Category Archives: Game Theory

A Brief Survey of Small-Grid Games

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I can’t decide if I should write a GDC wrapup post, but I cobbled this post together from notes I sent to a colleague discussing 4×4 grid games, as well as my thoughts after seeing Asher Vollmer talk about Threes! at GDC.

All games are programmed on a grid of some kind. Fundamentally, even oddly shaped maps are generally reduced to a grid at programming time. But what I want to look at here are “games set on a smaller square grid”, presumably either 4×4 or 5×5 or maybe 6×6. This greatly reduces the search space.

There are games where the grid space contents move, and games where they do not. In the games where they don’t, you are still changing something about the grid, either marking a path or changing the state of the space in some other way. One category of games like this that comes immediately to mind are logic puzzles like nurikabe, numberlink, or nonograms. (I don’t think they all start with ‘n’ tho!) Another category might be games where you place specific pieces onto the game board, as in one of my favorite chess variants, Tic-Tac-Chec. Stacking games like Rumis might also qualify.

It feels like, at least in video games, games where you move the grid might be more common. The hole puzzle is, I think, the oldest. Although the ‘sliding a whole row’ mechanic is also pretty common, there was an early NES game called Yoshi’s Cookie that used that one. I am tempted to break these types of game down by mechanic and make a whole list. (This is the kind of thing I really like to do, and one of my favorite examples of thinking about mechanics is this cool family tree of matching tile games put together by Jesper Juul.)

Recently there has been a really interesting category of these games with a huge spike in popularity started by this game called Threes! launched recently in the app store. You can play it online too at http://threesjs.com/. There are now a ton of clones, and some of them have (slightly) different mechanics, creating a whole new branch of small-grid games. My favorite is this one called 2048, also playable online (though it appears to have not one but three app versions — no doubt because the original is open source). The main new mechanic here is that tile states “combine” to form a new more valuable state. An additional mechanic is that in Threes! as well as the variants I’ve played, the entire game board is moved at once, whether it’s only one space as in Threes!, or to their farthest empty position as in 2048.

I’m not doing a good job of remembering the details of Asher’s talk, but one was that in at least one previous version of Threes!, there were negative numbers. It’s worth noting that I haven’t seen a clone/version that adds those.

This is nowhere near comprehensive. Let me know what I’ve missed in the comments, thanks!

References / further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_puzzles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Logic_puzzles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_puzzle_video_games
http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/16754/games-played-on-a-4×4-grid

games I wanted to make for Ludum Dare 28

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So another Ludum Dare has come and gone. (The 28th Ludum Dare, although don’t ask me why the twitter hash-tag appears to be #LD48, rather than the equally noisy #LD28, because I can’t figure it out.)

The theme this time around was “You only get one.”

I saw the theme on Friday (on twitter, of course) and being “aware” the game jam was happening, spent much of that night (in between and around playing board games as I usually do on Friday nights) thinking about what kind of game I would make for it. I idly wondered how many Highlander or Lord of the Rings games would get made over the weekend, although browsing the (approximately 2000) competition entries, I have yet to see any. (I have looked through far less than a representative sampling, however.)

It was Saturday afternoon before I decided I definitely didn’t have enough time to participate, but I was still thinking a lot about game ideas. At that point, I had narrowed down the infinite paths in my brain to about two game ideas. Who knows, if I’d had enough time to actually make something, which one I might have latched onto.

First idea: touch-and-drag math game

I’ve been thinking lately about games that I characterize as “math puzzle games”. Some app store examples are Drop 7 (very early example), 10, Nozoku. I think some of the inspiration here is seeing the updates to my friend Roger’s Nurikabe app, Nurikabe Vault, as well as seeing some twitter buzz around Asher Vollmer’s forthcoming Threes.

Anyway, the game idea is essentially a grid of empty spaces that slowly fill up with numbers and math operators. (0-9 and +, -, x, %) The goal would be to “remove” those numbers by sliding over an equation that equals exactly 1. It would start easy with lots of 1s, 2s, 3s, and +s and -s, but eventually end up more difficult. Of course the speed of numbers and symbols appearing would also need balancing. This idea is simple enough I could easily have made it over the weekend. I may yet do up a prototype, we’ll see.

Second idea: local multiplayer

This is clearly inspired by all the thinking I’ve been doing about local multiplayer games, (which deserves its own post some other time), but essentially the idea here is a “get the man with the ball” type game. These are not uncommon and I would not have pursued it without adding some twist or spin on it, but I’ve been really wanting to make a game or two that uses 2-4 PS3 or XBox controllers plugged into a computer. (With the eventual intent to showcase the game in an arcade cabinet somewhere, again, more about this later.) I didn’t actually come up with (enough of) what would make this game super different from every other game with a mode like this, but I was thinking maybe the “thing” you carry around gives you some power, (like a sword that gives you the ability to fight off the other players, or a teleport on a timer or something) and that would be randomized between “rounds”. Again, not a super unique idea or anything, but it fits with some of my personal short term goals.

(Thanks to Gavin Bowman, who inadvertently encouraged me to write this post.)

Game Design: For Science

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zooniverseSo, I’ve been following the Zooniverse projects for a while now, ever since the retired “Galaxy Zoo” project. For those not familiar, the Zooniverse projects (you can see a list of current projects on that link to their homepage) are basically crowdsourcing science. Each one takes a relatively focused (and menial) task that would take a researcher or research team years to complete, and makes a pretty simple web interface that allows “citizen scientists” to participate. The tasks all appear to be (at least from my limited experience — I’ve only done two or three of them) mostly image recognition of one kind or another. Interestingly, in the Zooniverse Reddit AMA (ask me anything) this afternoon, I learned that one of their retired projects was used to successfully train a computer to perform the tasks that the humans were completing, and thus, the project is no longer needed. That is some pretty cool computer SCIENCE.

Until today, I hadn’t given much thought into the people behind Zooniverse. But when I did think about it, I sort of assumed it was like rocket science — in other words, impossibly hard tech-wizardry. Reading the AMA where the team answered questions about quite a lot of their projects and process was for me a humanizing experience, striking home for me that, much as scientists are real people, (not superhumans), so too are the people who make really amazing software that advances science (also not superhumans).

As an aside, I think I have sort of an inferiority complex when it comes to “real” scientists. Not that I don’t know a few here and there, I do have a healthy smattering of PHDs in my facebook friend feed, (who for some reason don’t count). I think of “real science” as this thing that you have to be WAY smarter than me to do. When, in reality — or anyway my newly rationalized version of reality — I am now trying to internalize the idea that much of scientific discovery is not “breakthroughs” and genius-level eureka moments, but rather made up of tiny incremental observations and discoveries. Maybe this putting scientists on a pedestal comes from reading too much science fiction where there is a lot of hand-waving around what happens when the big breakthroughs are made. (This is actually something I do occasionally fault science fiction for, one of my pet peeves is when some near-future science fiction novel’s plot hinges on one or more breakthroughs that completely disrupt modern society, yet we’ve never heard of them before.)

Anyway, the Zooniverse projects aren’t quite gamefied, at least not in a competitive sort of way. I’ve “helped” a bit with a couple of the latest ones, and some of them give you some nice stats about how many images you’ve helped classify, and that sort of thing, which could be used to create a leaderboard or achievements, but the messaging around all the projects is much more about how you are helping further science than about how you can score more points or get the next gold star.

Screen Shot 2013-11-04 at 11.57.37 PMWhich brings me to my next example of crowdsourced science, the far more gamefied “puzzle” game, Phylo. Phylo is played by moving squares around the gameboard, matching their colors vertically, and trying to optimize (or eliminate) empty space between them horizontally. The link between science and what you are doing in Phylo is a bit harder to grasp than in the Zooniverse projects, but as near as I can tell, the colored squares represent genetic sequences of DNA or RNA. From the project’s about page: “By taking data which has already been aligned by a heuristic algorithm, we allow the user to optimize where the algorithm may have failed.” The game is interesting at least, to the puzzle gamer in me, if not actually fun (it would probably be considered fun to some people, I can’t quite decide why I don’t think it’s fun, even though it’s got that “just one more game” draw for me), and they have packaged up the game with a leaderboard and “levels” (that all represent sequences that need matching). There is even an end-game condition, whereby you have to meet the “par” set by the computer algorithms before you can complete each game.

So back to my observation that scientists, or at least the computer programmers who help scientists are not superhuman, and my final link-observation that much of the Zooniverse code is up on github. This means that, if I had the time to spare and inclination (and an image cataloging project I wanted to crowd-source) I could probably get a pretty decent head start by checking out what they’ve already put together. That observation led to my thinking about whether the power of lots of humans playing could be harnessed to create the ultimate video game. A kind of crowd-sourced game design. I imagine a sort of branching-path puzzle game where at the root node, the game is in its simplest form, (and probably least creative). Then, you give the player a choice of whether they want x feature, or y feature. You measure how many people chose x vs y, and you make games x and y also, so you can measure how long players “stick with” both. (One assumption here is that a “sticky” game is good game design.) You could build this incrementally, so maybe in the beginning only a few branches are “built out”, just to have some content, and then you keep building branches, ideally in direct response to additional user feedback or surveying. Wouldn’t that be fun? The problem is that of course you need to generate the “branch ideas” from somewhere. Maybe you also let the players contribute ideas that also get voted on. (A sort of “other” survey answer.) Dunno, it was just a thought. Might be fun tho.

A 4X Dice Game

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dice-pnpThis project came about while I was joking yesterday afternoon with my friend Patrick about how we needed to rush a space-themed dice game to Kickstarter before TMG publishes Eminent Domain Dice.

I’m still working on my deckbuilding 4X game, so 4X mechanics have been on my mind a lot lately, and the more I thought about it, the more I actually thought a 4X dice game could be pretty cool. Right away I had the idea that you would take your actions at the beginning of your turn, then roll the dice to plan out your next turn’s actions. From there, the game practically wrote itself.

I went to BGG to post my rough draft of the rules (without any graphics or pnp files), and before I got that far, I discovered that the theme for this month’s 24 hour game design contest is dice. Well, that seemed awfully convenient, but reading through the rules, I’d have to do everything myself, prototype art and all… so I did.

The other thing I did for this project that I’ve never done before, because I think it’s part of the “complete board game package”, is that I wrote some “flavor text”. I’m actually pretty happy with it too. Here’s probably my favorite bit: “What gravity at the edge of a black hole, this calculating weight of choice?”

So without further ado, here are the rules (and PNP pages, including custom dice in two sizes), for my new game, which I am tentatively calling 4X Dice.

Action Puzzle Games

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I presented the following slides on Action Puzzle Games tonight at the MN Mobile Game Dev Group. I’m not sure the slides are really enough to convey the meaning, but most of this is really just a list of good Action Puzzle Games for iOS, and I said I’d post those, so here they are.

Special thanks to Jesper Juul, from whose amazing article (“Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games”) I stole the Family Tree of matching tile games.

Announcing Oppo-Citrus

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You already saw the logo in my last post, but here it is again for posterity. Cool, huh?

I realized I was procrastinating this post, partly because I don’t know what to write here. I mean, this should be a teaser, so I don’t want to give away all the details, but I also want to be honest about giving an insight into the work I’m doing, both technically, and from a game design perspective.

There was another reason for not writing, a personal one that I normally wouldn’t go into here, but since I said I was going to have this post done a couple of days ago, I figure I should at least mention the real reason it’s later. The short of it is that I haven’t gotten anything done the last couple of days because my 2-year old daughter has been sick. The doctor thinks it might be whooping-cough, which despite having the silliest sounding name of any child’s illness, is actually fairly serious, and can lead to death in very small children. (Fortunately, she’s beyond that age, but it hasn’t been easy, and the most frustrating symptom is coughing until she vomits or gets very short of breath.) Anyway, it’s been a rough first week as an indie. I keep reminding myself that this is at least part of why I wanted to do this. I have the freedom to drop everything now and take care of her as needed. Yes, I might be delaying a product launch by a couple of days, and maybe I won’t make as much money in that time or whatever, but those are tradeoffs I get to make now.

Moving on… Lets start with the basic premise.

game_screenHere’s the current mockup of the game screen for Oppo-Citrus. The first idea I had for this is still intact: you drag a bar of colored squares into the column above, trying to position it such that you make a shape with four (or more) of the same color. You get points for every unique tetris shape. Right now, you get 1 point for the first one, 2 for the second, 3 for the third, etc. I thought about making additional shapes a multiplier, but since it’s fairly random right now, it seemed like that might be too rewarding. There is skill to it, don’t get me wrong, but a lot depends on getting the right combinations of colors.

The red shape and faded red squares around it are because this screenshot is mid-animation of removing the shapes made from placement of that top row from the gameboard.

As you can see, this first level is just two colors (lemons and limes), and as you might imagine, it’s actually fairly easy to make shapes. The real question is whether you can make enough shapes before filling up the board to progress onto the next level. That half-filled yellow bar below the row at the bottom is the level progress indicator. As you make shapes, it fills up, and eventually you get a screen that asks whether you would like to continue on to the next level or keep playing this one for points. I’ll leave what happens on subsequent levels up for a future post or posts, but in addition to the obvious (adding more colors), I have lots of ideas for powerups and additional game mechanics that actually change the game pretty radically while sticking with the original premise.

Everything is a Remix

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I’ve often gotten down on myself because I feel my primary form of creativity is taking things that I like from different sources and combining them. I’ve even gone so far as to talk about “combinatorial creativity” as an abstract concept (though I’m not sure I’ve done so in writing anywhere before today – I should look).

Anyway, today I stumbled onto the series of short films called Everything is a Remix, which (after having only watched the first two of four) I would (nonetheless) highly recommend.

I’m not sure I would go so far as to say that literally EVERYTHING is a remix, but I do think most forms of modern media are heavily inspired by (and often remixes of) existing art of some kind. Obviously, my games are no exception. I want to talk more about this idea, and “combinatorial creativity”, but I’ll leave that for a future post.

Man the Player

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Here’s an interesting quote from Masters of Doom, by David Kushner:

…Plato said, “Every man and woman should play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present.” In the fifties, the anthropologist Johan Huizinga wrote that “play…is a significant function…which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something.” He suggested a new name for the human species: “Homo Ludens,” Man the Player. Marshall McLuhan wrote in the sixties that “a society without games is one sunk in the zombie trance of the automaton…Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or actions of any culture…The games of a people reveal a great deal about them…[They] are a sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland or some Utopian vision by which we interpret and complete the meaning of our daily lives.”

I didn’t want to lose track of this.