Okay, so this past month has seen, seemingly, the unwelcome return of “Oh, but this is challenging!” to the Mad Welshman’s hearing. And I’m getting rather sick of the phrase, because it often disguises just plain bad design. So let’s talk about some common pitfalls here.

It Gets Better Much Later!

This is what we, in the criticising/design end of things, like to call a “Difficulty curve problem” or an “Interest curve problem.” If you are having to tell me that the game gets better later to keep me playing now, then something has gone wrong. And usually, it’s not understanding what makes a challenging fight challenging, or an area/encounter interesting.

A challenging encounter is one where you are given time to understand the rules of engagement, but will still get your shit wrecked if you don’t have the skill. The Asylum Demon from Dark Souls is a good example of this, as you can run away quite effectively for some time (In fact, the fight is optional the first time through.) He swings. He butt stomps. He telegraphs. That last bit is important. Equally important, even though it doesn’t seem it, is that you know what effect you’re having.

An uncomfortable encounter would be one where there are wrinkles that you would be unaware of until the fight is underway, causing problems down the line. A good example of this would be from the Persona series, where a specific encounter, Nyx/Night Queen, will charm your healer, who then… Heals said encounter up to full health. Because it’s relatively pattern based, it can be planned for and countered, but it’s an unpleasant surprise that can lead to a slow death and frustration the first time round. Hope you saved!

A bad encounter is one where nothing is telegraphed, or there’s something for which you have no counter beyond memorisation and/or flawless execution. An example of this would be Mind Flayers from the original Eye of the Beholder, whose awesome powers are represented by… An invisible ranged attack that can cause an all party paralyse, aka “Might as well be a game over.” Not even a late game enemy needs something like this.

Interest, unfortunately, is much harder to gauge. Even an engagingly written Wall-O-Text(TM) is going to turn some people off, whereas a five minute cutscene might have people sitting on the edge of their seats. But there are some things that aren’t recommended, and I’ll go into some of them a little further on.

The Last Place You’ll Look

This one can especially be a problem for exploration games, like Metroidvanias, but some people just don’t get that many players will do anything, anything rather than look somewhere they’ve been discouraged to. This is one where I’m not going to name names, but give a possibility, to show you what sort of things you really want to avoid.

The first, and best, would be the Heat Suit in the Lava Place. Okay, so on the one hand, props for thematic placement… But I’m not talking about the edge of such a place. Oh, no. We’re talking at the edges of your health requirements. We’re talking a case of “If you have X health powerups, and pass the obstacles along the way well (or flawlessly) while taking the damage over time from over heat, you’ll be able to get the Heat Suit, which stops that damage over time effect.” A perfect example of this was provided by one of my twitter followers, where, in La Mulana, the Ice Cape (Which reduces lava damage) is at the end of the Inferno Cavern (Which not only has lava, but fireballs that will often knock you into the lava.)

Don’t do this. Don’t ever do this. First off, what the heck is it doing all the way there? How did the normal schmoes get it, before everything went to hell? How did it get there? How will anybody know? And this applies to a lot of things, because players can be easily discouraged. Let’s say there’s something that jams your minimap. Let’s say knowing where you are is kind of important. Players won’t want to explore that jammed area until they know how to deal with it. If the thing you need to deal with it is in that area, then congratulations, you have basically created an old-school game maze, a piece of artificial padding that’s been despised since… Well, a long damn time.

While we’re on the subject…

The Maze. Because.

That “Because” is kind of important. Putting a maze in your level design for no good reason is going to annoy people. Especially if it’s a teleporter maze, where there’s no frame of reference. Especially if you can’t leave some sort of breadcrumb trail. Especially if you can’t pick those “breadcrumbs” back up again, and need them.

Realms of the Haunting, for all that it had a strong, interesting early game, suffers really badly from this in the latter half. At least two hedge mazes, at least two cave mazes, and a couple of maze puzzles. That game suffered because of that. Yours doesn’t have to. Yes, there have been clever mazes (And clever pseudo-mazes.) That doesn’t change the fact that often, it’s a lazy puzzle.

The Random Chance of Instant Death

This one mostly applies to RPGs, but there’s an analogue in some strategy games. Essentially, sometimes, monsters in games have a random chance, if they hit you, of straight up killing you. Often, this goes along with random encounters, or scripted, yet invisible encounters. So you walk into a fight and… Oh, bad luck, hope you saved before that fight!

Yeah, nobody’s going to ever claim that was fair. Or much of a challenge on either side. Either the insta-death doesn’t proc, and the monster wastes its life trying to kill you, or it does, and you’ve got nothing left but to reload an earlier save. I could point to an absolute multitude of early RPGs that do this, including… Er… Most of the CRPGs of the 80s and 90s.

Thing is, this applies to pretty much any game where you can be dicked out of a victory by nothing more than chance. Need to roll seventeen sixes on 20 d6 to win a game? That’s bad. On a related note, you have the…

Gotcha PowerUp

Oh, that extra life looks really tempting, doesn’t it? Shame that if you try and get it, you’re going to die. Well, chalk that up to learning a lesson abo- What, you thought you didn’t have to go through that tough segment it’s at the end of again? Ahaha no. Go directly to checkpoint, do not pass go, and do not collect your extra life. To make it worse, sometimes it’s not an extra life. Sometimes, it’s not even a real power up. When you just can’t reach it, ever, that’s lacklustre design. When you can, but can’t get anywhere without dying? You’ve been Gotcha’d, and it’s bad design.

Gotcha Enemies/FUCKING BATS/Gotcha Spikes

There is a reason Castlevania bats have mostly gone out of fashion… Because everybody knows they’re difficulty padding. For those who don’t know why bats (or birds, or spiders, or medusa heads) are considered such a bane, let’s consider a jump. If you are skilled, you will make that jump. Okay, that’s fair.

Now add knockback on a hit from an enemy or obstacle. Put that enemy in the middle, and make sure it dies in one hit. Okay, now it’s challenging, because there’s a timing element too.

Now replace that enemy you know with bats. There is never one bat. They either move toward some point on you (Often below or above your weapon’s hitbox), or they move in a predetermined fashion across the screen from a random point. Congratulations, you’ve just gotten pissed off at the fifth time you’ve been knocked into that pit, and very possibly died.

Another variant of this is the Gotcha Enemy, the one that is either on your target platform in an obstacle course, or appears just as you’re about to land. Unlike the other examples, it can’t be killed in one hit. So you’re going to get knocked back unless you have some other resource to deal with it… You know, into that pit. Which kills you.

But let’s say it doesn’t kill you. This gives us an example of the Gotcha spikes! You fall, and, holy of holies, there’s a platform, you’re not going to die!

Except you are, because you can’t control your movement while being knocked back, and you need to go right, not left to land on it. Everywhere else is spikes. For extra dickmovery, let’s imagine that platform is actually where you need to go to complete the level.

You’d think this was me making things up. But no, these are things that have happened in older games before. Mostly in the Mega Man and Castlevania series, both of which are well known for their equivalents of FUCKING BATS (Which, in Castlevania’s case, is where the term came from.)

Read My Mind.

This one is particularly bad with adventure games and RPGs, because it’s long been accepted that both genres can have puzzles, and maybe should have puzzles… But the art of designing a puzzle is a tricky one, because not only do you have to know the solution before you write it, you have to think really hard about whether you would, in the situation your character is in, arrive at that solution too. We even have a name for it, based on a game by Jane Jensen (Who normally writes much better puzzles, to be perfectly fair): Cat Hair Moustache. Of course, this includes a multitude of sins, including bad signposting, bad logic, and lack of clarity.

Gobliiins, by Coktelvision, has entertaining animations, endearing characters, and only got better with the addition of music and cheesy VA. However, it suffered from all three of these problems, and it was only made worse by a health bar system that would lose you the game if you screwed up enough. Hey, maybe punching/magicking/using this thing would he- Oh, wait, no, it dropped our health bar because it was secretly full of snakes/spiders/a possibly undead gribbley. One of those things, by the way, was an integral part of a puzzle, but if not handled in exactly the correct way, would give you a game over quite quickly.

Some of the hidden rules behind Gobliiins you learn quite quickly (Never ask Dwayne to use a stick shaped object on anything but the thing he’s meant to, or he will bash himself on the head.) Others, you can never be certain of.

And so it becomes a game of trial and error, because there is only one solution (Sometimes two), and sometimes, it involves moon logic (Such as opening a cupboard by throwing a dart at a picture of its owner) or just guessing which one is right (Which apples are safe to make big and carry to fill a gap in a bridge?)

I’m Not Going To Tell You

Sometimes, you don’t actually have the information you need to make a solid decision. This one comes in several varieties, but the core question in each of them is “Should I, as my character, know what I don’t know?” If the answer is “Yes”, then you have correctly identified the game padding its difficulty. Unfortunately, part of the problem here is that, a lot of the time, you don’t know it’s there to be important. For example, ally kills in Disgaea bar you from the best ending, but the criteria for it? It’s somewhat picky.

Now, I want to be completely fair here, and mention that, in one particular case, it’s because of factors outside the developer’s control. Specifically, copyrighting of sanity meters. That’s right, that whole “Your vision gets fucked up when looking at a creepy thing” comes from designers having to get around paying extra money because they can’t give you a number to tell you how scared you are.

Checkpoint: Failed

Hoo boy. This is a really common one. From the multi-stage boss without a checkpoint, to the one button runners without a checkpoint, ignoring checkpoints if your game is already challenging (or just plain difficult) takes it to a whole other level of fuck you. Let’s take the one button runner example. There is a game, that I will not name, which has a cool soundtrack, some great customisation, acknowledges that colour blindness is a thing, and has some cool set pieces within its limited repertoire. But none of this is very useful, because, since not a single level has checkpoints. In game, I’m hearing the same thirty seconds to a minute (On a particularly bad day, 15 seconds) over and over again, I’m not seeing most of the set pieces, and due to this, I have a playtime of… An hour, gained in ten minute dribs and drabs once in a blue moon, since I bought it two months ago. I have beaten two levels. Is it because I’m bad at the game? No, it’s because a one-button runner is already a challenging genre, and having not a single checkpoint in a five to ten minute level requiring quick input and pattern memorisation pushes it from “Challenging” to “No, fuck you.”

Things To Keep In Mind

A clever designer can make these things not seem so bad. Well, most of them. Hidden stats, for example, are pretty much “flavour” in many racing games, and you don’t need to know the hidden stats to play Pokemon. Sometimes, they’re limitations. But they can nearly all be taken out of your game, if you make one, with just a little forethought.

Ask questions as you design.

Ask folks to test your game, and watch folks playing your game. They will surprise you.

Look at older games, and learn from their mistakes.

Don’t blame me for any complaints if you don’t.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £10.99
Where To Get It: Steam
Other Reviews: Early Access

The satirical computer board game of being a capitalist douchebag (and Gremlin) released earlier this week, and I finally got a chance to properly give the multiplayer a go. As it turns out, I’m an evil, evil man. But you knew that already. So let’s talk about the game.

Gremlins Inc, essentially, is a tactical race for points, where the cards you use don’t only affect other players and give you points, they’re also the way you move. As such, you have to change your plans on the fly quite often, as while you could try holding on to that lovely card with all the victory points, you might need to get to a more immediate reward in a hurry… You know, before others do to you what you would do unto them. Despite being competitive as all heck, ranked multiplayer seems pretty relaxing, although due to one of the reasons it’s relaxing (Chat is mostly just emoticons and some stock phrases), it can be hard to tell sometimes.

Either way, playing against players is a very different experience than playing against the AI. Because the players are less likely to dick you over. Which segues nicely into one of the “problems” of Gremlins Inc. : Challenge mode is tough, because the AI is good. Or, more accurately, because the AI is aggressive. I have yet to gain three lamps in any of the challenges, despite them mostly being longer games than ranked. Because the AI players take every chance they get to dick you over if it looks like you’re winning.

In a way, though, this is still revealing, because it shows how the entire game is built around threat perception. And there are lots of threats to perceive, from a player having lots of money (Used to buy cards, especially ones that give you those sweet, sweet victory points), lots of votes (Meaning they’re going to become governor, get a victory point, and become immune to bribe or police search tiles, letting them keep their money in places you wouldn’t want them to), lots of EEEEEVIL (An indicator of how many “selfish” cards they’ve played, such as Robbery… 350 easy money, but also lowers everyone’s income), and even the not often seen Prison Experience (Which establishes how much of a threat they can be if you’re in the Jail with them.) The computer is good at establishing this, whereas in multiplayer? It’s much less certain. You could slip by unnoticed for many turns, not considered a threat until BAM, one Infernal Machine and an instant jump to the top of the board. Or, of course, you could be heading toward the Astral Plane, somebody will say “Aha, they are about to play a good card” , and slap you down for your hubris.

I haven’t had this much fun playing ranked since Bad Company 2. And the game is cunning in that your rank slowly goes down for each day you don’t play, allowing newer players a chance to climb the ladder when others get tired of playing. The game also tries to keep the interactions friendly by limiting them, and it seems as though that’s working. Seems. It’s kind of difficult to tell, but I’m pretty sure most people are being friendly, gasping at others’ misfortune, asking if they’re alright, and cheering each other on as somebody makes a canny play.

Overall, this is a tightly designed computer board game whose main flaw is the same flaw of any board game… Once you become familiar enough with it, the entertainment lessens. But nonetheless, I’d recommend it as a good example of computer board games, and a game at a reasonable price.

(Other reading: The Early Access Review)

The Mad Welshman smiled as the gremlins told him he’d be “Right at home in Clockwork Town.” As another failed experiment due to lax safety measures (They cost money, after all!) exploded, he smiled. Yes… He was… Home.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £14.99
Where To Get It: Steam

I didn’t really want to take a look at Soul Axiom before release, as it was a puzzle adventure, and game fatigue would possibly have made me forget this one was being released. I’m sort of glad I didn’t, and sort of frustrated. Oh, and it’s by a team of Welsh developers, specifically Wales Interactive. Let’s see how my countryfolk have done, eh?

Soul Axiom is a sequel of sorts to Master Reboot, an earlier game, but knowledge of what happened there isn’t strictly required, as the digital afterlife has gotten a 2.0 upgrade… One which has, as you might expect, gone horribly wrong. So it’s up to you to, er… Solve puzzles using contextual abilities like deleting/repairing things, blowing things up, and a sort of object-rewind feature. Also collecting PEMO data (Memory documents shaped like the creepiest banging cymbal monkey I’ve seen in a long time) and the eyes of G.O.D (Acronym deliberate for plot reasons) to expand the story. With them, you get a more complete picture of how exactly everything went wrong, and without them… It stays pretty confusing for three quarters of the game. Which is a problem.

Why is it a problem? Because I’m spending more time looking for monkeys than I am moving the story forward, and, while it’s possible to go back and get monkeys, I have one shot at it, because… One save.

So, nice things: It has pretty good colour blindness support for the actual puzzles. Thank the Holies, somebody listens when the word “Accessibility” is used. The soundtrack is fairly emotional, from the melancholy bells of the Lighthouse area to the beats of the aztec monkeyland (Although, as a Welshman, I’m confused. Why all the talk about food in the jungle song? I mean, they are saying “Bwyta”, aren’t they, Wales Interactive?) Once the story gets going, it’s okay, with a four character tragedy unfolding that affects the very concept of death itself. Dr. Davies, who discovered Deus Energy; Solomon, a politician and ex-soldier; Dana, a movie actress; and Anastasia Strazh, who had previously worked with Dr. Davies.

Of course, it’s balanced out by the bad in this case: The story is pretty hammy at times, and until you realise one of the characters is a movie star, their “Memories” will make absolutely zero sense. Many of the puzzles seem there for the sake of puzzles (The “Move the skulls to match colours” puzzle is possibly the most egregious so far), and that single save thing is a real git, considering there are three possible endings, one for three of the characters, and the trigger isn’t obvious as to which you’re going to get. The paths genuinely don’t have any differences I’ve noticed except for the end, although getting all three leads to something extra. Just as, y’know, collecting everything does.

This, in essence, is my core problem with Soul Axiom: Whether you think you do or not, not collecting everything is a lesser experience, while collecting everything… Sometimes requires either a guide, or doing everything to everything you can. For example, in the museum… Look up from time to time. Most people I know don’t do that so much. The game is often fun (With the possible exception of the drones in the War Zone. I hate timing puzzles with instafails), and death doesn’t seem to have much of a consequence except for achievements, but it’s constantly reminding you that it is a game, and a potentially interesting story suffers as a result.

I’d still say give it a go if you like first person puzzle games with FPS style movement, just be aware that… Well, the collectables might not be as optional as they first appear.

The Mad Welshman edited his memory of this article after writing it, but he keeps finding creepy cymbal monkeys in his apartment as a result. The IT Helpdesk at TMW has remained unhelpful in solving this problem.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £5.59
Where To Get It: Steam

Space, it seems, is similar to War, in that it’s longish periods of nothing happening, followed by moments of pants wetting terror. Also of not knowing who your friends really are. Both of these, it seems, tie in to Mars 2030, a game which has apparently hit full release.

I say “apparently” , because, honestly? It doesn’t feel quite finished. For the £5.59 you pay, you get a greenscreen styled Oregon Trail type game, in which you load up, try to travel to Mars, and get assailed along the way by various factors like asteroid belts, solar flares, medical problems, and… Computer virii. Which made me blink a bit. So far, so fine, and in fact, ignoring certain factors, it’s entertaining, in a relaxing, “Something I can play while I’m wanting to relax” sense.

There’s just one problem, or rather, a series of small problems making one bigger one: I can’t ignore those things. Not just because I’m a reviewer, and not mentioning these things would be bad, but because they have an impact on the game from the very start. By which I mean picking supplies, because this is, essentially, Oregon Trail… IN SPAAAAAACE!

You’re not actually told what you get for picking, say, “10” food. It’s certainly not 10 food. It’s definitely not just ten bits of ammo for your mass driver. And that’s a problem, because part of the fun of Oregon Trail type games is taking risks, or, more accurately, gauging risks. Beyond knowing that more than 10 food would appear to get me all the way there… I don’t actually know for certain. Likewise with, er… Everything I have. Meds, Food, and Ammo are fairly obvious, but Circuits, Panels, and Wires? Well, they’re possibly something to do with shields and system repairs, but it’s not very easy to tell.

Similarly with the crew. I know, from experimentation, that my Software Engineer is the only one who can fix virii, and my Hardware Engineer fixes the shields. My gunner, I’m assuming, does gun things. Sod knows what the fourth crew member does. And sod knows, from the overlays I have, who’s still around to do these things. Because it doesn’t tell you, anywhere I can see. And once someone’s seriously laid up in the medbay, say from radiation poisoning thanks to Solar Flares, they don’t do their job any more. Which I also don’t know, because the game doesn’t tell me.

I don’t know what a virus in the Auto-Nav actually does. Or the Disposal System. And sadly, I suspect the answer to both is “Nothing.” But the fact I’m not being told these things, things the game presumably knows, is a massive black mark against it, especially since I know the developers have been informed. I would, I was one of the people who told them.

And then there’s the little things. Little things, but telling things: The “Repair” button sometimes blanks out just after I get the window back to do the thing, and also just after I’ve re-opened the ship status window because being told I had a thing to do, for some reason, closes the window. It’s pretty easy to pin down why it’s happening: Because you can’t do anything while the crew are having an event, or just before, and the game, just after giving you a thing to do, then checks to see if anything else happens, stopping you from doing the repair while it checks if something’s going to make your day more complicated. And that one little thing, combined with the other little thing, makes for frustration in an otherwise relaxing game.

Oh, there’s also a lackluster minigame you can play, in which a defense satellite goes up and down, and you have to time your shots to defeat never ending waves of enemies. Whoop.

So, despite it having some nice ideas, some nice visuals that are inspired by, but by no means replicating the 8-bit greenscreen of my youth (Too smooth in places, too small in others), and the same with the visuals, I really can’t recommend this, because it claims to be finished, and feels like a beta still, with bad tutorialising, and promises that seem a bit empty about “crew status” being the next feature… Which is baffling when you consider this “Big feature” is literally adding a segment to the ship status UI, and using that same code to, er… Print some variables. Which… Somehow hasn’t been done in two months. There may be crew members still “with[out] activated game content”, and I don’t, neither as player or reviewer, know. I’m informed, just as I was informed a while back, that support will continue through 2016 for the game, but as release states go, this isn’t great.

The Mad Welshman looked up at the bright eyed, bushy tailed astronaut candidate. “Space Walker? So… No software, no gunnery, no hardware? YOU’RE HIRED.” He grinned, as another useless waste of human resources was sent into space.

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