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To gather the numbers, I used metacritic‘s advanced search restricted to developers (here‘s an example using Torus) and hand-copied the results straight into a spreadsheet.

In some cases, where data wasn’t available on metacritic and there was more than one sku for the game, I used gamerankings.com for a representative value.

To select by ‘unique’ title versus ‘port’ in cases where there was more than one version (both Heroes of the Pacific and Heroes over Europe are good examples) I treated the highest rated version as the ‘unique’ and the other versions as ‘ports’ of that. All versions of Heroes of the Pacific rated 76% so it’s just a function of a sorting algorithm that I took the Xbox version as the original. In the case of Heroes over Europe, the PC version rated 66% compared to 64% on PS3 and 62% on Xbox 360 so that’s treated as the lead platform and the others as ports.

Because of the way metacritic gathers reviews & collates data, there are omissions, so if anyone has additional data, feel free to email it to me or post it in the comments and I’ll update it.

Posted in Presentations | Tagged Data, IGDA, Presentations | Leave a comment

The state of things

Posted on November 11, 2009 by Paul

Last night at the reboot of the Melbourne IGDA chapter, I gave a short talk on the state of things locally and options for indie developers. The full presentation is available below, but I thought I’d make the first half – the data on metacritic scores – a bit more accessible.

For more information on the second half – opportunities for independent developers – check out Simon Carless’ and David Edery’s presentations from Film Victoria‘s Digital Distribution Summit:

Simon Carless (from here)

Indie Game Metrics – October 2009

Western Indie Game Trends

Digital Distribution Summit Video

David Edery

Digital Distribution Summit keynote

A more detailed breakdown of the numbers is below the fold…

Continue reading →

Posted in Presentations | Tagged IGDA, Presentations | 6 Comments

November EGP

Posted on November 2, 2009 by Paul

Well, too many other projects took over last month – including helping to set up the Melbourne branch of the IGDA, presenting at iDef, and working on some other things that it’s too early to talk about. As a result, my October game didn’t really evolve beyond the previous iteration. I did manage to hook up collision and put torches and coins in, but it still wasn’t really a game. Hopefully November will be different because this month, I’ve decided to follow the theme used on experimentalgameplay.com, and this month it’s ‘Art Game’.

Head over to the Freeplay forums to join other people in Melbourne doing the same thing.

Posted in Games | Tagged Experimental Gameplay, Indie, November | Leave a comment

Game Connect: Asia Pacific 2009

Posted on October 20, 2009 by Paul

Details of the 2009 GCAP program are now up on the website.

My session, What Does a Writer Do Anyway?, is on Tuesday December 8th at 3:35 as part of the Art / Design / Audio stream.

What does a writer do anyway?

Telling stories is an essential part of our cultural fabric, but in the face of a new medium, one in which mechanics, rules, and play are at the heart of the audience experience, we’re still learning how to work the thousands of years of accumulated knowledge in writing and storytelling to our best advantage.

An often-neglected discipline in video games, this session will look at the skills and craft that writers use when approaching storytelling, dialogue, structure, and characterisation, and how to apply those to video games without losing the particular strengths of the medium. By dissecting the craft of writing, it will demonstrate the thought processes behind story creation, what does and doesn’t work within the medium of games, and why some of those boundaries exist. It will also show how some of those core concepts are applicable to games without stories, informing mechanic, level, and systems design.

Looking to the future, the session will lastly speculate on the marriage of traditional narrative and mechanics, and the sorts of stories that can only be told in the medium of games by exploiting the fundamental gameplay forces of agency, choice, rules, and goals.

Posted in Conferences | Tagged 2009, GC:AP, Presentations, Writing | Leave a comment

October EGP

Posted on October 10, 2009 by Paul

Ten days in, and I’ve put up the first iteration of my October game project:

Here, the player’s movement speed is based on the mouse’s distance from the character – and the faster they move, the more they can see, but also the more noise they make, which will attract the spiders.

The gameplay is based on the Token Studios group currently in the Games Program at RMIT. Working with them, I really wanted to see whether or not their core premise would work in a 2D space – it’s too early to tell just yet.

Posted in Games | Tagged Experimental Gameplay, Indie, October | Leave a comment

Goals and opposition in Fabric

Posted on September 27, 2009 by Paul

This latest build of Fabric introduces goals – helping the blue particles to coalesce and eventually form suns & planets – and opposition – in the form of the red spikey particles which can destroy the blue particles.

What’s interesting here is how much focus has been pulled away from the grid – which was the original element. It feels like the more nouns that are added to the game space, the less interesting & dynamic it becomes. All the player is really doing in this version is clicking on the red spikey particles, rather than balancing destroying the grid & stitching it back together.

Next step, I think, is to pare it back and consider how the player interacts with the grid because adding elements to the space doesn’t seem to work. That might be some time because this week, there’s the Digital Distribution Summit, I’m running some workshops in Yarrawonga, and the flying to Sydney to do a presentation at Screen Australia – then we’ll be into October and the first of the Freeplay Experimental Gameplay Projects.

Posted in Games | Tagged Digital Distribution Summit, Experimental Gameplay, Fabric, Freeplay, Games, Indie | Leave a comment

Lighting and Texturing in Fabric

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Paul

I’ve added simple ambient and point lighting to Fabric, along with a (familiar to mac users) background texture.

I’m not sure either feature works just yet. The texture in particular is too busy and seems to draw the eye away from the grid, and the lighting effect, rather than focusing the player on the mouse cursor, feels as though it’s making the rest of the grid feel less important.

Posted in Games | Tagged Experimental Gameplay, Fabric, Games, Indie | Leave a comment

Meaningful choices and feedback in Fabric

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Paul

Playing that first tech-pass of Fabric, it was clear that unstitching the world wasn’t going to work as the core mechanic of a game – it isn’t particularly interesting to destroy something, even to save it in the long-term, if you don’t have the possibility of fixing it too. Enter the ability to stitch things back together, which changed the dynamic of the game, and introduced choice into Fabric’s world. The other new feature in this build is a simple particle system that indicates when the red blobs have been destroyed. This first pass player feedback gives cues to where events are taking place without necessarily forcing them to shift focus.

Posted in Games | Tagged Experimental Gameplay, Fabric, Games, Indie | Leave a comment

Fabric

Posted on September 21, 2009 by Paul

Once I’d recovered from pulling the event together, I found myself really inspired by the people at Freeplay who were pulling together their own projects – and it made me want to do the same.

So, I’ve started two things.

The first is an attempt over at the freeplay forums to run monthly experimental gameplay projects in Melbourne, producing one highly experimental game every month within 7 days and fitting a theme. The first will run in October and we’re still deciding on the theme. Head on over and sign up if you’re interested in taking part.

The second is I’ve started putting together what I think will actually be a bigger game now that I’ve started it. It’s called ‘Fabric’ and I’m going to try and document its progress here.

The original idea for Fabric came from thinking about expressing connections mechanically, and also about creating a game where you had to destroy part of the environment in order to protect it.

The fabric of the game world is essentially a cloth simulation – particles connected by springs – with charged elements that travel along the grid-lines, seeking out their nearest neighbour. When those charges connect, they destroy a large area of the grid around them. The only way to stop them moving is to destroy the grid-line they’re travelling along. The overall aim of the game is to stop the fabric unravelling completely as you can see it doing towards the end of the movie.

It’s still early days, but even at this early stage, the nature of the technology has brought up restrictions in what I originally thought I could do gameplay wise, but it’s also opened up other possibilities too, which was the whole point of the experiment.

Posted in Games | Tagged Experimental Gameplay, Fabric, Freeplay, Games, Indie | Leave a comment

Some followup studies

Collated data from my IGDA presentation