The Quixotic Engineer

If you pay attention to video game news, you’ve probably heard a lot of buzz these last few weeks about an indie game called Minecraft. Ever since it caught the attention of gaming tastemakers Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Penny Arcade, my online social circle has been completely twitterpated. In fact, it has become so extraordinarily popular that the developers have made it temporarily free-to-play in order to prevent overloading their servers.

Minecraft is a peculiar game that’s difficult to classify. Its pedigree certainly includes the world-building of Dwarf Fortress, the procedural dungeon crawling of Rogue, and the undirected creativity of LEGO. While it’s marvellously simple and intuitive, Minecraft is not an easy game to learn. In its current alpha release, it has nothing in the way of guidance or tutorials. It’s nearly impossible to figure out what to do on your own, making it necessary to follow an external FAQ.

In an effort to help resolve this unfortunate situation, I’ve put together a small guide to surviving your first day and night in Minecraft. There are already a number of excellent walkthroughs for new players available on the game’s forum, and my advice certainly does not diverge strongly from them. However, if this guide manages to pique your interest then I strongly encourage you to purchase a copy and explore the world of Minecraft for yourself.

Welcome to your very own procedurally generated world! It’s very pretty and ripe for exploration. However, you shouldn’t start wandering just yet. When nighttime falls, the land will be crawling with all sorts of dangerous fiends. You need to start gathering the necessary materials to survive the night.

The first resource you need is lumber. Walk up the nearest tree trunk and begin harvesting it by holding down the left mouse button. The block will eventually break, dropping a log that you can pick up. Chop down a few more trees in this manner until you have collected close to a dozen logs.

To begin using these logs, they need to be crafted into lumber and sticks. Begin by pressing ‘i’ to open your inventory, then click and drag the logs into the crafting window. You will receive four units of lumber for each log you process. Next, drag the lumber into the crafting window in the shape illustrated above (one on top of the other) to create sticks. If necessary, you can split your lumber pile in half by right clicking it.

Crafting is one of the Minecraft‘s most fundamental mechanics, but in the alpha version it is very poorly documented. If you’d like to know more about the sort of things you can craft, I recommend consulting the Minecraft Wiki.

Coal is the second essential resource for your first night in Minecraft. As illustrated in the screenshot above, it looks like black splotches on a rock cube. It’s most commonly found embedded in sheer rock cliffs and natural cave formations. However, unlike wood, you cannot gather coal with your bare hands; you need to craft a proper tool.

To make a tool, you need a crafting table to access the 3×3 crafting grid. You can make one by arranging four pieces of lumber in a square. Move the crafting table to the bottom line of your inventory, use the scroll wheel to equip it, and place it in the world by right clicking. Don’t worry too much about the position, as you can pick the crafting table back up by left-click “gathering” it.

Right click the crafting table to access the larger grid, then place your lumber and sticks in the above formation. This will create a wooden pickaxe, a valuable mining tool that tears through rock and harvests certain ores. Equip it (the same way you did the crafting table) and hold the left mouse button to mine the coal. You should also gather some rock while you’re at it, though it’s plentiful everywhere.

While pickaxes are fundamental to progressing in Minecraft, it’s worth noting that you can also craft axes, shovels and hoes to speed up your work or swords and armour to protect yourself.

By the time you’ve finished gathering coal, it’s quite likely that the sun has begun to set. Zombies, spiders and skeletons will begin wandering the land shortly, and you’re in no shape to fight them with your current equipment. It’s therefore imperative that you construct some shelter to hide in. Fortunately, all the materials you’ve been gathering will help you to do exactly that. Use your pickaxe to carve a shallow cave in the side of a cliff. Any location will do, but I advise not wandering too far from your starting point (you’ll respawn there when you die). For extra safety, wall up the entrance with dirt when you’re finished.

Of course, noone wants to sit around in a dark cave all night. To get things done, you’ll need some light. Combine sticks and coal to craft some torches, then place them on the walls to light up the room. Monsters won’t spawn in lighted areas, so you should place a few outside your abode as well.

Since you’re stuck inside until the sun rises, you might as well get some crafting done. I recommend constructing two particularly useful pieces of furniture. A furnace is made out of rock and consumes fuel (wood or coal) to smelt ore, bake bricks and cook food. A wooden chest provides an abundance of extra storage space. It’s a great place to keep your more valuable items, as it will protect you from losing them when your character dies.

If it’s still dark outside, you should start digging a mine and exploring the underworld. You can find rare and valuable ores as you descend, but you’ll need a better tool to gather them. For now, crafting a pick out of rock will allow you to collect iron. Resist the temptation to dig straight down; you might get stuck or fall into lava. Instead, dig diagonally in a descending staircase shape. If you hit a natural underground cave or dungeon, be sure to explore it (cautiously!)

Similarly to coal, iron ore appears as tawny patches on rock. Smelting the ore into ingots with your furnace will allow you to craft iron armour, minecarts, buckets, etc. Iron is a very useful metal, but as you dig deeper you’ll find precious gold, diamond and redstone.

When dawn finally arrives, the morning sun will burn any monsters that are still roaming about (except for explosive Creepers, inexplicably). The land is once again safe to explore, so I recommend taking advantage of the daylight to gather more lumber, hunt wild animals or embellish your residence (here’s mine at the moment).

Once you’ve gotten the basic mechanics down, how you continue to play is really up to you. You could try spelunking the depths of the earth, building a treehouse or sailing to distant lands. There are no explicit goals or directives, just a wonderful sandbox of pure undirected play. I hope you have a grand adventure!

Indie Gaming Gallery is a semi-regular feature where I attempt to support independent game development by highlighting some outstanding titles that you should definitely check out.

Ancient Trader [XBLIG]

It requires a bit of searching, but you can occasionally find a real gem in the unfortunate ghetto of Xbox Live Indie Games. Ancient Trader is a simple turn-based strategy game that’s aesthetically inspired by old world cartography and cryptozoology. Players compete to be the first to track down three artifacts and defeat the powerful Ancient Guardian.

At its core, the game is mechanically similar to the old DOS game Drugwars; the goal is to buy goods (tea, spice and fruit) for a low price at one port and sell them for a profit at another. Players must explore and uncover the map to discover the most profitable transactions, but the prices never fluctuate. However, the journey is not without peril, as players can be assaulted by sea monsters and competing traders. Combat is similarly straightforward: a game of rock-paper-scissors augmented with numerical values to settle ties. Allowing a choice of weapons gives the illusion of chance, but playing rationally makes the battles almost entirely deterministic. Players can upgrade their vessels with stronger cannons, larger storage and faster hulls.

Whereas the gameplay is simple and sufficient, the presentation is lovingly crafted and absolutely joyous. The sepia-stained maps of fictional islands look as if they were hand-drawn by 16th century explorers. The various sea monsters are inspired by the scribbled horrors imagined in the “here be dragons” regions of ancient atlases. Minor features are animated with care: waves sway, flotsam bobs, breezes fill sails, clouds waft. The menu iconography is simple, clear and consistent with the period setting. Fourkidsgames has done a tremendous job of developing this uncommon aesthetic style, and the game is consistently delightful and polished as a result.

Whatever Ancient Trader lacks in strategic depth, it more than makes up for with its charming presentation. If you’re as fascinated by ancient cartography and the exploration of the New World as I am, I strongly recommend checking it out.

Hook Champ [iPhone]

There are a multitude of platformers available on the iPhone’s app store. The vast majority of them rely on some kludge to work their way around the device’s touch interface, often opting to clumsily emulate a traditional control pad. However, every once in a while a game comes along that embraces the iPhone’s idiosyncrasies. Hook Champ by RocketCat Games is one such game, and a personal favourite.

The goal of the game is to direct protagonist Jake T. Hooker as he escapes from a sepulchral heist. Jake’s primary mode of transportation is his trusty grappling hook, which players can deploy by touching the screen and retract by releasing it. As you become accustomed to flying through the air in this fashion, the sequence of touch and release becomes delightfully rhythmic. Should you miscalculate a maneuver and fall, you can slowly run across the ground in order to locate a convenient ledge. However, keeping up your speed is essential, as Jake is being chased by a rancorous apparition known as “The Curse”. Of course, the thrilling feeling of speed conveyed by successfully maintaining a fluid swinging motion is sufficient incentive in and of itself.

Jake can spend his misappropriated gold on a number of grappling hook enhancements, special equipment and fancy hats. This of course provides some incentive to replay and explore previous levels. Upgrading the grappling hook enables a much smoother swinging motion, which in turn makes the whole game more fun. This is a somewhat curious choice; why not make the controls this excellent from the start? The unlockable shotgun and rocket boots provide limited horizontal and vertical bursts of speed respectively, and are activated by two small buttons on the bottom of the screen. This equipment adds welcome variety, but mapping them to a meagre portion of the screen makes them difficult to deploy with precise timing.

My largest annoyance with an otherwise excellent game is a significant late-game difficulty spike. Only the most dedicated players will be able to make any progress through the unforgiving Bull Idol stages, where a floor of lava ensures that every mistake is deadly. Since there are already time trials and global leaderboards in place for the hardcore audience, I can’t imagine why the developers sought to exclude casual players from the later levels.

Plain Sight [PC]

When I’m trying to proselytize my friends to this game, I describe it as “quick-draw robot sword-fighting with Mario Galaxy physics.” That’s usually sufficiently intriguing to pique anyone’s interest, but Plain Sight is more peculiar and interesting than even that brief description lets on.

The game’s multiplayer deathmatch has an unusual set of rules: you spawn with one point, and must slay other players to steal their points. Points makes you bigger and stronger, but also make you a more visible and attractive target. Here’s the rub: your points only get banked and added to the scoreboard when you trigger self-destruction. Catching other players in your explosion multiplies that score. These mechanics give the game a strategic risk/reward dynamic: should you bank your points now, or take advantage of the extra strength to accumulate more? Should you target a lucrative point-laden player, or elude him to avoid increasing his multiplier?

The aerial combat in Plain Sight is a breathtaking experience. Swords kill in one hit, so the emphasis is placed on movement and reflexes. As I mentioned earlier, this game builds on the orbital gravity mechanics of Mario Galaxy. Each platform has its own gravitational field, so the meaning of up and down is entirely relative. Holding down the left mouse button charges a dash attack, which is used both to lock-on to other players and to quickly change direction while airborne. Combine jumping, charging and low gravity and you can soar through the sky indefinitely. Beatnik Games tuned a thousand subtle details just right to produce a wonderful sense of speed and flight.

If you’re looking for something new to play over the Labour Day weekend, I hope you’ll consider checking out these terrific independent games.

Earlier this summer I took the annual trip up to my friend Thomas‘s family cottage in northern Ontario. I relished the opportunity to disconnect for a while and enjoy the long weekend without the usual digital distractions. The cottage procedure prescribes reading, swimming, fishing and cooking. After the sun goes down, the card games come out: Hearts and Cribbage are local favourites.

However, this year we were joined by my good friend Sven, an Antiguan foreign student who just graduated from software engineering at Concordia with me. He brought a set of dominoes with him, and thought we might enjoy learning a Caribbean game he had grown up playing. He knew the game only as “Dominoes”, but a little post-trip research revealed it’s commonly known as “Cut Throat”.

Cut Throat derives a great deal of strategic complexity from a very simple ruleset. The game begins by dealing the 28 dominoes evenly to four players. The goal is to be first player to empty their hand. The winner of the previous hand (or the owner of the double 6 tile) plays first, then play proceeds clockwise around the table. A player can only play a domino with an end that matches one of the two open ends of play (there is no branching). If no moves are possible, knocking the table indicates that you are unable to play. In the rare event where no one is able to play, the hand is shut and the player with the fewest total dots in their hand is the winner. The first player to win six hands wins the game provided (here’s the catch) another player has won zero hands.

As a game designer, Cut Throat utterly fascinates me, and not only because it is elegantly simple and a real joy to play. It has certain unusual characteristics that make it unlike any game I’ve ever played, and I have a hypothesis regarding why that might be. Video game bloggers have long discussed how Japanese and American games have distinct regional flavours. If we consider games as cultural artifacts, then logically their mechanics will reflect such roots. Despite my extremely limited knowledge of the region, I’d like to propose the following: that Cut Throat’s unusual characteristics, which distinguish it from more common tabletop games, may be an expression of Caribbean culture.

Despite its simple ruleset, Cut Throat has a rather complex colloquial vocabulary. Of course, it’s not uncommon for unique ad-hoc language to emerge from game communities (the fighting genre in particular). However, the terms in Cut Throat are used less to describe rudimentary mechanics and more to add flavour and commentary to the game. They enhance the experience, rather than merely describe it. Here are a few examples:

• Lie down: To play a double. Since you haven’t changed the state of the board, you haven’t done any work!
• Jail: A player is in jail until he wins a hand. The goal of the game is effectively to keep at least one player in jail.
• Pushing: You are pushing the player to your left. Since you play right before her, you have the most control over how she plays. If you’re making it difficult for her to play, then you are pushing hard.
• Strong Back: Conversely, if you’re being pushed hard but are still able to play then your back is strong.
• Buoy: The player you are pushing is also your buoy. If he gets out of jail, then your buoy has floated away!
• Running From: A player will run from numbers they are unable to play on. For instance, a player with no fours in their hand is running from fours.
• Wash up: To shuffle the dominoes.
• Eat Your End: Late in the game, it’s possible that there’s a tile that only you can play on. This is clearly a very advantageous situation. If you’re forced to play on this end, then you eat your end and negate your advantage.
• Anti-man: At the end of the game, there is one winning player (who won six times) and at least one jailed player (who never won). If the winning player was also pushing a jailed player, then he has played an exceptionally good game. The losing player is then referred to as the anti-man, a slur for homosexual men¹.

Cut Throat is a high competitive and energetic game. Indeed, players are encouraged to slam their dominoes on the table if they’re playing well. This aspect of the game is enhanced by this unique vocabulary; with the explanation of each term, Sven described an accompanying emotion. Lying down is cheeky, losing your buoy is stressful, escaping from jail is relieving, and being anti-manned is very shameful. “Washing up” is delegated to the player who was pushing the winner of the hand, because they evidently failed to push hard enough. Furthermore, winning players are permitted to draw from the shuffled pile before those in jail. In Cut Throat, friendly taunting is not only encouraged, it’s intrinsically built into the structure of the game.

Cut Throat has the strongest positive feedback of any game I’ve ever encountered². You may have noticed, for instance, that the winning player gains an advantage by playing first. However, there is a unique social mechanic that is far more influential. As I described earlier, the game ends in a draw if all four players have won at least once. In order for there to be a winner, there must also be a loser. Therefore, it’s common for the three players with at least one win to conspire to beat the final jailed man. In other words, they team up against the player in last place! This mechanic subverts one of the most fundamental strategies of all multiplayer games: playing to beat the player in first place.

In conclusion, Western and Japanese games tend to include some form of consolation to weaker players, often in the form of negative feedback. They certainly never stack the odds against the weakest player, then proceed to mock him for it. With its extremely strong positive feedback and institutionalized taunting, Cut Throat unabashedly offends these sensibilities. I suspect that this divergence in game design philosophy can be at least partially attributed to cultural differences. The uniqueness of Cut Throat may be an expression of its Caribbean roots. As video game studios continue to pop up all over the world, what new game design paradigms will be revealed?

¹ Homophobia is extremely prevalent in the Caribbean.
² For a quick primer on feedback loops in game design, check out Game Design Concepts.

This post is partly a (two month late) response to Chris Hecker’s GDC 2010 rant entitled Please Finish Your Game. It also condenses some rough thoughts I’ve long held about motivation and game making. It took some effort to edit it into a coherent form, so I apologize in advance if it’s a tad rambling.

In his rant, Chris expresses concern about the fixation on short development time. He worries that rapid-fire game releases (exemplified by Jonatan “Cactusquid” Söderström) have become a “badge of honour” in the indie game community. This attitude is mirrored in the industry, where ship dates often trump quality. Chris asserts that, in terms of contribution to games as an art form, Braid is worth more than 100 game jam games because it explored its mechanics to the depth that they deserved. “We need more depth and understanding”, he says. “We don’t need more wacky ideas or shallow games.”

I have great respect for Chris (I loved his talk at MIGS 2009) and thus am cautious about disagreeing with him. However, I believe his argument overlooks the real value of rapid development and its place in the creative ecosystem¹. I think that it’s misleading to compare a masterpiece like Braid with the multitudes of forgettable unpolished jam games. The final product isn’t the point; the value of a game jam lies in the process of creation. Specifically, game jams provide tools that enable amateur game designers to experiment, learn and grow.

Anecdotal evidence suggest that there are a great many people who are interested in making games, but have never done so. I suspect this is largely due to the fact that to start making games, you have to make your first game. There’s tremendous symbolic and psychological value to doing something for the first time, especially if it’s something you’re passionate about. As Havi Brooks explains, doing what you love can be terrifying:

You’re avoiding the thing that’s holding all your dreams? Good grief! Of course you are! That symbolic weight? It’s that much potential for hurt and disappointment. [...] It’s not this: “Even though I thought this meant everything to me, I’m still avoiding it so clearly I don’t really care about it.” It’s this: “Wow, this means everything to me… so of course I’m avoiding it.”

Game jams provide tools to help overcome this pressure. For instance, they establish a well-defined start and end date for the project. They provide a theme to riff off. Fellow jammers can provide assistance and feedback. Finally, knowing that you’ll release a game concurrently with dozens of others reduces its symbolic value. Simply put, game jams provide a friendly supportive atmosphere for newcomers.

Those who do take the leap and make their first game quickly run into another problem: they don’t like what they’re making. After all, if you care about games enough to try your hand at making one, then your taste in games is likely quite advanced. You’re perceptive enough to know that what you’re making isn’t very good. Ira Glass explains why this is problematic: “Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. [...] A lot of people never get past that phase.”

Fortunately, he also presents a method of getting past this roadblock: “The most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one [game].” In other words, do exactly what people like Cactusquid and the Experimental Gameplay Project are already doing! Experiment with weird genres, unusual aesthetics and unfamiliar technologies. Create exactly the kind of unfinished shallow games that Chris Hecker is warning us against. Why? Because nobody can create a masterpiece without first making a hundred crude sketches.

In a general sense, I worry that the burden of having to develop mechanics deeply will dissuade people from making games. If it is “our duty as developers to follow a mechanic to its logical and aesthetic extent”, then the inverse is also true; we should not make a game if we cannot give its mechanics their due diligence. This encourages designers to hold onto their ideas, waiting until they have the time to execute them with the appropriate fidelity. To quote Ze Frank: “If you don’t want to run out of ideas, the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don’t have the time or resources to do them right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack.” This attitude is anathema to amateur game development. It’s better to get those ideas out there, even if they’re flawed and incomplete!

If we embrace this sort of flawed rapid development, do we then disregard the notion of exploring mechanics to the depth that they deserve? I don’t believe we have to. As Cactus observed in an e-mail discussion with Chris, “it’s hard to decide if the game you’re working on really deserves that much hard work or not.” Creating these crude unfinished games is a form of prototyping; ideas that seem promising can be developed further². Chris himself did this with Spy Party:

SpyParty was actually an idea from Indie Game Jam 4 that I didn’t quite get working at the jam, but that I felt was strong enough to spend (a lot) more time on.

In conclusion, while I appreciate that “the good-enough is the enemy of the excellent”, I think the onus of developing mechanics fully is detrimental to amateur game development. Creating wacky, shallow games plays a valuable part in building up new developers. Attracting fresh voices and perspectives is the surest route to expanding games as an art form and creating more masterpieces like Braid. Don’t worry too much about greatness, just get excited and make things!

¹ I feel a bit sheepish saying this to one of the founders of the Indie Game Jam.
² This may have been Chris’ point all along: too few developers are following through in this manner.

Back in January, Henk, Thomas and I presented two games we were working on (Norwegian Wood and an alpha build of Pax Britannica) to the DemoCamp at CUSEC 2010. DemoCamp is a really cool informal event where programmers can show off what they’ve been hacking on. The rules are simple: 15 minutes maximum, no powerpoint, show working code!

I think the talk went really well, we got by with some laughs and a little bit of casual swearing. Big thanks to the CUSEC organizers, host Joey DeVilla and A/V tech Guillaume Theoret for giving us a chance to show off our games!