Postmortem of IGF's Web GOTY

Oasis was the winner of the Independent Game Festival's Game of the Year award in the Web/Downloadable Category. To give us some background on how an award winning indie title is put together, Gamasutra has a Postmortem from the folks at Mind Control Software. From the article: "'Life's not fair.' Oasis levels are not fair. They are created randomly, following a complex set of heuristics. It is not a foregone conclusion that a player will win a level militarily. If things look bad, a smart player starts to think more defensively."

Comments

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[myheroBobHope]

Somewhat interesting to read about the design concepts... but still, just one big advertisement... the guy who designed it writing about the "problems" (not real problems, fake, hey our game is great problems)... oh well. *shrug*

links

[rayde]

if you're so inclined, you can download the demo from their site.

demo too short

[Eugene]

I've played the demo, and IMHO it's allowable time is too short to attract players to buy it. It give you one hour of free trial total, and the website itself is really lack of information.. I know this is a low budget game, but.. at least provide enough information for possible buyers to decide whether you want to spend $20 to play it or not. by the time I went through tutorial, the time is up already. (yes, maybe it's intended, but it should allow enough time for players to finish a few rounds of easy games.. ).

Re:demo too short

[KDR_11k]

Seems to be a common trait among indy demos nowadays. Too short a timelimit for the potential customer to decide.

Re:demo too short

[MBraynard]

Agreed. And it's not that it's so short it doesn't allow the customer to decide - it's so short the customer defaults to 'no.'

Re:good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes I wonder where the trolls get these :-) This one is actually interesting, but I can't find the source by the usual searching for specific sentences *sigh*

Hey, Mr. Troll, care to post a link? :-)

WIndows only?

[mrgreen4242]

To bad it's Windows only. These seems like the perfect kind of game to be available on Linux/Mac/etc. No complex 3D engine to port or worry about, etc. Oh well, wonder if it's any good?

Re:WIndows only?

[bhtooefr]

Well, TFA said that they're using DirectX 7. They originally went for DX9, then their first publisher wanted a proprietary DX7 framework, then they switched publishers - to another (different) proprietary DX7 framework user.

Re:WIndows only?

[wormbin]

This surprised me too. Why would anyone make a quick, 2D, puzzle game targeted to one platform? Why should I check this out when I can run things like puzzle pirates on any platform that runs java?

Re:WIndows only?

[ectizen]

I had a play with the demo, and while I wouldn't pay what they're asking for a Windows version, I'd happily pay *more* than that for a Nintendo DS version...

Re:good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Here

Life's not fair, but Games should be

[LKM]

"'Life's not fair.' Oasis levels are not fair."

To me, this about sums up the reasons why auto-generated levels are most often useless. Life's not fair, but I'm playing games to avoid the unfairness of life, not to experience even more of it.

Levels should be designed by humans who can anticipate how a game will play out. Otherwise, games become more luck than anything else, which ultimately is often bothersome, annyoing and discouraging.

Re:Life's not fair, but Games should be

[Alzheimers]

Or, you can look at it this way:

In human generated levels, you're playing more against the designer than the game. On one level, this is more interesting, because it's adversarial and competitive. Yet if the designer uses the same tricks over and over, or uses strategies that are difficult to understand, then this can become boring real fast.

On the other hand, in a randomly or heuristicly generated level, you're playing against Chaos. Of all the possible levels that could have come into existence based upon the rules of the engine, *this* is the one you're faced with. Almost guaranteed a unique experience every time, playing as if against the hand of God itself. There's no human intelligence behind this design -- it's math, and it's going to PWN you on occasion.

Re:Life's not fair, but Games should be

[LKM]

In human generated levels, you're playing more against the designer than the game. (...) if the designer uses the same tricks over and over, or uses strategies that are difficult to understand, then this can become boring real fast.
On the other hand, in a randomly or heuristicly generated level, you're playing against Chaos.

That's an interesting point, but I would say that even if the level is randomly generated, you're generally going to find the same kind of repetition that human designers introduce. Maybe even more so, since an application is (usually, depending on algorithm and human) less complicated and more predictable than a human being.

Having said that, I agree that in some kinds of games, random levels are better. Tetris, for example, would probably be kind of boring if you got the same sequence of stones each time you play it. On the other hand, that would mean that somebody thought it through, and there would always be a way to remove those blasted rows.

In general, if you're playing in humanly created levels, it's your fault if you lose. If you're playing in a random level, it might be your fault, but it might be that the level was simply too hard (or even unbeatable), too.

Re:Life's not fair, but Games should be

[eyegee88]

the nethack community does not agree with you :)

Re:Life's not fair, but Games should be

[LKM]

True, but I suspect that secretly (or maybe even not-so-secretly), they actually want to be punished by unfair levels :-D

Re:good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you very much! :-)