If someone were to ask me what was the first video game I ever played, I would respond with “Probably something from the Leapster”. I know, boring answer, hardly anyone even remembers that edutainment handheld anyways. But if someone were to ask me which game I first distinctly remember playing? That inspired my love for video games, that played a part in who I am today? Well, that distinction goes to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
From the moment Link woke up on Outset Island, I was enraptured by the colorful land contained within the TV screen. The bright green grass, the foamy blue seas, that big black bird that dropped a pirate on top the mountain. This was a whole new world for my little self to explore and adventure in. And adventure I did, joining Link on his quest over seas and under stones to rescue his sister and put a stop to the dark lord Ganondorf. Though I was too young to understand the nuances of Link’s journey, and lacked the cultural history that would have enhanced some of the later emotional beats, I still enjoyed and felt the story that me and the boy in too warm green clothes had together.
And that feeling, of being a part of the story, is why I feel games are so important. It is the evolution of story telling. It is being a character in a book, overhearing the conversation in a TV show, doing the action scene in the movie, and more. Its not just escapism, its being as close to the story as we can to actually have an impact in it.
I want to be a part of making that story, of crafting that experience. I want to be the reason for a child like me, to enter a fantasy for the first time, to embark of that adventure with what I have created. I feel like everyone should be able to be a part of a loved story, and I full intend on helping make that happen.
A young man pulls a rock out of the ground and hold it to the sky, contained within is the skull of a creature dead for millions of years, and the newest member of his team. Each revitalized warrior, from the sturdy Stego, to the quick and fierce V-Raptor, to the hard hitting T-Rex, was once a fossilized skeleton pulled from the storied land of Fossil Island. Fossil Fighters adds a unique spin on the battle monsters formula where instead of merely running into the creatures, you instead revive the fossils of dinosaurs and other long-extinct species to battle it out. Incorporating an interesting fossil cleaning minigame, adds another layer of skill to collecting and strengthening your “vivisaur”, the in universe term for the revived creatures. The game also has a very interesting spin, where although starting out in a tournament like format, third-parties and their meddling spiral the plot away from the mundane.
In a nutshell, Fossil Fighters is a mon game, a game where you collect various types of creatures and battle using them against other teams of monsters. Released for the Nintendo DS in 2008, it garnered mild success and later went on to release 2 sequels. The main gameplay loop revolves around travelling to one of several dig sites, excavating dinosaur fossils, taking them back to the Fossil Lab, cleaning the fossils and reviving the cleaned fossils into new vivisaurs or upgrading the ones you already had. Throughout this process you will use your vivisaurs in teams of 3 to fight other fossil fighters whether through random encounters, during your traversals, or for story progression.
Fossil Cleaning Screen, taken from the Fossil Fighters wiki
Of course, there could always be some improvements, when you get to the ate game, the relative lack of variety in fossil types, being mainly shape of bones, and shape of the rock itself, means the mandatory fossil cleaning for new fossils can become rather tedious. As well as this, comparatively speaking, the vivisaurs have a rather basic elemental system, with a mere five elemental types, this means that there isn’t much strategy for team building besides “keep the strongest vivisaur of each type in your party” there was a buff/debuff system as well, but that rarely overpowered the elemental advantage.
Elemental Type chart from the Fossil Fighters Wiki
Of course there are a few steps that could be taken, fleshing out the elemental system for one could make the strategizing on which three vivisaurs to enter into battle would help expand the simple battle system. Another solution would be allowing for multiple visisours of the same type, in the game, you can only have a single vivisaur of a given species, allowing duplicates could mix up the battle system. As for the fossil cleaning issue, the game has a stop gap solution with a cleaning bot that slowly levels up that can clean repeat fossils for you, but that doesn’t keep the process itself very interesting. I think perhaps adding more types of fossil rock, like the fragile stone, or a larger variety of tools, could spice up the cleaning process and perhaps making it so that fossils can be in differently shaped rocks could add more variety for the cleaning.
All in all, I think this is a largely underappreciated game, with a fun story and interesting albeit simple graphics. I would love for this game and series to get a reboot, perhaps for the Switch or even a Mobile game which incorporates the touch controls the original game had. Seeing the dinosaurs turned into fantasy creatures, while still taking cues from their theorized looks and discoveries had a really cool imagery for this little game.
When I walked through the Open House on Friday on the second floor of Razer Hall, I saw many cool exhibits. From a large robot drone being tested on for attachments (they are going to put a crane like arm on it soon) to a demo for a VR co-op shooter. The variety of project being worked on were very intriguing. Of course, I too had was part of a group displaying their project here, but I will not talk much about that directly. The Tandy School of Computer Science Open House was an exhibition of all the major projects that students in TU’s Computer Science track were working on, most booths were from the various different groups of the schools senior software projects. However some, like the aforementioned drone, and an VR firefighting simulation demo were from other programs. During the roughly hour or so of the Open House people from the local community could walk through Razor Hall and see what exactly we were working on at TU. As well as this, food and drinks were provided so that people did not have to skip dinner to attend the event
Unfortunately, the space itself provided a few limitations to the experience. Instead of a large open floorspace like a conference hall, the open house took up the central hallway of Razor Hall, as well as the computer lab. The tight corridor-like space may have provided a closer more personal experience, but it also caused a bit of a traffic issue, as people standing to look at a single groups work could very well block off the hallways for people trying to pass by. And the fact that three groups, including my own, were in a classroom instead of the main through line of the open house, behind a booth at that, meant that most people passed by our projects without even looking into the room, to say the least of checking out what we were working on in here. Most of the booths themselves seemed to be pretty hurriedly put together, which is understandable given that most groups displaying here works were instead focused on their actual products and putting together demo videos, but it still lends a sense of people not at all prepared for this event you may have gone out of your way to attend. Fortunately, none of these issues are unresolvable. If the event were to be given a different, larger space, such as the Chouteau room in the Student Union, this would solve both the flow problem and the fact that people were relegated into what was basically a side room. The different groups could have larger displays and not block each other as the visitors passed through. of course, this would introduce the issues of moving the required infrastructure such as transporting certain computers and VR set ups as necessary, but it is food for thought. As for the booth preparation. I feel like the groups could be given more time to specifically prepare for the open house. It felt more like an afterthought than a central event that could provide a lot of critical networking for the senior students of the college.
All that being said, the open house is still a very cool experience and good for networking. Plenty of TU graduates came around last Friday and even if you aren’t looking for anything particular, seeing the different projects and demos could provide plenty of inspiration for your own ideas, and maybe spark your own interest in the college.
Cover image taken from official promotional material
When Link first steps blinking into the sunlight after a quick nap of 100 years, you are greeted with a big panning shot of a large green space with forests, plains, and ruins. And that’s just the tutorial zone. You are free to explore this space of relative safety high above Hyrule at large while you learn the mechanics and nature of the game. While at first given specific locations on a map to go to, the reigns are quickly lifted off as you are told what to find, and shown what they look like, but not where or how to get them. The Great Plateau allows the player to explore for themselves, as they see points of interest and test methods of reaching them. One good example being a Shrine on top a frozen mountain, too cold for the player character Link, to withstand unenabled, slowly having his health tick down. The player can discover three different methods of reaching the shrine without dying, each through different creative paths, and even locations on the Great Plateau. Motivating them in all this are two promises the game gives, one more explicit than the other. One, the player is offered a paraglider for the treasures in the shrines, a tool whose use is made immediately apparent by the presence of fall damage (which the player, currently stranded on a tall tower, may quickly discover if they have not already). And two, when the player explores that first shrine, they are given a new ability, with the spaces for 4 other abilities shown, with the ability they’ve just obtained being off-center. This implies that the other three shrines on the Plateau have abilities for Link as well, giving the player a more immediate drive to explore.
High above the Land
The Great Plateau stands at the tutorial region of Breath of the Wild, the (as of writing) latest entry in the Legend of Zelda franchise. Being a large departure from the trend of linearity of many more recent titles, BotW is a vast Open World game where the player can go nearly everywhere in the map and climb almost every surface to get there. But this is only achievable when the main objectives on the Great Plateau are completed. Until then the rest of the kingdom is locked off, effectively making this one of the few temporarily contained levels in this otherwise open world game.
Growing Pains
But due to the relatively hands off nature of the tutorial, the game can allow players to miss some info that the game wants them to know. Some mechanic introductions are placed obviously on the main through paths allowing for natural player learning, but some, even crucial tutorials can be easily walked past without noticing, and the game doesn’t directly encourage returning to the points where the player would learn them any more than the rest of the plateau. This can lead to player frustration when they later discover a mechanic like Z-Targeting and realize they have unintentionally been making their life harder in the process.
Some suggestions
I feel like these issues can be resolved by a bit more redundant placement of these tutorial triggers. Just make it more apparent as the player nears these items so they don’t miss the important info relating to them. Perhaps specifically put some closer to the shrines themselves, places the player will already be heading towards for level completion and ability gain. That way the developers can help players gain the knowledge without forcing them into dedicated tutorial sequences which their level design was trying to avoid in the first place.
Still “Great”
Even with this issue, the great plateau excels at being an environmental teacher, and using the landscape to guide the player towards learning opportunities, if not perhaps needing a few more to round off the lessons. When Link finally gets the paraglider and is able to leave the Great Plateau he and the player will be well equipped to explore the ruined kingdom of Hyrule and prepare to take down Calamity Gannon.
Featured image is of BotW interior Cover Art taken form mobygames.com
You come into this land a lowly creature of no renown, and die. But death is not the end for one such as thee. Like most FromSoftware games, Elden Ring is a game where dying is not a metric of how much you’ve learned, but how you learn. When you die, your progress does not get erased as you are thrust back to a previous save, but your runes, your currency and method of leveling up is dropped, and you are given a single chance to recover them, merely return to where you died and use a button prompt to regain all the runes you had when you last died. This simultaneously encourages players to retry the challenge they died in, such as boss fights with closed arenas, and encourages players to spend their runes, as to get the value out of them before they are lost. And even if they decide not to, that is okay, as Elden Ring is a more open world so if you are having difficulty in one area you can work on dungeons and quests in another region.
But as an overview Elden Ring is a open world action RPG game with a focus on exploration and movement based combat, you will be dodging and rolling to avoid attacks of small enemies and bosses alike. As well as this, you gather runes, equipment, and other such items to boost your stats, or give yourself special attacks or abilities. It is the latest and largest FromSoftware game in the same style as their genre defining Demon’s Souls.
But with the scale larger than ever, it leaves room for mistakes and poor design to slip in through the cracks. For example, some of the Soulsborne series’s most famous boss fights involve two opponents intricately designed to work and fight together (see Ornstein and Smough of Dark Souls) but that rarely if ever occurs in the vast world of The Lands Between. Nigh every boss with more than one participant is made of multiple bosses you fight by themselves in other points of the game. They aren’t unique, and the bosses, while designed well by themselves, are not designed to work with their companion boss, so any rhythm you build with you fight with one boss can be swiftly and fatally interrupted by the other boss attacking, even from off camera. And speaking of the vast world, due to the size of the playable area of Elden Ring, you are given a Spirit Steed named Torrent, if you happen to rest at the right checkpoint, the same check point where you unlock leveling up. It is entirely possible for a new player, while exploring, to miss this single checkpoint and get trapped in a difficult area with no way to level up or ride swiftly out of there.
Many of these issues can be fixed with more care taken into the mechanics of the bosses. For example they could design specific group variant of prior bosses or simply making specialized move sets or AI for group encounters of recycled bosses that account for the other bosses in the room. As well as this, allowing the player access the nigh crucial abilities to level up and move at speed across the vast land by resting as one of several checkpoints would help prevent the possibility of a poor situation leading to the player quitting the game in frustration.
Even so, this is a game with wonderfully detailed lore as any recent FromSoftware game can claim, and the movement system and most encounters hit that crucial intersection of Difficult and Fair. Each time you die you learn something new about what you are facing, and you build knowledge and muscle memory without losing strength you’ve gained, but merely a setback until your next rise in power.
Featured image is of Elden Ring cover art taken from fromsoftware.jp
A twisting street lined with warped houses, trenchcoated figures wielding common tools, and cameras and eyes watching you, always watching you. This is what greets you when you get kicked out the door of Boyd’s house in The Milkman Conspiracy, one of Psychonauts’s most famous levels. The entire level is styled around a classic suburban neighborhood. The level designers used many props in duplication, such as trees, trashcans, lawn flamingoes, and mail boxes to keep the identity of the level consistent, showing a good use of Unity and Repetition, while the variations in the houses themselves allows Variety to break up the level so you don’t feel like you are walking past the same houses over and over again. In start contrast are the black government surveillance cars and the G-men, who have their own sense of togetherness, while still feeling like they are intruding into this space, which, in a sense, they are.
A shot of the level’s main area.
Mind of a Madman
But what are we doing in this surveyed suburbia? Well, being a Psychonaut! This level, like most others in Psychonauts, take place in the mental world of one of the game’s colorful cast of characters. In The Milkman Conspiracy’s case, thats the troubled mind of the paranoid guard of Thorny Towers Home for the Disturbed, Boyd Cooper. Our protagonist, Raz, needs to get inside Thorny Towers, but the gate is locked and Boyd doesn’t have the key. Through the guards paranoid ramblings Raz discovers the key is held by someone called The Milkman, who is at the center of Boyd’s chalk sketched conspiracy. Not being to understand him from the outside, Raz uses a Psychonaut tool called a Psycho-Portal to enter Boyd’s mind to find out who the Milkman is himself, and we enter the level, The Milkman Conspiracy.
Raz’s borrowed Psycho-Portal, attached to the back of Boyd Cooper’s head.
But they don’t know, I know, they know, I don’t know…where to go?
Right now. The camera cannot go any higher.
But although the twisted tarmac narratively suits the paranoid guard well, mechanically and aesthetically the level can get a bit messy. With the nearly the entire level along a line that twists and loops back on itself the sightline is often blocked by the ground with landmarks either hidden or at angles the camera simply cant reach. As well as this, the space outside of the active terrain is completely empty with a simple skybox that often means the screen is cluttered in one part and nearly empty in another.
Slightly less maddening madness
To remedy these issues would not be too difficult, I think. Especially with the benefit of todays technology, well over 15 years in the future. By either unwrapping the level so that it has an over all curve, it would still allow for the iconic terrain twists while better letting the player see certain key landmarks, especially when they are further along in the level’s puzzles. Alternatively, the designers could spread out the sections of the level into islands like the final zone and one optional area with the playable portions connected by long telephone wires, adding more balance across the area and making the entire level reminiscent of a conspiracy theorists string board.
The Delivery was Completed in the End
He is the Milkman. His milk is delicious.
Even with the aforementioned issues, this level still provides a unique playing experience as well as telegraph the twisted mindset of a man who knows everyone is out to get him, even if they aren’t. The intentional uncanny valley of the neighborhood with a horde of mysterious investigators combines unity, variety, space and contrast to create an interesting and unsettling experience, while still being fun to play through.
All images are of Double Fine Productions’s Psychonauts. Taken by the author of this post, Aidan Pohl.
Pull no punches in one of the Nintendo Switch’s remarkable launch title, Arms. With quick paced action and great visual and audio design, Arms is a feast for the senses, and a half-decent work out as well, with motion controls integral to the combat controls, its almost as if the player is the one actually punching the digital opponent. Top on that with a roster of unique characters, each with a special power or ability, and a veritable catalogue of arm attachments, this game works as both a quick paced party game and a strategic fighter either by yourself or with/against a friend.
Spring loaded boxing gloves.
Arms for the Nintendo Switch is at its basic, a motion control based fighting system. Using a pair of Nintendo Joy-cons, one in each hand, the player controls their character by leaning, tilting, or jerking the Joy-cons to make their fighter navigate the arena, or throw punches in a pretty intuitive manner. Punching forward with the right Joy-con will sling the character’s right fist forward, connected to the fighter by some slinky like mechanism in a long distance punch that can be arced during the attack. Same with the left Joy-con and left fist. Punching with both Joy-cons simultaneously will start a grab attempt that will pull you towards the enemy, or the enemy towards yourself, so you can do a quick combo, while tilting the Joy-cons towards each other will make your character block. Tilting both Joy-cons in the same direction will make your character move in said direction. On top of that there are a variety of different arm attachments in different types, including dragon heads, chakras, and umbrellas, and elemental affinities, like electric and fire, which affect how you punch, and have different chargeable power attacks which can mess with your enemy.
A screenshot of a round during action. Image from Nintendo Life.
Rock, Paper, Scissors? Shoot….
Unfortunately, even will all that above, the core gameplay loop boils down to a simple rock-paper-scissors triangle of effectiveness. Blocking stops punches from connecting, while can make you very vulnerable to grabs, which are interrupted by punches. The issue, is that grabs can start a stun-lock cycle, where the moment a fighter gets up from a grab combo, they are immediately regard for a second, or third round of being flung around the arena. Sure they can try to dodge out of each grab, but that leads to the next issue. The controls being motion-detection based, are not the most precise. The characters can be difficult to control and may start walking to one side as you realize you have been leaning a bit, or a grab could be detected as two side-by-side punches. Even with the punches, a tiny rapid movement has the same affect as a more realistic punch so s game about exploring the uses of motion control encourages the player to move as minimally as possible, especially with the in-air arcing about as effective as a mild summer breeze and a prayer in changing the direction of your fists.
Working Out the Muscle Tension
None of this is to say that Arms is a lost cause, not at all! With some tuning of the motion controls, the game could feel more reactive and immersive, and possibly with more interaction with rates of motion some variety to the attacks would arise naturally. Along with this, playing more into the arm attachments, how the different hands and elements act and interact outside of the Power attacks could go a long way to adding more strategy to what you enter the ring with, and encouraging experimentation with different combos and otherwise rarely-touched arms.
Championship Contender
Even with what its got, Arms is a pretty fun, if mildly niche, party fighting game. Where the over the shoulder punching action of many boxing games crosses together with the zany powers and characters of many classic side-scrolling fighters. With both a tournament mode and quick fighting mode, along with a few minigames to spice it up, Arms is a fun game to pick up and play if you want to be a bit more active. Just make sure you got your Joy-cons strapped and clear space so you don’t deck a passerby or nearby ornamental vase!
With relaxing music and colorful stylized imagery, Dorfromantik stands as a peaceful world building experience as you pick where each new tile goes. An easy to understand puzzle system with randomly generated and often animated tiles means that each game results an a unique and stimulating landscape.
A Hexagonal Countryside.
Dorfromatik, released in 2021 by Toukana Interactive for the PC, is a strategy puzzle game revolving around building a land scape with randomly generated hexagon tiles. Each tile has different combinations of houses, trees, and fields, with some sporting water features or rails and should be placed where each side matches the side of another tile, the more matches you have the higher you score. Making things more interesting is the tile limit. You do not have an infinite supply of tiles, and when you run out, the game ends. To delay the end, you can earn more tiles by completing quests the typically require a certain sized grouping of objects, or if enough of a certain type of tile is placed, a milestone can be reached which unlocks new tiles to play with.
A screenshot of a game of Dorfromatik in progress.
Tile Tedium
While the game portrays a relaxing experience, inevitably the number of tiles relative to the types of terrain causes a bit of monotony as the game goes on. Rarely are you encouraged to close off smaller areas, and with eh randomly generated tiles you often have massive fields or forests lined with pockets of miscellaneous terrain, and the progression system means that you either have to stick to one game long enough for the individual tiles to begin to lose clarity or you need to play several smaller games and either intentionally end or leave it midway to unlock new tile sets.
Future Improvements
A few things could be altered to help the above points. For example, having varied terrain height can help break up the flat plane of the world and encourage using the camera function to view your world from different angles. As well as this, adding more tile types or including biomes where the color and details of the environment changes would also help the world feel more unique. Finally, adding interactions between terrain types, like a house becoming a lumbermill when next to a forest, or logs and bridges stretching over water tiles would encourage terrain mixing for a fuller experience.
A Relaxing Respite
Even without the improvements suggested, Dorfromantik is a relaxing puzzle game free from stress and time limits and can be a much welcome respite from the hectivity of life. Its forgiving mechanics and soft aesthetics work to encourage the player to stop, take a step back, and breathe without the worry that an opportunity will be missed. Even a few minutes of play is enough to refresh and unwind a bit as a little world of villages and forests and fields is born before the very eyes.
With a large cast of colorful and quirky characters, and an entertaining yet simple to understand building system, MySims(Wii) offers a fun and creative experience as you build up the rundown little town you find yourself in. You are the one who gets to decide which of the 80 potential residents move in, what their houses look like, and even the where and what furniture gets placed inside. Revolving around a surprisingly free construction system, MySims(Wii) tasks you to deliver homes and commercial buildings, (Roxie still needs that ice cream parlor) as well as furniture and décor (Have you finished Victor’s arcade cabinets yet?) to the various Sims that you encounter. You also get to explore around the world collecting Essences, special resources themed around different materials and items, such as Stone, Wood, Crayons, 8-Balls and more to use in your workshop endeavors. Some of my personal favorite moments playing this game is coming up with create ways to integrate essence objects into my creations.
Now what’s all this about?
MySims(Wii), released in September 2007 on the Nintendo Wii, is the first game in the spin off series of the same name based on Electronic Arts’ famous life simulation game The Sims. MySims(Wii) sets you in a town of your naming that has long been past its prime. Your character is tasked to make this community a Five Star town once more using your powers of Essence manipulation to build homes and furniture in two variants of a building system to convince Sims to move back and expand the village once more. The core gameplay loop revolves around running around the world, collecting essences and making furniture on request for the townspeople you have invited. As you help people more and more, the town’s rating grows which unlocks new blueprints for furniture and tools to unlock more areas to explore and move Sims into.
The workshop, with a basic chair blueprint loaded.
Not everything is sunflowers and rainbow trout
You are going to be seeing this screen….a lot.
Unfortunately, while the cartoony art style still looks fine even 25 years later, the game does show the limitations of its era and the signs of being the original of its series. While the core loop is fun after a while the experience can get relatively monotonous, with creative tanks beginning to run low. Sure you can just follow the default blueprint but more often than not, you need quite a few more essences than can be painted on the default build to make a Sim happy. As well as this, every area, subarea, building mode, and interior is separated by a loading screen that typically lasts between 10 and 20 seconds. With the amount of running around to collect essences you must do, this can cut into quite a bit of gametime. Another issue is that while there are plenty of characters with distinct and quirky characters, separated into 6 Interests (Fun, Hungry, Geeky, Spooky, Studious, and Cute), your interactions with them are limited almost entirely into build requests and generic Nice and Naughty interactions for Emotion essences. Many blueprints can only be obtained by maxing out your friendship with a certain Sim but that more or less boils down to cranking out several easy to build pieces of furniture like a deranged IKEA employee or repeatedly doing the Nice interaction over and over.
Building a better tomorrow.
Now the MySims series has moved on and has long since ended, but that doesn’t mean that suggestions for improvements can’t be made. If this game were to be recreated today the first thing to recommend is to optimize loading, I was not kidding about how long and how often the loading screen interrupts gameplay (the loading song is ingrained into my soul), cutting down on loading times would do much to smooth the experience. Another thing to recommend is to add some variety and expand on the build modes, the three versions (Exterior, Interior, Workshop) work decently well for their time and audience, but giving the player more freedom with camera or room layout (possibly even adding multiple floors or having the interior layout match the exterior) could do greatly to spice up what you will be doing for a large majority of the game. Lastly I would highly recommend fleshing out interactions between the Player and Sims as well as between the Sims would do much the make the world feel much more alive. The Sims already wander about town a little and engage in simple activities, but having more dialogue or detailed exchanges would make you feel truly like rebuilding a vibrant community.
A town with a pulse.
Despite all the critiques I have given. For a game designed for children, it is quite enjoyable. Throughout the whole game you can encounter new and interesting characters. My personal favorite (though admittedly its hard to choose), Dr. F, comes in a batch of residents that begin to show up after you have earned the town. There is also variety of furniture objects you can build and essences to paint them with to decorate their homes. This game, much like the town it features, may be forgotten by most but it still has a pulse, and with a little love can be elevated into an amazing experience.
A screenshot of the opening cutscene with examples of some of the buildings you can add and several sims around town. Note that the bottom left building is in the process of being built.
All images seen, excluding the cover image were screenshots taken by me of MySims(Wii) (2007) by Electronic Arts Entertainment.
Aidan Pohl's Game Design Blog 