Hey everyone,
This week I had the honor of being a guest on the Boss Battle Gamecast. We talk about my time in the industry, what i'm up to now, and more! Check it out here!
Diamond Raven Games
Scott Fine Game Design 2015 Year in Review!
In this past year, I started this blog to focus on game design and my own projects. Now that the year is coming to an end, I’d like to take look back on a few of my favorite posts.
Specifically, I want to highlight three game analysis/postmortems which I believe are my best articles of the year, plus one honorable mention that I felt should be included. I also want to highlight three posts about my personal projects and processes which I found to be enjoyable. If you have yet to check these out, I highly recommend them because I think they are excellent!
In this post, I sat down with an old friend who also worked on the NFL RUSH apps, and talked about what went wrong and what went right. It highlights some of the work we did and is easily the most popular of my posts this year!
I know I am technically cheating by counting these three as one post. In this series, I break down three of the toughest sections of Destiny’s King’s Fall Raid. I explored how the player learns to defeat each section, and eventually how they beat the raid.
A mobile game which captured my heart. My goal for this post was to understand why it was so pleasant. What are the core mechanics? How do they use the free to play model? What makes it so charming? What can we learn from this game?
Honorary Mention: Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade - Touching the Grim Dark Future
“Freeblade is a lot of things, and I could gush about so many things it does right, but today I want to stick to the controls. Controls in iOS games typically fall into one of two categories: either they are intuitive and easy to use, or an absolute mess and frustrating.” Excerpt from
Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade - Touching the Grim Dark Future
Personal Projects:
In my personal projects posts, I went for a less formal tone and more of a casual blog style than the analysis posts. I hope you enjoy them!
Here i’m going to walk you through a bit of my process. This is in no way how you should necessarily do things; this is just to show how I sometimes do things. I also discuss what I did programming-wise to bring this prototype to life.
2. Blog: Diamond Raven Games & Haunted Hop not quite a post mortem
Here I talk briefly about the process of bringing “Haunted Hop” to life, and eventually to the iOS app store.
“I like to prototype. It helps me to figure out my thoughts and test the game mechanics to see if they are actually fun. Also I don’t have beautiful colors or great looking assets to cloud my judgment. It allows me to focus solely on the mechanics.” Excerpt from Prototyping… I love it.
Last but not least I’d like to thank you. By reading and giving me feedback on my posts, whether through conversations over coffee or in the comments section, I learn more about what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong. I’ve improved because of your feedback. And even if you didn’t get the chance to give me feedback directly, I’d like to thank you as well for using your time to read my ramblings. Thank you and I hope you had an excellent 2015!
I’ll see you guys next week,
Scott
Blog: Diamond Raven Games & Haunted Hop not quite a post mortem
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Sorry again for another blog I haven't had as much time to analyze games as I would have liked recently (Though I'm going to be looking into Assassin's Creed: Black Flag soon). So update time!
As many of you may already know, after I got laid off I started a venture with one Ms. Josie Noronha. This we called Diamond Raven Games. We wanted to make some simple app that looks gorgeous for the iPhone. Something that would control well and was still enjoyable. Initially we wanted to do a dungeon crawler. We thought this was a brilliant idea. Because UE4 lends its self very well to level editing. Fortunately, within the first week, we realized this was a little out of scope for us. So we scaled back. Our next plan was doing a simple match-3. We figured this was more manageable. But we quickly realized a few hundred levels in our couple month time limit wasn't going to work very well on such a small team with an engine which neither of us have used in over a year. At least they wouldn't be possible at the level of quality and polish we wanted to release with. So we scaled back further. Then in April I threw together a quick prototype of a man jumping rope in UE4. It used a single input as the control (Just the space bar to jump) and kept score based on how many times players were able to jump without touching the rope. Simple enough we figured this might be a good starting point. Here is a video of said prototype/Proof of concept:
Knowing that simple games typically do fairly well on iOS we decided to press forward with this.
We ran into a considerable amount of speed bumps along the way. For one, while Josie could 3D model and animate she couldn't do it fast enough to meet our deadline. And while I could do some 3D modeling, animating was beyond my wheelhouse. So we decided to see what was available in the Unreal Store. We managed to snag the 3d character, graveyard parts, fire particles and sounds from the store. This was a lifesaver. Mostly because we thought about doing the game in 2D so Josie could do all the art without a problem. But we felt that it wouldn't look as cool as a 3D game and the camera angle would be weird. So we continued on.
A particular design challenge I ran into was: I wanted there to be 7 different speeds for the fire to move at. And each speed would be a different color. In concept this sounded good. But it turned out to make the game much more complicated and created a game design crippling bug. (Each speed needed to have it's own corresponding color the bug was letting any speed have any color so the player couldn't learn the feel of the speeds.) Because of the bug, and that it made the game possibly too complicated, we scaled back down to 3 speeds. Red (Slow), Yellow/Orange (Normal), Green (Fast). (Just like traffic lights BOOM GAME DESIGN! sorry I couldn't help myself...)
We continued on through many different bugs and issues which would make any non crazy individual pull their hair our (The legendary fire particle bug, the reset but in an alternate dimension bug, and the hidden sky just to name a few). I'll go more into those in our actual post-mortem. But we've finally come to the point where we are getting to release the game. 4 long months later. It definitely looks great. It's simple using only single input. And it is fun. At least in a similar way to Flappy Bird being fun.
I thank you for sticking around for the entire post and if you have an iOS device please download it and let me know what you think. I hope you enjoy the game and continue to support us in the feature.
Thank you,
Scott