Sweatshop, a free strategy web game I wrote with the team at indie developer Littleloud launched today. You can play it here.
It’s been developed in partnership with Channel 4 education, as part of the broadcaster’s programme to educate about fashion through games.
At the start of Sweatshop you are promoted to the position of “Manager-in-Training” at a foreign clothing factory. It’s your job to hire and fire the workers who make clothes for western high street clothing stores, balancing the unreasonable demands of Boss, your temperamental factory owner and Boy, a gentle, hard-working child labourer.
The idea is that, by placing you in a middle management role, you get to feel first hand the different pressures that tug on the various players in the real-life clothing manufacturing industry.
Loosely, it’s a Tower Defense-style game except, instead of shooting down aliens, your “towers” are workers who must stitch the clothes that travel along the conveyor belt. And instead of having base health points, you have “trust” with your client, which is broken for every piece of clothing that reaches the end of the belt incomplete.
So it’s a constructive Tower Defense game, which I *think* is a first (although it’s never wise to make that claim!).
I worked with a super small core team (including the wonderful Gary J. Lucken) to realise the game over about 8 months. It was the most positive game-building experience I’ve had, and I’m super pleased with the results. We worked with fair-trade experts on the educational stuff, which we tried to bake into the game mechanics. Hopefully you learn as you play and while the script is completely stupid, it’s pretty much all based on cast iron facts.
Anyway! Making games is super hard. And we managed to make one and, while it’s pretty much impossible to really know whether a game you’ve worked on is really any good, I’ve played this one a lot, in my spare time, just for fun, which is hopefully a good sign. Hopefully.
OK! That’s quite enough babbling. Go meet Boss and Boy and make some clothes.
Let me know what you think in the comments when you get chance.
It’s a good joke that has remained unvisited for 30 years. Take a character whose gender is defined in his name and turn a him into a her by adding Ms. in front of it. Slip on a colourful bow and slap on some lipstick and the transformation is complete, a neat recycling of assets that’s both economical and absurd.
It worked for Midway with Ms. Pac-Man in 1981, and it works for Twisted Pixel three decades later with a pink-skinned, restless, female counterpart to 2009′s original ‘Splosion Man.
Ms. Splosion Man has lost none of her elder sibling’s jitteriness, muttering teenage girl slogans to herself (“I must I must increase my bust”) before bursting into snatches of pop song lyrics, carrying on the incessant chatter irrespective of player input. A vivacious ball of energy, Ms. Splosion Man sprints along a tightrope between endearing and irritating, demonstrating Twisted Pixel’s firm handle on a character born of scientific accident – one who’s supposed to make you feel both sympathy and fear.
In terms of feel, Ms. Splosion Man comes across like an asset-swap. This is a hyperactive 2.5D platform-puzzler that bears many of the traits and tricks of its predecessor, the aim always to reach the exit as quickly as possible. In contrast to the exuberant character design, the controls are wonderfully restrained.
Ms. ‘Splosion Man can trigger three explosions in the air before she must momentarily recharge on the ground. Explosion jumps can also be restocked on walls and other surfaces, while moving her into proximity of a bar heater or crackling bolt of lightening will also replenish her stock of jumps.
The economy of the controls is thanks to the fact that a jump is also a detonation, granting the move the offensive properties to take out security cameras or any scientists caught in the blast. Explode near a human and they’ll disintegrate into cartoonish cuts of meat, but without a ranged offensive attack you need to get in close for the kill. The volatile properties of Ms. Splosion Man’s jumps are used further by the strategically placed explosive barrels, which act like bumpers on a pinball machine, propelling the character at breakneck speed.
For this sequel the developer has introduced a number of new ideas to go along with the closing walls and the key/switch puzzles that defined the first game. Ms. Splosion Man can grind along rails, an idea used to create a series of high-speed chases in which you must switch from power line to power line, avoiding obstacles and flinging yourself toward barrels that give you further propulsion towards safety. Indeed, the game has more of a precision platforming bent as it frequently breaks the confines of the science lab, requiring you to carefully jump between hover cars or risk falling to your death.
Likewise, climb into one of the Donkey Kong-style cannons and it will fire you across the level. These come in a few different varieties: some automatically aim and fire you towards a target, others spin, yet more must be aimed by hand. There is no visual distinction between the three types, which can lead to frustration when trying to make split-second decisions on when to hit the release button, but in general the idea adds welcome variety to an already rich high-speed puzzle game.
His games have been played by in excess of 200 million people, but he is neither famous nor revered. Such are the new economies of scale in the casual gaming boom that a Dutch designer in his early twenties can entertain an audience twice the size of that enjoyed by the best-selling video game of all time, and remain almost entirely anonymous.
He won’t be invited to speak at gaming conferences next year. He doesn’t have his own office. When introduced to him, I fail to catch his name. I’m ushered away before I have the chance to ask again.
‘Core’ gamers often roll their eyes at Nintendo’s effort to broaden the reach of video games to people and places where they have not ventured before. But the Nintendo Wii and DS have been abject failures when set against the successes of companies like Spil Games, owner of three causal gaming websites, one aimed at girls, one aimed at mothers and one aimed at teenage boys. Since 2007, Spil’s games have been played by billions of players, but few core gamers would be able to name one of its titles. And yet, for girls under the age of ten, Professor Purse is as recognisable a title as Modern Warfare is to boys over the age of 18.
30 minutes from central Amsterdam, Spil Games’ office complex is less like that of a video game developer than that of a social media network. Spacious, open-plan, with bowls of fruit on low-slung designer tables, it smells of young ambition and new money. Giant widescreen televisions pinned to the walls announce the company’s latest triumphs to workers (85 million sign-ups to such-and-such game) as well as listing ‘arrivals’ (those games that are going live across the network this week) before revealing the special that will be served at the company’s pristine in-house canteen that lunchtime.
“When Spil first started, we just took up that corner of the office over there,” explains Scott Johnston, a San Franciscan who joined Spil as head of external communications two years ago from TomTom, as he motions to an area of about 30 square feet. “Every few months we have to expand, knock down a few more walls, take over a bit more of the building.” Today, Spil’s offices are vast and spacious. At the centre of the office layout there’s even a bar with a pool table, darts board and beer on tap, a place for employees to unwind after a day’s hard work, with framed press clippings charting Spil’s rise and rise on the walls around.
But tying down what exactly the company is isn’t simple. CEO Peter Driessen, a smart, well-spoken advocate for so-called ‘casual’ web games, sees the company as a sort of Facebook for web games. But that’s too tidy a description for what is a more complex beast.
Spil is a collection of web portals, each aimed at a different type of player. But it’s also a publisher, working with small developers around Europe and the Far East to buy in content for those portals. Additionally, the company has its own in-house development team, founded when Driessen realised that there was nobody making the kind of games his new audiences were hungry for. It’s this development team that houses some of casual gaming’s star game designers, many of whom came to the company from more traditional console development jobs.
Sander Kalberg is just one such designer. Prior to joining Spil two years ago, he worked exclusively on Nintendo DS games. When the developer he was working for went under he joined Spil, as the chance to work on quick-turnaround projects was appealing. In the past 24 months Sander has worked on no fewer than 40 web games, many of them his own concepts. “I’m given an extraordinary amount of creative freedom,” he tells me. “Occasionally I’ll be told that I need to design a game in a particular genre, but mostly I get to pitch anything to my boss.”
There are echoes of the earliest days of the arcade industry, when Atari would prototype a game in a local bar for a fortnight and the project would live or die on the number of plays it received. Much of Kalberg’s work is concerned with developing a project over an eight-week period before releasing it on one of Spil’s portals and watching how it performs.
“But it’s not all about the numbers,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s just neat to be able to try out a game mechanic we’ve not seen before to see if something good comes out of it. For example, I have a game in development now in which you must manoeuvre a truck that has run out of fuel through a jungle by throwing grenades at its rear wheels. It may not be the most successful game – who knows? – but in the production process we might stumble across a new, exciting game mechanic.”
They all look the same, so they say. Blindness to nuance and personality in the face of the unfamiliar has always been the bigot’s way, and how many gamers are guilty of the same when looking to Koei’s Dynasty Warriors series? “There’s no real challenge,” they argue, setting the difficulty to easy and switching off after an hour. “You simply mash the buttons to trigger an apocalypse of fireworks,” they explain, ignoring the capacity for skill beneath the pyrotechnics.
These are half-empty criticisms for anyone who has invested the time and effort that Koei and Omega Force ask. The developers may have failed to keep pace with global trends, leaving their once-commanding hack-and-slash series fading in the face of newer, bolder creative visions. But only a wilfully ignorant critic would claim nothing changes from release to release.
Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3 arrives, then, as the most refined of the series’ robot spin-offs in recent years. In fact, it’s one of the most pacey and exciting Dynasty Warriors games of its generation, and it outshines recent entries to the mainline series in almost every way. Make no mistake: there are shortcomings here. But approached with the right mindset and expectations, this a game that offers considerable breadth and depth.
For Gundam fans, it is a crafted package, packing a huge number of battles from the long-running animated series’ mythology into the journey. While there is a main storyline to pursue, the quick-fire nature of the stages (many of which can be completed in as few as three or four minutes) means that you’ll be dipping in and out of historical fights across various timelines. The game’s free form structure runs several campaigns concurrently, allowing you to flit between those in which you must befriend another character to those set in the distant past, revealing the key protagonists’ back-stories.
That said, only the most avid Gundam devotee will be able to maintain a handle on the huge cast of characters (52 are playable, with many more pitching in with support dialogue) and the cat’s cradle of social ties that draw them together. This isn’t helped by the fact that only a handful of these characters are elaborated beyond the most basic level.
Instead, the air fills with ridiculous battle cries during play (Japanese or English dialogue can be selected), urging you on for who-knows-what. It’s never really clear who you are fighting or why, and unless you have a deep-seated affection for Gundam, the game is unlikely to make you a fan of the universe on anything except an aesthetic level.
There’s a twinge of disappointment when you first start up Uncharted 3′s multiplayer mode. It’s the feeling of over-familiarity: the layout of the menus, the experience bar marking the progression of your ascent through the ranks of your online career and the emblem editor. It’s the perk (sorry, booster) slots in which you assign upgrade bonuses that decrease your character’s sprint recovery time or allow him to run silently in order to avoid detection and so on.
It is, in short, the Modern Warfare-ness of it all, and the feeling that Naughty Dog, one of blockbuster gaming’s more creative voices, has borrowed a template instead of building one.
Of course, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s structural innovations to the multiplayer shooter have come to define the way a generation plays gun games online, and few would debate that template’s enduring brilliance. But familiarity breeds contempt, and Uncharted 3′s construction is oh-so-familiar, right down to the ladder of ‘finding player’ messages that appears on the upper right hand side of the screen while the game hurries to match eight players up.
Besides, the Nathan Drake universe is all about Saturday matinee thrills, leaping from tall buildings, quipping while treading on an enemy’s fingers as he hangs precariously from a ledge. As a myth, colourful Drake seems a poor fit for the dry, competitive machinery of Modern Warfare.
But as soon as you grab an AK-47 from the menu and head into the verdant jungle, it becomes clear Naughty Dog’s tribute to Infinity Ward’s work is limited to the meta-game and presentation. In play, Uncharted 3′s multiplayer fizzes with brash creativity and humour. There are zip wires down which you slide like the Last Action Hero. There are loot drops from downed foes. There are relics that form collectible sets, unlocking new clothes and emblems. There are spawning treasure chests full of goodies that act like honey pots drawing everyone in to a focused skirmish midway through a battle.
Then there are the incidental interactions: you can hang from a ladder making headshots with a pistol. You can kick a man hanging from a ledge and watch him splat on the ground below to the ding of a medal. You can high tail it over a wall rather than waiting for an angry grenade to flush you out, and you can throw a grenade back at him while mid-roll. You can fist-bump a teammate over the prostrate body of a downed adversary for a cash bonus. Every time a bullet whistles past your head you can launch into a headfirst roll, dodging and weaving their attacks while giggling at your irritating mischievousness. There are even Street Fighter-style taunts: a laugh, a flex, a dance or an air uppercut to rile your foe.
Game designers are gods, conceiving new realities before coding them into being. They set their dimensions and boundaries, the rules that bind them together and the shapes and colours that eventually fill them.
Then, when their creation is fully-formed, they invite us to step into these realities, to live under their designer vision, gifted with free-will, albeit one subject to the systems they have so meticulously arranged.
Eric Chahi, designer of Ubisoft’s forthcoming XBLA title From Dust, is just one such god. His seminal Amiga title, Another World – the game with which he found fame in 1991 – offered a gateway into another dimension where we could walk the contours of his imagination.
But while all games are god games, only some games are God Games.
Peter Molyneux first conceived of the idea of creating a reality in which the player could play as God. Populous – another Amiga title – set the player as steward of a populace, able to save or smite, bless or burn with touch of a divine cursor. And yet, the term God Game was always something of a misnomer. It implies power, dominion, freedom to exert one’s omnipotent will. But in almost every instance, God Games had us chasing after humans, running errands for them, micro-managing their wellbeing.
Perhaps for this reason, we grew tired of omnipotence. It was always a bit too much like babysitting, the creation ruling the creator. So Molyneux’s final stab at the genre, Black and White, became the last mainstream God Game in the orthodox sense (Spore was something else entirely). The genre’s creator, it seemed, was also its destroyer.
From Dust, then, is a title that works on various levels. In it you play as a God, raising a clutch of primitive tribesman from dust to glory. But this is also a game that seeks to resurrect its genre from a dusty grave, not to mention Chahi’s own career in the games industry, which has largely been in hiatus since 1998.
It starts before the beginning, before the word, with “The Breath”. The game opens at the foot of a totem pole on the edge of a remote peninsula. A gaggle of tribesmen and women encircle it, worshipping in their primitive tongue while frothing waves roll and roar around. The Breath is your reach into the world, your personification: a black dot stand-in for a mouse cursor, with a glowing fire tail snaking behind like a crimson streamer.
To begin with all you can do with the Breath is hoover up sand. Squeeze the L-trigger and you’ll scoop up the dust from the ground, forming a giant whisking ball of sand. Using the Breath cursor you can move and drop the sand, making a hill where before there was just a valley, a sinkhole where there was a plain.
