A couple of years back I was following a site that had a great insight: track Valve’s Steam prices and point out the best deals over time. It was great because if you are interested in a particular game, it was just matter of waiting to get a big promotional discount! Unless you are super-duper fan and want that game now, or it has a very heavy multiplayer component, here is no need to buy a $40-$50-$60 game. It will eventually get much cheaper (and much sooner than you imagine).

Unfortunately, I forgot the name of it, and I am a lazy writer that is not in the mood to search.

The good side is that is not needed anymore. That site closed doors and I discovered IsThereAnyDeal.com. It follows the same basic idea but in much bigger scale. It tracks Steam, GOG and a dozen of other online portals.

Also, it offers a chance to create custom alerts when a desired game get a price bellow a threshold. Indie games are often bellow $5. AAAs are also often promoted bellow $10. It opens a great window for great deals. My wanted list now have about 30 games!

It sounds unfair to the creators. But with so many good games in the market right now, I can play them all if I buy them cheap, or choose one or two with full price. Indies gets much more opportunities this way. The big players, that invest millions on a single title hopping to sell millions at a full release price, will suffer more and will have to adapt.

Just like Netflix, the abundance of games opens great business opportunities for those that have a long tail catalog instead only high-demand products.

So if you are a game developer, never count on making most of the sales with the full price. It was not true before, and it is even more true now. Your projections should include several strategies for promoting your product so 2-3 years at least.

With proper marketing and positioning, companies still can attract audience during launching. Mario, Zelda, Fallout, The Witcher, Doom and many, many other titles are recently launched and have massive initial sales. Of course there are always an EA, Ubisoft and Activision that tries to implement some weird and fake mechanism that forces players to buy or play in very specific way. Disasters like SimCity happens to them…

Otherwise: have fun buying!

One of the modern day indie classic, Limbo was in my shortlist for quite some time. Some days ago I got it and played from begging to end in a single seat. Here are my impressions. (Spoiler, I like it very much)

The first impression here is how minimalist it is. From the black and white presentation, controls, story and UI. It tries to be simple, but not simplistic. And it succeeds. It is a remarkable achievement. It conveys a lot of emotions with very few images and sounds. The general visual also transmits a sense of creepiness. All characters are have a bit disturbing visual. The enemies even worse.

The game is a simple 2d platformer. They gameplay focus on puzzle solving a timing action. There are no fights. And dying is a constant. The puzzles are clever but not brain burner. You will feel smart by solving, but not to the point that you can claim better IQ than your friends. It gives a sense of satisfaction and self-esteem without feeling that you cheated. The action is clever, and due to the presentation, represents real threats. Every time the famous spider appears, your heart stops.

The story is minimal, but I felt that it had a begging-middle-end. It is a little open and vague. People say that the “sequel” (not exactly a sequel, but it follows the same vibe, and it is from the same company) is even more vague and confusing. So it seems to be a personal mark.

It took me just a few hours to go through it entirely. I enjoyed it all the time and I recommend you to play.

This 2013 little indie game is pure charm. It tackles an unusual theme for games: father-son and brother-brother relationships. Generally games uses tragically and over dramatic man-woman love and revenge themes, but it is not what is shown here. It is a tale of two brothers trying to save the like of their father, that is just laying sick in bed. No supernatural force. No magic. Everything is very mundane.

Not only the story is charming. The visuals are also really cute. Even on the depths of the Earth, it still maintains the light color palette and the cute aesthetic. In fact, you can literally sit in a bench and admire the view. It delivers the introspective aspect of the story. Death, family bonds, life… a lot for the kids think about.

The world is not, however, mundane. There are some mystical creatures, monsters and a bit of magic. But the story motion force comes from the inner emotions. The narrative comes from very little dialogues. It is mainly a puzzle adventure game, focusing on the experience of guiding two young kids through obstacles. It is not very action-driven because most of the puzzles can be solved calmly, without hurries.

The main feature of the game is the ability of controlling both kids at the same time. It uses a very weird control scheme, but it works. It requires some brain rewiring and time to time it fails to be very responsive, but works both thematically and for the sake uniqueness.

The game is very short. I was able to finish it in a single long session. But it left a very fond mark on me.

It is inexpensive very cool adventure. Recommend to play.

Innovative is probably the most common adjective you will read and hear about this game. The gameplay mechanics are very, very simple, but the whole thing is very grounded to the theme.

The game is all about just watching a series of videos. They all are about a woman being interrogated by police officers. Each video is a couple of seconds long of the interrogation sessions. Watching them, one by one, will reveal details about what happened. And that’s it! The player is never asked to actually answer any question. It’s only watching the woman.

Well, to be fair, the game do have an interactive aspect. Each video is cataloged using keywords, but you don’t know which are they. So the player have to search for videos writing in a search box. If there is any videos with that keyword, you can watch it.

Performance of Viva Seifert is amazing. She performs more than one character, but due to the excellent performance and clever writing, you will be amazed by the result. On each piece of video, your understanding about the whole case changes. It reminds me of Agatha Christie’s books, because we jump to conclusions several several times.

The game itself is very engaging. However when I was about 50% of the way, I started to get bored. In order to find all videos, I started to guess obscure words. It was not super super clear so it leads to frustrating moments of try and error. At 85% or so, I was clear about the whole case. I had my conclusions. However, I had to use some online help to see all videos. I did not changed my mind about the mystery, but definitively it is not the way to finish a game.

I just watched a GDC presentation by the same name by the developer Soren Johnson, from Mohawk Games. I’ve agreed almost entirely with him. The basic premise of his presentation is that video games should pay more attention to physical board games, learning that techniques they use in order to create engagement. The motif is: board games have transparent set of rules and transparent implementation of luck. Video games should have such transparency too to engage players.

At the end, when he opened for audience questions, he was nervous to answer and he somewhat backed a bit from this point of view. There were a couple of questions that I want to discuss:

What if the game system is so complex that you deliberately want to hide it from the player? (watch the original answer)

In Civilization, as pointed in the presentation, the designers opted for displaying each variable or modifier as a series of bullet points in the UI. That is because the list of modifiers is long and complex. When engaging in a diplomatic mission, the player must understand what are affecting the relationship. But hey, it is only one way to solve the problem.

In Shadow of Mordor, the orc leaders challenge themselves for power and status. Each orc also have a list of strengths and weaknesses. All this information is presented to the player is a very elegant way. It exemplifies the Soren’s argument.

But if game is so complex that is really difficult/impossible to present the players all information? Well, it is probably a flaw in the game. If there is too much going on, most likely that the player action only impact slightly in the result. The player will feel that is pure luck. He is just a passenger. It is the game designer’s job to balance it back; otherwise, it will suffer from bad reputation and bad sales. Too shallow or too complex have to be considered equally problems to deal.

Notice that another possible consequence is when the game becomes a cult hit and the players that endured the gameplay formed a community to share information and demystify the obscure rules. A good example is Dwarven Fortress, a super weird and complex game that is loved by many for being weird and complex. My suggestion: do not try this path.

If you expose the whole set of rules and internal numbers, it will become a matter of optimization instead experimentation. (watch the original answer)

It can be a problem, yes. Tic-Tac-Toe suffers exactly from this problem: you can anticipate the full match to a point that you CAN guarantee that you will never lose (you cannot guarantee that you will tough).

But as a designer, you can implement counter measures to fight it. Luck and complex decision tree for example.

Luck is the classic solution. By implementing a series of unknown events, it makes very difficult to predict the future. Random numbers, random events, scramble cards. Notice that luck is merely an element that the one cannot control or predict, like weather or a die roll, or a hidden enemy in a fog of war.

Complex decision tree refers to both make several factors relevant for each decision and a game with several rounds. Think of Chess or Go. There are so many possible movements per round that, while theoretically possible, it is practically impossible to compute all moves in order to make a single best decision.

In general, I am with Soren. I might discourse about it in the future, because most people think that creating games is just an intuition and art. But there a lot of reasoning and logical decisions that should guide the construction of such products.