Spite is a one-button game for the Kokoromi Gamma 4 competition built with C# and XNA. You’ll need Windows XP or better and a Direct3D 9 capable video card to play it. Also, a finger to press your spacebar. XBox 360 controllers are supported. Also, there’s no audio – sorry, contest limitation.

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On a related note, I can now announce that Inferus was selected as a winner of Intel’s Level Up 2009 game competition. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out and very grateful to Intel for running the contest. You can check out the list of winners here – there are some pretty interesting games!

So, at one point we decided to run a weekend promotion to promote our upcoming title. We temporarily enabled access to the content from our next game, and allowed people who didn’t own the game to create characters and play for the duration of the weekend. Great idea – get people in there at no cost, try and convince them your game is fun and worth playing. Works good for existing customers, too, because now they get excited about what’s coming down the pipe because you’ve let them play it for a couple days.

I was pretty excited about it, since it was the first promotion of its kind that we’d run since I had started working there – which meant I could finally show some of my friends what I was working on, and try and convince them it was worth playing. Most of them hadn’t even looked at the game since they had to pay for it first – and who can blame them, really?

Friday rolls around and I head home late and get some rest. The rest of the team does the same.

On Saturday morning, I send a message to a couple of my friends explaining how to download our client and try out the game. They’re both pretty enthusiastic about it and get started. A few minutes later, one of them says:

‘Why can’t I use any skills?’

What? What do you mean you can’t use any skills? Are there buttons on the bar at the bottom of the screen?

‘Yeah, but they have little lock icons over them. Nothing happens when I press them.’

Well, uh, s–t. That’s not supposed to happen. I emailed one of my coworkers to ask – uh, did anyone try creating a brand new account for the promotion to see if it worked? – and the answer is depressing: Nope. Luckily, it wasn’t a total loss – our existing customers were still able to participate in the event, because they already had working accounts. But for new, potential customers – the game didn’t work. They downloaded and installed our game, and it was mostly useless to them.

The worst possible scenario is that your game breaks and you don’t know about it. A modern game company can be quite hard to communicate with sometimes – when a person’s only choices for getting support are outsourced email support in India or ‘support forums’ full of angry trolls, they might just give up instead of trying to get help. Even worse, if they bought the game with a credit card, they might just issue a chargeback instead of trying to get the game fixed – which costs you more than it would have to issue a refund – all because they either couldn’t, or simply didn’t, get in touch with you about their issues.

As a developer, you want to do everything within your power to make sure that a customer with a broken game remains a customer. Here are some important steps you can take:

Provide a visible, straightforward channel for user feedback and support. An email address printed in the front of the manual, placed at the bottom of error dialogs, or on the front page of your website are a good start.

You can get extravagant by using things like forums, twitter, blogs, etc. to communicate with your customers – some of them will probably appreciate it – but it is tremendously important that whatever tool you provide for customer feedback be as simple and straightforward as possible, and that it be easy to find. Many game companies have switched to hugely complicated ‘automated support systems’ that require logins, registration, password management, support tickets, etc. While these systems make sense from the perspective of a studio, most gamers simply won’t bother and will issue a chargeback instead of trying to figure out why your automated support system’s registration page is sending them an HTTP 500. If you want to manage support tickets using an automated system, go for it, but you absoutely need to accept customer feedback via email or some equally accessible method.

Also, when considering the use of twitter, forums, or blogs, keep in mind that visible complaints and negative feedback cost you more than invisible ones. You should strive to encourage your customers to contact you privately before taking their issue public for the world to see. Ideally, you can resolve it in private before anyone else ever sees it, which limits the negative impact the issue has on your image as a developer.

Prompt responses to feedback are also important. Nobody expects you to solve a bug in 2 hours, but you should strive to send your customer an initial response to their feedback as quickly as possible, even if the response is ‘We’re taking a look at your issue, please be patient – here’s a link to the ticket in our support system’.

Provide news to your customers about ongoing issues with your game in an obvious and accessible location (your website’s homepage or the homepage for your title are good choices).

Running a website is, contrary to popular opinion, quite difficult. As a result, some developers tend to … forget to update their website, or simply don’t offer support information for customers in a visible place, relying on blogs, forums, or news sites to serve as their method for communicating with customers.

This is inadequate. It sucks, but you need to be putting regular updates out there for your customers in the first place they’re probably going to look – your website. If possible, you should put that news in the launcher for your game, if it has one. When you’re showing your customers an error message because the game failed to start, you should make sure to point them at your website, too, just to be sure that they get any information you have for them.

It costs you time and money to communicate with your customers, but it’s time well spent and money that will pay for itself by keeping those customers from leaving.

Design your game so that when it breaks, it breaks gracefully. Present clear, informative error messages that customers can pop into Google and send you via email.

So, let’s be honest. Software in general does not break gracefully. People are used to cryptic error messages by now. Regardless, you should strive to do better.

Every failure should present an error message that:

• Tells your customers what to do to resolve the problem (even if it is ‘contact customer support at support@mycompany.com’)
• Clearly identifies the failure. Providing an error number or error code is good, so is providing the location where the error occurred. However, if possible you should avoid presenting gigantic stack traces or error dumps to the customer – they’re overwhelming, not helpful. Get them back to you, the developer, some other way.
• Lists any user-actionable problems that contributed to the failure – ‘your microphone isn’t plugged in’ is actionable, while ‘your Direct3D driver returned D3DERR_INVALIDCALL’ is not.

Do whatever you can to find out about failures.

When your game fails, if possible, it should ‘phone home’ to notify you. At the very least, it should report the version number of your game, the error that occurred, and a stacktrace of where it occurred.

Sometimes it’s not possible to phone home – no internet connection, for example – and in that case, it’s okay to give up. If you’re concerned that failures happen a lot in this environment, consider storing the most recent failure message in your game’s AppData directory and reporting it the next time your game is launched with an internet connection. Better than nothing, right?

In many cases you may find it useful to report detailed information on the user’s system configuration, and the circumstances under which the failure occurred – remaining memory and disk space available, etc. This is a good idea, but if you do it, you must be absolutely certain that you do not report a single shred of your customer’s personal/private information along with the crash report. If you do, they will be completely justified in kicking up an annoying s–tstorm about it on the internet.

Some customers will complain about your game phoning home no matter what you do. As long as you only phone home when your game fails, you can safely ignore them. You’re doing your best to make sure the game works for everybody, and you’re not compromising their privacy. If they’re worried, they can unplug the ethernet cable.

Note that if your game requires internet access to work anyway, you should probably also consider reporting a successful start and exit of your game as well. This will help you track down situations where your automated crash reporting also fails to work correctly (these are more common than you might think).

Don’t compromise your game’s reliability for business reasons.

Now, to begin with – I’m not a fan of DRM, but I’m not going to try and convince you to abandon it here. If you’re already using DRM, you probably have a reason for doing so.

However, there is no excuse for allowing DRM – or any other addition to a game title – to compromise the reliability of your game. Any addition -  DRM, an automatic updater, a ‘compatibility check’, etc – should never prevent customers who purchased your title from playing it.

Nobody’s perfect, of course – sometimes your game is going to break despite your best efforts, and it will be due to some secondary part of the game, like DRM. In these situations, the previous rules apply: Provide clear, informative error messages, and communicate with your customers.

When a game breaks because of a business decision, customers tend to be less willing to forgive. They just want to play your game; they don’t care about your revenue. Sorry. Therefore, while a good business decision is still a good business decision, you should always strive to make sure that you don’t make your game more likely to break.

If the addition of DRM reduces piracy by 2% but causes the game to break for 4% of your legitimate customers, you just kneecapped the effectiveness of that DRM package, which doesn’t benefit anyone.

]]> http://www.luminance.org/blog/code/2009/07/15/shipping-a-brick/feed 0 http://www.luminance.org/blog/games/2009/03/23/valkyrie-profile-covenant-of-the-plume-nintendo-ds http://www.luminance.org/blog/games/2009/03/23/valkyrie-profile-covenant-of-the-plume-nintendo-ds#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:07:35 +0000 Kael http://www.luminance.org/?p=300 This is a review-ish piece I recently wrote and posted on a forum. It’s not publication quality, but since I haven’t seen much discussion of this game anywhere, I figured I’d repost it here, with minor alterations. There’s no scoring or overall judgement on the game, but if you’re trying to decide whether you’re interested in the game, hopefully you’ll find it useful. I thoroughly enjoyed it and don’t regret spending $40, if that counts for anything. P.S. this review contains vulgarity, hide the children.

Covenant of the Plume is a very strange game. For the most part, the strange things are also good things, but it ultimately leaves you feeling unsure about what you’re playing and whether you like it or not.

At first, it seems like a typical strategy RPG. You’ve got the standard FFT-style isometric map and character sprites, with the rotating camera and per-character turns, characters each have their own attack and movement ranges, there’s terrain restrictions on movement, all that sort of stuff. Then they pile a bunch of weird stuff on top, and it’s hard to tell whether all of it works.

For example, like in a standard SRPG, if you run up to a guy, you can attack him. But it’s a little strange – it cuts away to a higher-res screen where you can see your characters fighting, instead of doing it on the main map. Then you move in another character to attack the same guy, and you realize that both of your characters are now on that cutaway screen, and they can both attack the foe at the same time.

You are now in the Valkyrie Profile battle system, not to be confused with the FFT battle system. The two are basically separate, with one exception. This is really, really bizarre. I don’t think I’ve seen something like it in a game before, which is all the more strange since it actually works pretty well.

As a result of the ability to do group attacks, all of the stuff from previous VP games basically comes back: You can combo enemies, you can knock them into the air, you can daze them, you can dodge attacks, you can counterattack, etc. One interesting twist as a result of this is that enemies get most of the perks that players do in VP games: If an enemy gets enough hits in a row, they can use a soul crush. If multiple enemies attack one of your party members at once, they can break his guard and knock him out, including getting red orbs to grant them extra attacks. To put it simply, enemies can fuck your shit up and there’s not much you can do about it.

Despite being able to wipe you out pretty easily if you let them gang up, the enemies are oddly pretty dumb. In most fights more than half of the foes on the field will be idle at any time, since their AI apparently does not turn on until you get within a certain number of spaces. It’s a little unnerving, but may be necessary to keep the game balanced, since I can’t imagine it being possible to beat some of the fights if all 10+ enemies came rushing at you at a time. It sucks regardless, though, since it’s often not obvious whether a foe is a threat and makes it harder to figure out how you’re expected to navigate the battlefield.

When ganging up on enemies, if you’re positioned around them in formation, you get bonuses like extra experience or more soul crushes. It’s a minor detail, but it does make fights against powerful enemies like bosses more interesting, since you have to weigh the cost of ‘better’ positioning versus potentially losing turns or opening yourself up to area attacks. I feel like this mechanic was ultimately underutilized, though, and badly explained.

The story is arguably better than either of the previous games’. They tell it in a manner close to the original’s, where there are numerous characters brought in and out of the main story arc with introductions, dialogue, fights, and deaths. The game branches at various points based on where you choose to go and how you use the plume (i’ll get to this later) and the storytelling changes similarly. The dialogue is better written than VP1′s and the story is easier to follow.

In VP1 the ‘branching’ aspects of the story felt weak and disconnected from the main plot, but VPDS has a much more coherent story so these little optional story segments integrate much better, and sometimes they actually retell the same events in different ways, based on your actions. A character who dies in a cutscene in your first playthrough may survive in your second playthrough and join your party.

Other than the oddball battle system, though, typical SRPG fare. There are a couple subtly brilliant systems that were added in, though, and I think they’re what plant the game firmly in ‘strange’ territory. I’m still not sure if I like either of them.

So, first. The ‘Destiny Plume’ system. The game is named after this, since it ties into the plot and how you use it actually affects how the game’s plot and missions branch out. To summarize: The main character has an ability that lets him sacrifice his allies on any given turn. Sacrificing an ally pumps up their stats tremendously, and grants a bonus based on their identity.

If you use the plume on the archer chick you get early in the game, it paralyzes every enemy on the field for 3 turns in addition to cranking up her stats; other characters have different effects like drawing enemy attacks or silencing foes. It’s powerful, and if you use it correctly you can overcome pretty much any difficult fight.

Two problems here, really: Giving up party members sucks. You rarely have more than a couple ‘extras’, and sacrificing them requires dragging them into battle. If they’re a character you don’t like, they’re probably underlevelled and undergeared, which means dragging them into battle is a liability.

Furthermore, the characters die at the end of the fight, with a sad death sequence, and they’re no longer available to you for levelling up, etc. I found that I was very unwilling to sacrifice characters I liked just to get past a tough fight, especially since I was thinking about using them in future playthroughs. This may actually be an example of how a New Game + mode can suck some of the fun out of the first time through a game.

A couple other notes: Using the Plume too much apparently can end your game. This was unclear to me in my first playthrough, but I also didn’t run into it (since I actually never used the Plume.)
Using the Plume will also completely fill up your Sin meter. This can be pretty helpful, so I should explain what the Sin meter is.

The second system is not quite as complicated: There’s a ‘Sin’ meter shown onscreen in battles. Each battle has a quota you have to meet. If you don’t meet the quota, you risk being punished by Hel – she’ll make your next fight harder, or withhold valuable items. If you vastly exceed the quota, you get valuable equipment and items, some of which are the best in the game or can’t be acquired any other way.

The way you accumulate Sin is by doing damage to enemies after they’ve died. You were able to do this in VP1 and VP2 by continuing to smash the face buttons or use soul crushes, but now it actually matters – all hits after a foe’s death boost his health bar in the reverse direction, displaying ‘Overkill’ on screen and filling up your sin meter. If you deal twice the enemy’s total HP in damage, you fill the sin meter all the way up and get 100 Sin for your kill.

This makes it important to think strategically about how you will kill an enemy – attempting to do it all at once may mean you just barely do enough damage to kill him, and only net a few sin points. Doing this repeatedly will mean you fall far short of the quota. Trying to kill him in two volleys means he gets an opportunity to counter-attack, and against foes in later fights this can mean the death of one of your party members, causing you to lose multiple turns resurrecting him in battle before finishing off the enemy.

You also end up having to choose not to use soul crushes or counter-attacks if they mean that a foe will die without generating Sin, which is an odd choice to make in a game like this. The game punishes indecisiveness by not letting you abandon a counter-attack once you’ve begun – the first time you hit a face button, your character is committed to battle and the round won’t end until he’s out of attacks. More than a few times, I thought ‘well maybe I’ll just hit him once’, then realized I was losing out on 100 Goddamn Sin Points and, to my horror, could not back out. Oops.

After a while the Sin system starts to feel a little tedious, though, since it becomes straightforward to rack up 100 Sin on every kill by surrounding enemies with your entire party. The biggest downside is that in parts of the game where you get thrown into multiple battles in a row without getting to save, a minor mistake can rob you of the Sin necessary to hit the quota, giving you three equally awful choices:

1. Beat the fight and get punished by Hel for missing your sin quota
2. Reload your save to try again, but have to replay the previous fights
3. Use the plume to fill up your sin meter, which means getting rid of an important character and possibly even ending your game

In my first playthrough, I never used the Plume (except for in the one fight where you’re required to), but I still managed to easily meet the Sin quota in almost every fight. The exceptions were the few encounters where your objective is to ‘Rescue’ someone. These encounters sucked so hard that they merit a paragraph:

In the Rescue encounters, a would-be ally is trapped behind enemy lines, usually 2-4 turns of movement away from your party and in imminent danger. If you do not move as fast as fucking humanly possible, they will die before you reach them. Even if you do move as fast as possible, bending the laws of space-time, they will probably still die. They are fucking pussies.

Okay, another paragraph – the would-be allies without exception spend every turn attacking foes for 5-10 damage per hit (utterly worthless), and getting counter-attacked every time for huge chunks of their health bar. They almost always die due to their own stupidity instead of due to your mistakes. What’s worse, the game fails to make it clear how you are intended to rescue them – in some cases, even casting a heal on them is insufficient, so you will have to replay the rescue missions multiple times.

One particular rescue mission is particularly offensive in that it expects you to notice that by having a magician stand on a ledge, you will get an opportunity to heal your would-be ally in about 3 more turns. This is impossible to notice without playing through (and losing) the mission at least once, and is impossible to exploit if you don’t have a magician. Utterly moronic; I really don’t understand how this made it into the game.

Enough about rescue missions; there are only a few of them, and you can always use a plume skill or something if you have to. A large, but forgettable speed-bump.

Between missions, you have the opportunity to visit towns. Towns have taverns where you can read blurbs about the story and the world, which are fairly well written and tend to either be interesting or utterly boring. Occasionally you will find lore in a tavern that unlocks an optional side mission, where you can kill strong monsters in exchange for XP and loot (thankfully, no Sin system in these missions). This is pretty similar to the structure of the FFT games I’ve played, nothing special here.

Towns have shops where you can buy and sell equipment. Most of the items you need to heal and remove status effects are there, along with a few assorted bits of equipment and accessories you can use to fill in gaps in your characters’ loadouts. Money is fairly plentiful in this game, so I usually found myself with just enough OTH to buy upgrades for all my preferred characters and a few extra items for the worthless layabouts.

The game is item-heavy, far more so than I remember the previous VP games being. This is mostly due to the importance of Action Points in this game, compared to how they worked in VP1 and VP2 – every turn, every available action will either consume action points (usually at least a third of your maximum, if not all of it) or regenerate a tiny amount (10 by default, 20 if you pass your turn).

This means that once you’ve exhausted your AP (by using a powerful spell, or a couple items/abilities), you don’t have any, and you won’t have enough to use spells for another 3-4 turns. It’s very easy to fuck yourself over by spending all your AP and not having enough left to use a resurrection or healing item. Ultimately, I think this system makes fights more challenging, but I was constantly hitting myself for wasting AP without thinking about the consequences.

Also, buy tons of curative items. You will get absolutely covered in status effects and go through your entire stock of items in the span of one or two battles, and if you forget to buy more, your party members will get utterly destroyed. Status effects are easier to inflict than in previous VP games, and are more powerful due to the tactical nature of the game (since about half of them prevent characters from moving or acting).

I was extremely satisfied by the difficulty level despite my complaints about the AI. It’s a little uneven, but overall mistakes can cause you to lose almost any of the battles in the game, even on a second playthrough. I never needed to use the Plume skills to win a fight, despite needing to try some of them multiple times, so I think they struck a good balance here.

The different character classes are balanced pretty well. Mages make good all-around support fighters, with lots of useful spells, while archers have extremely good range making it easy to combo with them, and melee attackers do great damage/combos but are troublesome to get into position for attacks. The game does a good job of encouraging you to mix and match classes instead of relying on the single ‘best’ class for all of your party slots.

Um, what else… The music is pretty weak. Mostly remixes of VP1 songs, and they sound like ass on the DS’s pitiful synth and tiny speakers. That, and I don’t think some of the songs they picked are particularly good examples of Sakuraba’s ‘best’ work. He tends to ‘phone it in’ on games and this is definitely one of them. It’s acceptable, at least.

The voice work is fairly good, with a couple exceptions. The dialogue helps here, even though most of it isn’t voiced. The sound effects are crunchy and distinctive and not too repetitive.

The art is quite good, considering the genre and restrictions. The battle environments look nice, though the tiles are a bit too low-res and reused too much. The character portraits are great, though a little stereotypical, and the character sprites are fluidly animated and very detailed. The on-map sprites are a little bit derivative in the sense that they all remind me of recolored FFT sprites, but the in-battle ones are extremely good.

I should devote another paragraph to the story – overall, the game’s story is extremely well written. It has a large cast of characters that are, for the most part, not flat stereotypes, and the interactions between most of the characters are well thought out. The quality dialogue helps a lot here and the story is further improved by the way that it changes on multiple playthroughs, showing you glimpses of characters’ motivations and backgrounds from different perspectives. The plot itself is also well crafted and manages to flow well and has a few decent twists.

My first playthrough took around 12 hours of game time, so probably around 15 real hours. My second (new game +) playthrough took another 8 or so hours, and got me a bunch of new story sequences and fights I hadn’t seen before, so it remained fairly interesting. Most individual battles last between 5-20 minutes, which makes replaying a mission after a defeat somewhat tedious, but not frustrating.

If you haven’t finished the game yet and you have any plans to see the ending for yourself, please don’t read anymore. Spoilers ahead. If you don’t care about spoiling the ending, this might not make much sense to you anyway, because I’m going to be mostly discussing the details of the story and the ending.

One thing that’s surprised me so far about the response to this game is that it seems nobody has been reading quite as much into the ending as I did. It seemed clear to me that the developers were trying to subvert some stereotypes with it, and I think they might have tried a bit too hard to be subtle. It may be that they had greater aspirations for the ending (and the story in general) and ended up scaling them back in the end, but left bits and pieces of their original ideals remaining in the ending. If this is the case, it’s hugely disappointing, because I believe Prince of Persia’s ending is far more interesting than it appears at a first glance.

Once Elika is dead, approaching the altar presents you with another vision. This by itself is kind of a big hint, from my perspective. Earlier in the game the developers try hard to establish that the visions are coming from Ormazd. If that were the case, what purpose would the visions have now that Ahriman is resealed and all is right with the world?

Another detail is the voiceover (which is unfortunately far too quiet, in my opinion) after Elika dies. If you turn on the subtitles, the voiceover’s only caption is ‘ahriman whispering’, which isn’t terribly surprising – but there’s something else at work here. There are *two* different voiceovers, with distinct voices and distinct tones, each telling you a *different message*. Only one of them has a subtitle, and that one is Ahriman. Who is the other voice? The Ahriman subtitle goes away when it’s speaking, so it’s not him. Based on the previous hint, I think it’s not too hard to come up with a plausible guess. The mere fact that Ahriman is able to speak to you even after Elika has sacrificed herself to seal him away indicates that your victory is far from total.

The third detail is less concrete, admittedly, but ties in with the first two: Throughout the game, you’re essentially cleaning up a mess that was created by the people who were supposed to be protecting the world from Ahriman in the first place (the Ahura). He was sealed away long ago where he could supposedly never harm anyone, locked in place by all these fertile grounds and whatever other plot mechanisms were keeping him sealed. Unlike in many traditional stories in this vein, he did not break free as a result of his overwhelming might, or through the actions of his willing minions – he was released, by one of the people who were supposed to ensure that he stayed locked away – of his own free will, without any manipulation or deceit.

Based on this, by sealing Ahriman away again, what has the Prince actually accomplished? This also ties in with some hints given to the player in some of the story dialogue, in that according to Elika, Ormazd is *gone*. Nobody knows where he is or why his presence is no longer felt, when clearly he was a strong presence in the time before Ahriman was sealed, and Ormazd was essential in dealing with Ahriman. Contrast this with the fact that according to the game’s story, Elika only gained her miraculous light powers AFTER her death and subsequent resurrection. These powers are clearly intended to have been granted by Ormazd.

Based on all this, here’s what I think:

Sealing Ahriman is the easy way out, and a hollow victory at best. Allowing Elika to die simply to lock away Ahriman is not defeating him at all, it is merely shoving the danger under the rug so that someone else can set him loose again in a few hundred years. It’s not a victory at all – it’s a short-sighted compromise, that gets you back to your thick rugs and loose women as quickly as possible (from the Prince’s perspective). From the player’s perspective, it provides a relatively quick ending to the story, and essentially ties up all the loose ends in the world – the girl made a noble sacrifice, the great evil is sealed, and the prince gets to go about his life.

But a lot of us don’t *want* that ending, because we know it’s not quite right. That’s why most of us kept playing after the credits rolled, and cut down the trees.

If the whole saga of Ahriman and Ormazd, Elika and the Prince, is supposed to be inspired by higher concepts – which it almost definitely is, at least to some extent – then really, the idea of defeating Primal Evil by merely sealing it away is ridiculous. Sealing away Ahriman did nothing to eliminate the evil within the other characters in the story – Elika’s father was willing to sacrifice the entire purpose of his existence in order to see his daughter again. You can easily frame this as a metaphor for the difficulty of confronting the human capacity for evil. Ahriman’s four surrogates (who provide the boss fights for most of the game) are, according to the story, all former Ahura who chose to serve him for their own personal reasons and motivations, instead of as a result of being ‘corrupted’ or manipulated or forcibly ‘turned’ to evil.

In all likelihood the inevitable sequel to this game will prove without a doubt that I’m imagining depth and subtlety where there is none. But for now, I’m going to remain cautiously optimistic and hope for something more than just another tired Light vs Dark saga with a shallow moral fable and predictable ending. Here’s hoping the next Prince of Persia game doesn’t disappoint!