the process for this reason) and if you get it right then nobody will ever notice. Which is why developers sometimes don't bother and just kid themselves that everything will be OK. But once the game releases, players are consistently unforgiving of bad designs.
Is King Machine's interface good now? Actually, despite all the rebuilding I still don't know. It's definitely a lot better, but more – hopefully minor – changes will likely be needed before it reaches its final form. Fortunately everything gets easier from here. I'll be blogging a bit more about the development now that it's mostly back to more interesting areas and in a couple of months or so there should be some kind of demo release so that people can finally get their hands on the game.
Not that this means the game is close to release yet. Feedback from more people is something I'm really looking forward to, but between then and release the aim is to refine the game further based on their comments. Because releasing bad games really isn't in anyone's interests.
I spent last week fixing my pooter, which was generating pretty regular blue screens of death thanks to a dying motherboard. I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say it works again now!
This week, I've been improving King Machine's basic building UI.
This is a process I've left much longer than I should have done for the simple reason that the old UI worked. I could build more-or-less anything I wanted with it. As a result, improving it didn't seem like a priority. Also, perhaps more relevantly, improving it was less fun for me than designing levels, making machines, creating artwork or coming up with new machine parts.
The problem is, there's a big difference between being able to make something with the old UI and the process actually being smooth enough to be fun. Players in King Machine will need to build a lot of stuff and if that process is fiddly and demanding it's not going to make for good gameplay.
So what have I changed?
The main difference now is that there's no need to use the menu at all to line up objects in basic ways. Clicking on the edge of an object will align the edge of the object you're holding with it and pull those two edges together. This makes it far, far quicker to build walkways and surfaces your bot can travel along. Clicking on a face of an object will align the closest face of the object you're holding to it and pull those faces together. This makes it much easier to build complex structures with all the relevant parts lined up correctly.
I'm also experimenting with automatically switching between grab mode and build mode. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it's quite common to grab something, carry it for a while, then want to build with it at the far end. On the other hand it's annoying to have the game switch modes when you didn't want it to. I'll probably need to wait for playtest results with this feature to work out if I want it.
Next step is to rethink how wiring and logic work. These are the aspect of the game most strongly tied to earlier versions of King Machine, so I've been reluctant to mess with them. On the other hand, you know what they say about sacred cows.
They go "moo".
It's amusing, looking back twenty or even as few as ten years how people
seriously used to debate whether high level languages were a good thing. Programmers – and not just the sort with big beards who wore sandals in winter – would sometimes claim that C was just fine and there was no reason for anyone to use anything else. C++ had rather more advocates, but even they were keen to stress that the overheads introduced by their more expressive language were very small. If you did things "right", you were still in some sense writing assembler code. Allegedly.
But all along there have been people who have been quietly doing different things. Even back in the 90s, Tcl/TK could be used to build a fully functional UI for something in under half an hour. PERL has long been used to do all sorts of text-related things with incredibly short dev times. And ultimately even some of the C++ programmers started to bind Python and Lua to their C++ projects. "Scripting" was the word used for these secondary languages, because to admit that they were being used for programming would be to admit defeat.
Now environments like Flash and Unity take things a bit further. You write essentially your whole program in the local ECMAScript dialect (or something similar) and all the C++ is stuff that someone else has written, somewhere in the library layer. Like a kind of OS. Or, if you prefer, like the CPU's microcode somewhere in that layer you probably never even think about. Not that this is really new either. People have been doing approximately the same – albeit without garbage collection – since the 8-bit era.
But what is new is that programmers are finally realising that this is programming after all. In fact, not only is this programming, it's the bit of programming we really care about. Getting things done!
Guess what I'm doing to King Machine this week? I'm adding another language to the big stack of languages.
KMScript is, despite the obvious sounding name, not really a scripting language. What it actually does is to behave like a little virtual machine inside the game. Does that sound completely insane to you? Particularly for a game that's "almost finished"! (In quotes because of course these projects never are.)
In fact this is not some kind of absurd complexity creep. It's the opposite. King Machine's codebase is a huge, sprawling mass. In order to fully debug it and stabilize it ready for release I have to clean it up. But due to the ad-hoc way it has grown that isn't an easy process. I've spent a long time looking through it, searching for ways to simplify it. My conclusion is that there are very few functions that can be shared further and very little complexity that can be removed. However, most of the game's code I don't need to look at most of the time. When it occurred to me that this was rather like having two layers of functionality, I knew what I needed to do…
Within the game world, things happen like a block is created, aligned with another, activated, rotated by 30 degrees or whatever. These are simple things, but currently they are not simple to work with at the code level. So what I need to do is add a new layer of abstraction. So, for example, instead of having a class for "push beam" blocks that inherits from "block" and implements the push beam effect when used such a block should instead be a block containing a small code fragment in a new language internal to King Machine. In that language, a beam within the King Machine world is a known kind of thing and a "push" is a known action, so the behaviour of this block is very simple to express.
So far so not-very-interesting. But the real payoff here is that things like save files and replays can be encoded in this same language. This unifies all the data in the entire game and means I no longer need to add support in four different places for every feature in the game and keep them carefully synchronized. Even better, testing and debugging becomes so much easier because the level of code sharing will be far higher and all the code will be exercised more often.
OK, I lied, that's not the real payoff. The real payoff is that it's going to be fun! What's the point of being an indie developer if I can't have fun, eh?
On Monday I entered King Machine into the 14th annual Independent Games Festival – "the IGF" to its friends. Here's the trailer I made for the submitted version:
You may have noticed two exciting announcements hidden in there…
First, the talented Ed Fry (@Aeronic) has been persuaded to compose and produce all the music for the game! And yes, this is the same Ed Fry who did the music for Sophie Houlden's Swift*Stitch. I'll make a separate post about the game's music at some point because, as good as it sounds in the above video, there's some even cooler stuff going on with it that video cannot capture.
Second, the game now has proper voice acting thanks to some amazing work by Emma Newman (@EmApocalyptic). Best known as a fiction author, Emma also does voice work for audio books. Being an experienced roleplayer, she wasn't too hard to convince when I suggested she branch out into a spot of voice acting! The voice clip in the video above is possibly a slight plot spoiler, but again I think I'll leave discussion of how the game got its plot for a future post.
Last but not least, a hat tip to all my playtesters and to the numerous people who offered to playtest but whom I haven't yet taken up on it. I still plan to. The game may be getting a beta release of sorts in the next few months and there will need to be a lot of testing of things between now and then… including a lot of testing of stuff I haven't written yet. Speaking of which – back to work! 🙂
It is well known amongst programm
ers that the first 90% of a project takes 90% or the time and then the last 10% takes 90% of the time too (originally observed by a chap called Tom Cargill at Bell Labs, I'm told). King Machine is, I think, just approaching the edge of that last 10%… or should that be "last 90%"? All the basic gameplay mechanics are there. I've been designing tutorial levels for the last couple of weeks. The game runs well even on less powerful machines.
But… from Tom Cargill to Helmuth von Moltke, who said "No plan survives contact with the enemy". Very early playtests (with friends, not enemies) turned up a critical problem: positioning objects was far too hard. I'd noticed this a long time ago when trying to build scenery, but my solution was to add special purpose tools to make scenery easier to build. What I failed to notice was that I'd become very good at the basics of the game to the point where I wasn't really conscious of the extent to which fundamental actions were still quite hard.
My usual approach to UI design is to ask the player, immediately after they experience difficulty, what their ideal interaction would be to solve whatever they're trying to do. The trouble with moving things in 3D is that their answers were along the lines of "I want to put that there!". That's an objective, but isn't an action any UI can support directly because it's too high level. So more questions had to be asked and more frustrating failures had to be watched until I had a better understanding of the problem. The main diffculty, it turned out, wasn't so much transforming objects as working out where they were in the first place!
The typical solution to this is to use shadows – and that's certainly some use – but there are two problems with this. First, it means that the game is really limited in how it uses light sources, because slightly weird lighting conditions could make object positioning hard again. Second, shadows are only available in Unity Pro. This is a piece of software I definitely want to invest in when I have the opportunity, but right now King Machine has no development budget at all. However, shadows do provide a clue as to how best to proceed.
The key observation is that intersection between objects is already quite easy to spot, so the main problem is in visualising non-contact relationships. These matter mainly when the player is planning to drop something. But dropped objects – in King Machine at least – always fall downwards. So what matters most is the relationship between the held object and what is below it. A bit of playing about with different kinds of HUD and similar gadgets quickly convinced me that the answer needed to involve rendering something within the 3D game space. A visible guide downwards from the centre of the object helped a bit, but a few more playtests showed it wasn't solving the problem. Two difficulties remained. First, if the centre of the object wasn't above anything then it was just as confusing as ever. Second, the angle of the held object made no difference.
The current (final?) solution involves guides at all corners of the held object, with the bases linked to give a better sense of their relative positions. Will this be good enough? I won't know until it's been tested…
In the meantime there are sound effects to sort out. And the artwork needs improving. And I need to design some more levels. And I have something fun planned for the help system… but it's only five and a bit weeks until the IGF deadline. It would be nice to enter if I can get the game ready in time. Or at least 90% ready!
Tuning joint behaviour in King Machine is difficult and not very sexy, but now everything's working to my satisfaction I can make cool things like this:
Work on King Machine has been very busy for the two months since the last demo. A lot of that has been boring stuff like fixing bugs, but there are exciting new features too. Here's another demo video showing off some cool stuff you can do…
(Or watch on YouTube in HD.)
Just need to fix a few more particularly hairy bugs and I can get on to the fun business of level design!
In the announcement post for King Machine I promised a big, long waffly post about the game and my plans for it. So here it is…
Machines Want To Be 3D
In the past I have actively avoided developing games with true 3D gameplay because with relatively few exceptions the games I enjoy playing the most have all been essentially 2D even when employing 3D graphics. So when I was learning Unity 3 I spent a lot of time thinking about which kinds of gameplay really worked well in 3D. Exploration games are good – and I love the idea of doing a really good 3D maze game – but that doesn't make a good first project because there's a huge amount of art and level design to do and not much game design or programming. Racing games and first person shooters aren't really my thing (and arguably aren't 3D anyway, but I'll try not to get too sidetracked).
It was when I started thinking about the third dimension as a way of not getting things tangled up that I ended up thinking about connecting things and wires and machines. This wasn't much to do with game design at first. Some of my PhD work involved automated layout of wiring for digital circuits… it gets pretty nightmarish in 2D! But then I remembered the old 2D versions of King Machine had similar problems. Not surprising really, since 2D spaces are just difficult generally. If you like fiction that makes you think I recommend A.K.Dewdney's 'The Planiverse' for some great discussion on this topic.
Machines seem like they naturally want to be 3D. So I had my project… sort of.
Too Big To Be Small
There was one big problem. For some time I've been working as a freelance programmer, working on games projects for as much of my time as I could get away with. Like most designers in a similar position I've been trying to gradually transition to full time games work. Generally this is all good, but it does place a strict constraint on my projects: any big project must be commercial. King Machine has, historically, been my favourite example of the kind of game I personally love but which could never possibly be commercial because it's just too geeky and inaccessible.
It was a conversation with my sister Josie which changed my perspective. I'd lent her my copy of Logicomix (because it's excellent – you should read it) and while we were chatting about it I offered to explain to her some stuff related to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. I tend to feel that the way mathematics is approached in academia makes ideas much less accessible than they could be and that most concepts can be explained to anyone reasonably bright provided you don't mind sacrificing a little bit of the rigor expected of actual proofs.
Later it occurred to me that this same attitude is something I should apply to games. King Machine is a huge amount of fun. So, as a game designer, I should be able to take the game and present it in a way that makes it comprehensible and accessible to a much wider audience. A combination of good user inferface design, gradual introduction of concepts and comprehensive help resources should be enough to get pretty much anyone playing and enjoying the game.
Finding the Core Gameplay
The first step in making a complex game as accessible as possible is to decide what it's really about. At first King Machine seemed pretty easy in this respect, since I knew I wanted it to be about building machines. The problem with that is that building machines isn't a goal as such, it's a means to an end. This begs the question of what that end should be. Of course I could make the game a pure sandbox, but that feels lazy to me. I want to let players play in a sandbox style if they choose to, but for some players that's just not satisfying.
Machine-based play is ridiculously versatile, so as I began to make notes about possible goals and play styles the list just got longer and longer and picking the right option started to look a bit hopeless…
…until I realised I was looking at the problem the wrong way. Instead of picking one goal I could pick all of them. The danger is that doing this sorts of thing inhibits the player from learning, but I don't think that needs to be the case. If each level gives the player a new kind of task and then provides them with the support they need to discover the solution that should keep each experience fresh whilst gradually teaching them what they can do with their machines.
That just left difficulty levels. The word "accessible" has a bad reputation in certain quarters these days because it's seen as a euphemism for "easy". I don't think that's right, but certainly the two can be related in the sense that it is difficult to find ways to present hard challenges without causing bad play experiences for some players. In the case of King Machine the approach I feel most inclined to adopt is optional challenges on the same levels as compulsory problems. That way the player can give some thought to anything they can see but doesn't need to feel as though they're stuck. Also, having seen a challenge, the player can always come back later if they have a flash of inspiration or simply learn a new trick which they think might help.
Was That Waffly Enough?
Hmm… I still have over a dozen more things I wanted to talk about. Maybe trying to fit all this into one blog post isn't such a great idea? The rest can wait for now, I'm off to do some more programming!
OK, so as those of you who read my previous post will realise, this is really King Machine 5. Given that it's going to be the first commercial release and is radically different from the previous incarnations it seemed sensible to reset the numbering.
I'll make a big, long, waffly post about the project sometime soon. For now, here's a shiny video:
(Or alternatively watch it on YouTube in HD.)
And in case you don't have a chance to watch it all, there are Twitter and FaceBook accounts for you to follow and like respectively. (Hey, don't look at me like that, all the cool kids are doing it!)
Twitter: @fastramdesign
FaceBook: www.facebook.com/fastramdesign
I've written the same game four times.
As with film trailers, a brief glimpse of a game is often more exciting in our imaginations than the reality. Puzzle classic The Incredible Machine was like that for me. It was a long time before I got to actually play it. By the time I did, the gap between the game itself and the way I'd imagined it spoiled most of the fun. Fortunately, one of the upsides of being a game designer is that if someone else has inexplicably failed to make the game you wanted to play, you just make it yourself.
I first wrote King Machine in BBC Basic on the Acorn Archimedes in 1993. The idea was to make a game that really was about machines. Not just interactive scenery, but machines that really did things. In King Machine the game board was a grid. Each cell of the grid was a machine part. You could only do one thing to a machine part: "use" it. The simplest parts, wires, responded by using another adjacent machine part. Other parts rotated or moved one another or shot beams across the map which did various things to whatever they first struck.
The first King Machine was a lot of fun, but tremendously slow to play. Each team controlled small, furry, bipedal characters who could carry machine parts around. We only ever played one proper match. During this match, one team built a machine that flew along a short way above the ground, pulling each block below it up by one cell. This strategy was devastating, leaving the other team in a – literal and metaphorical – hole from which they had no chance of emerging.
The reason the game was only played once is because it obviously needed tweaking in some way to prevent the "earthquake machine" strategy from dominating. In the process of thinking about what needed to change I realised that the game needed a concept of a composite object. That is, it needed to be possible to stick things together. To get that kind of power back in 1993 meant I was going to have to rewrite it in ARM Assembler.
The second version of King Machine took a while to debug, but by the time I'd finished it the game was easily the best thing I'd ever written. We played it exactly once. It was great! But again the game's first play exposed a serious problem: building things took too long. Each team built a machine, they clashed, then the game was effectively over as soon as one machine couldn't fly anymore because rebuilding was so clearly impractical.
It was a while before King Machine 3 was written, but by the time it was complete it was miles ahead of KM2 in terms of technology. It was faster, supported far larger maps, included a 'factory' system allowing complex machines to be constructed in a single turn within each team's factory area and had a much better UI. We played it exactly once. Two expert teams faced off. The game took several hours. It lasted only one turn. One team built a giant robot which completed all their objectives in a single move! Everyone agreed the game was a lot of fun, but that it would have to be tweaked in some way before it could be played again.
Many years then passed. My interest in King Machine returned as the era of free-to-play internet games arrived. For fun, I began developing an updated version of King Machine in Java. This one was played zero times. It reached a fully working state, but still more alpha than beta. However, by this point it was much harder to find time for the kind of deep playtesting the game needed. Before testing was complete I shifted my work life to full time game development. King Machine development was paused for the simple reason that after working on games all day I didn't particularly want to spend my evenings working on a different game.
The key new feature of KM4 was mini-maps. An entire machine could be stored in a single map cell, with inputs and outputs interacting with the main map. This greatly improved the depth of gameplay, meaning that machines which did logically complex things no longer had to be physically large.
Perhaps most interesting from a design perspective, though: even having never played KM4 I was on some level aware of problems. A couple of years later I was explaining KM to a friend who had never seen it. He asked why I didn't ever go back and release it. I didn't really know at the time, but I thought about it afterwards. The reason is: even KM4 still had gameplay which was too much about the details of how the machines worked. If your opponent was doing something you didn't like your first recourse was to pull chunks off their machine. If you wanted to defend what you were doing, the main strategy the game rewarded was to build big walls and keep the enemy away. "Good" machines weren't usually clever, they just did simple things fast.
I've written the same game four times, but I still haven't got it right.
So why tell this story now? As you've probably guessed, this is the secret project I mentioned in my previous entry. King Machine is coming back. The details can wait for next year, but suffice to say that this time I'm doing what I explictly declared to be impossible previously: making it a commercial project. Not that I've changed my perspective on the subject significantly. There's a good reason why this is now possible. All will be revealed!
