Dead Cells: Analysis through Lenses

Posted on by
Reply

Dead Cells is a roguelike, Castlevania-inspired action-platformer, allowing you to explore a sprawling, ever-changing castle… assuming you’re able to fight your way past its keepers. To beat the game you’ll have to master 2D souls-like combat with the ever present threat of permadeath looming. No checkpoints. Kill, die, learn, repeat.

From the dead cells wiki

Elemental Tetrad:

Mechanics:

Dead Cells’ core mechanics are simple, move around the level and kill enemies, while dodging or parrying enemy attacks. The diversity of level layouts, environmental hazards, enemy types and equipment combinations make full use of the core mechanics to create a large variety of challenges and situations for the player to overcome. 

At its core, Dead Cells is a rogue-like. Players are expected to be defeated often, each time starting anew, but with more knowledge of the game and access to persistent upgrades that helps the player progress further through the game. At every corner lurks a new mechanic for the player to master, the game never feels dull.

Story:

The story in Dead Cells is rather light, the player plays as the Beheaded, whose goal is to travel through the levels to hunt the King. The player is not given any prologue or direction at the beginning of the game. Pieces of story and lore are drip fed to the player as they progress through the game, via short cutscenes from interacting with points of interests, or when the player defeats a major boss.

Aesthetics:

The game features grim 2D pixel art graphics and grungy level and enemy design that accurately signals to the user: this game won’t be sunshine and rainbows. 

Technology:

While this game is available on both PC and consoles, it is clear that the game is meant to be played with a controller. 

Lens of Problem Solving: 

A key component of performing well in the game is designing the right build (combination of equipment and skills). Newer players will often find their runs ending very soon due to a lack of damage output or survivability. Seeking out equipment and selecting skills that synergise with each other is a key problem that players will need to solve in order to beat the game, especially at higher difficulties. This game demonstrates good game design, by balancing the skills and equipment such that there are many viable builds. This encourages players who beat the game using a specific build to try out different builds, which lead to refreshing new experiences.

The Lens of Fun:

The core gameplay loop is simple – traverse each level and kill enemies along the way. Killing enemies is not a simple activity of mashing buttons, certain enemies have a special attack to watch out for and the player must dodge or parry at the right time to avoid taking damage. The controls were very well polished, which is essential for an action platformer title. The graphical and aural feedback were well polished as well, the enemies would explode with a satisfying sound when killed, and send bits of enemies flying across the floor. Important gameplay events such as boss fights and leveling up were accompanied with sound effects that gave the player a feeling of strength.

The Lens of Surprise:

The game employs a procedural level generation technique that randomizes the layout of the levels each time. No two runs will be the same. Players will be blessed with good RNG in some runs and encounter tough levels in other runs. 

The Lens of Curiosity:

The game has a minor story component, provided as points of interest scattered across the levels. Interacting with them rewards the player with interesting lore and tidbits about the world they are in. However, the story/lore is not very compelling and almost feels as if it were added as an afterthought and does not contribute very much to the appeal of the game.

Fortunately, the game is still able to intrigue the player’s curiosity. The game features a non-linear level progression, allowing players to explore different biomes on the way to the final boss. The different biomes feature different enemy types as well as a variety of environmental hazards. Furthermore, the game features a large variety of equipment, categorized into melee and ranged weapons, shields, traps, turrets, grenades and powers. Each piece of equipment has a unique effect that synergizes well with certain builds. The player starts out with only the most basic of equipment unlocked. The others are unlocked through a variety of means, including exploration of the game (think secret areas), feats/challenges, killing bosses, random drops etc. Personally, I found this to be the best quality of the game. During my first dozen or so runs, I would experiment with different combinations of equipment, and be excited to test out a newly unlocked equipment.

The Lens of Endogenous Value:

The pickups in the game all provide endogenous value – gold is used to purchase or upgrade equipment, cells are used to unlock new equipment and enhance drop rates of better equipment. Equipment drops are always a welcome sight, as they are scaled to the level and are usually superior to the equipment from a previous level. It is rare that a player will find collecting items to be pointless or a waste of time.

Preferences for VR/AR HMD

Posted on by
Reply

For VR HMD I prefer to choose the Oculus Quest all-in-one VR gaming headset. This one sells $399 on Amazon.

Advantages:

Screen:

Oculus Quest uses a monocular 1600 x 1400 OLED screen, although there is a sense of pixels, the pixel sense is not obvious, and it can be ignored when playing games because games are not required much for 3D graphics.

Lens:

Oculus Quest uses a Fresnel lens which advantage is that it provides clear experience for surroundings and there is almost no dispersion in the center or the surroundings, while blur and distortion will appear around ordinary lenses.

Controller:

There are two ways to use Oculus Quest. One is suitable for standing or sitting in place. It will let you set up a virtual wall with a diameter range of more than one meter. A blue grid will appear around you in the game. When you do not exceed this area It will not be displayed when it is exceeded, it will be warned after it is exceeded, and an external screen will be displayed, but the colors are processed. Another way is to use touch to mark a moving range. This range can be relatively large, such as two or three meters in diameter. You can draw a range around the wall around the room. As long as your body does not exceed this area, no warning will appear.

In some games, the touch controller will become its own hands. It is quite unexpected that the controller can almost represent various gestures of people, including raising the thumb can be perceived, and feedback in the game. Some picking movements can be done easily, even with a slight hallucination that which is your own hand.

Game:

Oculus Quest is the most suitable one for playing games, and can even be directly positioned as a game console. It has a perfect game experience for playing Rhythm Space that the music and lightsaber are perfectly matched with the vibration feedback. Some roller coasters and horror games are suitable for people to play when there are many people as they can activate the atmosphere and bring joy to relatives and friends.

Disadvantages:

The angle of view of Oculus Quest is about 100 degrees which is worse than Vive. Fresnel has a disadvantage that is its clear central area is small, and it is necessary to carefully adjust the interpupillary distance and up and down position so that the eye is located in the central area of the lens, otherwise, it will be very unclear. Therefore, VR devices with Fresnel lenses without interpupillary distance adjustment may not be suitable for some people. The battery is not durable and can last for only about two hours or more. The effect of the built-in headphones is average, with 3.5mm ports on both sides, but the cable is easy to interfere with after connecting the headphones. Due to the limitations of resolution and FOV, Oculus Quest is not very suitable for watching videoes.

In general, Quest is still the main game but not suitable for watching videoes. It is the main product of Oculus at present. Because PC VR is too expensive to get started, many people ’s home PCs have not been updated for many years. If the price of a complete set is too high, it will block mainstream users. Quest this all-in-one machine should be the main development direction, at least in the mainstream public domain. The wireless of VR is inevitable. After the popularization of 5G in the future, an all-in-one machine such as quest can put a lot of processing pressure on the cloud server. This wireless is also the most effective for resource utilization. And wireless like PC VR, just remove the cable, still need to set a high-performance PC at home, this PC is only working when you play VR games, the rest of the time this PC It is in a state of idleness and waste. This method has performance advantages in a certain period of time, but it is destined to be difficult to radiate to mainstream users. To make VR as popular as smartphones, Quest is taking an inevitable path.

For AR/MR I prefer HoloLens 2.

Compared with the parameters of the first generation, it can be seen that the field of view of the Hololens 2 has more than doubled compared to the first generation, and the resolution has increased from 720p to 2k, and the sharpness has been greatly improved. The holographic scene brought to users is more vivid, more realistic, and more immersive.

And Hololens 2 has a better understanding of the environment and support for gesture interaction. This means that when we use it, it will be more convenient to operate.

Prior to this, the Hololens generation has always been criticized that the device is heavy, and it will compress the bridge of the nose when used, and it cannot be worn for a long time. The second generation has added a new function-a sunshade can be lifted up, and cushions are designed on the front and back of the head, which greatly improves the wearing comfort, which is not only very convenient to wear but also solves the problem of pressing the bridge of the nose.

Hololens2 enjoys a two-year commitment to quality assurance and obviously has improved in after-sales service.

In summary, the second generation has comprehensively improved in terms of performance, comfort, and cost performance.

A woman wearing hololens glass and feels it experience

Songbird Symphony

Posted on by
Reply

Game Summary

Website: https://joysteak.com/
Demo: https://joysteak.itch.io/songbird-symphony-v02
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3vmzG3kKbY

Songbird Symphony is a 2D platformer with a rhythmic twist.
Follow an orphaned chick, “Birb”, in his heart-warming journey of discovery, as he sets off to find his true origins. Follow this cheerful little bouncing bird who revels in singing, and guide him through this magical journey of stunning pixel art and gorgeous animation that shapes itself to your musical interactions!Chirp to activate platforms, and sing to the residents of the forest, learning new notes to aid you in captivating rhythm battles against the creatures of this sprawling, enchanting world.

Features

Aesthetics

One might say the biggest draw of this game is its aesthetics. Its beautiful, colorful and cute pixel graphics with adorable characters draw many players in to try the game.

Not only are the visual aesthetics excellent, the game also comes with its own original soundtrack, handcrafted to go hand in hand with the pixel art. The superimposed lyrics are rather meaningful and helps blend the soundtrack into the story.

Story

Songbird Symphony has a heartwarming story which definitely engages the audience’s mood in one way or another.

Birb travels through the forest, exploring and learning new notes from other birds to help him in his quest to find his parents.

Gameplay

While exploring in the magical world of Songbird Symphony, we come across platforming puzzles that we have to solve to progress further. The player also engages in rhythm battles with other birds to either learn new notes or gain progress in their quest.

Songbird Symphony is a platformer with no death but instead focuses on adventure and solving not-so-hard puzzles. Even the rhythmic element was designed specifically to not have a lose condition.

Technology

Songbird symphony is developed in Unity, is very lightweight and has been released on multiple platforms.

Lens #81: The Lens of Character Transformation

  • Birb’s character
    • Starts of as a weak little chick thinking he is a peacock but just different
    • Finds out that Uncle Pea, the peacock, is not actually his parent and becomes extremely emotional
    • Figures out that he is a songbird
    • Becomes empowered by his mother after knowing what had happened to his mother which caused him to be initially abandoned
  • Owl’s character
    • Begins as a mentor to birb
    • Turns out to be the antagonist which wants all songbirds dead
  • The magpies
    • Is the initial obstacle in Birb’s quest to help Owl
    • Turns out to be helping Birb’s mother in attempting to stop Owl’s plans

Lens #68: The Lens of the Hero’s Journey

Birb’s story is certainly one of a Hero’s journey. Starting as an outcast from the peacocks, he journeys through the magical world and slowly figures out his origins, helping other birds along the way. Eventually, he rises up to take out the big bad Owl who caused his initial plight.

Lens #48: The Lens of Accessibility

The game was designed to have accessibility in mind.
Firstly, all the rhythmic elements in the game do not have a fail state, allowing the player to not frustrate over not being able to ace a level in order to progress.
Secondly, all platforming puzzle elements are of increasing difficulty where a puzzle always builds upon previous knowledge.
Lastly, the puzzles are designed not to be difficult as to encourage the player to focus on the story and adventure part of the story.

Lens #49: The Lens of Visible Progress

The player gains more notes as they progress through the game. These notes also increases the difficulty of the rhythmic element of the game. Additionally, optional objects appear throughout the platforming elements of the game in the form of feathers. Players can see that their collection of feathers slowly increase while they progress through the game, each giving the player a small bit of lore into this magical world.

Lens #58: The Lens of Juiciness

The game employs juice as one of its main ways to maintain player engagement. For example, in some sections of the game, the player is required to sync out key presses with the rhythm. The game rewards the player with ripples on the screen and on some occasions, screen shake. This is only one of the myriad of ways the developers of this wonderful game have juiced up the game.

VR/MR review

Posted on by
Reply

Mixed Reality

The Hololens 2 allows user to experience what it is like to live in a space where reality and virtuality amalgamate. The Hololens is designed to fit over the user’s spectacle which is something conventional VR/MR headset do not really cater to. The design of the Hololens, in my opinion, is extremely well-done. It looks sleek and expensive, it’s aesthetic is something that one would associate with futuristic technology. It is designed to feel light and comfortable such that it can be worn over long period of time. This feature is essential as it is targeted at enterprises and businesses would look for tools that provide such wearability. One that attracts me the most about the Hololens is the use of the eye tracking and hand tracking. The Hololens does not use controllers to track the movements of the user’s hand. But rather the movement of both the user’s eyes and hands is tracked by the special lens. This feature is extremely unique in the VR/MR market and can serve many functions. As well as provide more user freedom when using it. It makes the navigation more intuitive and the experience more immersive as the user explores the world created by the Hololens. The user can use his hands to interact with virtual 3D objects. This provides the perfect way of teaching someone through an immersive experience. The Hololens aspires to render more complicated 3D objects in the future. I do see this tool being employed in the near-future by businesses in their practices

Virtual reality

7 years ago, Oculus VR is a pioneer in consumer grade virtual reality. They introduced to the world the Oculus Rift which revolutionised many domains in the world. They then introduced their improved version of the Oculus Rift, the Oculus Quest. This is the first wireless VR headset that could fully manipulate the virtual world and provide three degree of freedom (or as commonly known as 3 DOF). The user could fully move in the virtual world as he would in reality. He could crotch, walk or spin in the VR world. And this provides a fully immersive experience for the user. However, instead of a powerful graphic card, the Oculus quest uses a SnapDragon 835 processor which is merely a cellphone CPU. This limits severely the graphic quality provided by this headset. However, the wireless ability of this headset more than makes up for it. 


Analysis of Don’t Starve

Posted on by
1

Don’t Starve is a survival game where the player aims to survive as many days as they can by managing three conditions: Hunger, Health and Sanity. The player is able to choose from several characters, who each have their own unique advantages and disadvantages.

Game play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-Wjz_Gn-8
Game’s website: https://www.klei.com/games/dont-starve

Lens #7: The Lens of the Elemental Tetrad

Mechanics

  • Rules: If the hunger bar or the health bar reaches 0, the character will die and unless the character had activated a resurrection item, the player must restart the game from Day 1.
    Apart from maintaining the health and hunger bar, there are many other dangers that the player needs to avoid or be prepared for in order to survive.
  • Player actions: Players are able to craft items from a menu and collect items from the map in order to prepare themselves.
  • Goals: The primary goal of the game is to set the highest personal record for the number of days survived. There are also several other goals, like exploring the entire map and solving the puzzles scattered around the map.

Story

  • Back story: Maxwell, the ‘king’ of the The Constant (the playable world), has dragged the player into his world and has forced them to survive within it.
  • The story is not told throughout the game. The player knows the back story and will only know the next part of the story if they manage to complete the game. Hence, players are kept in suspense as they try to survive and complete the game to find out what has happened to their character.

Aesthetics

  • The game has a whimsical, dark look.
  • The animals, environment and music of the game becomes creepier as the Sanity of the character drops.
  • At night, the game heightens the player’s fear of darkness throughout suspenseful music and complete darkness.
The representation of rabbits when sanity is high (left) and when sanity is low (right).
The screen goes completely dark at night. The character is equipped with a torch in this picture.

Technology

  • The character can be controlled fully through mouse and/or keyboard inputs.

Overall, I believe that the game has managed to use each aspect of the Elemental Tetrad to build upon one another and improve the player experience. The technology of the game is simple, which reflects upon the simple goal of the game. The story and aesthetics build suspense and desire for the player to complete the goal of the game. The mechanics and aesthetics works together to strengthen the player’s fear. For example, the rule of the game is that if the player does not find a light source at night in a certain amount of time, a monster that cannot be killed will be spawned and the character will likely die. The light sources that the players must equip will also run out over time. This creates suspense and a real consequence which, paired with the atmospheric tension, heightens the fear that the player experiences when night comes.

Lens #4: The Lens of Curiosity

The player is able to develop many different strategies for each challenge and character in order to survive the game. After each iteration of the game, the player will often wonder how they can tweak their current strategy to survive longer and be more efficient in the next game. Leaving out a tutorial also makes the player more curious as to what comes beyond the current day. The map also has many mysterious items which hint towards a puzzle waiting to be solved.

Lens #31: The Lens of Challenge

The game does not provide a tutorial on how to survive in the world. The player has to experiment and probably die several times in order to gain some experience and survive past the first month. The environment of the game is also constantly changing over time, bringing new challenges to the player. For example, the game has 4 seasons that they cycle through. In Winter, the main challenge is in staying warm and surviving the winter boss. In each iteration of the game, the map also changes. Hence, the game is ever changing and the players will have to figure out how to survive in each iteration. The player also has to figure out by themselves how they can progress forward from the current map. This challenge inspires the players to continue playing and break their own record.

Lens #41: The Lens of Punishment

The game often punishes the players if they do irrational actions. For example, if the player randomly attacks animals or monsters, they will often find themselves dead and having to restart the game. If the player carelessly uses their torch to burn an item near their camp, their entire camp will go up in flames and all the items built will turn to ashes, resetting the progress that they have made. This constant punishment manifests a sense of caution and tension in every action that the player makes. This tension adds to the suspenseful element of the game and makes the game feel thrilling.

Lens #49: The Lens of Visible Progress

The game has a ‘Morgue’ tab that keeps note of the amount of days survived for each iteration of the game. The player will be motivated to continue playing and break their record as they can see the improvement in the number of days survived. The progress of the game can also be observed from the player’s ‘camp’, (the place where they have built most of their items), as the players can see their camp growing and looking more organised as time passes. The number of days that they have survived in this iteration can also be seen easily from the screen, giving the player satisfaction and motivating them to continue playing. All these factors allow the players to see how much they have improved over time and encourages them to continue playing and improving to beat their record and complete the game.

The player is able to view their progress from the current state of their camp, and from the current day counter on the top right of the screen.

Streets of Rogue

Posted on by
Reply

Streets of Rogue is an action rogue-lite game. You play as a disgruntled citizen making his/her way through randomly generated levels in a city in order to confront a corrupt Mayor. This game emphasises on player choice; you are given complete freedom on how you will approach completing the missions in the game. Will you go in a restricted area guns blazing to get to someone? Or will you poison the air vents to make him come to you? You can also choose from a variety of characters, each with their own perks which drastically change the way you play the game.

Here is a video of how the gameplay looks like.

Elemental Tetrad

Mechanics
Controls:
– Zoomed out overview, WASD controls.
– Mouse is used to orientate the player, mainly for aiming with projectile items/ weapons.
Environment:
– Levels are randomly generated. Every third level, there will be an additional challenge on that level (e.g. Killer Robot Is After You!).
– As the game progresses, levels become harder. Players encounter new levels with their unique structures and NPCs (e.g. During the Downtown levels, there will also be many mafia NPCs walking around which will try to extort money from the player.)
Interactions:
– Players have freedom to talk to, attack, hire, or help any of the NPCs that are walking around.
– Depending on the character being played, more options might be open(e.g. threatening, bribing, gifting, etc).
– NPCs will remember their encounter with the player for the rest of the level; hostile NPCs will try to attack you or call the cops, while friendly or aligned NPCs will come to your aid.
Leveling:
– As this game is a rogue-lite, players will always start a game at level one.
– Players can get experience from almost any action performed, with the largest bulk of experience being gained from completing the main missions.
– On level up, players can choose a new perk at the end of the level.
Multiplayer:
– Up to four players can play together locally or online.
– For local play, players have to share the same screen view (meaning players cannot walk too far away from each other)

Story
– Story of Streets of Rogue is shallow, serving mainly to give the setting for the player. During the tutorial, players are shown to be recruited into the Resistance. However, after the tutorial, as the player makes their way through the city, there is no longer any mention of the Resistance.
– Rather than use a main storyline, the game stands out for its quirkyness and randomness. Example: character selection. Players can choose from a multitude of characters, each having a short backstory and their “Big Quest” to achieve along way to overthrow the mayor (e.g. Doctor wants to spread peace, big quest is not being allowed to kill people). Some characters would make sense such as a Soldier or Policeman, but there are characters that seemingly make no sense introduced like the Vampire and Zombie.
– Some storytelling is done as the player progresses through the levels: starting from the Suburbs, the player will eventually reach the Downtown and Uptown areas where there is greater security and more tension shown where the player is denied access or privileges due to not being an “authorised citizen”.
– There are no story-specific events that unfold, until the player finally wins the game.

Aesthetics
– Game looks simple with its pixel artstyle. Since the gameplay is fast paced, this is not a game where you stop to look at the design.
– Minimalist approach is taken to focus on gameplay; NPCs dialogue is simple, when you interact with an object you will see a simple dropdown list of what you can do, similar to using an object there are no unique animations, status effects will be displayed in text on the corner of the screen (e.g. Weak)

Technology
– PC game, standard controls. There are options to use controllers which would be more suited since this is similar to arcade games.

Lens of Surprise

Wow, this game is full of surprises.
– Random events happen throughout the levels, with some events base on the demographic of certain areas (e.g. Ongoing war on the level, so there will be soldiers and cannibals constantly spawning and fighting).
– Similarly, randomly encounters with NPCs (e.g. thieves coming up to steal your items, gorillas attacking you on sight because you are a scientist, a cannibal popping out of a manhole to eat you).
– Note that the element of surprise is so overwhelming at times that it is not uncommon for you to suddenly die and lose the game, which might detract from fun – or, provide an element of challenge (e.g. being caught in the crossfire of a random battle between mafia and the police).

Lens of Time

Wow, this game takes a long time to play.
– Normally for rogue-lites, you would expect gameplay to be short, but one game of Streets of Rogue can easily take an hour.
– This is partly due to the large level size, and the complexity of mission that usually have the objective nested inside a large complicated building.
– Additionally, due to the unpredictability of the game, players would want to navigate the level in a cautious manner versus just rushing through.

Lens of Problem Solving

Basically the essence of the game.
– This is one of the key selling points of the game: being able to complete the missions any way you want.
– To the point where you can complete the whole game indirectly; i.e using circumstances, hiring people, inciting conflicts, and the missions will complete themselves for you.
– This high variability can make the game too easy sometimes, though. Example: The final mission, get the Mayor’s hat. Mayor is accompanied by guard detail, I completed the mission within 15 seconds by giving the guards poison to make them enraged, the resulting shootout killed the mayor.

Lens of Endogenous Value

Wow, this has some amazing rewards.
– The missions that the player has to complete before completing the level, will yield random items of highly variable utility, giving players a lot of options to approach future missions (e.g. Resurrection shampoo, cyanide pill, necronomicon, hacking tool, friend phone, etc).
– Although some items have powerful effects, they are not game-breaking as the items are not able to be used constantly through the game, so it is balanced.

Wargame: Red Dragon

Posted on by
Reply
Wargame: Red Dragon init screen shot(Game is on Steam)

Wargame: Red Dragon is a modern-warfare typed RTS(Real Time Strategy) game developed by Eugen System. Player is the commander of a customized military force(containing multiple services).

On Single Player Game, the player play the storytelling PvE game. On Multiplayer Game, the player customized their own army and compete with other online players(or AI), the winning goal is customized, like destroying certain number of enemies, or occupying certain zone for enough time.

Background:

Wargame: Red Dragon is the 3rd game of the Wargame Series, the earlier two are European Escalation and Airland Battle. From European Escalation the basic operation and army types are determined, Airland Battle expands the PvE storyline, and as its name expresses, it expands air force into the game. And now coming to our focus, Red Dragon, it continue to expand the dimensions of war from 2 to 3, as adding the marine and navy into the game.

The game continues to maintain the mechanics of the series’ success, but the focus of the war in the franchise has shifted from Europe to Asia, focusing on disputes and fictional wars between China, South Korea, North Korea, Japan and other Asian countries from 1975 to 1991.The game includes more than 450 new units, including naval and amphibious vehicles.

Lens #1: the Lens of Essential Experience

Wargame as its name illustrated, the game should focus on how to create its war and battle to the players, after all Wargame is a war game, the essential experience is the process of war. What the Wargame does, is to divide it into 2 levels. From the macro war level, the experience is turn-based, each player controls its troops(in a macro scale) to move,recover or attack. The former two will decide the troop’s strength, and only when raised an attack, it goes to a deeper level, the battle level. In this level, the game turns to be a high reality RTS game, and its essential experience is the reduction of war, to do this, the developer implemented lots of Lens to maximize its reality of a battle.


Screenshot on a battle: bomber just delivered bombs at hostile infantries.

Lens#22 The Lens of Dynamic State

The most fascinating point in Wargame for me is the dynamic states the game represented. One example is, when infantries get hit by hostile, get casualties, definitely the combat effectiveness will drop, that will be represented in lots of fields, like the weapon accuracy, the response time, the reloading time, and whether or not to accept the command. Wargame Red Dragon implemented all these features, by using Dynamic State of units. During a battle, the unit is given a morale state, initialized as Calm,  when gets hit or friendly forces nearby get hit, the morale state will dynamically change to Worried, Shocked, Panicked and even Stunned(escape in disorder), as the state changes, the main index of combat performance will also get a state-related penalty, as accuracy, response time, etc.

Lens#47 The Lens of Balance

In Wargame Red Dragon, the balance is controlled in many aspects. Like in one essential part, customizing one’s own troop(in the game, make a deck of army cards), the balance is, the stronger the army is, the availability is less and the price is higher.

Take the M1A2 and M1 as example, the M1A2 is much stronger than M1, but it has much higher price and can only be bought 2 in a deck.That is a balance between price and strength, which avoid grind between units, also makes lower strength unit meaningful and useful, in a word, more real.

Screenshot on deck making, to illustate Lens of Balance

Lens #37 The Lens of Cooperation

In Wargame: Red Dragon, the cooperation between different army types and players are very important. Take Air-defence as an example, usually the most important battle unit in the war process is tanks and vehicles, their strength is only on the ground, which means they are vulnerable to air-attack and cannot fight back. That means the ground main forces has to be cooperated with air-defence units, Like radar-guidance missiles: long range, high accuracy and impact but low firing rate and total availability, and most important one, can be anti-radar missile targeted, usually they are used for high-value air target, and there are also cheap, lower accuracy and shorter range air-defence artillery. They are not sufficient as missiles but they can be put in battle with huge numbers and can knit a fire net which the air force cannot pass. In Wargame Red Dragon, their are much more than these two air-defence units to use, and their are much more kinds of cooperation, like anti-tank infantries with flame gun vehicles in a city(former to fight alley stike on hostile vehicles and latter to very effectively destroy other enemy infantries).

Lens#67 The Lens of Simplicity and Transcendance

From the former introduction of Wargame Red Dragon, I think reader must think this is a hardcore RTS game and is very difficult to handle, actually it’s not. Red Dragon uses very genius idea to simplify the damage system into only 2 type, AP or HE(very common and typical seen in vehicle shooting games).AP mechanism is simply collision check, the projectile only dealt damage when straightly hit the target, under AP mechanism, the damage is calculated by AP Power minus the hit-armor protection,takes the M1A2 as example again, if one M1A2 hit another M1A2 in the front, then the damage is the AP power of the firer 24 minus the front protection 22 then plus 1, that is 24-22+1=3, dealt 3 damage. The other mechanism is the HE mechanism, which usually are effective on no-armor or low-armor(0-1 protection armor) units, like infantries, helicopters and air-fighters. The HE damage is AoE type, which means even it doesn’t hit directly, but once the target is in Effected Area, the damage is still dealt, of course with some inner distance-dampling mechanism, in other word, HE damage is minimal to highly-armored unit like tanks, which is also very real.The AP and HE mechanisms together simplified different kinds of weapons， like tank gun, missile, flame bomb,etc .It’s a very genius simplification.

Screenshot on one unit, to illustate the simplified damage mechanisms

The simplification is to make it more friendly to common players, not those hardcore military fans in Wargame. There are also other kinds of simplification in game mechanisms, no need to make it too detailed.But the use of simplicity, is to lower the complexity of both developer and the player. The amount is controlled by how real the game the developer want the game to be, and how the player like. Definitely, Wargame Red Dragon developed a very real game, but with those simplicity, it lowers its complexity but still keeps its transcendence.

Baba Is You

Posted on by
Reply

Baba Is You is a puzzle game that gives player the ability to manipulate the rules of the puzzle itself to solve the puzzle. Baba Is You also won the Excellence in Design and Best Student Game awards in the Independent Games Festival 2018, and was nominated a finalist in two other categories, including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

Website: https://hempuli.com/baba/

Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E24WWi9X8u0

Elemental Tetrad (Lens 9)

Mechanics

  • Rules: puzzle games usually come with a set of rules to dictate what the players can do. In Baba Is You, rules of the level is presented as movable blocks, which the player can modify and manipulate to win the level. To explain the mechanics better, we have to look at one of the levels. In the first level, as seen in the photo above, you can see four distinct rules on the screen. By conventional puzzle game logic, you might be inclined to move right to push the rock to get to the flag. However, if you take a closer look at the borders of the level, you can see that there is actually more space for you to move about. The rules themselves are movable blocks which you can manipulate to form rules like ‘ROCK IS WIN’ or dismantle existing rules, thus changing the win condition itself.
  • Controls: The game has a very simplified control scheme, with four buttons for movement, one for undo and another for wait. The wait button might seem to be quite useless but it acts as a mechanic to solve future levels. It is very satisfying to undo movements when the player almost got the solution but took a slightly wrong path.
  • World design: The overworld is split up into different worlds, some of which are gated to ensure the player understands the more basic rules before trying levels with a higher difficulty. Each world has a theme and introduces new words like ‘NOT’ and ‘HAS’. Within each world, the first few levels act as a mini tutorial to help the player understand the new words.

Aesthetics

  • I like the simple and cartoony graphics of the game, but I dislike the ‘wobble’ effect. Fortunately, the options allow me to toggle the effect. The music is calm and subtle, which goes great with the puzzling gameplay.

Story

  • There is no story in this game, and that is fine because the unique selling point of the game is its mechanics.

Technology

  • The game has simple controls and is not graphically intensive. Available on PC and Nintendo Switch.

Lens of Curiosity (Lens 6)

  • When playing the game, I always ask myself if an action is possible or a rule make sense. The game makes it easy to try out the different possibilities due to the compact size of every level and the ease of undoing undesirable actions.
  • The mixture of rules often lead to funny and unexpected outcomes. For example, if ‘KEKE HAS BABA’, ‘BABA HAS KEKE’ and ‘BABA AND KEKE IS YOU’, I become invincible because if Baba kills itself, Keke will appear as it ‘broke free’ from Baba and vice versa.

Lens of Problem Solving (Lens 8)

  • Most levels contain fixed rules that cannot be changed, and they are strategically positioned at the corners of the level which the player cannot manipulate. This forces the player to work with a small set of rules sometimes to get the desired outcome.
  • There are some unspoken rules to the game, like if ‘ROCK IS NOT MOVE’ is already present, forming the rule ‘ROCK IS MOVE’ does not negate the effect of the first rule. This is shown visually by the crossing out of the two rules and the prompt to undo the move.
  • The game contains over 200 handcrafted levels, and the developer has stated on his blog that he is working on a future expansion for a level creator, which the players themselves can create new levels to challenge one another.

Lens of Challenge (Lens 38)

  • Despite some mind-blowingly hard levels, the game is scaled well. The game always provide mini tutorials when it introduces new words to help the player understand the mechanics and slowly build up from there.
  • It is easy for new players to play the game. I often ask my friends for help when I get stuck on levels. Even though they might not have heard of the game before, after explaining the core mechanics of the game, most of them understood and were able to help me.

The Sims 4

Posted on by
Reply
The Sims 4 (taken from https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/the-sims-4 )

The Sims 4 is a single-player life simulation game. Players can customize their characters and houses. Players can also control the life of the characters and explore the worlds in the game. Game-play includes household development, careers, emotions, traits, aspirations and more.

Story

Lens of Story Machine: The Sims was especially mentioned in the Lens of Story Machine, and for good reason. There was no fixed architect of story line which could be a negative for the game as it can get mundane playing the game. However, the sims being a long time game has a huge community of players who will come up with stories or challenges for other players to try. An example will be the rags to riches challenge where the player will have no money and residence for the character, wherein the player will have to figure a way to get their character rich. These player induced stories add more potential and fun for the players in the community.

However, The Sims 4 itself does not have a story arc. The game does not impose conflict and character development is minimal. There is little repercussions for actions in the game. For example, characters that have a bad relationship can still chat amicably. The lack of a story makes the game boring and “too easy”. This results in a heavy dependency on player induced stories when playing.

Mechanics

The Sims 4 has a rich pool of mechanics incorporated into the game as it was big scale life simulation game. For example, there are friendship and romance level for relationships between characters, there are career paths and aspiration with defined tasks to complete to get a pay rise or a promotion. Other than these, there are many more interesting mechanics.

Lens of Essential Experience: The Sims 4 also brought mechanics for University into the game through the Discover University expansion pack. The game focused on the dormitory and roommates, where players are most excited about. They made attending classes a rabbit hole as these are the repetitive and mundane aspect of university that do not add much value to the experience. Focusing on the roommate aspect can also be extended to other areas of the game as the game can now have roommates not just in the University pack but also in other residences of the game world.

Lens of the Toy: Other than mechanic for story making, there are also different ways the sims can be played with: Character creation and house building. As The Sims 4 provide a well-defined mechanism for character creation, many players spend their game-play on making their characters. Challenges like creating characters to suit a color series or to create a character similar to a celebrity spun from these mechanisms. Similarly, for building lots, the players can not only build residential lots but also public lots. With the addition of the latest Tiny Living stuff pack, many players tried to challenge building a small lot.

Aesthetics

The visuals of The Sims 4 is hugely made up of the characters and builds in game. In every released expansion packs, the developer team spent a great effort in creating new styles of clothes, hair, accessories for characters; and furniture, wallpapers for builds. They also tried to express diversity by adding different skin tones and religious clothing like hijabs. As with story and mechanics, the Sims community also created custom character and build content for the aesthetics of the game, some with a different art style. The art style of The Sims 4 is a huge improvement from its 3 predecessors. However, some players find the art style too cartoonish and prefer custom contents with more textures for more realism.

Lens of Imagination: The Sims 4 has its own made up language that players call “Simlish”. Whenever the characters communicate, they speak gibberish and have dramatic expressions and movement. This leaves the players space to imagine the conversation the characters are having. In a lot of Let’s play videos, the players make up the conversation themselves from the characters’ body language. However, some Simlish phrases appear often that players can guess the meaning, making the game more immersive.

Technology

Having so much content, The Sims 4 will have to consider how to allow the game to run on different hardware. The Sims 4 releases expansion packs with different content, users buy the content they are interested in. This keeps the game-play and content of each player simple and efficient enough to meet their needs; also keeping the game profitable. The pre-built characters and builds are also kept as simple as possible to ensure smooth run of the game for more hardware.

Breath of the Wild

Posted on by
Reply
https://www.zelda.com/breath-of-the-wild/
   https://www.zelda.com/breath-of-the-wild/

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the latest videogame of the Zelda series. Released in 2017 for the Wii U and Nintendo Switch, this game introduces an open world action-adventure game which lets the player decide their own paths to achieve different goals, reach different places or just explore the game’s world. 

Game trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw47_q9wbBE

Elemental Tetrad

Mechanics: Breath of the Wild is an open world game which lets you go wherever you want in the map. The mechanics are taught at the beginning of the game and they are:

  1. Exploration and reaching different locations.
  2. Solving puzzles.
  3. Finishing missions.
  4. Obtaining equipment such as weapons, food, clothing, special abilities.

These are done by the player’s abilities: climbing, running, swimming and paragliding all limited by stamina. Also, attacking, which is enhanced by the weapons you carry and cooking, which increases your health.

Story: This game is a post-apocalyptic game that happens 100 years after a calamity occured. This story is told at the beginning but elements that help you uncover more about this story are the ruins present in the landscape, finding places where you obtain some memories back and talking to NPCs who tell you more about the past and life in the present. The game has a lot of places, so you always find yourself searching for clues about the past.

Aesthetics: Ruins and abandoned places add to the post-apocalyptic story of the game and overall drive to explore of the game. Also nature and landmarks make the player explore and find places. Sound design includes for example only some piano notes that add to the feeling of not many people being present around you and add up to the drive of discovering unknown places or just admiring the landscape.

Technology: The portability of the Nintendo Switch lets you play the game wherever you want, therefore if you have not that much free time you can just continue exploring or walking without any compromise. Also some puzzles require tilt control offered by the Switch. Other features include vibration and sounds which increase the feedback to the user when he is attacked.

Lens of Time 

First of all, Breath of the Wild features a clock and a weather indicator on its main game play screen or Graphical User Interface. In my case, sometimes I check the time and weather to know what type of things to equip for a certain weather, decide parting times for a mission, wait until the sun sets to accomplish a sun light related mission or just see a nice view. 

The game itself and almost all of its missions are not restricted by time, even the main storyline can be accomplished in less than 24 hours. In addition, if you get bored from a mission you can just change it and head towards a different direction in the map. This lets the player feel that they always have something to do in this open world game and it having no time restrictions creates a feeling of freedom in the player.

Furthermore, the passing of time and changing in weather in game changes its dynamics. For example, on cold weather you lose more life if you are not wearing warm clothes, or different enemies appear at night time. This lets the player experience the game differently at exactly the same locations depending on the time.

Lens of Goals

Since the beginning of the game, you are given the main mission to “Destroy Ganon” and this mission always appears at the top of your goals list. It’s easy for the player to understand that this is the ultimate goal of the game. But, there are also a lot of extra missions and quests that add more goals to the list, even the player gets to decide which goal to do next and focus on it. 

Goals range from long term to short term goals. Sometimes when I get bored of a long term goal or don’t know what to do next, I just find myself changing it for another one, or just exploring the world and having more things to do and accomplish. This lets the player feel they always have something to accomplish even if they failed or get tired of their last mission, which lets them never get bored.

The game also features sightseeing towers that let the player see the different geography and locations in the game. Moreover, the player is able to put map markers so that if they decide to visit or revisit one place they can just follow their markers. In other words, the game lets the player decide their own goals, that can be as simple as climbing a mountain or reaching and unknown location.

Lens of Atmosphere

Breath of the Wild is a post-apocalyptic game. It is set 100 years after a great Calamity happened and destroyed the major villages,  landmarks and killed hundreds. Even if the game has beautiful cartoonish graphics, the landscape lets you know the places are not as they once used to be. The main example is the Hyrule Castle Town ruins that is completely destroyed. Therefore, the game has a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, in my case this made me feel sad as the player gets to know the main characters failed to protect the Kingdom and you can no longer see or experience the places as they once were. 

A calming atmosphere is also created in the places were mostly nature is present. The world in Breath of the Wild feels alive, in the sense that many things resemble the real world. For example the movement of the grass, the wind, weather, water, the trees moving, there are animals and insects roaming around, even the sunsets are beautiful in game. In addition, sound design is important as most of the music is just separate piano notes and chords that just add up to the relaxing atmosphere. This made me feel as if I could just stop for a second and hear the sounds in the place I am exploring or watch the sunset from the top of a mountain and relax.

Lens of curiosity

In Breath of the Wild the player is always filled with curiosity, as that is what keeps the player on exploring. This is achieved through the placement of objects in the world. There are many distinct landmarks that are easily seen and that drag the player’s attention towards them, resulting in them wanting to explore and get to know what’s there. Also the maps don’t have a lot of information, but just seeing the drawings lets you wonder what could be found in those places.

In my case, the ruins placed throughout the game awaken my curiosity as I begin to question what they were. There are also ruins with different designs, which lets the player even sort them into different time periods. Another feature is that some of those ruins resemble places in past games; therefore, this lets the player imagine and wonder how this places came to be what they are now. This adds up to the feeling of wonder and exploration the game creates in its players.

References:

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw47_q9wbBE

[2] https://www.zelda.com/breath-of-the-wild/

[3] http://www.sg4adults.eu/files/art-game-design.pdf

[4] http://deck.artofgamedesign.com/#/menu/0/?lang=en