It was a fairly empty feeling to leave the game jam without a game to show for it, but I made a couple of great new friends/contacts, and I’m particularly proud that I managed to flag down the keynote speaker Manveer Heir, senior designer on Mass Effect 3, to interrogate him about BioWare and their hiring practices. If only the bottom line weren’t that I shouldn’t expect to get a job there until I have 5-6 years of industry experience…

My favourite games produced at the jam (that I’ve seen) are Mein Panzer (which I kicked everybody’s asses in at the after party) and Infinite SWAT (which was developed by – among others – Jan Willem Nijman and Rami Ismail of Vlambeer, the Super Crate Box guys). If nothing else, you owe it to yourself to watch the hilarious trailer for Mein Panzer.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

I picked up Star Wars: The Old Republic on December 20 when the servers went live to non-preorders. This is only my third MMOG ever, the other two being World of Warcraft (of course) and Guild Wars. The only way I really enjoy MMOGs typically is to play them with a friend as though it were a two-player co-op game, which hinges on neither of us playing without the other person so as not to create a level gap between our characters. This time I made arrangements to play with Burrie.

If one wishes to play The Old Republic with a friend all the way from the beginning, the players must choose one of the pairs of classes that start together. Jedi Knights and Consulars start on the same planet, as do Sith Warriors and Inquisitors. Smugglers and Troopers start on the same planet, and Imperial Agents and Bounty Hunters do so too. As I wanted to play either a Smuggler or an Imperial Agent because of the simplistic cover system these classes have to spice up the otherwise mostly ripped-off World of Warcraft gameplay, and Burrie wanted to play on the Imperial side with me, we went with an Imperial Agent/Bounty Hunter combo.

I have not been disappointed so far. Playing with Burrie, I get to experience two storylines at once: most of his Bounty Hunter storyline and of course all of my Imperial Agent storyline (we only miss out on a couple of each others’ holocom transmissions that can’t be listened in on). I was so impressed with the Agent storyline in all its James Bondness that I decided to create another character to play on my own when Burrie wasn’t around. I went with a Jedi Knight for my solo character so as to get closer to the authentic Knights of the Old Republic experience. I find the Knight’s storyline to be significantly less engaging and original than the Agent’s, but to be honest just having a lightsaber is enough to make me happy.

Here are some random screenshots from my play time so far. I’ve got my female Twi’lek Jedi Guardian up to to level 25, and my male Chiss Sniper is at level 15 so far. I’ll probably have more to write about the game later, but there’s a lot of thoughts to organise and I need to get a bit further along either storyline until I can filter it all properly. Hover for captions as usual.

As my graduation gift to myself, I decided to get a new lens for my camera. Being a game designer, I’m all about balance. The lens of my life is a Nikkor 18-200mm zoom lens which has such a wide range that I can bring it anywhere I go and rest assured it’s the only lens I’ll really need. The problem with the zoom lens is that because it covers such a wide range, it’s pretty slow – if I want to take pictures with it in-doors without using flash and/or a tripod, it always feels like I have to kind of beat it into submission. Since I didn’t really feel like I needed a macro lens, it seemed like the best lens to complement my zoom lens would be a nice, fast prime lens.

After taking in advice from a few people, I ended up buying a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G prime lens. With it, I can take pictures like these:

It happened to be a nice foggy weather outside tonight, so I took my new lens out for a spin to see if I could accurately capture the gloom, but like most times I try to photograph fog, it ended up looking like I’d smeared the lens with vaseline. Nevertheless I did get a few good photos.

Because I had nothing better to do this evening, I spent a few hours making my own bokeh shapes. Bokeh is what happens to any sufficiently out-of-focus light photographed with a small enough focal ratio. The light becomes a blurry smear in the shape of the lens (typically circular), and if you cut a shape out of a piece of black cardboard and put it in front of your lens, you can change that shape because optics are basically magic. Here are some before-and-after pictures to demonstrate. I’m aware they’re not great art, but I had fun messing around with it. In time maybe I’ll find a less silly use for these things.

Abstract

The design of the game space is a major factor in shaping the player’s movement patterns and the player’s perception of movement (kinesthesia) in computer- and videogames, but very little research has been done into which aspects of the game world affect movement in what ways. Understanding the specifics of how space shapes movement is important in designing varied game worlds that affect the play experience in particular ways. This thesis analyses how different spatial structures give rise to different movement patterns in games with or without context-sensitive controls. The thesis analyses the dynamics between the game world, the controls, and the rules, and employs methods from user experience research to gather qualitative data about how players experience changes to each of these aspects of a game. The results demonstrate concrete relationships between different types of game space and different movement patterns and explain the player behaviour underlying these relationships, which will be especially valuable to those seeking to design environments for games where movement is a central part of the play experience.

Kinesthesia and Game Spaces is my Master’s thesis from the IT University of Copenhagen. It’s 70 of your regular human pages, which comes in just under 90 magic university pages (2400 characters per page). It was handed in on the 1st of November 2011, three months after the original deadline, and I defended it orally yesterday to the grade of 10, which translates into an A on the American scale or a B on the European scale. Not that the grade matters much to me right now, as I’m frankly just happy to have graduated with the least scientific Cand.Scient. in the country after 18 years of education.

I guess this marks a goodbye to this blog’s “University paper” tag.

You can download Kinesthesia and Game Spaces as a PDF weighing just under 2 MB.

I’m almost afraid to write this post. There’s so much to say, and I’m not sure how to organise my thoughts. Moreover it’s difficult to identify my own biases based on my history with the Deus Ex franchise and weed them out of my opinions to form something at least marginally useful. I’ll give it my best shot below, but remember this is not a formal review, this is just my thoughts on the game, written in whatever order they matter most to me.

You may expect intense spoilers. Lots and lots of spoilers. All sorts of spoilers, both for the narrative and the mechanics of the game. You should not read this unless you’ve finished the game.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is brilliant

I love it to bits. I’m mostly going to write about the things that bothered me, or the design decisions that I disagreed with both in general and relative to what I know about the paradigms that gave birth to Deus Ex. Before I get to any of my criticisms or doubts, however, I must emphasise that I mainlined this game for 4 days straight and finished it in just under 40 hours. I forgot to eat. I neglected to sleep. I let myself be transported into a completely different world, at once reassuringly familiar and intriguingly fresh and different, and I loved every second of it. Yes, every second. Yes, even during the boss fights, which isn’t to say I like the boss fights at all – I’ll get back to that.

Deus Ex 3 is very much a return to form for the franchise – in abandoning the uncompromising ambitions for constant reinvention of the Origin / Looking Glass school, they’ve managed to recreate most of what made Deus Ex special while introducing all the no-brainer features that are expected of a modern AAA game. A lot of what Deus Ex does, Human Revolution does better – as just a few examples, the city maps are much bigger and function as proper hubs to an extent the original city levels didn’t, hacking a computer gives you unlimited time to read through all its emails, and the acting is infinitely better (people in China actually often speak Chinese! I have much respect for this). Most of the modern updates they added to the design are unmitigated improvements, such as the cover system which changes the nature of both the stealth and the combat in directions I wholeheartedly approve of, or the iron sights which are pretty much mandatory in a modern shooter and improve the feel of the combat significantly.

Their dialogue is well written and well implemented, and their narrative is thematically extremely strong. Though I caught myself hoping for a revisit to one of the original Deus Ex locations, I very much respect and appreciate that Eidos Montreal resisted the urge to shoehorn obvious references to the original into every aspect of their game – you’ll find plenty of tie-ins to the DX story if you look for them, but they’re mostly quite subtle and fit naturally into the plot and setting. (Still hoping to infiltrate Area 51 or Liberty Island or somesuch in some DLC though.)

There are other minor ways in which DX3 falls short of DX1, especially the end of the game (it got the job done, but it was fairly weak compared to the first game, both in terms of the endings themselves and the build-up to them). It also seemed to have fewer memorable characters than DX1, but it also had far fewer characters that seemed included just for the hell of it, so I guess that evens out. The health regeneration didn’t bother me nearly as much as I’d expected it would, but the energy system did foster some weird and problematic behaviour in me – I quickly realised the best tactic was to keep all but your last battery drained most of the time and instead drag around a bunch of items to charge up your energy for when you need it.

Instead of trying to list a myriad of small criticisms, however, I’ve picked the 5 main problems I had with Human Revolution, presented here in order of most to least annoying:

1. XP for takedowns

As I understand it, Deus Ex was fundamentally conceived out of Warren Spector’s frustration that Thief would not allow him to think on his feet and fight his way out of a bodged stealth attempt. The whole philosophical core of the game design is that players should be able to play the game in whatever way they choose, and not get punished for it. The original game didn’t entirely succeed at this – some play styles are vastly more useful than others, and some styles yield far more rewards in the form of items or background info. Nevertheless, you never feel overtly punished for indulging in some combat here and there, you rarely have to load your quicksave if you trigger an alarm, and for every NPC that scolds you for murdering enemies, there’s another NPC ready to pat you on the back for being a cold-blooded badass.

One of the most important design decisions that facilitated this balance was the lack of skillpoints for taking out enemies. Skillpoints were reserved for completing objectives, be they mandatory or optional, with a few bonuses thrown in here and there for exploration*. That way, neutralising enemies was only mildly more rewarding than avoiding them completely, and only in ways you were unlikely to need with such a play style anyway (after all, what use is ammunition if you’re not confronting enemies anyway?) Knocking an enemy out was completely the same in gameplay and balance terms as killing them, only the narrative would change.

Human Revolution gives you XP for taking out enemies. In fact they give you XP for damn near everything – missions yield XP to the tune of 1000 or so a pop, pretty similar to Deus Ex. Exploration rewards are routinely 100 or 200 XP, however, to Deus Ex’s 30-50 points. Even hacking yields XP, as opposed to Deus Ex. Not raising any alarms is 200 XP extra at the end of the mission, and not getting spotted triggers a whopping 500 XP bonus. Would you rather fight? Tough luck, you’ll have to write off 700 XP per mission. Perhaps even more heinously, taking an enemy out non-lethally gives you far more XP than killing them. Shoot somebody and you get 10 XP – 20 if you got a headshot. Shoot them with a nonlethal weapon and you get a 20 XP bonus. Eviscerate an enemy with a melee takedown and you get 30 XP, knock them out and you get 50. Get two enemies together and knock them out at the same time if you have the aug for that, and you get 125, 62.5 XP per head.

You might suggest that this is done to balance the fact that unconscious NPCs can be woken up again, but the fact that non-lethal weapons and takedowns are completely silent whilst the lethal approach generates ridiculous amounts of noise should easily take care of that, and besides – nothing except your own squeamishness/ethics is stopping you from executing unconscious enemies if you bring a silenced weapon. The funny thing is, I prefer going the stealthy route, I derive incredible enjoyment from sneaking around levels and knocking enemies out, remaining unseen and causing no alarms to be triggered. The XP system is rewarding my favourite play style, but it bothers me out of principle. I want to select this play style because it’s what I like, not because it yields better rewards, and more importantly I want the freedom to draw my weapon and blast my way out of a sticky situation if I get spotted, and the freedom to hack a robot and turn it loose on the unsuspecting enemies without losing a 200 XP bonus at the end of the mission plus 30-40 XP for every enemy the robot mows down. I want to be able to use the silenced and fully upgraded combat rifle I’ve been lugging around since the first mission without being annoyed that I’m missing out on 30 XP.

In the end I mostly stuck to non-lethal takedowns even though I didn’t really need the extra XP, and I finished the game with (according to his calculations) 7 upgrade points more than Mads, who went for a more aggressive play style. I also hacked every PC and keypad and explored every nook and cranny of every level religiously, but I’d have done that anyway, because that’s the only way I know how to play a Deus Ex game.

* As an aside, I don’t feel exploration can be accurately classified as a play style on par with eg. Stealth, Heavy Weapons, or hacking turrets or robots to turn them against their former masters – exploration is more of a meta-play style that facilitates the other play styles. After all, how would you be able to play puppetmaster if you didn’t know about the back route that takes you right past the outer patrols to the security computer that controls the robots?

2. Boss fights

Much has been written on the subject, but I’ll try to see if I can’t add anything to the discussion. By the time I started the game, I’d already been warned from every source that the boss fights are pretty much terrible. Some had referenced Alpha Protocol, which I notably never finished because I got stuck on motherfucking Brayko as my stealth/hacking character build was totally useless in that boss fight. With this in mind, I stocked up on grenades and made sure to bring a combat rifle with me at all times: in case of surprise boss fight, break out rifle and hope for the best. The first boss fight proved just as terrible as I’d expected, but perhaps not in the way I feared – the first three times, he survived me unloading a full magazine of my upgraded combat rifle in his face, and then destroyed me with grenade spam. The fourth time, I threw a frag grenade at him first, then unloaded my rifle in his face, and he went down in all of about 5 seconds. The boss fight went from damn near impossible and entirely unfair to completely anticlimactic in an instant, with apparently nothing in between – not a good sign.

The second boss fight was not as bad, a little gimmicky but I failed it twice and then succeeded – it didn’t feel as unfair, but I cheesed my way out of it with frag mines. The third boss fight was over in the second attempt when I found the right rhythm between spamming frag mines and shooting him with a stun gun. The final boss fight was much different and actually felt like it made pretty good use of the various augmentations and play styles at your disposal, but it was a little confusing and I’m not sure how it would play if you can’t hack. I also think I managed to break it on my first attempt, but it worked fine the second time around.

My main problem with the boss fights isn’t so much about gameplay as it is about narrative and… philosophy. Honestly, failing a boss fight 3 times before you succeed is totally acceptable, and seeing how I cut loose with the lethal weapons anyway, it didn’t affect me in directly that they all died in cutscenes in the end. However, knowing that there is no way to use stealth against these enemies, and knowing that even if you stick to stun gun, tranquilisers, and knock-out gas, they still die in cutscenes, offends me as a Deus Ex fan. What did affect me directly was how spurious and poorly supported they were. An antagonist is somebody who’s supposed to be connected to the protagonist, and merely being another mechanically augged person in a world surprisingly full of mech augged people does not count.

You see all three bosses in a cutscene after the tutorial level, and the third boss shows up in another couple of cutscenes throughout the game, but apart from the first one who shows up in a couple of emails, you never even know their names until you look at their corpses after each fight. When I killed Anna Navarre in Deus Ex, and when I faced Walton Simons, they didn’t have to be introduced in cheesy cutscenes and they didn’t need special scripting – they didn’t even have to put up much of a fight, because no matter what, it was going to feel special. They were characters I knew because I’d dealt with them many times and had interesting conversations with them throughout the entire game, they had reacted to my play style and other NPCs had discussed them with me behind their backs – I know these people and killing them was always going to be meaningful no matter how it went down. You could remove all three boss fights and every reference to the characters involved entirely from Human Revolution and it would change precisely nothing. Except the game would be three pointless, out-of-place boss fights lighter.

I wish they had.

3. Pheromones

Maybe this one should be higher, but… it’s less of a flaw than a massive missed opportunity. In case your memory needs refreshing, the game offers a social aug (“CASIE”) which does a variety of things. This is used exclusively in a sort of negotiation-style conversation minigame where you have to pick your way through precarious dialogue with major characters that you need something from. Without CASIE, these conversations are incredible – you’re forced to really listen to what people are saying and consider everything you know about them in relation to your dialogue options. In some cases you can even get useful clues as to how you’re doing out of their facial animation, though more often than not it’s too crude to read properly.

Many of the things CASIE does are fine. It displays a window with a short psychological profile of the person you’re talking to, which genuinely helps you decide what to say. It gives you a reading of their personality type (Alpha, Beta, or Omega – I don’t know if these are ever properly introduced, but I figured out what they mean pretty quickly). Most usefully, it gives you a “persuasion level” reading of how close you are to either losing or winning the argument. All of this works splendidly. Where it picks all of that up and tosses it directly out the window is with the addition of a “pheromone” button. This is basically a magic cheat button where no matter how good or bad a job you’re doing of winning your opponent over, all you have to do is keep an eye on their personality type readings and then pick the matching line to instantly win the argument. That entire brilliant structure I outlined above, all of the work and thought that went into that goes completely out the window, and worse – you miss out on a whole bunch of really well written and acted dialogue.

If you have yet to play Human Revolution and you unwisely decided to read all the way down to here despite that, I implore you: never use the pheromone button. You can still get the CASIE aug, its persuasion level reading and its psych profile are both extremely useful, but winning an argument the proper way is by far the most satisfying way to do it. I’ve tried both ways, and I can tell you I’ll never be using those damn pheromones again.

4. The economy is broken

We’re approaching niggle territory. Those three points above? Those were some serious points of critique, major annoyances that bothered me for the entire game. This… is more of a detail. And really, it’s not like Deus Ex did it much better, but still: the economy in this game works poorly, and I blame it mainly on being able to sell items to vendors. Each city hub level in the game has two vendors, and certain missions have vendors of their own. So far so Deus Ex. Human Revolution adds a shop GUI to make trading a more pleasurable experience, which also allows the vendors to stock more items than Deus Ex could, since that was all handled through dialogue.

Being able to sell stuff was one of the most requested features in The Nameless Mod. Do you know why we refused to implement it? For the same reason they never let you sell items in Deus Ex: it encourages you to wade like a pack mule back and forth between some alley where you killed a bunch of enemies and the nearest vendor, selling all their items and weapons one by one. Sure, it doesn’t force you to do so. Sure, you still get enough money in the long run that there’s no need at all to do it. But when you find that praxis kit for 5000 credits, you better believe you’re going to make your way back to that apartment where you left two shotguns and take them one at a time to the vendor two blocks down where they sell for 750 credits each.

I did this. And I hated myself for it. I felt like an idiot, I knew I was just being impatient and that I would make that money through normal means soon enough, but I just had to have that praxis kit. It was the worst parts of Diablo all over again, and this time you can’t even pick up two shotguns at a time because they’re simply merged in your inventory. So I wasted my time and turned Adam Jensen into a pack mule, and at the end of the game I had 26755 credits – more than I could ever possibly hope to spend.

Obviously this hilarious surplus of money wouldn’t have been entirely fixed by not letting you sell things. You’d have prevented players like me from carrying out some severely boring commuting, but I still would’ve had far too much money at the end. The game needs some sort of money sink, something you can buy if you have loads of money, but the lack of which doesn’t nerf you completely. For a while, the praxis kits looked like they might be it, but the 5000 credits that seemed so outrageous at the start was spare change half-way through the game. Deus Ex had this same problem, but Eidos fixed so many of Deus Ex’s other weaknesses, I would have liked for them to fix this one too.

5. Too many praxis points

By the end of the game, I had fully upgraded every augmentation that I gave half a damn about and then some. I bought and maxed-out dermal armor basically because I had nothing to spend my points on that I really wanted. I bought the wall-hack augmentation just to see how it looked – used it once, nodded approvingly at the nice visual effects, then turned it off and never used it again. Taken in isolation, this is good and bad, but in the context of the franchise I think it’s mostly bad.

Irrespective of Deus Ex’s design philosophies, it’s fine that you have points to spare. You still have to prioritise your upgrades since the first half or so of the game does change substantially depending on what augs you upgrade first, and knowing that you’ll eventually be maxed out gives you some leeway to build a more all-round character right from the start instead of having to pick a specific play style and stick to it. Essentially this fits right into that fundamental design ethos I outlined when I was criticising the XP system, in that you can easily “multiclass” between stealth, hacking, and combat without being underpowered later on, which gives you freedom to switch to combat whenever you get tired of stealth.

On the other hand, it really limits the replayability of the later levels. ION Storm Austin put a fair amount of thought and effort into making sure Deus Ex would remain interesting on further playthroughs. Every aspect of the game contributed to this, from the semi-reactive narrative and the multipathed levels to the limited inventory and the skill system being tied into your item use. One of the most obvious aspects of this was how augmentations were set up to be mutually exclusive. The game had twice as many augmentations as you could install, and they typically came in matching sets of two. The result was obvious: to try out all the augs, you had to play at least twice.

To be fair, I was incredibly thorough. I mostly stuck to non-lethal takedowns to get the most XP, I explored every level fully, I hacked everything, and I got a fair few ghost and smooth operator bonuses. Less OCD players may not experience quite the same abundance of praxis points by the end of the game as I. To be even more fair, I didn’t max out all the augs I wanted until about half-way through the game, so the first half of my second playthrough will be just as different as my second playthrough of Deus Ex. But my abilities in the second half of the game will never be much different from playthrough to playthrough. I’ll upgrade my inventory fully so I can carry all the weapons I want, and there are no secondary upgrade system such as Deus Ex’s skills to further differentiate character builds from each other. I’ve already seen nearly everything the game has to offer in terms of level and narrative, so the only motivation I have to play again is a scattered handful of narrative choices that may have interesting alternative outcomes if I choose differently next time.

It’s not a huge problem, but it does feel like a small step in the wrong direction. When so many aspects of the original game have been improved, it feels particularly disappointing when the game falls short of its predecessor on such a comparatively major point.

In summary

It’s important that you understand why I have so much to say about the things that annoyed me in Deus Ex 3. It’s because I love this game, it comes so close to perfection and so close to its predecessor, which is deeply embedded in my personal identity. Any flaw I perceive in such a game will inevitably draw far more attention than a similar flaw in a worse game. Furthermore, my history with the franchise and my fairly deep understanding of and respect for the design paradigms that gave rise to it and the handful of games like it adds a philosophical layer to my experience of the game – I’m bothered by things that don’t directly affect me, simply because they don’t fit with the intentions behind the original game. Finally, the very fact that I’ve dedicated over 3000 words to discuss the things I didn’t quite appreciate about the game should indicate how much I care, and though it won’t necessarily communicate that I really really love the game, rest assured this entire post was born from powerful, undiluted enthusiasm.

To make it clear that I really did enjoy this game tremendously, I’ll end with a short list of my favourite details in the game:

• Laser grids shut down when your enemies walk near the lasers, to allow them passage. This also means you can disable the lasers by dragging the dead or unconscious bodies of your enemies with you through the lasers. EMERGENCE!
• As if it’s not enough of an emotional high point if you fail to save your pilot after you’re shot down, you can find her dissected corpse at the Harvesters’ later on, as they’ve been digging out her augmentations. It’s an incredibly cruel gut punch, and it totally works.
• One of the most powerful scenes in the game for me was showing up at Picus HQ in Montreal to find it completely empty. It’s quite startling how unsettling and cinematic that whole scene felt simply because there was nobody there, and just like in the pod hotel in Hengsha, getting a chance to explore the level thoroughly before the enemies turned up made the following escape all the more fun.
• The helipad storage room in Sarif is restocked between each of your visits.
• Eidos Montreal has played around with the emails just as we did in TNM – you can track reply chains across different PCs and piece together little background stories if you read everything. As far as I can tell, even the TO and FROM fields are consistent, using names where there should be names, addresses where there should be addresses, and mailing list names where there should be mailing lists.

At the same time, my laptop has been less and less useful as time has passed. At 6 years old, it’s no longer powerful enough to run reasonably modern games, and while a smaller laptop might make up for such shortcomings by adopting a new role as a digital type writer, my laptop with its 17″ screen is just a bit too large and heavy to carry everywhere. I’ve been thinking about getting a netbook instead, to fill that need for a mobile typewriter which is especially prominent right now when I’m finally working full-time on my thesis, but available netbooks just didn’t seem to be worth the price.

But then this little spark of genius appeared unexpectedly:

That’s the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer, or the TF101 if you want to make it sound like some secret military detachment. It runs version 3.0 of Android, Honeycomb, and the magic trick that makes it worth its price where ordinary netbooks or tablets aren’t, is that it’s both.

The Transformer is mainly a 10.1″ tablet, and its most natural mode of interaction is the multi-touch screen. By itself, it’s a pretty solid little device with a good, clear screen (even with the inevitable smudges you see so clearly in the above photo), an audio jack, mini-HDMI output, and a micro-SD slot for external storage just like a phone. Honeycomb isn’t quite as fundamentally smooth to interact with as iOS, but it’s clean, it’s logical, and it’s fairly pretty – above all its “back” button is pure magic, flawlessly predicting whether you want to go back to the last place you were within whatever app you’ve got open or whether you’re trying to switch back to the last app you were using.

DockTales

The whole idea of the Transformer, however, is its dock, which doubles as a keyboard. The dock has two USB ports and a standard SD slot. It also has its own battery that always charges the tablet battery when they’re connected, ensuring that the tablet has the highest possible charge if you undock it, and giving the Transformer an alleged 16 hours of battery time (it’s less if you actually use the thing, but it tends to last me a couple of days so far). When you connect the tablet to the dock, a cursor immediately appears on the screen, and all on-screen keyboards in the OS are disabled so you can type on the real keyboard instead. The touch pad below the keyboard works just like the touch pad on a Macbook, including the super convenient two-finger scroll gesture. You can even hook a USB mouse up as well and it’ll work right away, with no fuss at all.

The keyboard is both the main strength and the greatest weakness of the Transformer, because it’s not really very good. It has some super useful functions that work extremely well with Android, such as a back key and a home key, and possibly its most useful key is the one that disables the touch pad so you don’t accidentally touch it while you’re typing, but its keys aren’t as forgiving as I would’ve liked. If you hit their corners or even sometimes their sides, rather than hitting them right in the centre, they have a bad habit of ignoring your stroke. I type too damn fast to hit the keys that accurately, so I tend to curse a lot.

It’s also a big problem that some apps or websites have loads of input lag, which makes it hard to tell if you’ve hit the right keys or not – I can’t say if that’s ASUS’s fault, Android’s fault, or the fault of the apps or websites in question. The Transformer comes with an office suite called Polaris which is slightly too devoid of features to be a complete replacement for Microsoft Office, but which at least works quite well with the physical keyboard, detecting more strokes than most other apps or sites and with almost no input lag.

And speaking of lag, I have experienced some performance issues, both in the OS itself and on websites and in apps. The Transformer has 1 GB of RAM, and it seems like that may be pushing it a little. A greater problem, however, is that many apps handle the keyboard fairly poorly, and if you connect a USB mouse it only gets worse – for some insane reason, right clicking either on a mouse or the buttons beneath the touch pad defaults to “Back” instead of calling up the drop-down menu that you typically activate in Android by pressing and holding on the touch screen of the tablet. The mouse’s scroll wheel is also largely ignored – the OS occasionally manages to translate it into the equivalent of pressing and dragging on the touch screen, but too often it doesn’t seem to work.

App-less and oranges

If you don’t mind the inconsistencies of the input methods at your disposal, however, the Transformer is extremely handy. If you need to write up an email you simply slot the tablet into the dock and press it down gently until the lock clicks in, and then you start typing. When you want to lean back and waste some time on Reddit, you undock again and put the tablet in your lap so you can browse lazily, your genitals blissfully unroasted. In netbook mode, the tablet goes to sleep when you fold it down and wakes up without a hitch when you open it up again. It’s a perfectly good tablet and a fairly decent netbook, and it costs no more than what any other good tablet would set you back.

In the end it will come down to the app selection on the Android Market, as it always does. Right now two major criticisms of the Transformer is that there are very few HD (ie. optimised for tablets) apps on the market, and that even fewer of them work very well with a keyboard and mouse. The former will hopefully be fixed when Honeycomb converges with the other Android versions – which is scheduled to happen around the end of the year as I understand it – and the latter is tolerable in most cases. The main thing I’m missing for now is a better browser, as the built-in Chromium is slow and clunky and Dolphin HD has some interface design decisions that cause me much frustration. I also drastically need to find a way to import my PC Chrome bookmarks into either of those browsers – none of my attempts to do so have succeeded thus far.

The more I get used to the idiosyncrasies of Android and the Transformer, however, the more I enjoy it, and the more certain I become that I made a good purchase. If you happen to want a tablet and need a netbook but you don’t think either is worth the price on its own, the Transformer is hereby recommended. And if you don’t particularly like Android or you just need a device that can run Windows programs, a version of the Transformer running Windows 8 is slated for release some time next year.

That must be why we don’t have any in Denmark.

This weekend I flew to Oslo, rented a car with three of my class mates, and drove into the mountains to chill in a cottage with some board games and go for walks through the amazing landscape. With two days of travelling (Thursday for getting there and Sunday for getting back) and two days at the cottage, the cost/benefit of the trip in terms of my motion sickness was not brilliant, but the guys were remarkably accommodating and patient. Even with the sky overcast and the rain pouring down half the time, the spectacular Norwegian nature just about made up for the suffering.

The weather was all right on Friday, so that’s when most of my photos were taken. Saturday started out grey and quickly became very wet indeed, but we hiked undeterred (though drenched) up to a nearby mountain and back again in spite of it. I have no regrets. By the time we were leaving again on Sunday, the valley was partially flooded and we had to go off the highway and up through the mountains instead, where the roads are crooked and full of holes.

Here are some of the photos I took on the trip.

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Yesterday I handed in a 20-page paper on the topic of emergence vs. progression. I wrote the paper in April to get it out of the way so I could concentrate on my Master’s thesis, then proceeded to do fuck-all on the thesis for the entire month of May because I’m an idiot. The project was focused on the production of Archive X, which was meant to be an arcade-action game but turned out to be a puzzle game instead. In relation to the point of my paper, the game is quite a failure, but in and of itself it’s a pretty decent, if very short, puzzle game.

You might wonder how I could manage to work on two different Unity-based university games (Archive X and Broken Dimensions) at the same time. The answer is that I could not, and I did almost no real work on Archive X other than writing the original pitch document and putting the level geometry together in 3D Studio Max (a painful process which required me to first learn how to use 3D Studio Max). Most of the credit for the game should go to my class mate and programmer Isaac Dart (who is also not responsible for its failure to be properly emergent) and the rest is due to his partner in crime Juan Ortega and our artist Veselin Stoilov. They did most of the work while Ali and I were occupied with Broken Dimensions.

If you’re in the mood for a quick little puzzle game based on a very clever physics/chemistry simulation, feel free to download Archive X (111 MB). If you’re interested in the project and how it was used in my academic work, by all means grab the paper, Designing Emergent Gameplay (7 MB). I actually quite like it, it’s probably the first truly academic paper I’ve written at the IT University.

The exam is scheduled for June 16, and it’ll be my last exam before I defend my thesis.

Broken Dimensions is my graduation game from DADIU, the Danish Academy for Digital, Interactive Entertainment. Ours was the last class to make two full game productions as part of the programme (last year I worked on Imachination) – starting this fall, DADIU will become a one-semester programme involving a curriculum and a small prototype-style project in addition to one big game production. Time will tell if that produces better games or not, but it certainly will fit better into the curriculum of IT University students. I didn’t get any ECTS credit for this production, but I’m using it in my MSc thesis, so at least it’ll get me a modest scope reduction there.

Broken Dimensions is a puzzle-adventure game. I could also call it a puzzle-platformer, but then you immediately think of side-scrollers about jumping accurately, and Broken Dimensions is more about… falling with style. I could also call it a horror game, but it’s more creepy-freaky than horrific. Puzzle-adventure it is.

You’ll find it reminds you a lot of Portal. This is down to several factors, the overriding cause of which is a combination of me really liking Portal and just happy circumstance:

1. Like Portal, Broken Dimensions was built entirely around a single core gameplay mechanic. Everything else, though also important in my opinion, came second.
2. Like Portal, this mechanic isn’t just a way to solve the puzzles, but also immediately becomes your primary way of navigating the levels.
3. Like Portal, you’re guided through the levels by a friendly woman (sometimes appearing only as a disembodied voice) with the promise of candy.

Reception has been pretty good. Though I fully expected to be cleft in twain by the panel at our evaluation, if nothing else then because the game is super hard if you’re not a bit of a puzzle game connoisseur, their feedback was overwhelmingly positive (none of them had actually finished the game, but they all enjoyed the parts they saw, and at least one of them would’ve definitely finished it if the final puzzle hadn’t glitched out on him). Likewise, IndieDB and Desura‘s users have given us a fairly good rating and many flattering reviews – amusingly, many of the comments there indicate that the game is too easy for hard core gamers.

Finally, the national newspaper Politiken has reviewed all the graduation games and gave Broken Dimensions 5 out of 6 stars with a special emphasis on the quality of the puzzles.

I’m not going to do a full post-mortem here, but I’d still like to go over what went right and what went wrong in my opinion. I think the best qualities of Broken Dimensions are its completeness, its consistency, and its intuitive controls. It may not seem so, but Broken Dimensions is a very long game for a 5 week production – though this meant our artists couldn’t spend nearly as much time as they’d have liked sprucing up the levels and making them look less boxy, it gave us room to let the game develop as you play through, including a complete story arc, a minor plot twist, gradual introduction of new mechanics, and most importantly a suitably gradual difficulty curve in the puzzles. We even managed to squeeze a little environmental storytelling into the levels, and the final level has an in my opinion genuinely startling aesthetic shift.

The consistency of the puzzles is another success, though bear in mind this is essentially me patting myself on the back for a job well done. I completely bent my brain over and folded it in on itself to design properly 3-dimensional puzzles for a fundamentally 3-dimensional game, and I’m quite pleased with how well the final set of puzzles that made it into the game explore and exploit the core game mechanic of rotating the world around you. We had many more types of obstacles and possible ideas for extra mechanics in mind while working on the game, but in the end we kept it pretty simple, and the game is all the better and less gimmicky for it. This is aided tremendously by the intuitive control system, for which I can only take half the credit – the other half must be given to the programmers who helped me plan it by pointing out problems with the initial design, implemented it, and made it work. I’m quite proud of the way the rotation keys change to match the orientation of the camera, everybody seems to find it very intuitive, and I personally find it incredibly satisfying to control.

All this is tainted by a few problems, primarily an annoying amount of glitches, some general difficulty issues, and several missing features. The PhysX system in Unity gave us quite a lot of grief throughout development – PhysX is probably the best physics engine on the market, but Unity doesn’t give you full control over it, making it hard to tweak it just right. Exacerbating this, the whole idea of physics-based puzzles in the first place is a little problematic, since puzzles (unlike problems) are essentially non-emergent, and the emergent nature of physics systems tends to do more harm than good when used for this sort of puzzle.

I’m overall pretty satisfied with the way the difficulty ramps up gradually throughout the game, but the general difficulty of the game seems to suit very few people. A lot of players find it excruciatingly hard to even navigate the game, many others find the puzzles to be trivially easy. I’ve talked to just a handful of people who thought the difficulty suited them. Puzzle games, at least of this kind, are extremely hard to balance, and next to impossible to implement different difficulty options for. You can’t just raise the player’s health like in combat games, and there are no opponents to be made weaker or less accurate. The only real option would be some sort of hint system, and that tends to ruin the play experience entirely.

There are certain other features I miss, however – most importantly, the game really needs a level selection menu. This is on the list for our lead programmer Elvis to implement when he has time, but I think its absence hurts our chances at the various competitions and festivals where we’ve submitted Broken Dimensions. Another problem is that you can’t access and change the options from inside the game, meaning if you play it for a while and then realise that you’re constantly rotating the wrong way, you have to start over if you want to invert the rotation controls. As an advocate of accessibility, it also saddens me that we didn’t have time to implement closed captioning: subtitles for sound effects as well as dialogue audio.

Overall I’m extremely proud of Broken Dimensions, both of my own contribution and of the overall quality of the game. Everybody on the team did a bang-up job in the face of our own far too high ambitions, and though I flinch at the thought of the glitches people have encountered, I’m astounded that the game works at all considering how little time we had to develop it. As I mentioned, the game has been submitted to several festivals, including PAX, IGF, and Indiecade. I really hope we get to go to at least one of them, as I think we deserve it for having made a super engaging and satisfying little puzzle game.

You can play Broken Dimensions in your browser at BrokenDimensions.com, but I recommend downloading the Windows or Mac client, available from the same website, as it looks a whole lot better.

I’m not particularly a fan of challenge in games. I’ve never had a high tolerance for playing the same sections over and over again until they’re finally grokked, and that tolerance has only lowered as I’ve played more games. I’m currently at a stage in my life when I have enough time and money to play all the games I’m interested in playing, both out of personal taste and professional interest, but because I’m squeezing as many games as possible into the free time I have, I still don’t want to “waste” any of that time, and replaying difficult sections over and over certainly feels like a waste.

Obviously there’s a difference between my personal tastes and my professional design paradigms, and I’m fully aware that a lot of players love a solid challenge and get a kick out of finally pushing past a nearly impossible part of a game. That’s what difficulty settings are for. It’s just that I generally play on Easy, or Normal if I’m playing a type of game where I’m pretty confident in my own skills or which is pretty clearly targeted for a mainstream audience.

So when I booted up Risen, with which Leo shocked me by gifting it to me for my birthday, I picked Easy without hesitation. Risen is a German RPG made for a niche audience, and I’m not an idiot: I know that means it’s going to be tough as nails. It also tends to mean the tutorial will be shit, half the mechanics will go completely unexplained, and all the visual feedback will be ambiguous at best, but I reckoned as long as I could at least hack my way through the fights, I could lean on the Internet to fill in for the substandard tutorials.

Turns out even on Easy, I was completely taken apart by the simplest enemies. I became stuck in a negative feedback loop where I seemed to be too low level to survive any of the fights, so I couldn’t level up because no enemies were low-level enough for grinding, the quests that didn’t require me to fight required gold, and I couldn’t get any gold because the rest of the quests involved impossible fights. There were hints at ways to get gold without questing, but the mere act of exploring the world was incredibly painful because I would constantly aggro monsters by accident and get slaughtered. All of this frustration was compounded by the loading taking ages and crashing the game a third of the time.

Eventually I found a solution: God mode.

I played through most of the swamp and the whole Harbour City section last night, completely impervious to damage, and had lots of fun. Some games aren’t engaging at all without an element of danger, but Risen became significantly more so once I was invulnerable. Now, I can actually explore the world without being annihilated every time I dare to leave the road. Finding locations and objects and solving quests still have elements of challenge due to the lack of quest markers or proper descriptions of what to do, and the simple act of climbing around on rooftops and sneaking into people’s homes at night to relieve them of their possessions without being caught in the act is easily enough to keep me entertained, despite knowing that I can easily fight my way out of any bad situation.

When the danger of engaging in combat is no longer there, the fun of exploration and the surprisingly engaging narrative (based more around interesting quests than memorable characters or plot points) slide into the foreground and take over as the primary motivators, and it happens to be a form of motivation that I enjoy far more than fighting swamp creatures. One simple console command has changed the game from an indescribably frustrating slog to a highly enjoyable game of exploration, thievery, and prospecting.

But Risen still drastically needs a better tutorial and proper visual feedback during combat. “Read the manual” just really really doesn’t cut it in 2011. There is no excuse for that kind of laziness. And it would really help if “Easy” meant “Easy”, and not “Damn near impossible.”