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.

DADIU stands for Danmarks Akademi for Digital Interaktiv Underholding, which is Danish for Denmark’s Academy for Digital, Interactive Entertainment. It’s not a university, but rather a fairly unique collaborative organisation that every year arranges game development projects for students from a series of Danish university-level educations. Whereas most educational game projects give groups of 4-6 students a whole semester or more to create a game, DADIU takes the opposite approach: teams of 12-15 students get one month to make a game. Under the old DADIU system, which I have the fortune to be among the last participants of, the programme consists of two projects, a practice run in May of the first year and a graduation project in March the year after. I’ve been told the new system will only have one project, during the fall.

Still with me? All right. I’m gonna go on a bit more about DADIU; if you’d rather know what the hell is up with the post title, skip to the sentence marked in bold below the next picture.

I had my first DADIU project, the practice run, this May. It was an incredible experience that I enjoyed immensely. DADIU is brilliant for pretty accurately recreating the structure and the dynamics of a real game development project – each team is composed of students from completely different educations, working with pre-assigned roles in a strictly defined (but optionally enforced) hierarchy, in the same room for 8 hours a day. The management team is the project manager, the game director, and the game designer (that would be me). An art director and a lead programmer further make up the leads. The rest of the team consists of a number of programmers, CG artists, animators, one or more graphic designers, and a sound designer. The practice run is executed under strict constraints (this year we had to design a game for 3-7-year-olds, playable with just the mouse and the left mouse button, featuring 3D and AI with critical importance to the gameplay, and playable in a browser) and all teams must use the Unity engine.

As a game designer on this project, I had so much fun. I like to think I have the qualities to make a good lead designer, because I won’t hesitate to decisions on the spot when necessary but I also respect everyone’s competences and creative input and I understand how to delegate tasks and share creative power rather than trying to do everything myself. On DADIU teams, the major conflict zone tends to be between the director and the designer, because their areas of responsibilities are a little poorly defined. Further, the game director is a person from the animation line on the Danish Film School, who will often have no prior experience with game development and no knowledge of the medium as such, yet has been given veto and creative oversight by the organisation. Fortunately I got a director who was fully aware of these issues and we were both determined to collaborate, give each other space, and work together.

I will say, however, that if we’d had a level designer on this project, I would have been bored far more often than I want to be. I feel that it’s important as a designer in a lead position to set an example for the team by working hard, and personally I enjoy getting my hands dirty if there’s time – since we had no level designer, I did all the level design and construction myself, which was the only reason my position wasn’t purely managerial.

At the end of the project, I had to hand in a personal report to our DADIU contact person at the ITU. It explains every facet of the project in more detail, focussing on my responsibilities and how I handled them. If you think you might find that interesting, you can download it here , it’s 8 pages and weighs a mere 589 KB.

The game we made in May is called Imachination. It’s a game for 7-year-olds about digging through Earth from Denmark to China with a huge construction vehicle stocked with weaponised tools and building equipment. At its most basic level, Imachination is an arcade shooter in the vein of Robotron 2084, but it has one very significant fundamental twist: your weapons fire automatically at a predefined rhythm, all you have to do is move and aim.

As you will see if you choose to read the report, it’s not a decision I’m particularly happy with in hindsight. Personally I enjoy playing the game and I think it works great, and so does most of the team. The problem is only about half the people who’ve played the game agree. Far too many players think it’s unsatisfying not to have to click to shoot – clicking gives the player a very direct connection to what’s going on in the game, and many players simply don’t find our gameplay involving enough without it.

If you’ve played Invisible War, the sequel to Deus Ex, you’ll be familiar with the concept of universal ammunition: instead of each weapon using an individual ammunition type that is spent and replenished independently from the ammunition for other weapons, every weapon shares a single pool of generic ammunition. This has the advantage of making game balance somewhat simpler for the designers, but the fairly significant disadvantage of making side-arms pointless (if you’re out of ammo for your primary weapon, you’re also out of ammo for all your other weapons) and making heavy weapons too expensive (the flame thrower for example will eat up all your ammo very fast, and then you’re stuck with melee weapons). It’s an original design decision that looked perfectly innovative on paper, but in practice it doesn’t really work – at least not the way it was implemented in Invisible War (Mass Effect 2 makes the whole thing work simply by divorcing the ammo expenditure of its weapons from each other, while picking up one clip will still add its ammunition to every weapon the player has).

Though it’s obviously not quite the same, I can’t help but think of the auto-firing weapons in Imachination as my own universal ammunition. There were signs of controversy already during development (I once read that Warren Spector himself was worried about universal ammo; likewise, one of our industry consultants repeatedly spoke out against it during our meetings), but the idea stayed, I guess primarily because it was sold convincingly to the rest of the team – everybody understood the reasons why it was a good idea, so the reasons why it might be a bad idea weren’t given sufficient weight. Finally, it’s a streamlining of the core gameplay that makes the designer’s job somewhat easier (in the case of Imachination, it was the least complicated way of handling our one-button constraint) but takes something away from the gameplay that most players enjoy.

In the end, the problem isn’t that only half the players think the game is fun without clicking to attack, the problem is that all players would have thought the game was fun if the clicking had been there – I introduced a problem without really fixing another one.

I’d like to think I’ve learned from this. Learned to be more careful about what to innovate in the future perhaps, and to test the game even more with people outside the team, even if there’s not really time to run those tests. If nothing else, I’ve learned that when there is shooting, the player wants to be the one doing it.

If you have twenty minutes to spare, please do give Imachination a try and let me know what you think. It runs in your browser if you have the Unity web player, it only has 3 levels, and all you need to know is that your health regenerates if you avoid taking damage for a while, everything else of importance is explained in the brief tutorials at the start. Drop me a comment to let me know what you think if you play it

Though the core of its message is something most of us should be able to get behind, there are some flaws in the delivery. First of all, the actual gameplay (a small shmup-style thing) may be neither challenging nor complex, but the facts that there’s no penalty for failing a level, that levels are fairly short, and that you get to keep any money you pick up makes the game itself take a backseat to the upgrade system. The game is uninteresting, but it’s not bad, and it doesn’t get in the way.

Secondly, the upgrades actually really mean something in this context: the more you upgrade, the more ‘splodes appear on the screen, and you get the basic satisfaction of blowing up loads of things at the same time. It’s highly doubtful that the game would’ve worked at all if it had started out the way it ends up fully upgraded and then never changed, but since the upgrade system has been made to literally make the game more fun, you get the joy of seeing the game improve as you progress through it. Perhaps what the creator was trying is to show that rather than games starting out fun and becoming even more fun as you progress, they start out poor and only achieve the level of fun they should have been from the start once you’ve upgraded fully – this has certainly been true for some games, but I would say that’s less a problem with upgrade systems as such than the result of poor execution.

Most importantly, the point of Upgrade Complete is to upgrade everything by the time you finish – in fact even once you complete the final stage, you haven’t completed the game until you’ve upgraded everything you can upgrade. That works for Upgrade Complete because it’s a game explicitly about upgrading everything, but in any other game it would be a poor design decision in my humble opinion: the point of an upgrade system should be to make the player choose between different options for character advancement or equipment loadout – by unlocking more upgrades, skills, or equipment as the players progress, you ensure that their options at the beginning of the game aren’t too overwhelming; then you open a steady trickle of new options so the players can slowly familiarise themselves with their options for customising their experience. You should never let the player buy every upgrade in the game, because it ultimately eliminates the element of choice and personalisation.

Since Upgrade Complete is a really rewarding game, what it inadvertently ends up demonstrating is that games can be fun without solid core gameplay as long as they give you a great sense of accomplishment and progress. That probably wasn’t the point. No matter how weak the satire is, however, Upgrade Complete is certainly worth playing for its wit and its humour. Give it a shot, it’s free, it’s short, and it’s hilarious.

Our instruments indicate that at some point this map contained readable and fairly important treasural information.
Unfortunately pirates store things underwater so the deal is blown.

I don’t play enough indie games. To be honest I almost never play them. I should because it’s looking like my most likely route into the industry and I’ve collected quite a few ideas by now (Larry keeps poking me about sharing but I’m still working on writing them all down in a good format).

My newspaper, Politiken, recently started reviewing games in their culture section, and the first batch of games to receive this honour were the winners of the IGF. I already knew the winner of the Audience Award Audiosurf from having played the beta – I didn’t enjoy it that much, it was fun enough in the beginning but after about half an hour I lost interest. The tech is cool but I don’t enjoy the gameplay. A game that caught my interest, however, was the winner of Best Web Browser Game, Iron Dukes.

I checked out the demo today and it was great. Being a preview, it doesn’t offer a lot of content, so I only played it for half an hour – but it kept me entertained that long, not least thanks to its outstanding sense of fun. Ever read Calvin & Hobbes? Remember the naïve, playfully nonsensical feeling of Calvin’s games? Iron Dukes replicates that perfectly – it truly seems like an illustration of a universe some kids have come up with to pass the time until their parents pick them up from kindergarten. Especially the item descriptions are laugh-out-loud funny. It’s wonderous. And since the demo is free and currently all there is, I think you should give it a try. I can’t guarantee that it won’t get repetitive after a few hours, but as far as the preview goes, it’s worth your time. You can play the Iron Dukes demo here, right in your browser!

Play it.

My plan for Tuesday is to attend the following presentations:

[Edit 05-19-07] Added my notes and some photos.

9:30 – 10:15
Paulina Bozek
Keynote entitled: “My Everything” – From Play Lists to Profiles and Virtual Worlds. Mass Customization: The Explosion of Choice and Creativity

Summary: Personalization and the power of choice have become a sweeping trend across media and entertainment industries. New game platforms and online distribution are poised to enable this new age of mass customization and player participation. As game creators, what can we do to embrace this?

My notes: Can’t say I’m a great fan of SingStar, but Paulina has personality, and what she had to say on Mass Customization was pretty damn interesting. It’s the future, don’t you know? Oh, and Barbie frickin’ scares me :S

10:30 – 11:15
Magy Seif El-Nasr
Lecture entitled: Game Modding as a Gateway to Computing and Media Literacy: A Myth or Reality

Summary: There has been a current increase in the number of game environments or engines that allow users to customize their gaming experiences by building and expanding the games’ content, design, and behaviour. In the recent years, there is a move towards using these game engines in computer science, architecture, history, and media studies classes. However, there has been little research on measuring the learning outcomes through the use of these engines. In this talk, Magy will discuss results of studies conducted to evaluate the use of game modding to promote learning of programming, design, mathematics, and visual design concepts.

My notes: I took 2 pages of notes on this. She basically went over her results from several years of using game modding in extra-curricular high school classes and senior level college courses, and she even went over 4 specific engines (including my favourite, Unreal) listing their pros and cons as education tools.

11:30 – 12:15
Jesper Juul
Lecture entitled: Seeing the Game in a New Light: Content in the Player’s Mind

Summary: Players have little knowledge of the resources that go into developing games; they buy games based on the experience and content they believe a game provides. Using concrete examples, Jesper will examine some traditional methods for creating game content with little effort (especially changing level layouts), and link this to studies of how challenge can make players feel that a game has more to offer. In a nutshell: a simple theory of how players estimate the amount of content in a given game.

My notes: Juul’s presentation was clearly targetted at developers, which was both sensible and interesting. Very practically applicable stuff, but the most interesting part was definitely the conclusions from his studies of difficulty in casual games.

13:15 – 14:00
Adrian Hon
Lecture entitled: Alternate Reality Games Are for Everyone

Summary: Alternate Reality Games have enjoyed critical success, but have not yet broken into the mainstream. What sort of innovations will happen this year to expand the audience, and make ARGs even more fun?

My notes: This was mostly a history of ARG’s and an overview of his own ARG PerplexCity. He packed the speak with crazy anecdotes from the games, which was highly entertaining. Exciting category, this ARG stuff. Not my style though (right now).

14:15 – 15:00
I haven’t decided yet! It’s killing me, there are two really interesting presentations in this slot:
Masaya Matsuura: When You Catch the Blinking of Sunlight: The Inspiration of Music on Game Development and Its Advancement into the Future and
Aki Järvinen: Communities of Nurturing: How to Design Empathy?

My notes: I ended up going to Matsuura’s talk. His English was horrible and he was reading from his laptop; I didn’t understand half of what he said. He did, however, end the presentation with a small performance, singing a duet with an Aibo dog. It was extremely unexpected and really just… crazy. Hilariously crazy though. Rasmus got it on video, awesome stuff.

15:15 – 16:00
Joonmo Kwon
Keynote entitled: Asian Online Game Market and NEXON’s Strategy

Summary:
1) Online game market status in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China and SE Asia
2) Major games of NEXON
3) NEXON Corporation
4) Diversified Business Strategy of NEXON Corporation

My notes: This sounded like it’d be pretty boring, but was actually really enlightening. The man is CEO of a company with 16 published online games and around 320 million subscribers! Madness!

16:15 – 17:00
Daniel Paladin
Lecture entitled: Sidescrollers from Start to Finish: Art & Game Design Approaches Intertwined

Summary: Dan describes his approach in creating art assets, as well as the game design elements that affect it directly in his sidescroller work.

My notes: Paladin is basically doing what I’m doing – creating games online with a team that’s very geographically scattered – only in a different genre, and he’s making money off of it. I wanted to ask him how he coordinates it afterwards, but I didn’t get around to it.

And then there’s the Nordic Development Support Grants Ceremony at 17:15, followed by dinner. It will be a long but frickin’ epic day. My only regret is that we didn’t manage to book a room in time, so we need to skip Tuesday’s party to catch the train home, and we need to get up extremely early on Wednesday to take the train to Malmö again. Thank God it’s relatively close to Copenhagen (about 40 minutes by train).