A lot of the gaming web has been fawning over Kirby and Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai’s design videos. I haven’t had the chance to look at them yet, but they look interesting at least. They’ve been coming out at a good clip, like one every two days.
Sakurai’s star is so high right now, that it’s worth noting that (going by memory) he left Nintendo with a bit of a cloud over his head, after Kirby Air Ride was seen as something of a failure. Nowadays KAR (nice acronym!) is seen as an underrated classic, and I have put many hours into its City Trial mode, which is terrific, a tiny open-world high-speed racing/party game. More people should have the chance to play it; it is unique, which is something I can’t say about many other games. While the 3DS version of Smash Bros. has a mode inspired by it, in versus mode human players cannot interact with each other during the exploratory portion of the game, which harms it somewhat.
At the height of his abilities, Sakurai can make really interesting and new kinds of games, like Smash Bros. was, and like Kirby Air Ride and (the sadly neglected these days) Meteos are. It’s a shame that Smash is so popular, one of Nintendo’s biggest tentpoles, enough to crowd out his other work. I’m really interested to see what the next crazy idea he comes up with will be!
Another interesting game-related video he’s made is about the beloved old pinball game that was included with Windows during the XP days, but vanished with Vista. The game’s exclusion was the subject of a blog post by former Microsoft developer Raymond Chen, who mentioned that he had trouble getting the game to work correctly under 64-bit Windows. The ball kept clipping through objects, and sometimes falling through the plunger and out of the table. NCommander’s examination indicates that the problem was probably related to floating point precision as Chen had said, but that the cause was probably more complicated than that, and may have had to do with issues getting the game to run correctly on Intel’s ill-fated Itanium architecture, their first attempt at a 64-bit processor.
NCommander’s explorations were made possible by the discovery that, although there was no way to get the installer to offer it, the 3D Pinball game files are on the CD for the various editions of XP for Itanium. For more information, I refer you to the video, embedded above.
Notably, Chen has responded to NCommander’s video with more details about the game’s removal, which make the story even more interesting, bringing in Alpha AXP, a second obscure 64-bit architecture that could run Windows XP.
It should be said that all of this is much more technical than the usual post here. Please don’t freak out too badly if this makes little or no sense to you. We’ll have something marginally more comprehensible for you tomorrow.
The book also contains interesting information on the licensing and approval process! Some things specifically listed as potential issues for approval (page 1-2-4 to 1-2-5) are the player being able to get somewhere without hope of escape, the inability to pause somewhere during gameplay, “inconsistent scoring methods,” calling the controller or cartridge by unacceptable terms like “joystick” or “cassette,” accidentally leaving Super Famicom-style colored buttons in depictions of the controller, and whether there are vowels in the password system.
Tiled is a popular open-source tool for tilemap construction
Popular and prolific game asset creator Kenney has a page up at Github that links to some of his favorite tools for manipulating pixel art, such as creating sprite sheets and extracting images out of them. It’s got a lot of useful info! If you have an interest in this style of art, especially making games with it, these programs are worth having in your toolbox.
If the algorithms that drive the ad servers of social media sites have you pegged as a casual gamer, you will be given a little window into a world of madness. Searching for “mobile game ads youtube” will turn up a fair number of YouPotatoes pointing at that madness and saying, “Look! Isn’t it crazy! How can that be allowed!”
Those kinds of videos themselves are their own exploitative little world, but they have a point. One such video recently made the Blue (that’s what Metafilter users call their main site), and it’s a prime example of both worlds, accurately calling out a lot of mobile gaming ads for being batshit insane, while also having the dismissive, hyper-edited, sound-effect-laden style all too illustrative of the problems with YouTube’s own engagement algorithms. It’s a crappy thing, making fun of a very crappy thing.
Edit: Here’s the video itself, which might be useful, it’s about 13 minutes long:
The thread is interesting, arguably more interesting than the video. Two MeFi users currently in the industry had a conversation there, and after a somewhat rancorous beginning, it was fairly civil by internet standards. Jilder is a writer in the mobile games space, and Ryvar works as a dev in more traditional computer gaming.
Here are some selected quotes:
[…]the ads aren’t aimed at children. Children don’t have money. The game developers want whale tier players – so people who can drop thousands of dollars a year on a game without blinking. There is a whole industry dedicated to building games to find and catch these sorts of players and the game developers are very much not interested in children – the ethics of that not withstanding, the legal implications are expensive.
[…]boy, hes got no idea how wild ads can get if he’s only seeing the Dude Ads. Lily’s Garden ads are a whole ass thing all on their own and one of the grande dames of the genre, along with Merge Mansion, which is I suspect the game Alison mentions above. Merge Mansion’s most recent crop of ads full on have Oscar Award winner Kathy Bates starring as sketchy grandma Ursula (which, I must stress, are basically a tv mystery series only very loosely connected to the game).
Jilder (same comment)
The basic model for mobile game profitability is to release several dozen lightly reskinned clones of the exact same game and invest continued development into the handful that attract a sustainable population of whales. It’s grift, all the way down.
When mobile exploded the market and dropped financial barrier to entry by an order of magnitude, both game dev and game consumer culture were considerably thinner on the ground and even the best things to come out of the resulting environment (Genshin Impact, Lineage 2 Revolution) are still exploitative as shit. […] Part of the reason devs and gamers alike fucking hate Diablo Immortal is that it’s an extremely public beachhead for the tentacles of pure capitalist greed into a culture that has until now been moderately successful at keeping this avalanche of bullshit at bay.
All competitive online gaming has a pay-to-win element, it’s just not easily seen a lot of the time – it’s just that you pay for a decent gaming rig, and in my case you pay for having a decent internet connection. Like I’m in Australia, so lol how’s my ping bruh?
But the gatekeeping around AAA rated gaming is huge – gamergate bros are just the most visible manifestation […]. As I mentioned in my first comment here, I’m a middle aged woman, so you know, I’ve been dealing with gatekeeping shit around gaming my entire gaming career.
Lots of players are also armchair designers, so we like to present interesting tools as they appear. One that recently went up on Steam is the voxel-oriented RPG In A Box ($29.99). It has that interesting 3D-yet-8-bit vibe that make the Dragon Quest Builder games so appealing.
There are a lot of interesting tools out there for a variety of skillsets, and greatly differing levels of flexibility. Some considering are RPG Maker MZ and MV (who knows what the letters are meant to stand for), Zelda Classic for action games, and for more flexible tools it might be worth checking out Godot, or maybe creating something with Python and Pygame.
Pangur is a text processing system that works entirely through visual code. People familiar with systems such as Scratch or Nintendo’s Game Builder Garage should be at home with it. Its workings are adjusted by creating and connecting a number of nodes, with both input and output connections. You can try it out directly in your browser (Firefox and Chrome are known to be supported), or read the guide to learn how to use it.
I’ve known and spoken with Keith Burgun for over a decade now, and his early hit 100 Rogues for iOS was featured back on @Play. (It’s sadly now unplayable because of a combination of rights issues and Apple’s upgrade policy that makes old iOS software impossible to use.)
Many of Keith’s games made heavy use of randomization. 100 Rogues was a roguelike, Auro was a single-character puzzle/tactics game with randomized maps, and his current Gem Wizards Tactics (Steam, Switch, Xbox, Android) uses random maps.
But Keith is always reexamining his ideas. A while back he decided he didn’t want to keep making roguelikes, taking the ideas from it he liked and leaving the rest behind. And now he’s questioning his use of randomization as well.
He’s written an essay on his blog, titled “Space Narratives: A Map Randomizer Denounces Map Randomization.” It’s got some very interesting points, and he draws in the awesome Ocarina of Time Randomizer project in his discussion, as a way to have benefits of randomness without having to randomize the map itself. It’s good food for thought for developers interested in procedural content!