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Achievements/Rewards statistics for Spring Up Harmony

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

Spring Up Harmony PC was released a few months ago, it’s now a good time to study statistics of the rewards (or achievements) of the game. Rewards are a good way to see what the players are really doing in the game.

These are the stats of online players that played the full version of the game. To have more data, I also used data from pirate players. Pirate players do not appear in the leaderboards, but I still log their achievements. I consider a player has the full version (legally or not) when he has played a level not included in the demo.

I sorted the achievements according to the percentage of players having it.

Beginning

Complete the first level of the game.

100%

Two in One

You hit two Harmony objects in one shot.

100%

Five

You completed five levels.

99.8%

All Clean

You removed all the objects of a level.

83.0%

Bronze Medal

Your global score is 500,000 points.

82.6%

Just in Time

You completed a level with less than ten seconds left.

65.1%

Catcher

You caught 500 objects with the bucket.

55.4%

Silver Medal

Your global score is 1 million points.

47.5%

Fast

You completed a level with seven shots or less.

38.0%

Shooter

You shot 500 balls.

35.4%

The End

You completed all the single player levels.

19.9%

Gold Medal

Your global score is 2 million points.

17.9%

Top Scorer

You scored 200,000 points in one level.

16.5%

Addict

You played for 5 hours.

2.9%

Multiplayer

You played ten multiplayer games.

1.2%

Another stat not shown above is that no player have all achievements.

The main thing to learn from these stats is that I probably spent to much time implementing the multi-player mode. It was not that long to develop but more levels would have been better. It’s probably because it’s only multi-player on the same screen and not online. The achievement “Two In One” seems too easy. Maybe it should have been “Three in One”.

Players, do you like achievements?
Developers, do you also log the achievements of your players?

Feel free to comment and follow me on twitter and facebook.

Tags: achievements, rewards, spring up harmony, statistics
Posted in Game Design, postmortem, spring up harmony | 1 Comment »

Never released game design and prototype #2 : DJ Machine

Friday, April 29th, 2011

This is the second post of the series, you can read the introduction of the series in the first post.

Project 13

I will talk about a prototype called “DJ Machine” (Project 13), that I started while Spring Up Harmony (PC X360) was being approved for Xbox Live Indie Games. I was looking for something fun and that could only be done with XNA. I was playing DJ Hero at that time and logically started to create a simple program playing with the turntable (see image below). Nick Gravelyn already did some research on it and this information was very useful to get something working very quickly.

I didn’t want to make a clone of DJ Hero because I could not afford licensing many interesting songs and don’t want to compete with the AAA guys. After a few crazy ideas, I finally came up with the idea of manipulating a machine using the turntable. Each part of the turntable (scratch, buttons, euphoria, fx dial) activates/moves a section of the machine. Some of the inspiration came from a very old game called Night Shift where the player controls a worker that must take care of a machine and quickly becomes overwhelmed by the amount of elements requiring attention.

Screenshots and Video of DJ Machine

Here are a screenshot and a gameplay video of my prototype:

I removed the sounds in the video as I do not own the rights to some of them:

I suppose this requires some explanation. Refer to the image of the turntable while I explain the gameplay for those not familiar with the controller. The player is supposed to build objects using the “DJ Machine”. Of course, it’s still very abstract because of the programmer art.

Square items are coming from the left on the gray path. They stop at the first black square. Here, the player has to scratch with the corresponding button and direction (for example, blue scratch up, green scratch down). There are between one and three scratches to do per item.
When all the scratches for an item are done, the item moves to the next black square on the top right. Here, the player must spin the knob as fast as possible.
The item is then transformed in a shape (yellow circle, blue star or red octagon) that falls down the screen.
The player then controls the dark red claw with the cross fader (if the cross fader is on the left, the claw moves to the left, the player must move the cross fader back to center to stop the claw).
The player must move the claw below the shape items on the right and use the euphoria button to close the claw (keep euphoria button down) and catch the item.
He then moves the item to the corresponding area on the left and drop it by releasing the euphoria button.

There is also a penalty if the player activates elements when not needed. For instance, if he scratches when there is nothing in the top left section of the machine, the machine gets stucked and can’t be used for a few seconds.
You can also see the crosses on the top left (one is red, two are white on the screenshot). They represent the errors made by the player. After three errors, the game stops.
On the right, there is, from top to bottom the time, the score and the number of objects succesfully made. If the player drops an item when not on the proper location with the claw, the object is lost.
That’s basically it. The game was supposed to be played in short sessions where items come faster and faster.

I also planned another game mode where the player first choses between different music styles (techno, rap, funk…) and then scratches and mixes with proper sound samples on an abstract background. I named this game mode Freestyle DJ. Here is a gameplay video:

Sadly, without sound, it’s not very exciting but it is actually working pretty well. There is two short music loops that the player could mix with the cross fader, scratches play sound effects and fx dial speeds up/slows down the music.
The graphics in the background are made from Spring Up Harmony’s algorithm.

Design Document (notes)

Here is a copy of my design notes. I just translated the bits in french and added comments in blue. It’s in chronological order, it means that ideas on top have no connections with “DJ Machine” prototype and were discarded:

Byala 80 pts (a game (strange) name with a price: I think I made a mistake by pricing Spring Up Harmony at 240 pts at the beginning, so I precised very early I’d put the next one at 80 )
Musical Arts (other idea : just playing music with nice backgrounds : not really a game, but gave birth to the freestyle game mode)
Platform game playable with turntable (first game idea: platform game (inspiration: Donkey Kong Country (LINK) that is playable with drums))
Playable with guitar? drums?
Original rendering : squares, blobs, glow (Inspiration: the Sony PS3 dashboard but I finally used Spring Up Harmony’s algorithm as a starting base)
Night Shift (from here, I’m going toward the design described above, citing my main inspiration)
A cube comes to a platform, after 1 to 3 scratches, it goes in step 2, after fx dial, it goes in step 3. Movement with XFader, player has to make the cube fall in the right hole with euphoria (this is the sentence that resumes it all )
Show a message to the player if he’s playing with a pad.
Classic “Freestyle DJ” game mode
Choices betwee left/right handed and buttons on the left/right (same as in DJ Hero)
Different difficulty levels: Tutorial, Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert and Hardcore
Game over because of three errors or machine full if player does not play fast enough
Restrictions of the free version: Only 4 difficulty levels out of 6, DJ Machine sessions only 3 minutes long, Freestyle DJ sessions only 1 minute long.

Here is a early prototype screenshot I used to set up of the gameplay:

Why I didn’t complete it, and thoughts

I started this project mostly for fun, to try to see how was working the turntable. I hesitated to complete and release it on XBLIG. I didn’t, because:

The market share is very small. According to numbers (DJ Hero, DJ Hero 2 and consoles) I could find, I estimate between 1.5 and 3% of xbox players have turntables (probably many DJ Hero 2 players also own DJ Hero 1). Also, XBL Indie Games are approved by other developers and you need multiple votes by creators to get your game on XBox Live. Therefore, I would need actual XBLIG developers to have turntables (well, that’s not entirely true as the game would be playable with only a pad too, but they would not fully test the game and might not want to try it). I already had to remove french support in Spring Up Harmony because I could not find two or three french-speaking developers. I honestly think there are more developers speaking french than developers with a working DJ Hero turntable.
Gameplay variety is very low. People might argue that DJ Hero also have few variety, but it’s of course in the musics and leaderboards that the players find variety even if the gameplay is roughly always the same. In DJ Machine, only speed brought variety.
However, now that the DJ Hero series will not be completed (LINK), DJ Hero players might love to be able to use their turntables again.

Today, I still don’t plan to work on this prototype again, but who knows.

Feel free to comment and share ideas and talk about your unfinished projects in the comments section.
You can also follow me on twitter or facebook.

Tags: dj hero, Game Design, prototype, screenshot, turntable, video
Posted in Game Design, Screenshots / Videos, XNA, Xbox 360 | 1 Comment »

Never released game design and prototype #1 : Museum Director

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

Last week-end, I ditched a prototype of a game because it was not as fun as I thought. It gave me the idea to blog about some of the game design documents and prototypes I made that were never released. It can really be interesting, because:

If everyone agrees that the design sucks: I’ll definitely stop thinking about it and I’ll be glad that I moved on to other projects.
If some players or game designers have ideas to save the prototype and make it into a game: I’ll be happy hear it and may eventually work on this project again… and why not release it.
If the description of my project gives ideas to game designers and they get inspired to create an original game from it: I’ll be very happy that my failed game designs helped/inspired fellow developers.

Of course, in this series of posts, I will not talk about all the cancelled projects. I will just choose the most interesting ideas/prototypes in random order.

Process when Designing/Prototyping

Everytime I have a valid idea that I really want to implement, I create a new folder in my “gamedev” directory, using a number. I started last weekend “Project 16“, therefore, it’s easy to know how many ideas I gave up (or paused) from the released games. Here is the list of my released projets:

First released game “Shapy” (PC) is “Project 3“
Second game “Around the World” (PC/Mac) is “Project 4“
Third game “Spring Up!” (PC/Mac) is “Project 6“
Fourth game (flash game hidden on sister site) “Futoshiki” is “Project 7“
Fifth game “Spring Up Harmony” (X360/PC) is “Project 12“

So I cancelled at least 10 projects. In fact there is more because I sometimes use a quickly ditched project as the starting point for another.

Project 8 : Design

The first one I chose to talk about is “Project 8“, codenamed “Museum Director“. This is probably the cancelled project that I spent the most time working on.

The idea came from Patrick Curry’s Game Idea #35 (you can see my comment back in 2008!) [I removed the link because Google flagged the site. The url was www.patrickcurry.com/thoughts/?p=51]. It is basically a “Sim Museum”. In addition to Patrick’s idea, the game design was mostly inspired from Theme Park (I loved this game when I was a kid!). Museum Director was planned for PC and Mac (using the same game engine than Around the World and Spring Up!).

I usually don’t write “real” game design documents (GDD) as I am the only person using it. Instead, I tend to take some notes in a Google Docs or a .txt file. However, looking back in my Design folder of Museum Director, I found a 10 pages design document (I did not remember I wrote all that). This confirms that I spent a lot of time on this “unfinished project”. Unfortunately, the game design document is in French so the raw version won’t be very useful to my readers. Some sections on the document should also be in a technical design document (TDD) instead. Here is a quick “best of” in English of the game design ideas. I kept the original randomness of my GDD, as I usually just write interesting ideas in the order they’re coming in my mind. You can see how I transformed and mixed Patrick’s idea with Theme Park:

In the museum, there are three sections of “art works”

Art (paintings, sculptures…)

Natural history (dynosaurs, fossils, rocks…)

Science (experiments, atoms, chemistry…)

Here are the items and global museum parameters available

Tickets price (or free)

Stock management (maps, bar, food, souvenirs, t-shirts…): buy price can vary

Assurance of art items

Rules (can use camera inside museum? free entry?)

Advertising (local/national newspapers, TV, flyers, radio, ad on a specific art item or for the whole museum…)

Air conditionner

Goal of the game: to have a high “museum grade”, based on:

Global reputation

Cultural evaluation

Art maintenance

Quality of art items

Quantity of visitors

Organisation of the items inside the museum (don’t mix everything randomly)

Security (of visitors and art)

Cleanliness

Visitors have different characteristics (walking speed, likeliness of each art type…)

There are some VIPs (politics, rich people) (idea taken from Theme Hospital)

Visitors have various needs: (hungry/thirsty/toilet, leaving the museum (when inside for a long time or unhappy…), buying things (when very happy), need more money (can withdraw cash inside the museum), want to see a specific item, wandering around randomly…

How to earn money for the museum:

Entrance fees

Sales of food/drinks/souvenirs

Allocation

Donations

Selling or renting art items to other museums

Art can be stolen inside the museum. Player can buy CCTV and hire security agents

Employees (paid (high quality) orvolunteer (low quality))

Archeologists/scientists (through a research program) to discover new items

Ticket clerks

Security agents

Art specialists (to take care of items)

There is a world map with famous cities where you buy your location for the museum with a limited size (number of tiles).

The document also contains the list of every item available in the game as well as stats available to the player but it’s not really interesting here. I can really see Theme Park’s inspiration when I read the document a few years later.

Prototype

It took me some time to find a working version of the game , but I eventually could run it and take some screenshots. The art assets are coming from other games (the visitors are from virtual villagers for instance), Google Image, or I made it myself (you can see the ugly shops made with paint.NET ) :

You might be able to see from the screenshots that many features were implemented such as:

Isometric tiled engine with camera translation
Interactive Minimap
Choosing, moving, rotating and dropping items with a working GUI
Path finding of the visitors
Visitors waiting in lane (ala Theme Park)
AI of visitors walking in the museum, looking at art, buying stuff, using toilets and leaving the museum.
Saving/Loading of the game

It still very sandbox-like.

Why I never released it

Here are the reasons why I stopped working on this project and the mistakes I made:

Despise the original museum “theme”, there is a lack of originality in the gameplay, I was too much copying Theme Park.
This game would require a lot of money in art assets.
I realized that this kind of game is very difficult to tune properly. The technical part was quite easy to do but it’s hard to have an interesting gameplay.
I stopped the project way too late. I looked into my source control software history (perforce) to see that I worked on the game for more than 3 months.

In comparison, I spent less than a month on “Project 15″, stopped last week. And Project 15 was already playable but the game itself is also much less complex. Anyway, I’m getting better at moving on early when something is not working, that’s good

Conclusion

Obviously, even if it can be difficult, it’s good to stop working on a game when you realize it’s not that good. Just backup the game, and keep it somewhere just in case a killer idea can revive it. I now try to concentrate exclusively on gameplay from the beginning of the development and avoid any technical features if it’s not required. That way, I can find out quickly if it’s fun or not.

Feel free to tell me what you think about Museum Director and to share your “failed game designs” in the comments.

Follow me on twitter and facebook to know when I post other unreleased designs.

Tags: design, museum director, prototype
Posted in Game Design, postmortem | No Comments »

Spring Up Harmony PC – Rewards and Tips

Sunday, February 13th, 2011

Hi, the release of Spring Up Harmony PC will probably happen in the following weeks. Here is a post about the rewards included in the game and some tips for the hard ones.

Beginner:	Complete the first level of the game
Top Scorer:	Score 200,000 points in one level. Tip: Choose your level carefully when aiming for this reward.
Just in Time:	Complete a level with less than 10 seconds left
Fast:	Complete a level in seven shots or less. Tip: Only aim for harmony balls.
The End:	Complete all the 35 single-player levels
Multiplayer:	Play 10 multi-player games
Catcher:	Catch 500 objects with the bucket
Clean:	Remove all objects of a level. Tip: Make sure to keep harmony balls for the end of the level.
Five:	Complete five levels
Two in One:	Hit two harmony objects in one shot. Tip: aim carefully and you should get this reward easily.
Addict:	Play the game for five hours.
Shooter:	Shoot 500 balls
Bronze Medal:	Get a global score of 500,000
Silver Medal:	Get a global score of 1,000,000
Gold Medal:	Get a global score of 2,000,000. Tip: make combos, catch items and hit as much items as possible

Some rewards are easy, some are difficulty and some take some time but I’m sure you’ll love getting them all!

Do not miss the release of Spring Up Harmony PC by following us on twitter or facebook!

Tags: rewards, spring up harmony, tips
Posted in Game Design, spring up harmony | No Comments »

Video : Dynamic level demo and background effect update

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

The development of Spring Up XNA has been going pretty well last week.

Here is a new video, please note that it is still not the final art, just placeholders for now :

You can see the following:

New ways of using the physics engine in the levels (joints, gravity…)
Small improvements on the background : slight halo around targets, bloom reacting to matches, especially when hitting sparkling balls (the sparkling balls are part of a modification of gameplay from Spring Up PC/Mac. I will talk about it later. This is also the reason I cropped the borders of the video ).
New particle effects (code in place, art also not final)

These days, I also implemented the sound effects (I just recoded the wavs available in the original version), improved the level editor, added many types of objects (bumpers, shrinkable balls, motors, splines…), added player score with statistics…

Globally, it’s going well, but I am having difficulties in level design. I find it very hard to innovate in each level but I still have a few interesting level prototypes in place.

Hope you like it!

Tags: background, design, physics, spring up, video, XNA
Posted in Game Design, Screenshots / Videos | No Comments »

Video : Level Editor

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

I am mostly working on the level editor. I was not sure when I started this project that I would need a specific level editor. But Spring Up! X360 needs some serious changes in the level design to improve the quality and to adapt to the X360 platform, therefore I need this new level editor. Working on tools with C# is great : it’s really powerful and efficient! Technically speaking, the level editor is just a Game Component (DrawableGameComponent XNA class) of the Game. When the “Editor” component is created, all the new mouse and keyboard shortcuts are available.

As you can see in the video, here are some features implemented: create, move, rotate and delete items and targets. You can set up objects as static, dynamic or with a motor. There is also a snap feature. And as the game is running at the same time, you can play directly in the editor.

You can also see some of the new shapes that will be available in Spring Up! XNA : a triangle and pentagon.

That’s it for today, I hope you liked it!

Tags: level editor, spring up, video
Posted in Game Design, Screenshots / Videos, XNA, programming | No Comments »

Spring Up! XNA : first try at background effects

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

I spend some time trying to create an interesting visual effect in the background of Spring Up! XNA. The backgrounds of the PC/Mac versions are not really nice. I tried to do something more abstract and animated depending on the flow of the game. Geometry Wars 1 and 2 did a very good job at that. While trying to develop an effect, I came up with many different results. I uploaded a video of one of this effect (you can see it in full res here).

Of course, feedback is very much welcomed (negative, positive, ideas…).
I personally have some concerns about a few things:

Black background, is it too simple?
When background is colorful, I think the player might not see the “real game” because it attracts the eye.
Colors are a bit too much “programmer art”. I made also some black and white tries that were nice too.

I have many variables available to tune this effect and each one of them really changes the final result. Basically, the algorithm here is a grid of particles that are animated and lit depending on the velocity and position of the moving elements around them.

I will also probably add thin trails behind objects. For boxes, I will try to attach multiple trails to every corner.

I also have a bloom effect I did for fun before starting this project, I might try to add it in Spring Up!, probably on the trails, maybe on the background too.

Tags: background, design, fx, spring up, video, XNA
Posted in Game Design, Screenshots / Videos | No Comments »

Win/Mac and X360 differences (2) : Screen resolution and aspect ratio

Monday, January 4th, 2010

The second “Win/Mac and X360 differences” post is about the aspect ratio and resolutions of the screen. This may not apply to all games as more and more casual games nowadays can be played on multiple resolutions included the X360 ones. However, I decided to write a post about it because that’s a problem I am facing at the moment.

Most PC/Mac casual games are only developed for a 4:3 resolution (640×480, 800×600 or 1024×768 generally). However, on X360, resolutions are mostly 16:9. In fact, the 1280×720 resolution is recommended by the XNA developers to ensure the game works on every video adapters. Spring Up’s resolution on computers is 800×600, and it will be 1280×720 on XNA, as shown on the first screenshot revealed last month.

Of course, there is a difference in the number of pixels, but the biggest problem is the aspect ratio (from 4:3 to 16:9). The following picture illustrates the problem.

: aspect ratio differences

The blue sections represent the X360 screens and the green sections represent the PC screens. The first illustration shows how the 800×600 screen fits in the 1280×720 screen without any change of resolution. That’s the easiest way to do and what I did for the first screenshot of the game. Basically, you don’t change anything, you just render your game in the center of the X360 screen.

On the second illustration, the PC screen is enlarged so that it fits with the height of the X360 one. This is a 1.2 scale that transforms the PC screen in 960×720. You can see there are blue portions on the sides. That’s what Peggle did (see XBLA screenshot). They just added some (useless?) stuff on the sides to fill the gaps.

There is a third solution that scales the PC screen so that the left/right borders match with the 1280 width of X360. This is a 1.6 scale. In this case, some pixels are lost on the top and bottom if you keep the 4:3 aspect ratio.

I do not want to scale the objects of the game (balls, fans, launcher…) because I prefer pixel perfect sprites (one pixel of the texture is exactly one pixel on the screen). Consequently, in Spring Up!, I will probably move the items that compose the levels so that I take up more space on the screen. A good point to this solution is that it will contribute to correct one problem of the game stated earlier: objects will less likely be stuck due to extra spacing between targets.
I will also tweak the level design to “fill the blanks”, mostly on the left and right sides.
As the background is made up of tiles of 100×100 pixels, I just have to draw more tiles so that’s not a problem.
The walls will of course need to be moved to the sides of the screen.

Another detail that sometimes bother people that don’t think about it right from the beginning is the “title safe frame”. On X360, it is required that every important instruction on screen is displayed in the inner 80% of the screen. In 1280×720, that is 1024×576. On Win/Mac, I have many important information on the borders of the screen (bonus bar, score, level). I will need to change game design here to pass this requirement. I keep that in a corner of my head for the moment and will decide how to do it when working on the UI.

That’s it for resolution and aspect ratio, feel free to comment!

And happy new year!

Tags: aspect ratio, porting, resolution, safe frame, screen, spring up, XNA
Posted in Game Design, XNA, win/mac to x360 | No Comments »

Using (bad) reviews to improve your game

Friday, December 18th, 2009

I’ll port Spring Up!, but it won’t be an exact copy of the game. I will spend time to fix some problems people have seen. I could not afford many tests when releasing Spring Up! for Mac and PC. I only saw a few people playing the game before the release. Now that I’m making this game once again, I look back at those reviews carefully.

I could find 7 interesting reviews. Four of these reviews comes with a grade, here are they, in decreasing order:

harryballs.com : 4 out of 5
bytten.com : 73% (Bronze)
outofeight.info : 4 out of 8
gamezebo.com : 1.5 out of 5 (ouch, quite harsh review, too)

There are also 3 reviews without grade, at macupdate.com (small user review), softpedia.com and meryl.net.

Of course I read them all carefully, and some problems where recurrent among reviewers, here is a small list, with the most important problems on the top:

no way to lose / lack of challenge
no reward for difficult shots
ugly/utilitarian graphics
multiplier too easy to increase
levels are too long, boring near the end of the levels
not enough different power-ups
repetitive music
some bad sound effects
adventure mode not really useful, need story, garden is useless
objects can be stuck and don’t always fall at the bottom of the screen.

Well, it’s already a huge list of problems. I won’t fix all of them, but I’ll certainly take these reviews into account when doing the XNA port of Spring Up! I may not be able to invest much more money to improve graphics and music, but level design, game design and the physics engine will probably be improved.

There is often a debate whether a bad review is better or worse than no review. I think a bad review is better. Not to sell the game, but to improve it.

Tags: review, spring up
Posted in Game Design | No Comments »

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