ooh look, the Cletus level editor - looks, erm, fun?

This week Anthony has mostly been going over the level design for level 1. He has been deciding where to place any pesky traps, where you will be able to pick up Cletus’ weapons and figuring out which enemies are going to blow you to bits. As Anthony has pointed out, because this is the first level of the game, it is probably the trickiest; it needs to introduce the core elements slowly, as well as hook people in so it has to be both exciting and easy. It also establishes the rhythm of the game. Whatever else we do, it ultimately depends on getting this part right. Or at least not wrong.

Nice shrubbery…………………………………………………..Melt your face off shrubbery

Recently Pete has been working on some deadly shrubbery for one of the Cletus levels. When asked to describe how exactly the player interacts with this particularly heinous shrub he said: ‘Oh look, a lovely and completely innocent looking bush. No wait it’s trying to kill me!’
Death by violent undergrowth has to be one of the best ways to die in a video game.

This week I discovered the iPhone/iPod Touch. Not by actually using one - the only time I actually had a go on a real one was briefly at GDC when the dude who had converted my old game Platypus to the iPhone was showing me how it turned out. But because we’ve been kicking around the idea of making some small games for the iPhone, I’ve been looking at reviews and videos of iPhone games, making mock-up images in Photoshop, and imagining what it would be like to hold the thing, tilt it and control a game by pressing on it.

That’s probably not the ideal way to experience the system, so now I’ve started looking for a second-hand iPod Touch I can pick up for cheap (hang on, this was supposed to be a way to make money, not to hook me into buying another game system!)

Apart from the juicy big screen and the novel control interface (always fun for a game designer to consider), I really like the low price-point of the games. Maybe they are priced TOO low, but what is cool about it is that developers have been compensating by making games with extremely small scope. Very small and simple games, with short development cycles, that get right down to business. No time to mess about, just straight to the fun.

If they are fun? I don’t know. Like I say, I’ve only been imagining them, not actually playing them. But there is something about tiny games that really appeals to me. It’s more like the games that were made in the early 80s, when I was first getting into video games. Back then, it was totally acceptable to make a game built around a single, simple mechanic - so long as the mechanic worked.

In more recent years we have all been expending so much energy trying to make our games bigger, longer and more impressive, and I think that can actually be to the detriment of the games - to say nothing about the poor developers. We do it to try to one-up each other, to make our game that little bit more appealing than the last one that came along. And we do it to try to convince people that what we are offering is still worth the money. People won’t pay $40 for Tetris any more… but maybe if you add in a story mode, RPG elements and everything else you can possibly think of to try to deliver the magical "twenty hours of content" that supposedly represents adequate value-for-money, they might do?

Of course it doesn’t really make Tetris a better game. In fact all that cruft you added has probably made the game considerably worse. So now you’ve spent a whole lot of money and wasted months of your one and only life, to make something that doesn’t work as well as a game you could have programmed by yourself in a day. Just to make people feel like you’re trying hard enough.

Or you could try making games that are just as big as they need to be, and no bigger, and sell them for a price that people will pay. The iPhone game developers seem to be doing just that. I don’t know how well this will all work out; it sounds like finding success on the iPhone is a bit of a lottery and there are some problems with the way the store is set up that need addressing.

But I’m happy to see the return of the small game, at least. It’s been a long time.