The Tokyo Game Show is here, and we’re keeping you updated! Japan Correspondent Eric Schabel is following the news out of the show, and the rest of us are keeping up Stateside.
Also coming up: Our impressions of the PlayStation Move’s launch titles, as well as reviews of games both high-profile and under-the-radar.
In these games, players start with a very basic deck, usually consisting of ten cards, and use them to purchase and/or conquer additional cards with stronger powers. Ascension is unique among its deck-building peers in that there is not a set matrix of cards available for purchase. Instead, six cards are laid out from the 100-card “portal deck” to form a center row between the deck and three stacks of “always available” cards of two slight upgrades over your starting cards and an easy-to-defeat enemy of essentially infinite numbers. The cards in the center row are immediately replaced as they are purchased or banished (sent to a stack called “the void”, to distinguish it from each player’s personal discard pile), providing a constantly-shifting environment to which players must adapt as the game progresses. From two to four players are given a starter deck consisting of ten specific cards, drawing five of them to begin the game and at the end of each round (after discarding any remaining).
Cards come in one of three types. The most common are Heroes, which are one-shot effects that are played to generate runes (money), power (combat strength), honor (victory points), additional draws, and/or the ability to banish weaker (read: “starter”) cards from your deck in order to improve your overall draws. These Heroes come in four types, representing their general flavor and abilities. Like Heroes, Constructs also come in the same four types and generate useful effects, but unlike their counterparts Constructs remain active once played, providing their benefits every round. Both Heroes and Constructs are purchased by spending runes. The third type of card are Monsters, which can be defeated with power. Once defeated, Monsters are banished from the center row (rather than added to the player’s deck); in addition to providing honor, many Monsters also have an additional ability when defeated, which can include forcing opponents to discard one or more Constructs that they have in play among other effects.
Each game begins with a set number of Honor points (represented by plastic stones in values of one and five) available and ends at the end of a complete player cycle after that starting pool has been exhausted. Every non-starter card is worth an indicated number of Honor in addition to the stones gained via defeating enemies and/or the abilities of cards. Whoever has the highest Honor score wins, with ties being broken in reverse turn order — in other words, the first player always loses ties and so on down until the last player, who always wins ties.
I greatly favor Ascension over other deck-building games. I like the flexible structure of the player turn and multiple potential paths to victory. In my experience, too many games of (non-expanded) Dominion degenerate into “acquire tons of gold, purchase largest VP cards, repeat until game ends”, and I didn’t like the “dungeon or village” action segregation of Thunderstone, which frequently resulted in “wasted” turns during my only play of it thus far. Ascension occupies something of a sweet spot in between the other two, always allowing the players options without dead draws (aside from a single rune or single power without any way to draw more cards). This keeps the action moving; a game of Ascension can usually be completed in an hour or less. Also greatly in Ascension‘s favor is the quick set-up time, as there is no need to randomly select which cards are available for a given session; you just keep the “always available” and starter cards separated (easy to do when scoring at the end of the game), shuffle the other half, count out honor stones, and you’re good to go for another session.
Available for around $40 from most game retailers or around $36 on Amazon, the 200-card Ascension is a little lighter than Dominion (500 cards) or Thunderstone (over 500), but makes up for it somewhat by including the plastic Honor stone counters and a game board that provides the layout and turn reminders — plus unlike the other games, you use all of the cards every time instead of just a subset. The board isn’t really necessary, however, and makes the game ship in a box about three or four times larger than would otherwise be required. Ascension-specific sleeves and a card box are forthcoming, but you should be able to pick up generic equivalents for a nominal fee (the cards fit into Magic-sized sleeves) at any gaming store. I would recommend doing so, as the one complaint I really have about Ascension is the feel of the cards while shuffling. I’ve shuffled a lot of cards, both sleeved and unsleeved, and Ascension‘s kept giving me a nagging sensation of almost tearing the lamination off while doing so. Unfortunately sleeved cards don’t quite fit into the provided box insert, which is fairly generic (unlike Dominion’s custom-tailored card-sorting tray). It’s an odd flaw considering the game’s pedigree, but ultimately a minor one for an otherwise top-quality game.
Editor’s note: Brad Talton is an independent game designer and developer. What kind of games? Video games? Board games? Card games? Well, yes. His company, Level 99 Games, creates all kinds of geekiness. In a series of columns here at SBG, Brad shares insights into the game creation process. In this installment, he talks about when the rubber hits the road: taking all your planning and assets and starting to put everything together.
Before I can start putting together the game itself, I have to get graphics in place so that I can have an approximate idea of how it will look. Since the artist and graphic designer are probably not even close to finished with the game’s resources, the developer has to make do with simpler versions for the present. These approximate versions (or proxies) will have the same general shape as the final game resources, and are easily swapped out for the real thing when the time comes.
Even though I don’t have the actual versions of resources ready yet, there’s no time to waste in creating the foundations of gameplay. I know what the final resources will be shaped like, and that’s all it takes to put them into place in the design of menus and interfaces.
Before starting on any other part of a project, I work on the core of the game. In SPCF3, the core is the versus mode. It’s the easiest part to begin with, because there is no need to write artificial intelligence. In fact, at the early stages, you’ll want to be in control of both sides of the field so that you can test out everything from both players’ points of view. It would be terrible if something worked differently for player 1 than it did for player 2, after all.
The core engines for the game are open source and generally bug free. These days, very few game designers write their core engines from scratch. Even bigger-name game developers usually outsource this aspect of design to dedicated game engine companies. (Those are all the other names you see but don’t recognize before the title screen.) Modules like physics, graphics, and sound are just too complex and easily reusable to be worth writing over again for every game.
Since the game engines are in place, all the developer needs to do is coax them to work in the way that the game needs. Even if all a game requires is simple physics, 2D graphics, and mono sound, this is not always an easy task, and requires a good degree of programming knowledge. Each engine behaves in different ways, and so has its own learning curve and nuances to master.
Once the foundations are laid, it’s time to start working on rule enforcement. Video games, unlike board and card games, enforce their own rules. There’s a fairly common mantra: “If the game lets me do it, then it’s not cheating.” (I had to tell cousins this every few minutes back when I was throwing cheap punches with Dhalsim in Street Fighter 2.) This is an unfortunate expectation of video games, but because players expect a game to force them to follow rules, the developer has to rise to this expectation.
Rules are more than setting boundaries to the stage and making sure the match ends when someone runs out of life. It’s important to ensure that damage is assigned correctly, an attack strikes with the right amount of force, and that your balancing factors such as defensive power and offensive power are actually working as you intended.
The rules are different than the actual game balance. When making a game, I try to keep the characters’ information as separate as possible from the actual game systems. The information that describes a character (how much power they have, how fast they are, what their defense is like) are commonly called tuning variables. By storing these outside the game in configuration files, the developer give himself a means to rebalance the game after each round of play testing, as well as to make patches and updates without recompiling the entire project. Keeping all this information in separate files is what allows game developers to make a 1 MB patch to a 5 GB game without forcing you to download the entire game again.
Once the core of gameplay is established, I move on to what I tend to think of as a ‘game skeleton’. The skeleton consists of the main menu and submenus that form the game’s workflow. The skeleton gives you access to the different game modes and menus, even if those are still blank at this point. It’s sort of like a Christmas tree that you can decorate at leisure with new game modes and options.
At this point, the workflow of the game is established, along with what players can do, and how the menus will pull together. Menu design is actually one of the more important and often overlooked aspects of a game’s execution. A poorly crafted workflow or a visually weak menu system can cripple user experience. If the user can’t get to the actual game content within 15 seconds of the game launch (but shorter is even better), then there are problems with the streamline of the interface. Of course, as a developer debugs and tests the game, these shortcomings quickly become apparent.
Personally, I’m a bit spotty in my game development habits. I tend to build different elements onto my game skeleton in no particular order. Since many elements will require coinciding development, this isn’t a bad strategy—arcade mode is built on top of versus mode, and story mode is built on top of arcade mode. But training mode is also built on top of versus mode. So which one to do first? This is an issue of pure developer preference.
The only important point here is to build upwards. I try to intuit which modes depend on which other modes, and which portions of my design can be re-used and re-purposed elsewhere in the game, and then attack the problems of the game in that order. Of course, this is mostly guesswork, but a little experience goes a long way in helping a developer to make the right guesses and save serious hours of development time.
So with a game plan for what order to build my game modes, there is still the task of actually doing so.
In the next installment, Brad will look at transitioning between game modes, building a workflow and creating dependencies.
Character art by Victoria Parker for Level 99 Games.
While the industry divides the year into quarters, we realize that there are really three parts to the year: the barren early months, the gimmicky, convention-filled summer and the action-packed holiday season. This time, we look at May through August.
Chris Ingersoll: How absolutely tiny the screens on standard-issue DS systems are. I picked up a midnight blue XL along with Dragon Quest 9 and now it’s almost impossible for me to even look at my old Phat (kept to serve as a glorified GBA SP should the need arise) or a friend’s Lite. I’m actually (half-heartedly) considering not picking up a 3DS at launch so I don’t have to go back to a non-XL screen. Honorable mention goes to the fact that Nintendo published DQ9 themselves, thus allowing me to pick it up at launch without having to pay the $5 “Square-Enix tax”.
Justin Last: Monday Night Combat (XBLA). I wasn’t expecting to like this one and only really decided to buy it because it was essentially free after deciding ahead of time that I was buying the other four titles in this year’s Summer of Arcade. Boy am I glad that I did, because it has turned out to be my favorite of the bunch. It’s equal parts TF2 and Defense of the Ancients, and I can’t stop playing it. Classes that are well-balanced, a great mish-mash of shooting, game show commentary, and upgrading, and a great co-op mode make Monday Night Combat a standout that I didn’t expect.
Andrew Passafiume: Nothing was more surprising these past three months than what Nintendo had to show at their E3 press conference. The 3DS is probably the biggest surprise for a lot of people, but I was a bigger fan of the new games they had to show off. A new, incredibly original Kirby game, a new Donkey Kong Country from Retro Studios, and the return of Kid Icarus. Nintendo has clearly learned from their mistakes and delivered one of the most surprising and entertaining press conferences I’ve seen from them in a long time.
Graham Russell: Protect Me Knight (XBLIG). When I first heard about this $3 Indie Games title, I obviously didn’t have high expectations. But this is the best 45-minute-long party game out there. Ancient’s turn to downloadables after Big Bang Mini looks promising, though it’s unfortunate that this wasn’t a full XBLA release. With the retro homages, RPG elements and a solid base mechanic of princess protection, it’s worth a purchase for everyone.
Shawn Vermette: Civilization V coming out this year. This or the 3DS topped my list of surprises this quarter, but given the fact that I have yet to get a chance to actually see the 3DS for myself, Civilization V wins out. Civilization is by far the game series I’ve spent the most time playing in my life, and while I was hoping for Civilization V to be announced at E3, I harbored no hopes or illusions about it coming out before the holidays of 2011. So I was very surprised, and ecstatic, to hear that it was not only in development, but scheduled to be released this September!
Chris Ingersoll: Can I say the entire Wii line-up for this portion of the year? I’ve never liked Mario platformers, so I didn’t even have Galaxy 2 to carry me through the absolute dreck that was foisted upon the system these past months. I gave Fragile Dreams and Monster Hunter Tri a shot, but they both fell incredibly flat for me and nothing else has really grabbed my attention.
Justin Last: Don’t get me wrong – Mafia II is a fine game. I just wish that it was actually an open-world game instead of a game that happens to take place in a large world. As someone who has played through GTA IV and both expansions, Just Cause 2, Crackdown, and Infamous where are the optional objectives? Where are the side missions? Where is anything to do that isn’t the main storyline? The narrative is great, and the characters are fleshed-out, but Empire Bay exists only to tell Vito’s story instead of becoming a living, breathing entity.
Andrew Passafiume: Microsoft usually gives us a pretty entertaining press conference, but this year it was a huge misfire. Despite showing off some cool looking games, making Kinect the focus of the majority of the event was a huge mistake. None of the games appealed to the people they were showing them off to, and the technology, while impressive, never really grabbed anyone the way the Wii did when it was unveiled. Most gamers will look past the Kinect (and its large price point) and instead spend their money on the games they’ve been buying for years.
Graham Russell: Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii). Wow, how voice acting can torpedo a game. What could have been a pleasant JRPG in the vein of Baten Kaitos and Tales of Symphonia ends up just being grating due to the horrible voice track. Of course, you can turn it off, but then you have awkward silent pauses while on-screen characters move their mouths. It’s still a decent experience, but just not the great one I was hoping for.
Shawn Vermette: Honestly? My biggest disappointment is finding out that my computer overheats when I try to play StarCraft II. If I have to go with an industry disappointment though, it would definitely be Risk: Factions. I went into it expecting a lot more than there was. Sure, for the first time ever I can play classic Risk and mission based Risk online. However, the factions part of it and the actual implementation of the online game don’t really work for me. In the few games I’ve played online, I’ve had bugs crop up repeatedly, and the factions offer no gameplay differences whatsoever.
Chris Ingersoll: Dragon Quest 9, full stop. I’ve put over 260 hours into this game as of my sending this in, and will probably put in at least another hundred before the new Professor Layton title finally pries open my XL’s deathgrip on the cartridge. I haven’t put this much play time (especially condensed into so little real-world time — unlike, say, Animal Crossing) into a non-Pokemon game in forever.
Justin Last: My relationship with the Wii is a strange one. It sits unused for months at a time until a new Nintendo game comes out and then I can’t peel myself away from it. Metroid: Other M is the most recent game to convince me that getting a Wii wasn’t a poor choice. I love Samus’s adventures, and it’s nice to see the series taking a chance with a new control scheme and an emphasis placed on close-quarters fighting. Other M is absolutely gorgeous, and the Bottle Ship makes for some great level design. I’m falling in love with the series all over again one missile expansion at a time.
Andrew Passafiume: Updating the already excellent formula found in Grand Theft Auto IV and bringing it to the Wild West was the best thing Rockstar has done in quite some time. Red Dead Redemption truly impressed with it’s excellent story, characters, and truly immersive game world that was unlike most settings you would find. With the added bonus of an addictive multiplayer component, RDR is easily one of the best games of the year, and will still be remembered years after its release.
Graham Russell: Valkyria Chronicles II (PSP). Got in under the wire, didn’t it? Blur was on top for a few months, managing to survive E3 and its aftermath, only to get toppled on the last day. VCII is not quite as cohesive an experience as the original, and it suffers a bit from asset reuse. But it seems Sega knew that it couldn’t beat the original, so it tries to create its own advantages. Customization, branching class paths and co-op missions help it do that.
Shawn Vermette: As much a Final Fantasy fan as I am, I have to tip the hat to Square Enix’s other major RPG franchise- Dragon Quest. Dragon Quest IX has won me over. The classic feel and the polish on the game easily made it my favorite game thus far. Although, looking ahead, that may change in September.
Mafia II looks great, and the narrative is fun to play through. On paper a 10-12 hour sandbox sounds great, but this sandbox only has sand in it. There are no shovels, no buckets, and no Tonka trucks to drive around while making engine noises. If you didn’t deliver packages for Jacob in GTA IV or tear down statues in Just Cause 2, then maybe the narrative is enough for you.
When Vito comes home from WWII – which makes a great tutorial for all the shooting you’ll be doing – he hooks up with his buddy Joe. Joe offers Vito a way to help his mother and sister who have fallen on hard financial times after Vito’s father died. Vito starts out doing menial jobs that aren’t terribly fun – you’ll beat people up, sell ration stamps, hawk cigarettes, and drive from place to place. Easy missions at the beginning is to be expected, and the driving needs to fun. The driving mechanics are sound, but the cops in Empire Bay are amazingly good at catching you speeding so you’ll spend a lot of time evading the police because driving the speed limit isn’t fun. If I wanted to safely drive the speed limit I wouldn’t be playing a video game.
Mafia II is in second place all around. Both visually and it terms of AI behavior it pales in comparison to GTA IV. As a third-person shooter it feels sloppier than games fully-devoted to the genre. Thankfully the bone-headed AI makes up for the less-than-stellar shooting mechanics. Snapping to cover feels strange because it doesn’t always work. You’ll hit the button and not snap. You’ll move a step to the right, turn 90 degrees, hit the button again, and it’ll work. If you’re setting up for a gunfight that’s not a huge deal. If Vito is taking fire it’s more bothersome because bullets hurt. Mafia II is designed with cover in mind, and it hurts the experience when it doesn’t work quite right.
The narrative is lifted straight from mobster movies, and that’s fine for a game called Mafia II. What isn’t fine is that the linearity becomes glaringly obvious when you pair it with the crippling lack of other things to do. There are no packages to deliver, no cars to steal for other criminals, no chaos meter to charge up, and no ambulance to drive around to eventually earn a health upgrade. What really hurts Mafia II is that it has an open world that is only populated by icon for your next story mission. There are no choices for next mission a la GTA and causing trouble just isn’t rewarding, and those things make Mafia II feel like an action game pushed into an open-world framework. And once you get there you compare the third-person action mechanic to Uncharted 2 and it just doesn’t hold up in terms of atmosphere, characters, or mechanics.
If you really need to continue the Mafia story or absolutely hate feeling like you have a choice in what you’ll do next in a game then Mafia II is a serviceable game, but it feels like it should have come out about five years ago.
Pros: Narrative is accessible, and you’ll never be lost
Cons: Open world with nothing else to do, cover doesn’t work well, cops care too much that I’m speeding
