My nephew was playing one of the random Cartoon Network games, RC Laser Warrior, which I found notable for two reasons. The first: its extraordinary writing, with which I’ve just rocked you.

Second, it handled kart racer pickups in a way I hadn’t seen before. Mario Kart and its imitators usually don’t allow you to pick up any powerups if you’re still holding one. This encourages players to use them right away, at the cost of some depth. RC Laser Warrior puts them into separate, visually obvious slots. A Nitro powerup goes on as a giant rocket at the back of your car, Nuke goes on top, and Lasers go on the sides. None of them stack with themselves, but you can get an item for each slot. When you press fire, all of your powerups activate– potentially nailing someone with lasers, tossing them again with a nuke, and then nitroing your car into the explosion.

The three visual slot design, plus more liberal powerups, creates additional tension around when to use a powerup. I can also see it providing more gameplay to the back-of-kart (i.e. bored) player in a game like Double Dash.

Ludum Dare is a 48 hour game dev competition.  It has run seventeen times already. If you like experimental gameplay, I can’t recommend it highly enough– check out the top entries for any given competition. Each entry only takes a few minutes to download and play, so you can tear through more new ideas in an hour than you might see in a month of major releases. Just don’t go looking for full-fledged games: these are experiments. After all, they were made in only 48 hours!

In case you’re still on the fence, Enviro Bear 2000 was originally made as an entry into Ludum Dare 16. Yeah. Ludum Dare is that good.

My favorite entry from Ludum Dare 17 is Gaiadi (also the overall winner). It combines tower defense with shooter– and judging from the result, there’s clearly a lot of promise in that concept. There are a lot of directions to take (maybe a Herzog Zwei adaptation?). Five minutes playing Gaiadi will fill your head with game ideas for weeks.

What I realized, though, is that almost all early arcade games were built around you losing every single time. Sure, many folks defined a win as a new high score, but those high scores were vanishingly rare, by their nature. Furthermore, that motivator only worked for a subset of the players: I played lots of arcade games, but didn’t care at all about high scores.

The primary motivator in most games, PvP or PvE, is simply the fun of playing them. So what is the purpose of these extrinsic motivators– levels, achievements, score, gear, ranking, showiness (“X is on a kill streak!”), and so on? The purposes are tough to cleanly delineate, but on initial brainstorming I came up with:

• Strengthen the appeal of the game: you already like the gameplay, but given a choice between two gameplay clones, you might choose the one with better extrinsic motivators.
• Broaden the appeal of the game: maybe you don’t even find the gameplay interesting, but the social reinforcement of your WoW guild keeps you playing.
• Enhance core gameplay: some systems actually integrate back into the gameplay, offering new skills and weapons, adding more complexity to the game on a dole-out schedule. Here’s where the line gets especially blurry.
• Alleviate boredom: every game has lulls in its gameplay– there’s no way to ensure every player is in the zone all the time. But maybe they’ll keep playing for the story.  Or the progress bar that keeps filling up.
• Encouragement: here’s that PvP motivation I was talking about. Yes, you just got crushed. But you’re still making progress, or are still good at some subset of gameplay.

I’ll still get around to a discussion of specific extrinsic motivators, but what I realized is that I accidentally ended up at the same place Chris Hecker did in his GDC 2010 rant: don’t break your game! External reinforcements have become easy and expected, to the point that you need to force yourself to step back and ask what each additional reward is contributing to your game. Some sample questions:

• Does this achievement encourage an exciting twist on gameplay? Or does it promote tedium?
• Does this leveling mechanic smooth the learning curve? Or does it artificially slow the learning process, thereby boring players?
• Do these additional, loss-mitigation rewards detract from the feeling of accomplishment when a player wins?
• Will this external scoring system feel meaningful to a sufficient percentage of players, and will it diminish the intrinsic satisfaction they get simply from playing, and performing well?

None of these questions or answers are simple. MMO leveling systems clearly stretch the learning curve past the breaking point, but it’s a trade-off that often works. As an RPG addict myself, though, my goal is simply to be aware of the trade-offs– without adding yet another leveling and loot system simply because I can.

cm.py

It will then generate a list of 20 heroes at random.

But what if you don’t trust your friends to generate a pool? What if the opposing team’s captain generates the pool at “random”, but it suspiciously includes their favorite heroes every time?  That’s where the other modes come in.

By using the more advanced mode of cm.py, you can generate a hero pool that’s verified random to both teams.  In technical terms, the captain of each team will pick a number at random.  The captains will then exchange a one-way hash of those numbers.  After this exchange, they will THEN exchange the original random numbers.  These random numbers will be combined to generate a seed for the program’s random number generator, which can then reproducibly generate the hero list for both teams.

So, how do you use it?  Here’s the output of “cm.py –help”:

-s <num>: RNG seed
-f <path>: path to hero listing file.  Defaults to herolist.txt.
-h, –help: this help message
-o <integer>: hash the integer using md5 and print the output
-x <int1> <int2>: XOR the provided integers, then use as the seed (instead of the single int argument -s)
-r: generate a random number

Here’s the procedure:

1. Type “cm.py -r”.  The output will look like this:
   Your secret number: 1029929668
   Your public number: b322801c07f467ae63e5b648eeff99d1
2. Email your public number to everyone.
3. The opposing team’s captain also performs steps 1-2.
4. Both of you now email your secret numbers to everyone.  If anyone’s suspicious, they can run “cm.py -o <secretnumber>” to verify that it hashes correctly.  For example, I’ll run cm.py -o on the secret number above, and it had better result in the public number above:
   cm.py -o 1029929668
   b322801c07f467ae63e5b648eeff99d1
5. Now anyone can run “cm.py -x <secretnumber1> <secretnumber2>” to generate a list of heroes.  For example:
   cm.py -x 1029929668 1157727935
   Using seed 2019753083 from inputs 1029929668 and 1157727935
   Storm Spirit
   Witch Doctor
   Nerubian Assassin
   Necro’lic
   Vengeful Spirit
   Butcher
   Dwarven Sniper
   Morphling
   Centaur Warchief
   Spectre
   Enigma
   Lightning Revenant
   Pit Lord
   Slithereen Guard
   Warlock
   Goblin Techies
   Dark Seer
   Prophet
   Dragon Knight
   Admiral
6. You’re done!  Now you can debate those picks to your heart’s content over email, with your completely untrustworthy friends.  When you’re done, you just pick your heroes as normal in-game using “-ap”, or “-pa” to pick allied heroes if you’re using any AIs.

If you want to add or remove heroes, they’re all stored in “herolist.txt”, in the .zip linked below.  You’ll need to add heroes as they’re added to DotA.  Also, I believe -rd disallows Goblin Techies for some reason, but I’ve left them in herolist.txt.

Note: I haven’t done any work to make this method statistically robust.  If you have basic knowledge of cryptography and want to help me improve the code, please drop me a line!  Also, thanks to Billy for coming up with a lot of the method here.  Finally, I actually do trust my friends– but this is fun to do anyway.

Download the files here.

Drop me a line if you want to hook up. I may hit the expo floor for a bit, but mostly I’ll be working during the days and meeting folks at night. I’ll be at the iPhone dev union party on Wednesday night, and it sounds like there’s another iPhone dev get-together on Thursday night, maybe at Thirsty Bear? I’m at a private gig on Friday, and probably other places as serendipity dictates.

(Does serendipity really “dictate”?)

Fish cleaning a manatee:

Manatee with caustics! (Hey, that’s at least graphics related.)

A manatee getting a belly rub:

And, of course, You Have to Eat the Rope:

• Bioware’s best content is so amazing, that people will put up with a whole lot of intestine-crawling* and monster-boxing** to see it.
• While all game genres have to fight to keep up with the technology march, RPGs have it the worst.  There’s obvious strain between technology development, tool development, and designer learning curve.  There should be at least one more Dragon Age this generation.  DA2 : DA :: BG2 : BG?  I certainly hope so.
• “Character” offers a riper field for productive innovation than “plot”.  While The Plot is on rails, everyone’s game experience is unique as a result of their morality intersecting with the NPC’s.  Expect to see more fruitful exploration of character development in future games, as Dragon Age influences developers everywhere.

* intestine-crawling: walking through a hallway that’s been looped back and forth many times in a tight space (usually square) so as to maximize walk distance.  This gives the dungeon more time to digest the adventurer.

** monster-boxing: stuffing monsters into a series of boxes, usually with doors.  Frequently, the monsters have no reason to be in the box, yet do not attempt to leave the box until they spot a curious adventurer.

Dan Cook writes that he and the folks at Office Labs have taken a big step: Ribbon Hero!  If you have Office 2007 or later, you can download it right now, and learn how to use the controversial new “ribbon” interface element.  I don’t own a copy, so I’m stuck reading CNet’s coverage– but if you do give it a shot, please let me know what you learn (and maybe invite me over).

Without having seen the add-on, I think that an experimental, Office Labs add-on is the right place for this work.  There’s a long way from “we think we could use progressive learning techniques in video games” to “we’ve discovered what really works”.  I’m very excited to see this work kick off, and hope to see further developments before long.

EDIT: OMG, it has Facebook integration.  If you are my FB friend, PLEASE spam me with your Ribbon Hero updates.  I promise I won’t ignore you like I do Mafia players.

A few hours of Uniwar on the iPhone have shown me: I underestimated Advance Wars.

I mean, what’s so hard about Advance Wars?  It’s a typical turn-based strat.  You make your land, sea, and air units.  You make some big ones and small ones, add some basic RPS, add terrain bonuses and penalties, crank out a bunch of maps, and you’re done.

Of course, that doesn’t give you a satisfying game.  Uniwar’s two biggest flaws:

• Unit glut.  You simply have more units than you want to control.  Half the map is filled with units moving around, healing up, taking up space, doing nothing.  The delicate practice of using your few units to restrict the enemy’s movements is pushed to the background.
• Drawn-out games.  After you’ve essentially won, it can take quite a while to actually complete the mission.  I last played a mission that I “failed” at the end because I didn’t farm my objective long enough before winning.  I’m not sure I’m willing to replay it.

The biggest culprit may well be the maps (or the terrain movement penalties– chicken and egg).  With few open stretches of land, you spend many turns moving units one or two spaces, clogging up the abundant choke points.  Flying units help, though you’ll end up resorting to them not because they’re better suited, but simply because you’re bored.

Furthermore, combat just isn’t lethal enough.  You’ll stack up a totally overwhelming force against an enemy base, simply so that you can kill off the infantry on it faster than the base can produce another one.

Uniwar is fun– it’s just not Advance Wars.  And it illustrates a troubling constraint on iPhone games: shoestring development budgets.  While Uniwar would be a much better game with some more time to tweak the units, playtest the maps, and improve mission design, it’s hard to say that would pay for itself at $3 a pop.

Yes, together, I and a very special group of iPhone/iPod Touch owning Star Nerds can work together to create a very special Christmas miracle.  (Actually, more like a January miracle.  Or a February miracle, depending on AppStore approval time.)  What’s the miracle?  Why, the best math-based video game of all time.

If you’re interested in helping us test Calculords, and maybe giving us some feedback to make the game better, send me your email address, device type (Touch, 3G, 3GS, 1st Gen, etc.), and UDID.  We’d love to have your help, but there are a limited number of slots, so please don’t take it personally if we’re full up.

Happy holidays!  If you’re simply interested in hearing more about Calculords, just hang on until January.  We’ll be asking for your help spamming your friends before you know it.