Final reflection

            Wow. This semester’s been quite the journey. I’ve spent so much time and energy working on Sunbots it’s easy to forget it’s only been about 3 months since the game’s inception, and that for the first 3 weeks it wasn’t even clear Sunbots would be our game. But through this whole process I feel like I’ve learned quite a bit about the process of game development, what makes ideas successful (or not successful) and much more.

            When our team first formed in late April, we had a couple meetings to try and brainstorm ideas for our upcoming Senior Capstone project. Unfortunately, we were in the final stretches of work on our Production II games, in addition to high end-of-semester workloads in our other classes, and were thus unable to come up with any ideas whatsoever. This was to be expected, and wasn’t particularly concerning; after all, we had months before the class even began; surely we could come up with something good during that time.

            We proceeded to hold several Skype meetings over the summer, and we had plenty of ideas then. Unfortunately, almost all of them were terrible. We seemingly had the opposite problem from April; with so much time, our ideas were overthought. They were all too cute high concept pieces that sought to say something important about the human condition or redefine what games could accomplish artistically or some other lofty goal, but no attention was paid to the basics of play. These ideas focused on interesting environments, or narrative settings, but a game needs to be fun to play, first and foremost.

An argument can be made that a game does not necessarily have to be fun, but simply engaging, and examples of such certainly exist in the wild (Spec Ops: The Line, Every Day the Same Dream, etc.). However, pulling off something like that takes a lot of skill, and requires an especially strong artistic vision. Quite frankly, I don’t think a team as relatively inexperienced as us would be able to pull it off. We can learn vicariously here; two years ago, a senior team produced The Return, a game which is often derided amongst the game cohort for being thematically overblown and mechanically unsatisfying; the Flash game Don’t Look Back delivered on many of The Return’s goals much more strongly, with a release several years before The Return. However, a team comprised largely of the same members made the puzzle game Loc during the same timeframe. Loc is based in interesting and engaging puzzle mechanics first and foremost, and although it has a (largely unnecessary) narrative component, by focusing on the mechanical play Loc delivered a very engaging experience, significantly more so than The Return.

With an acute awareness that our concepts were more The Return than Loc and with summer swiftly drawing to a close, we staged a brainstorm session with specific restrictions. Each idea presented must be mechanically based, and if the idea was agreed to be strong it must be possible to create a prototype within a week demonstrating the core mechanic. The ideas that came from this process were much stronger. Of particular note was an on-rails platformer idea with a focus on “shifting”. This idea went through several iterations even before the semester began: it was fun, simple, but with great potential for expansion. It seemed for a few weeks that this would be our team’s game.

 However, the rail prototype had one main failing; rail platformers are HUGE right now, and it was hard to find a point of differentiation. Our game was engaging, sure, but it wasn’t particularly memorable. We’d avoided the trap of being pretentious, but being bland is similarly disastrous. I feel that if we had stuck with the rail idea we might have been able to come up with an interesting twist at some point; looking at VXT, that game has some similarities to the red-blue shifting prototype we made, and it’s not hard to imagine a parallel universe where that game evolved from our prototype.  But we at least weren’t feeling the creative spark with that idea, and we might have been doomed to mediocrity without a savior.

The game that would eventually become Sunbots did not have a very auspicious start. During the first week of the semester, Melissa had a vision for a game where a robot jumped between planets in space, with fully realistic gravity affecting their movement. She began prototyping, and the initial iterations were none too promising. They were in full 3D, mirroring actual planetary systems as one might expect, but actually navigating this space was incredibly difficult and confusing. It was hard to tell where planets were in relation to one another, how fast and in what direction the player was moving when they were jumping, and the prototype was generally not all that fun. But it was unique, and as the rail prototype’s derivative nature became more and more apparent with each passing week, we were desperate for another route.

So, we decided to try a radical alteration of the planet prototype to see if the idea was in any way workable. Mainly, we decided to shift the game from 3D to 2D. This severely limited the player’s movement options, and could have left the concept stale and uninteresting. But it was instead exactly what we needed. The removed dimension took our camera problems with it, as the singular plane of play meant we always knew the optimal viewing angle for the player. With our camera problem solved, we could easily show the players their movement relative to other planets since we could keep many planets in view at a time.

It’s not like this one change magically created Sunbots, or even solved all of the prototype’s main flaws (the controls in particular would take another week or two in order to be presentable) but its importance cannot be overstated. After the shift to 2D, it became significantly easier to see where the game could go in the future, and to be assured that it could be realized. Without the shift, we could not feel assured that our concept did not have inherent fatal flaws.

            Ultimately I think it’s fitting that our best idea had such an unassuming origin. It wasn’t the product of a specialized brainstorming session or some carefully honed high concept. Melissa had a vague idea of something that sounded like it might be fun, but it took a lot of iteration to get into an enjoyable shape. I think that iterative process is key to what made Sunbots work so well, especially when contrasted with our other ideas. Because we had no preconceived notions about how this was supposed to work, we were able to go wherever made the most sense in the moment, creating a stronger end product.

            As Sunbots came together, we began targeting two different demographics, as mentioned many times throughout the various presentations and stage challenges we’ve made over the semester: the young, and the young at heart. This is most clearly demonstrated via our art style, which is colorful, cute, and playful. Over the course of the semester our team’s received a lot of great positive feedback from testers and colleagues, and we were ultimately rewarded with a green-light for second semester. Clearly we were doing something right, and I believe our aesthetic direction is a key contributing factor. There were a lot of strong candidates this year, with many potentially good games getting cut in the interest of logistics. Any game wishing to avoid this fate needed to stand out, and visually nothing quite looks like Sunbots, especially amongst our peers. The game is like a storybook come to life; to my knowledge, only Kirby’s Epic Yarn has a similar aesthetic.

            However, this visual style has also caused complications. Sunbots has moderately complex controls, utilizing both analog sticks and all four shoulder buttons. Although it can be played with mouse and keyboard, it’s a game that’s been designed with a gamepad in mind. During QA testing, this control scheme has met with near universal positive feedback. Players required a few minutes of unstructured messing around to get the hang of things, but once they did they were lost in the game, controls no longer being a barrier.

            But our QA testing was limited in a way we didn’t quite realize until late into the semester; namely, every last one of our testers was a college student, age 18-22, with an interest in video games large enough that they’ve elected to spend $40,000 a year in order to learn how to make them. These are people steeped in the language of gaming, with entrenched muscle memory. They understand how a dual-stick game works; using the left stick to move the avatar and the right to aim shots makes complete sense to them.

This built up gaming knowledge sometimes colored the feedback we would receive. For instance, when I first built the gamepad controls for Sunbots, I assigned jumping to the A button. This is the default in gaming, especially for games related to platformers. Pressing A to jump is like understanding that a cut in film doesn’t break the continuity of a scene, a skill internalized to such a degree that it can be hard to imagine the medium without it.

Of course, this only applies to gamers who play on consoles; PC players do not internalize this. Therefore, we would occasionally get a tester with minimal console experience who found our jump controls lacking; namely, you use your thumb to reach the A button but both thumbs are often occupied by the analog sticks. These players would generally recommend the jump command be remapped to one of the shoulder buttons, which are accessed with your index finger. Their critiques made sense, and so we altered our controls, remapping jump to RB. We removed all mention of the A button being the jump command, and put the game in front of new testers.

They generally liked it, but more than a few felt the jump controls were counter-intuitive, and requested they be mapped to A. Even though there was no real difference between the two inputs in terms of how they impacted play, and even though RB was more easily accessible during play, pressing A to jump was so ingrained in players that they wanted to do it anyway. We found a very easy compromise in this situation, mapping jump to both buttons so that either preference was accounted for.

However, we also encountered another issue, one which we still have yet to fully resolve. During the green-light demo night, our game was played by the EGD and COR faculty responsible for determining what games would go forward. These players fell into a completely different demographic than the ones we got through the QA lab. They weren’t hyper coordinated 20-somethings, and some of the COR faculty had limited familiarity with gamepads in general. They found our game significantly harder than we had intended, and had difficulty understanding the controls.

Well, so what? We were still green-lit, and we could simply argue that a lack of familiarity with gaming conventions puts one outside of our target demographic, removing the need to cater to people who don’t understand how to use two analog sticks simultaneously. However, our aesthetics told a different story. They were inviting, accessible, and told people that this game was for everyone. In fact, we’ve been told many times that, because of our artistic style, we should really consider a mobile release, possible even making it our target platform.

The idea that brightly colored, up-beat games belong on tablets is fairly powerful right now. With dark, gritty games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto breaking sales records on consoles, it can feel like only those types of games belong on a gamepad. For years, people have been calling for Nintendo to release their stable of brightly colored, friendly looking games on mobile devices. Noted games industry analyst Michael Pachter has gone as far as to call for Nintendo president Satoru Iwata to be fired for not porting Nintendo content to tablets (Peterson).

But let’s look beyond the impressive stats of Angry Birds and Candy Crush Saga. There is in fact a very good reason why you won’t find Mario games on iPhone, even ignoring that Nintendo owns the competing 3DS. Tablets are a very limiting platform for game development, and it has everything to do with controls. There’s only so much you can do by poking and swiping at a screen, and secondary input methods (such as gyroscopes) are often too imprecise to use in a game which requires precision, which is sometimes true of Sunbots. So far, no one’s been able to make a traditional platforming game with a traditional range of motion work on mobile. Sure, there have been great successes when the genre’s been reinterpreted (Temple Run, Rayman Jungle Run) but a game where you can go in any direction and jump at will has so far not materialized. Ports of games like Sonic the Hedgehog exist, but work quite poorly, since they utilize a virtual controller, which simply doesn’t work without tactile feedback. Since Nintendo games tend to require precise input, their games belong on traditional platforms, with analog sticks and physical buttons galore.

I feel the same way about Sunbots. There’s a lot of pressure for us to think about mobile, even from within the team, but I’m ultimately hesitant to pursue that platform. Although our game certainly has a “mobile” look, what makes our gameplay fun and unique is our movement system. Figuring out how to manipulate the gravity of all the planets in a system in order to travel is a hard but rewarding process; with an imprecise mobile control scheme this would be lost. Even games specifically made for mobile, such as Angry Birds, can suffer greatly (or even be crippled outright) by the imprecise nature of poking and swiping as input. Try making the same exact shot twice in a row in Angry Birds and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Making Sunbots has been a great learning experience for me. I’ve learned what makes ideas good and not-so-good, although the greatest lesson there was that you sometimes can’t get the complete picture without a little digging. I’ve learned the importance of aesthetics, and how they can sell your game, and sometimes even sell a different game entirely. I’ve even learned a little about myself; during the course of this project I’ve really enjoyed the work I’ve done as a makeshift second programmer. I like the problem-solving aspects of that job; you have a specific goal in mind, and you work to accomplish it. In contrast, I haven’t enjoyed the design work nearly as much, since it can so often be a game of guess and check, where you don’t know if you’ve done something right until you get a bunch of other people to play it and gauge their reactions. This is reflected in our team composition moving forward; we acquired two new designers but no new programmers, sine I’ll be transitioning to full-time programming work next semester. I’m very happy with what we’ve accomplished so far, and I can’t wait to see what we’ll accomplish in the future.

Works Cited

Peterson, Steve. "Pachter: "I Don't Know Why Iwata Is Still Employed" Gamesindustry.biz.

GamesIndustry International, 05 Dec. 2013. Web. 09 Dec. 2013.