FunEffect.com

Hey! That's My Fish! has got to be about the silliest possible theme for what is, when you get down to it, an abstract strategy game with surprising depth. True, its rules are sufficiently simple as to be accessible to quite young players, but as with any abstract strategy game, the ability to plan and think several moves ahead is critical. In other words, this is not exactly a kid's game.

Before game start, the players lay out hexagonal tiles in a set pattern. Each tile is printed with between one and three fish. Each player places penguins of their colors on tiles, pretty much as they wish; it can be played by up to four, and the number of starting penguins depends on the number of players (e.g., in a four player game, each starts with two). On your turn, you may move one of your penguins any distance in one of the six directions permitted by the hex grid -- but not through an empty hex, or a hex containing another player's penguin. When you move, you remove the hex you formerly occupied, and score between one and three points, as indicated by the number of fish on the tile.

The main strategic element of gameplay is working to isolate other players' penguins, trapping them in small areas; when this happens, and an area is isolated that contains only one penguin, the owner scores all tiles in the isolated area, and the penguin is removed from play. Maximizing score by getting high-fish hexes is a secondary but important strategic consideration.

What is striking and admirable about the game is the strategic depth it provides for a remarkably sparse rules set. As Eric Goldberg says, it is far harder to design a good, simple game than a good, complicated one, and Hey! That's My Fish! succeeds at the task.

Mike: 6 When I visited Labyrinthica’s website, the screens immediately reminded me of the Legend of Zelda. Ultimately, the game is a more generic hack and slash game. The hand drawn cutscenes and in-game characters look nice, but the dungeons themselves are sparse and boring looking. I realize they’re randomly generated, but there could’ve been [...] Continue reading

Another exemplary downloadable console game is making its way to PC! CarneyVale: Showtime, an Xbox Live Indie Games title that sister-sites Gamasutra and GamerBytes named the #1 release for the service in 2008, will arrive on PCs later this year thanks to an exclusive distribution contract with Games for Windows Live.

Developer by the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab plans to "slightly" modify the gameplay for PC gamers and add new features like a built-in map editor for creating and sharing stages. The one-button game stars a circus acrobat swinging and flipping through stages, collecting balloons along the way.

The game beat out 350 entries to win $40,000 at Microsoft's XNA Dream-Build-Play competition in 2008 and recognized at several indie events; the 2009 Penny Arcade Expo included Carneyvale in its "Top 10 Independent Games Showcase Winners" and the 2009 Independent Games Festival selected it as a finalist for the main competition grand prize.

If you've no patience to can't wait for Microsoft Games and Gambit to release CarneyVale: Showtime on Games for Windows Life, you can download the console version right now for just 400 MS Points on Xbox Live Indie Games (free demo also available).

Despite the generic name, S.H.M.U.P. is not a generic shmup. A finalist at the Chinese IGF, it is indeed a horizontally-scrolling shmup, but with some unusual characteristics.

Killing enemies gives you points you can use to upgrade, a common trope, but upgrades persist the next time you play under the same username, even if you've died. Indeed, it's designed so that you will almost certainly lose the first time you play, but that over time (a few hours of gameplay, at any rate) you will build up enough to be able to persist and triumph even through the higher, and more difficult, levels.

Control is entirely with the mouse; your cluster of ships follow the mouse pointer around. Right-click launches missiles, of which you have a limited supply. There's a boss at the end of each level, but these are not all that impressive.

Behind you are a cluster of squares that you can think of as akin either to the cities of Space Invaders or the points you must protect in a tower-defense game. Ships you fail to kill as they scroll by reduce them, and you can lose either by losing them all or losing all your ships.

However, at higher levels, enemies self-organize into impressive opposing formations -- sometimes taking advantage of combined arms, with defensive ships protecting high-fire but more vulnerable ones, sometimes organizing into megaships, in the fashion of amoebas forming into the cells of a multicellular monstrosity.

Gameplay is not, however, particularly challenging from a traditional shmup perspective; at worst, you simply die a lot, build up points to buy upgrades, and eventually triumph even with a fairly minimal twitch-action skill set. There would seem to be a bit of a casual game influence in this.

High scores can be posted to your Twitter feed, something I haven't seen before.

In general, it is neither the most visually beautiful shmup, in a genre known for its weird psychedelic beauty, nor the most challenging game of its type, but there are some interesting design ideas here.

Towlr is a puzzle. Towlr is an art movement. Towlr is an aesthetic with its own manifesto. Sort of. Towlr is frustrating. In Towlr, the cake is not a lie.

Towlr has a + sign in the screen. It has no meaning.

Towlr provides no rules, no tutorial, not even a minimalist statement of goals. You must deduce the goal.

Towlr tells you when you have failed, in a most annoying fashion.

Towlr displays only simple, geometric shapes such as you might see in an Atari 2600 game.

Towlr rewards success with cake.

In Towlr, the appropriate response when you succeed is "Doh!".

Towlr looks simple; but actually, there is a highly refined sensibility at work here, one that could only and can only derive from games. It's a sort of minimalism that rejects almost everything we know, or believe we know, about games. There is no hand-holding, no increment in skill, only a puzzle, with no hints and no support. The purpose of Towlr is to figure out how to play, and once you have, you are done.

And just as stark as its gameplay are its visuals and soundscape.

The first Towlr was created by PoV for a Ludum Dare competition, but a bunch have been created since. They are all available at the Towlr site. Some are web-playable, others are downloads, and the downloads vary in what platforms they support. But you should check them out, if only to experience a remarkably different aesthetic of the game.

Nearly a year before they put out 2009's surprise Flash/iPhone hit Canabalt, Adam "Saltsman" Atomic and composer Danny Baranowsky worked together on another one-button game, Gravity Hook. Created in just five days, the simple but addictive Flash game had players ascending a mine by throwing a grappling hook onto floating orbs, then pulling themselves toward the orb and using their momentum to reach the next orb.

Adam and Danny have returned to the project -- their first collaboration -- to add new graphics, sound, controls, and gameplay to the game while still keeping its one-button simplicity, and released it as Gravity Hook HD. They're planning to release a paid version for iPhone and iPod Touch, but as with Canabalt, you can play the full title for free online.

I've already lost an hour to it, and it's just as habit-forming as the original. To make it even worse for fans of the original version, the two promise a special treat if you can reach the 500m mark; so, don't plan to eat dinner any time soon if that's the goal you're shooting for. Even with the changes to make the game more approachable, like cutting back on the exploding orbs, dying is still ridiculously easy in Gravity Hook HD.

[In a panel on racial identity in games at the recent DICE Summit, attended by our own Brandon Sheffield, panelists claimed that developers make characters that look like them -- and are often unwilling to move outside of their own racial box.]

Racial diversity, both within the industry and inside games themselves, is an issue not very often addressed. At DICE, a panel that spanned disciplines and experiences tackled the issue, moderated by Kill Screen Magazine’s Jamin Brophy-Warren.

He was joined by by Manveer Heir, lead designer at Raven, Dmitri Williams, professor at USC, and Navid Khonsari, founder of iNK Stories and former director of production for Rockstar Games.

Diversity Study

By way of introduction to the topic, Dmitri Williams discussed his research into how people look in games versus how the players look in reality. The motivation was to learn about stereotypes. “Stereotypes are a natural, logical, and intelligent process,” he said. “It’s taking a small group of data and spreading it over a wider group. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a dangerous thing.”

For the project, Williams and his researchers took all the bestselling games from 2006-2007, new at the time of the study. They allowed for weighting in terms of what people played more often, so Madden counts more than Beyblade for DS.

There was a sample of 150 games, at least 15 per platform. They recorded a half hour of gameplay from each game, and did a simple count of the characters in the game, finding 8,500 human characters. They then compared this with the U.S. census.

What they found was that white characters were overrepresented by 7%, Asians by 26%, while black characters were underrepresented by 13%, Hispanics by 78%, Native Americans by 90%, and biracial characters by 42%.

So if this doesn’t represent the U.S. population, what does it match? In the end, it seemed to match the IGDA survey of game developers in the industry, almost to the exact percentages. You make games that look like you, Williams concluded.

The Panel

So how do you get people to write about what they’re not? When Navid Khonsari was at Rockstar, they agreed that “You can’t have an Englishman and a Scot writing a story about what happens in LA,” so they did a lot of research into the culture by actually spending time there, with the types of people upon which they were basing the game.

“You need to embrace a story that’s not just going to be based on a white male,” he said, “and if you’re going to go out there and talk about other ethnicities, you need to reach out to those communities and get input.”

“In Prey, you have the Spirit Walking mechanic,” added Manveer Heir. The developers skinned it with Native American themes. “We have to find mechanics in our games that can support the kinds of characters we’re creating, so their backgrounds actually matter. Where do they come from? It could be racial, gender, or being homosexual.”

Why is it that we don’t make more adventurous characters? There’s a “giant shortage of female characters in games,” said Williams, noting that there is an 85/15 split in terms of male to female characters in games, whereas in the real world it’s about even. “How do you get people who make games about themselves to be different? Until you get those people into the industry, they’re not going to make games about themselves.”

“We can move past it,” postulated Heir, “we just have to start thinking about it. We don’t even bother throwing out new ideas for characters. We’re not thinking about what the rest of the market potentially wants. We have to encourage everyone to start thinking about it, and in the long term plans, we have to encourage more minorities to get into this industry.”

But why bother from the business side? “Part of it is there are potentially untapped markets,” said Heir. “You could certainly grow – there are a lot of black kids and Hispanic kids playing these games, and we’re probably losing them as they get older.”

“It’s really important to remember that there’s an industry beyond these borders,” said Khonsari. “There’s a potential for a lot of markets that could start consuming these games. We should recognize that there is money there, and we can’t appeal to people by putting them as victims in these games.”

Khonsari posed that developers should hire people of color to write for non-white characters, but Heir disagreed. Heir figured that if you have a good writer, they should be able to write any character. If you ask the business folks to not only take a risk on a potentially racially divisive character, and then ask for more money to hire someone new, that’s not going to fly.

Personal Thoughts

Obviously the issue is a large one, and there will be a separate GDC talk on the same issue, but in the audience myself, I couldn’t help but have some opinions. Not discussed were character creators, in which a player could potentially be any race. I spoke with Heir after the conference, and he said they only go so far – sure you can be any race, but if the content doesn’t address it, it’s not very powerful.

Still, we agreed that perhaps having a character be a certain race and not have that called out may be more progressive than focusing on it directly.

My own thoughts led to a more potent reason why we don’t have more racially diverse characters in games. If the majority of our developers are White and Asian, White people especially are trained to feel racially bland, and as though they cannot discuss racial issues without offending someone.

Thus, attempting to write a character that’s not of your race opens you up to some potential harsh criticism, and people would simply rather not take the risk, because the risk versus reward potential is very high there.

I would submit that writers should be able write characters of other races, and be confident in their work. We are much more comfortable dealing with racial issues when there’s a layer of fantasy, as is done in Mass Effect or Dragon Age.

In my personal opinion, we should see more games like Fallout 3, in which many races are represented, but the race of the character is far outweighed by how they interact with you. We don't need to deal with all of society's problems in games, but having demographics represented even just visually seems worthwhile.