Who spent all day reading My Little Pony fan fiction and only realised an hour before posting his blog that he hadn’t even started?

Trick question, it was half an hour.

AAAAH introduction hey everyone video games visual novels other stuff link to YouTube video witty jokes on with the blog.

Quarrel

So the only game I’ve really been playing this week is Quarrel, an iOS game that Gary Whitta recommended over Twitter a few days back. Basically Quarrel is Risk game, but instead of relying on random chance, it’s replaced with a Countdown mixed with a Scrabble-like system which works really well, and makes the game for me at least a lot of fun to play.

How it works is each player controls territories of a map, and can initiate battles with neighbouring enemy territories. During the battle each army is given the same 8-word anagram, and the best word wins. Instead of just being the longest word, however, each latter has a Scrabble point system attached to it, so for instance X will give you 10 points whereas S will only give you 1 point. On top of even that the length of the word you can make is dictated by the size of your army, so that stops you just entering the letters into an anagram program and getting the 8 letter anagram every time. Armies can range from two troops all the way to eight, so while you could try and trample the entire board in one round, trying to beat high level AI with a troop disadvantage is rather foolish. I you do manage to beat an enemy with more troops than you; you automatically capture some of their troops as a bonus.

At the end of your move you get more troops, guaranteeing you always have at least two troops per territory. You can also get more troops by collecting treasure and making high point words, by doing this you eventually fill up a meter that gives you a backup troop which you can deploy at the start of a battle. If you’re really good at anagrams (or have an anagram solver program) this can easily be gamed. If you have one territory of 8 troops and solve the anagram, the amount of bonus treasure you get equates to at least one new backup troop. Therefore, since Risk rules have one troop stay behind when you take over a territory, you can just keep deploying your new extra troop and keep making the anagram, and therefore completely dominate the entire game in one turn as long as you can reach every opposing territory with that one unit.

But that’s a complete hypothetical, of course.

Moero Downhill Night

If you’re one of those kinds of people that only play one genre of games, first of all you’re crazy and you should play Portal 2 seriously what the hell Slowbird I can’t even be- then you’re probably thinking “Hey, all these visual novels are fine and all but I need something to sustain my lust of over the road racing!” Well my friends your question has been answered, here this week is Moero Downhill Night, a visual novel about street racing.

The game stars Daichi Shou, a rather normal teenager who works as a delivery man for a shop on a mountain ridge. That all changes, however, when he gets into an accident, and through a random case of convenient amnesia, he can’t remember the specifics. When he wakes up he finds himself in a taxi cab driven by Michi, the main heroine of the story. She thinks Shou is an amazing racing navigator and, because Shou decides to go along with it, gets dragged into being her navigator as she tries to race against the best and become the champion racer of the mountain ridge.

So while the story does revolve around racing, your character is never actually doing any racing, and hooray you fell for the trap, all the gameplay in this game is just standard visual novel selecting lines of dialogue. Admittedly the system in this game has a nice twist to it which makes it a lot more involved than other visual novels. Whenever you’re not in a race it’s rather standard fare, but in a race, all of the options are paired with a timer and all revolve on racing strategy. For instance, coming up to a bend, you’ll be given the option to either go into the bend slow and out fast, or keep speed and go along the outside of the bend. The options get more difficult the further into the game you get. I’m sure if you actually knew how to race the options would be incredibly easy but since I lack that knowledge I got stuck quite a few times during the last few races. If you make enough mistakes in a race the car will spin out and you’ll lose, but beat the other character and you progress through the story.

The story itself is short and thus can’t really flesh out any characters other than the main two, and even there isn’t sort of whatever. Throughout the story you’ll be racing against 5 different opponents, most of which are conveniently pretty girls as opposed to Vin Diesel. When you beat a girl as a race they’ll come up with some excuse for you to bang them, or if you want to stay true to Michi you can decline them like a real man. Like I said since the game is short none of these characters are really developed in any way, and just fall into generic stereotypes. No matter if you do end up getting with a girl you can’t then be their navigator or anything like that, the story while having separate endings for being faithful or not, doesn’t ever divulge that much.

One interesting thing to point out though is the graphics. While sticking with the normal anime visual novel presentation as you’d expect, the races have 3D cutscenes after each decision. This I find is rather amazing, and made all the better when you realise this was made back in 2005, so the 3D is great. As far as the actual anime graphics go it’s par for the course in my opinion, not terrible but nothing too impressive. The music as well, despite being MIDI based, at least tries to go for an Initial D vibe, so there’s that.

All in all Moero Downhill Night is a rather average visual novel, but still pretty good for a few hours of distraction. But for people looking for a good story to enjoy will be disappointed with what little Downhill Night has to offer, without any well thought out characters and a short run through time, the visual novel is rather something something something racing pun.

Programmers are not Game Designers

This was the subject of a lecture I got in university from my tutor, who is an ex-Blizzard programmer, talking about how in group projects we should never dump the job of designing games onto the programmer. Admittedly I was in a slightly different position than my colleagues; I had in fact been designing games as well as learning how to program them all throughout my high school years. Therefore, this talk didn’t really mean much to me.

At least, that’s what I thought.

The talk at the very least made a lot of sense. A programmer will see point A and point B and code a line to join them. Very efficient, no hassle and works as intended (hopefully). When you have to design games as well, however, the line isn’t straight at all. I’ll give you an example, two programs made for 2nd year PS2 programming, one by me and one by a friend who, in his defence, is a great programmer (but not as good as me).

Point A and Point B in this instance was the incredibly easy Start Menu to Game. You can see the very obvious path to take here, highlight a button, click X or start, and then load up the game. That’s what my friend did; there was really no need to do anymore. Using the pixel text we were given with the font code already provided, he wrote the title of his game and ‘Press Start to Continue’, and then coded that when the user presses any button it continues to the game, because why not. I, however, took a different approach, an incredibly silly and convoluted approach; I created a 3D camera using 2D sprites.

Why would I do this for a start menu you ask? Well I came up with a silly concept for my game. My game was a 3D dual joystick space shooter, sort of a mix between Geometry Wars and Tempest. But then I wanted whenever you die for the game to zoom out and reveal an arcade machine, where buttons on the PS2 controller were corresponding to buttons on the arcade machine. Therefore whenever you start the game it’d show the arcade machine, and when you press start the camera would zoom into the monitor and start the game. This unfortunately didn’t get made and instead I had panels held up by rope that had the menu options on them, and when you press start, the camera zooms past it onto the action. I also added the right analogue stick to slightly tilt the camera in the menus a la Super Smash Bros. Melee. Was all this necessary? Nope, my friend’s system was arguably better because it got the user into the action faster. My incredibly complicated maths based camera system would be lost on most people playing (even the lecturer marking it I might add). I did get feedback speaking extremely favourably on my game design and music (my music was an 8-bit rendition of Black & Yellow I made which, might I add, was rather amazing) saying it’s incredibly rare for students to realise the importance of design in their programming.

Another not as successful attempt to do this was in 1st year when I was coding GBA games. I made a silly fighting game; complete with wasting half my sprite sheet on a fire explosion to transition from the character select screen (the characters were all disembodied heads of my old high school friends) to a versus screen, where they’d come in from either side of a metal door and fly away, the doors will open to reveal the battlefield and they’ll fall down onto it as the 3, 2, 1, GO started to tick down. When a person won they had personalized win quotes that were all in-jokes between my high school friends and I. Needless to say it was amazing. But the marker didn’t care at all, and only cared about my programming ability and got an incredibly embarrassing grade (read: not an A).

Unrelated but the disembodied heads of my friend and I previously showed up in my last year high school project which was a generic jRPG battle system.

Since this isn’t a programming focused community, the question I want to ask here is how important to you are the little design flourishes? If you were met with the two games I described, would you prefer my friend’s game that gets you into the actual game much faster, or my system of adding a little style to the whole thing? In my opinion it can do in two different ways. When it’s done right it can be amazing, but if it takes too long or the actual functionality of the menus suffer as a result of the flourishes, it can be the worst thing ever. By not adding these kinds of flourishes no one is going to care either way. Fancy menus are only ever talked about if the game attempts it, and I seriously doubt anyone is going to be annoyed by a game because they don’t attempt some kind of superfluous effect.

Sorry for the lack of stuff this week, it’s sorta been a crazy week all round, and it doesn’t look like next week is gonna get easier! But whatever, even when everything that can go wrong does all at once, I’ll get by knowing I have my precious visual novels to keep me going!

...Man that’s really depressing when I say that out loud. I’m going back to My Little Pony stories.