Friday Rambles (and Game Research Report) 2023-10-20

It's already Friday! And so, with it, comes the Friday Rambles.

Well, as promised last week, I spent this week playing, err, I mean, researching a bunch of games I've been meaning to play, in hopes that experiencing some inspirational new works would help kickstart my motivation and creative drive.

Here are the games I played this week. With each game I'll list some "Learnings," aspects about the game that I found were effective, or reinforced my own game design beliefs/principles (or otherwise).

Ghost Trick 

This one counts, even though I've been playing a chapter or two before bed each night since before I actually started my Research Trip. I finished the game this week, and despite having cleared it like 10 years ago, it was almost completely new to me, because apparently I had forgotten almost everything about the game. I guess it's worth replaying story games  after all! Just wait 10 years.

The story was engaging, and I cared about the characters a lot. This in turn really gave the gameplay parts more meaning and stakes. During the puzzle sequences, experimenting around and then eventually figuring out what I needed to do made me feel so smart and cool.

The awesome stylized art serves the gameplay, with animations and movement that gives life to the characters and world. This is difficult to do well, I think, especially as a solo dev, but I do think art really does a lot of heavy lifting. For a game like Ghost Trick, where the art and gameplay are both fantastic, it becomes a masterpiece. Of course, they had more than one person working on the game.

Learnings:

• Tightly couple story with the game mechanics, so there's a point to the actions the player is performing
• Low stakes (gameplay AND storywise) for retrying puzzles, encourage experimentation
• Hints that give just enough information that trigger an "aha" moment, or inform the player whether or not they're on the right track, without stating exactly what they need to do to solve the puzzle. Even if the player is on the wrong track, the hints can still be entertaining/interesting to read, or not even feel like a hint at all.
• Over-the-top character designs and dialogue and situations are perfectly A-OK, and especially so if they're integral to a plot point and explained in a way that fits the context of the world and doesn't break immersion. I think it really validates a lot of the silly things that happen in Endless Monday that the characters just sort of roll with.
• Music really is essential to setting the tone of the events happening on screen. I love to hear "Background Music" in a normal situation, and then "Background Music, But More Intense" when the urgency kicks up. Much like how they (Shu Takumi et al) did it in Ace Attorney (Testimony music), they do it here in Ghost Trick too. So, for the next game we might have fewer BGM tracks, but more variations on the important ones. idk. I'll have to discuss that with Chance.

7 Days to End With You 

I've had this game on my wishlist for a long time, but I finally got around to playing it because Lizardry (the developer the game) played Endless Monday and liked it. So I was like, oh, now I really have to play this.

The (spoiler-free) premise is this: You (the player character) are in a house with a mysterious stranger who talks to you in symbols, representing words of a language you do not understand. Over time you learn the words of this language, and uncover the story.

I spent several hours learning the words through context clues and pointing to various objects in the game world with the mysterious stranger. Then we'd have these deeper conversations where I realized my assumption for what certain words meant were completely wrong, and went back reading dialogue to fix meanings, replaying the week (the titular "7 Days") over and over, until eventually everything clicked into place and I fully understood our conversations and experienced a pretty emotional ending. All in all, a very meaningful experience that I think could only exist as an indie game, and I'm glad I played it.

Learnings:

• It's important to give the player enough tools to make solving a puzzle a pleasant experience, rather than fighting with UI, even if it's at the cost of immersion. I think the game does it well here.
• Mystery is very compelling plot driver, assuming it's a mystery you care about. The mystery revolving around a cute character helps. lol
• I can listen to the same song on repeat for 7 hours and not get sick of it. As long as it's a good song (which it is here)
• I will play a game multiple times to see the different endings, even if there are no achievements related to them.
• I have a weak spot for anime pixel art. Well, that much is obvious. 
• Maybe when Tiger-chan follows you around in a future game, she should stay on the corner of the screen.

Return of the Obra Dinn 

Right after I cleared 7 Days to End With You, thinking about what to play next, I got a notification that Return of the Obra Dinn was on sale for 50% off. Well, there you go.

The premise is that you are investigating the return of a ship that went missing, with all crew lost. You have the ability to view the moment a person died, and you have to determine all the fates of the crew for insurance purposes. You don't know who the corpses were, and the moments are presented out of chronological order, and some have more context than others, so it becomes a real puzzle to deduce who is who and how they died.

What an amazing game. A sort of game that makes you rethink what's possible with the video game medium. It came out 5 years ago. What? I thought it was way more recent than that...

As a game where most of the fun derives from solving the mystery, I'm unsure how replayable it is, but I do think it might also be worth going through again just to see the story from the beginning with all the new context you have now. Then again, not all games need to be replayable in perpetuity. There's a story to tell, and it's been told. Done! It's art.

Learnings:

• Either there are a lot of time travel/loop mystery solving games, or I just naturally gravitate to them. I didn't even plan on this.
• 1 bit color can be used very effectively to set a certain atmosphere.
• There were certain UI QOL improvements I would have appreciated, like being able to view memories from the logbook and listening to the audio without going into the memory, but I also don't think it really hindered the gameplay that much...
• idk. I was just sort of overwhelmed by how good this game was. Hopefully the game's inspiration juice somehow seeped into my brain and will eventually magically make me into a good game designer.

Little Goody Two Shoes (Demo) 

This game was on my wishlist for a while because the game's wonderful pixel art sprites were hand crafted by my good friend Ichigo, and the demo had been out for a few days, so this was an obvious choice for this week's Research Trip. It's a sort of old-school jrpg style game with resource/time management (and horror(?)) elements. After three mystery-solving puzzle games in a row, this was a nice change of pace.

The demo lets you play about 2 in game "days" worth, which is just enough to introduce the mechanics and main characters. The CGs that accompany the dialogue are drawn in a sort of 80s shojou style and are so ridiculously over the top I can't help but be completely smitten with the game. There are original music tracks with singers "la la la"ing, fully animated cutscenes, voice acting in English AND Japanese, the menus are works of art, and game has a level of polish that feels rare in an indie game. Is that what you get with Square-Enix money?

Anyway, I preordered the game (which releases this Halloween) because I was gonna buy it anyway, and I get a free soundtrack with it.

Learnings:

• Put effort into art and presentation. Go wild with it. 
• Make the menu system really cool.
• Get Square Enix money.
• Hire Ichigo for pixel art.

Cube Escape Collection 

I was vaguely aware of the Rusty Lake series, but I did not have any idea what it was or what to expect. I looked into it after a recommendation from a friend, and apparently all these games have connecting lore and I need to start with the first one, Cube Escape: Seasons (which is part of the Cube Escape Collection).

Wow! Surprise! It's a time-travel mystery solving puzzle game!

This reminded me a lot of an old point and click Flash game that you might find on old Flash game portal. Which, apparently, is because it was actually an old point and click Flash game that you'd find on an old Flash game portal. It's, as the name "Cube Escape" implies, a kind of escape room sort of deal where you'd go around the room, find things that interact with other things, sometimes in specific orders, and remember numbers to turn dials to open a thing that gives you more things to interact with other things.

I finished two games from the collection. I found it interesting enough, but I'm guessing it's one of those series where you have to sort of play a bunch more til you really "get" it. I'll definitely finish at least the 9 games in the collection, at least. Although, I'm generally not super into the sort of creepy jumpscare stuff that it's been so far.

Learnings:

• Long series of narratively connected games can really gather a devoted fanbase over time. Consistency and interesting story/characters are important for this.
• I think "escape room" style puzzles have their place, and I think they work well here with this particular setting and style. There should be specific narrative reasons why I'm combining the thingie with another thingie to open a thingie.

Laika: Aged Through Blood (Demo) 

This game was on my wishlist because it looked cool. I got a notification that it released this week! So, instead of buying it, I played the demo, which had been out for a while.

This isn't a mystery puzzle game. But the main character is able to talk to the dead. In any case, the fast action gameplay was definitely something I needed after all the thinky games I'd been playing til now.

I'm apparently not very good at these kinds of games. I died a lot. Maybe that's expected. But pulling off a sweet flip in the air while blasting away evil birds in bullet time is pretty rad. The game features some amazing animated cutscenes, everything is hand drawn and animated, and the world looks great. I cared about the main character and her story. There were two boss fights in the demo and they were amazing. I'll definitely buy it later at some point, after I go through a few more games in my backlog and I feel the need to do more sweet flips on my motorcycle and blast some evil birds to save my scrappy village.

Learnings:

• Make the player feel really cool.
• Make retrying difficult segments quick and easy.
• Put effort into art and presentation. Have a killer OST, and showcase it.
• RPG Elements.

Coffee Talk 

Well, I finally started playing this, after it sitting in my library for years. I was not able to finish in time for this report, though.

Maybe I should make a Va11-HallA-Like game too. Whiskey's Bar. Whiskey starts a bar after getting fired in an alternate timeline and ropes Penny into tending. Penny is not good at it. Hijinks ensue.  And the customers who come in would just complain about their jobs a lot, and also about Penny's terrible drinks. People get drunk and get emotional and yell and fight. Penny accidentally poisons a customer and the Health Department suspends the bar's liquor license. The ending is Whiskey's Bar closes because of bad Yelp reviews.

Learnings:

• The popularity of this game I think represents the real desire people have for another Va11-HallA.
• After writing about Whiskey's Bar above I actually want to make that. Like as a stupid shitpost. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm........

Conclusion

Well, that was a real mishmash of random games. I didn't play games that were like, really expensive for my funemployed self, or would take like 50 hours to finish (thus a lot of missing popular AAA games and famous VNs), and focused more on shorter narrative games.

Did I learn anything? Maybe? It was in any case a much-needed break from banging my head against the wall trying to make progress on Game 2, though. I did remind me how a good game can really leave you thinking about it long after it's over. I hope I can make something like that. Even if it won't have epic hand animated cutscenes or CGs for every interaction like Laika: Aged Through Blood and Little Goody Two Shoes have. It's hard enough making a character sprite blink and have a talking mouth.

With a nice break from coding and hating everything I make, and lots of new inspiration and motivation, I'm excited to get back into making Game 2. My research says it should be a time traveling mystery solving puzzle game with rpg elements and bullet time, with the main character running a cafe, making coffee and listening to customers talk about their in-laws.

Anyway, hopefully I'll have something more substantial to share next week. I'm going to an amusement park with my family now. Thanks for your support, as always!