A meaningful game

The so-called "motion gaming" hasn't been a reliable resource so far. The technical aspect seems to be ages ahead of the gameplay part, leading to games which may stupify initially only to disappoint in the long run.

That's the reason why casual gaming was born and the general audience has widened in recent years. The reason why there are just a few good games in this generation, and not plenty as it used to be.

In my first dissertation, entitled "Applications for WiiMote and perpspectives of use", in 2006 I analised the first games coming out on Wii. Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3, Trauma Center, Wario Smooth Moves, Zelda: Twilight Princess. Some of them succesfully managed to create new gaming experiences, but to me that was disappointing as well since the elements added to the gameplay were not able to deepen how the game was enjoied.
In Metroid, for example, we could pull a lever by pulling the WiiMote towards us, and that was something new, but the consequences on that specific gameplay element were null, since we could have pushed a button instead without losing anything at all.
Hardcore players couldn't find any reason to prefer Wii to the HD consoles, and usually settled with one of those two, leaving Wii to the masses of casual gamers, even tough there are amazing games on Wii, too.

Anyway, Nintendo has had a big economic boost from this generation, allowing them to think about the future and develop new consoles like 3DS or the next WiiU. Economically, there are a lot of reasons to follow Nintendo in this new adventure, gaming-wise there shouldn't be many.
The new hardware, coming out at least a couple of years before the new Sony and Microsoft consoles, promises to be far from them in performance as it was the case with Wii, but there already are completed games for WiiU and the development kit is all over the gaming most important studios.
Crytek already declared to be elated with the WiiU dev kits, as well as Sega, while EA and other companies are helping Nintendo in estabilishing performing online features. UbiSoft have a game in store and many more to accompany the debut of the new console as it was with 3DS.

They shouldn't be that eager to jump on this train, given the way Nintendo treated Wii abandoning it in its prime, when games were needed to prolong Wii's lifespan to be technically realigned with the other hardware companies once this generation was over.
The reason which is pushing them is one game. Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

Perfectly crafted, Z:SS is the classical game which could have been a masterpiece also on N64. There is nothing revolutionary in the gameplay. No Ico-like take on two characters story, no genre reinvention, no new impersonification measures. It just an action RPG, with the same greatness as the saga previous chapters, the same visionary stages and dungeons, the same secrets and enigmas.
Anyway, the sword Link brandishes seems to be the key to carry us over the storm of this flat generation into the next one. Thi WiiMote is used, for once, as a mean to enlarge pre-existing features rather than inventing new ones. Trivially, it is your sword. In the first dungeon the player can cut a spider web however he wants to, to pave his way through it. The first boss needs to be attacked from a specific point, depending on his stance, directing WiiMote in that particular fashion.
Multiply this for all the dungeons, all the creatures, all the enemies. You'll come up with thousands of ways to defeat villains, compared to one button of the past.

Gamers are, slowly, getting smarter, they will soon realise that too many games resemble each other. And the solution to this eventual behaviour is exactly what major companies are looking for in Nintendo. Finding the genius behind the constant progress of games. They want to jump on this train, they don't care about how many figures Nintendo can line up; that's just good for the japanese company.

Last summer I was preparing my other dissertation, on Kinect. When it came down to find something to program on it, I was taking into account too many options, and fortunately my teacher chose for me. That's basically what programmers do: they have this heck of a hardware and need to get a game out of it.
That is why motion control is always a couple of steps behind regular controls, the lack of previous gameplay engineering turned designers in newbies, finding a natural use of the peripheral instead of an "hardcore" one.
Anyway, you should be wondering why they didn't conceive something like Z:SS in the past, to crash opponents before they even came out with their consoles. That is easily explained by, again, the obviously poor experience they had at the time and the technological woes such devices undoubtedly have. With a first generation WiiMote, deeper games were impossible to develop for the low sensibility of the device which led to the infamous "shake-and-win" users behaviour; then, when WiiMote Plus came out, it was still needed some time to properly understand the input sent to the console, and how to tweak it into something playable. In a way, it seems like Nintendo has the edge over its opponents because this tweaking has been already made, and starting from Z:SS the only way is up while Sony and Microsoft are still fighting to find a suitable hardcore veil for their creations.

This is the edge third parties want to exploit, as if sales figures would represent where users want to go from now on. If hardcore gamers don't want motion sensing controllers anyway, it won't be possible to bridge the gap no matter what developers try to do. If they are open to this possibility, Nintendo will ride the wave at least until further generations, 20 years from now, will prove that motion gaming is not a stable innovation.

Heavy Rain, so heavy!

 Warning: spoilers all over the entry!

When shipped in February, Heavy Rain brought a much needed fresh air in the PS3 catalogue. Sony sold console bundles themed around the game, and the reception for the Quantic Dream masterpiece was as warm as ever. But, what were the players actually doing, by purchasing that game? They were taking distance from interactivity, they were showing how tired of the usual games they were, they were just trying to mutiny to the hardcore gamers cliches which forced them to sink into a spiral of plain and old gameplay mechanics in order to play a non-casual game.
But, were they doing it the right way? Is Heavy Rain a real masterpiece just because it is so different from everything else around?

The game is an 8-hour adventure, which uses "on-rail" investigation sections alongside QTE sections to guide four different characters to the epilogue, which can vary based on what they do or achieve during the adventure itself, which lets the player go on even if he doesn't solve every aspect of each scene or also if the character dies or is jailed. So, there is plenty of freedom, and that's something Quantic Dream must be praised for, because granting freedom using such techniques is hard and the main reason why graphic adventures are nowadays abandoned. Identifying where you miss something or where your character mistakes is easy, and the player will always be aware of what to change in order to reach a different ending (there are like 5 different endings per character, and sometimes they are combined each other). Then, when he completes the game, he can take on his previous session from where he missed something and go on from there, completing the game in a different way.

The plot is good enough to make you come back and try to reach the perfect ending for anyone, but there is a series of flaws which is worth considering before evaluating the game as a gem in the market. First of all, let's say that out of 8 hours, you play half of it, or maybe 5, because cutscenes take a good share of playing time. So, if you replay 2 hours, you end up watching 60 minutes of cutscenes, changing half of them for a 30 minutes of new content. Next time you play, maybe the 30 minutes will be 20, then 10, and so on. You are basically forced to get bored, and constrains kill fun and the real replayability value of the game, which is now just relying on an amazing plot to survive.

Heavy Rain gameplay also decreases the chanches of it getting away with murder from this entry. For how well it is programmed, for how varied it can be, QTE does not guarantee identification, especially when you are set to play with 4 different non-evolving characters. The pair of exploring section are a good alternative, and fun, but the imaginary boundaries set spoil the experience. In conclusion, in movies you identify with a character that has your same behaviour, or profession, or mindset. The same happens in Heavy Rain, and if you are not an architect who lost his first son and has the second kidnapped, or a hot journalist who cannot sleep, or a killer, or an FBI phenom, you won't fully identify with anyone in the game.

Quantic Dream made a great game, shipped it at the right time on the right market, created a legend because Heavy Rain is so different from the rest that users will end up adoring it. But, besides the huge scripting effort and a remarkable cinematic flow, fails in being the beginning of a new era. The title will remain unique, don't expect anything quite like that. A single sparkle in a land of shallow fun and involvement. But it is actually nothing really revolutionary, and has too many flaws to pave the way for clones. Since the same happened to much better games like ShenMue or Fumito Ueda's works, there is no reason why Heavy Rain would succeed in this particular aspect.

Future and words

Last month I had the opportunity to attend, as a student, the "Go Go Games" convention. It was about mobile gaming, a growing market which must be of some interest for everyone involved in the industry. Actually, mobile gaming is still far behind, for revenues, compared to the console and PC market, despite the incredible number of applications and different types of devices to exploit. Such figures were introduced by Renate Nyborg, the head of business development in a London-based multimedia company. We also found out that the U.S. are the main market for mobile applications and that the usual difference between number of female and male users is narrowing over time.

But, more than this, the part of the convention which got my attention was the last one. First, there was a presentation from the so-called "chief Wonka", an amiable guy who owns a small startup which produces iOS applications. His motto was trapped into a single word: "succailure" which means "success + failure". He showed the audience his personal journey into the mobile gaming market, started with some fun applications like a cartoonesque mouth that moves according to the users voice. The income from this kind of tools was around 0. To try and avoid "laying eggs", he tried with a game called ".", in which the player must guide a point inside side-scrolling levels towards the end. ".." followed "...", which was eventullay followed by ".....". 5 dots, don't ask where the fourth game ended up.
Anyway, chief Wonka wasn't earning a penny out of it, even if production times were narrowed to 48 hours in order to avoid wasting time/money into the programming phase. He finally found a way to pay the bills by publishing a collection of interactive children tales on iPad, a still growing application since he has so far received a lot of requests from users. Parents will be able to tell their children stories remotely.


That's what the mobile market is right now. It's like the Klondike for Scrooge McDuck. You go there, you try your best, you might come up with a great idea (luck) or you might be back home without nothing to show off. Anyone can dig in this first phase. There is no advantage for who is already in the business, as "Angry birds" shows very well.

The following lecturer was Mark Rein, one of the pioneers of the FPS revolution before founding his own AAA studio called Epic Games, which would eventually dominate the market, even thanks to its own engine, the Unreal Engine. Rein is a celebrity in the videogaming sector, and the possibility to attend one of his rare talks is something really precious.

Obviously, he is the exact opposite of chief Wonka, his company takes a lot of time to publish the next "Gears of War" and makes seven (eight) 0s revenues out of it. But Epic Games cannot stay out of the mobile market, it has to cover the possibility that consoles and PCs will fail in a couple of decades. With the growing capabilities of mobile devices, which will eventually reach consoles (*), Rein assumes that AAA developers will be the only ones to be able to publish compelling games, leaving people like Wonka behind. Rein's talk was broad, covered technical as well as marketing aspects, and was very interesting, but the real essence was that AAA, and his quality titles, will keep on staying on top of the selling charts.

But, as usual, a doubt popped up in my mind: if the difference between handhelds and consoles is going to get really fleeting, will we end up playing "Uncharted" in the metro instead of in our living rooms? Is the videogaming experience going to change in what seems to me as a complete abomination?

Uncharted on the NGP.
You'll be playing it on the metro or on the aircraft, with people chatting or children screaming around you. Not exactly the experience you wanted when you bought it.

Of course, I approached Rein after the conference, to speak with him about a series of topics. When I asked: "Do you think the new empowered way of mobile gaming suits the AAA usual titles, like Gears of War or adventure games like Uncharted or others?", he answered that we will be playing such titles on a tablet at the university bar. This vision scares me, as well as it should scare anyone aiming to get into the industry. The reason is that if I invent a videogame, I set a target, and a possibile environment for it to be played in. With markets colliding each other, one target melting one into the other and unpredictable ways in which a game will be played, the risk is to totally lose any artistic direction, with AAA titles, that now stand for "quality titles", losing a big part of their appeal.

(*) This is actually not true, mobile devices capabilities will NEVER reach PCs or consoles ones, but we can be confident they'll reach comparable standards in 5-10 years.

Standardizing creativity

When we think about game design, we usually think about long brain-stormings, endless design documents and the constant research of a common direction all over the span of a videogame development. Actually, the work of a game designer is far from that. Yes, they still have the idea, they still decide how events unroll during the game and how to interact with the environment. But this, as I was told a while ago from professionals, requires just the 20% of the total working hours. The main task is to follow the production process and make sure developers, artists and programmers do not lose sight with the most important aspects of the gameplay, and that the original idea is always arranged for the better. No design document reaches the deadline unchanged from the first draft.

So, it would be a good idea to standardize the game design chain, so that designers can easily follow a series of steps instead than always improvising. But what about this kind of management getting in the way of innovation? What if this new behaviour dries off every creativity, standardizing the games themselves, instead of making them richer in content over the years?

We had the opportunity to follow a presentation from the team director of a Ubisoft studio last month. The way they adopt is a perfectly coded alternation of elements and measures to enrich the original idea. A little example: the initial input for the Assassin's Creed series was “a game where you can climb up buildings walls”; it eventually developed in an immensely deeper gameplay which allowed the game to become a franchise. They simply put things together by following their method.

Such method is common to all Ubisoft studios. They basically kidnap people who work for them, escort them to some kind of hidden location in France and teach them this way of implementing gameplay during a week long full-immersion course.

I really apologise for not being able to get in more depth, but Ubisoft policies are very strict and I can't see the point in getting myself into legal troubles. I can ensure that it's all extremely precise. Each element has its own name, each structure has its design, measurement systems are common. Suppose a game designer in Toronto is speaking with one in Shangai: they would use the same vocabulary to communicate and exchange ideas about their respective games.

The aim of this post is obviously not to teach you this system, but just a way to discuss how this way of working stands in the way of pure creativity and gaming experience provided.

First of all, are games born from this “method” different each other?

The most successful games for the company in 2010 have been “AC: Brotherhood” and “Just dance 2”. I can't think of the more different titles. The former have come out just one year after the predecessor, and considered how big it is and how different it is from ”AC 2” defining it a miracle is not exaggerate by any extent. The latter already has a sequel, “Just Dance 3”, just announced. In a huge reality like Ubisoft, with many teams working on many different titles, variety is not a problem. In a small company, that would be a problem. Ubisoft is also wise in avoiding to publish two similar games from the same genre in a relatively short span of time. This measure is going to keep them away from repetitiveness. So, speaking about numbers and figures, it's the right approach, but what about new genres, new ways of entertaining independently from the hardware?

How innovative are the new Ubisoft sagas? Not much. The first AC, for example, was very boring for its lack of variety, which didn't make it stand out. It eventually developed into a franchise, but more because of marketing and other secondary reasons than because of gameplay. Ravid Rabbits is fun, fast and one of the best third party franchises on Nintendo consoles. But it's not a new genre. The new project “Child of Eden” out soon, might seem a totally new way of entertaining, and somehow it will be so, but denying any resemblance with “Rez” would be unfair. So, the question remains... will Ubisoft be able to grant us brand new gaming experiences? Maybe not, even if they're pretty close.

Child of Eden is bringing new ways of using Kinect to the mainstream

In conclusion, systems like the one I just briefly discussed are very productive and can allow a whole worldwide company to keep a common style without sacrificing any creativity. Maybe they won't let us do the “next step”, even if they actually are used on each of the new hardware (Kinect, 3DS), but, as of now, “games come out by themselves” and, given the reality of the gaming market, just this will guarantee a lot of income.

Demo: Seawars!

This is the video for the 1-player mode of my graphics assignment.
List of OpenGL or other features used:
- Texture mapping
- Collision detection
- Shaders (sea waves, boat wakes, cell-shaded moon)
- Model loading from scratch
- Objects transformation
- Basic AI
- Basic GamePlay
- Dynamic lighting
- Particle effects

Boat wakes have been realised by adding a quad behind the boat model and one triangle on each side. Then, these three objects have been moved using the same vertex shader used for the sea waves, with a higher frequency, according to where the ship was moving or rotating.

Not shown in this video is the first-person view, which makes the boat stop to aim to islands more precisely. This was achieved by transforming all the objects on the scene zooming them and rotating them all according to the sniper movements.

The subsequent video, instead, shows the 2-player mode, in which each boat must destroy the other one, and where destroying islands is only useful for grabbing power ups (in both videos you can see the augmented speed power up).

The total given time for the development was four weeks, with just a little tutorial on OpenGL carried on before. Most of the features have been implemented from scratch, by researching on books or course slides, with sometimes a little help from our teachers.
Some of the features (mostly shaders, fp view, 2p mode, particle effects) have been developed in no more than one day, while the deadline was approaching. That's because most of the time was dedicated to 3D transformations and the model loader, which uses obj files to create boats, islands, wakes and bullets, other then to the basic gameplay mechanics to make it an actual game.


I'm sorry about the poor video quality. For example, you cannot see bullets from boats.
This is the address to my youtube channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/dariazzo84#p/u/1/qVhQkjwbhts
If you set an high resolution there, you'll be able to see the demos properly. Sorry about not being able to link my videos directly onto this page.

Just to point out!

On this month 'Develop' there is a short article about Italian video game market, which could be very interesting for English people but awfully inaccurate for people who have a wider idea of how things go down there.
First off Will Freeman, the editor behind this article, makes a list of economical difficulties Italy is experiences in the last years. As always when speaking about Italy, the news he gets from M.A. Rickards, chairman of the annual IVDC (Italian Videogame Developers Conference), are somehow vague to say the least. Basically, he says that the crisis lowered the funds coming from the government and wants game developers to move in this direction, being more persuasive or passionate when looking for funds.
The imprecise bit about it is that crisis in Italy is not for real. It is just an excuse to lower wages, to avoid hiring and to keep costs down. Since the first pictures of employees in Wall Street leaving their offices years ago burst over the first pages of newspaper, bosses started looking for the opportunity of turn that international feeling in their favour. So, the change must happen on an ideal layer, and if the video gaming industry in that country is so poor, it's not because of the crisis.
Then, the speech turns to the alleged ignorance of Italian government about the field. That's true, but it is also true that this situation can be extended to a lot of aspects. It's true that the most funds in art go to cinema and music, but the quality of films and record which comes out is incredibly low for a country that in the past has leaded this two artistic fields for centuries; it's a shame. This is not my personal opinion, but something clear to which ALL critics agree. More than considering video games by their economic aspects, Italian government will be attracted by the way in which video games can work as an art, and in a couple of years maybe rate them higher then cinema or music.

But these countermeasures would come down to nothing in the Italian job market. This is how it works: people come out of schools, universities, colleges. They are then thrown into an office, where their chiefs make them sign (wrong verb) an intern-ship contract, which usually lets them without any income for 4 or 6 months. Then, if they're good enough and they have somehow mastered their new (and first in most cases) job, they are signed for a 'determined time contract' or an 'apprenticeship contract', which basically makes them earn something like 1000 euro/month for 1 or 2 years. Then, amazingly, they are NOT guaranteed to be finally hired. If they are kicked out, they usually end up at a cafeteria or serving at McDonalds, since they don't have many opportunities given the fact that they always worked on the same topic.
Is this model applicable to video game developers? That is a work which requires dedication, long development, leniency about deadlines, a solid group. Impossible. How many major studios are there in Italy? Ubisoft Milano, then nothing. What is the percentage of people hired after their apprenticeship (the whole technology field)? It's around 50%. This two statistics will go hand in hand from now on, meaning that if the latter doesn't rise, those guys in Milan (MotionSports on Kinect and other AAA titles) will remain an exception.
If you tried to send your resume to all the, let's say, 20 studios, working in Italy, 18 would not even respond you.

It's a good, and fairly ambitious, habit to say: “We can play with the 'Made in Italy' brand” as G. Caturano (CEO of a new media company in southern Italy) states, but first there are a ton of other things to fix and, unfortunately, for as much as the Italian very creative and capable developers, most of whom have abroad experience, can say, right now Italy cannot be on the map of the video gaming world.
The point is not about passion or other so-called intangibles, but about managing complex and young new businesses in a country in which you get your first wage at 30.
To me, this article told nothing about the actual situation it wanted to depict. Nobody, as reported, thinks that “video games are like gambling, or very bad” in Italy, they simply don't have time to think about something so challenging, because the current state, which is not even close to getting better, doesn't let them.

Pull harder on the strings of your martyr!

You have been in places that most people doesn't recognize as belonging to their own World. You have been stuck on the Nigerian highway in a stranded van with just a bunch of armed and corruptible guards to look after you. You drove cars you had never driven before between walls of snow and ice, or during an halestorm. You have passed university exams in the most tiring and bad familiar conditions, without even a shelter in which recover. You tore a ligament twice, and still you can play soccer. You could explain what a blitz is to an NFL coach, you could teach forechecking to a Canadian, you could be the leading voice in a debate about offside in Italy. You have hundreds of articles behind you, you have collaborated with professionals when it wasn't even required, you don't fear to commit 100% to something and put everything else on hold, even the most important aspects.

You just don't feel like you need to be judged using an anonimous marking scheme.

You just realised the second question is too hard. You are sure it doesn't bode well for the rest of your exam. Your scarf strangles you, tightening your neck more and more. The clock is ticking, everything is falling into pieces, included your self inflicted hopes. They never understood you, they just think you are aiming too high, they don't care about your strange life, they are just waiting for your corpse to pass, heartbroken, in the river flowing at their safe feet. They are gonna win, you are going to lose. Maybe all you've got.

You met a lot of people along the way. You are 26, it's been already a month now. Everybody was amazed with how young you were and how determined you looked. These people admired you, and how did it hurt when people close to you weren't looking like that. You thought it was impossible that, just because you give your strength for granted, nobody cared about saying how proud they are of you. You can't wait to watch them from above, in your ivory tower, your own personal Babel where you are the king, where you can finally be free... Will you feel free, anyway? Or will you be surrounded by old ghosts of when your value wasn't displayed to all?

You take a look at question number 6. Ahahahha, how are you supposed to answer that? Do the fifth, it's convenient. You'll take a closer look later, that's all you can do. Meanwhile, you go over the other questions, finding a way to respond to all of them. 25 minutes left. Now you think it is too much.

You recall one year ago. Stretched onto an office chair, filling sheets without a straightforward aim. Waiting for the next aircraft to take you out of that maze. 1 day in Paris, 10 days in the Netherlands, off to Sicily and back to Rotterdam in no time. Money stacking on your multiple bank accounts, without translating into really satisfying outcome. That girl who doesn't even want to hear your name anymore, another one who does not realize how torn you are.
A situation to never repeat, that eventually got even worse. By signing those papers you sign a deal which will keep you attached to your addictions like in a web where a wire is cut and a new one grabs you with both hands. And you have to fullfil them, never let go, because everybody expects you to achieve your goals. Anyway, not to disappoint you, but nobody will care even after that.

5 minutes left. You have answered all the questions, in the end. It wasn't that difficult, even if you still have doubts about the final results. You are going to burn the booklet as soon as you got home.

Face it, you are a nice guy, but you are depressed. There will always be another exam, there will always be another task to succesfully complete in order for you to be just Ok and for the others to have enough weapons to kill your self-esteem. You think it is fine if you fail, that you have been through a lot in your life which would justify the fact that, for once, you fell heavily to the ground. You found your shelter, you can have your own failure and live with it, alone. You'll be alone in every case, you know it.

But before that, think about when you were facing the Suez canal, or the immense snow valley in Rugen, or when they said there was no place for you in that field you so hardly fancy. Focus on the extreme cowardice and falsity you saw in her eyes that day of September where you found out, not recognizing it, that sooner or later even you are gonna bend like all of us.

You can have two more minutes to go over what you have written on that damned exam paper, but the guy is pressing you: “Are you done? Can I take it?”. Since you don't handle pressure, snatch the border, bend it and hand off your exam. As they have been saying since the first moment you got here, 'you'll be fine'.

Try to explain them it's not quite like that, I dare you!