Badge spotlight: Zilch
Fool's Gold (hard, 30 points) -- Earn 100 awards.
Many games on Kongregate have their own in-game achievements, which naturally serve as a convenient starting point for making Kongregate badges, either of the form "earn this particular in-game achievement" or "earn a total of X in-game achievements". However, the design goals for in-game achievements and Kongregate badges are often at cross purposes; the game designer wants people to play their game, so they have incentive to toss in lots of achievements, some of which may be ridiculously long, while Kongregate (as I've discussed earlier) is, I believe, better served by promoting a wide diversity of games, and of course includes the maximum for four badges for every game.
Consequently, Kongregate badges often don't match up to the in-game achievements. There are a few games (such as Arachnophilia and Vector Runner) where the in-game achievements conveniently translate directly to Kongregate badges, and it's not uncommon for there to be a hard (or, rarely, impossible) Kongregate badge for getting all of the in-game achievements, but sometimes some of the in-game achievements are simply unsuitable (usually because they're too long or grindy) for Kongregate badges, and this is a perfectly reasonable outcome too. (It even happens, sometimes, that the in-game achievements are too easy for Kongregate badges, as in the 3 Slices games.)
This brings us to Zilch. Zilch, which I reviewed here, is an entertaining little dice game, which serves as a nice little time-waster. (It is, however, the kind of game which is much better played a bit here and a bit there, rather than trying to sit down and play for two hours straight, which could get pretty tedious. The same is true of the Papa's Fooderia series, which is what I think a lot of the people who complain about those games are doing wrong, but I digress.) It's simple but cleanly designed, and has a good mixture of strategy and luck to keep you playing.
I actually started playing Zilch before it received badges (always a rarity), and enjoyed it, but I could see that the game had many in-game achievements (120 in total), and it was a pretty obvious choice to create a badge which required earning a certain number of the in-game achievements. At the time, it was not long after the badges for Amorphous+ had come out, which also had 120 in-game achivements and had received a Kongregate impossible badge for attaining all of them. So I was quite worried that Kongregate would go down the same path for Zilch; as I discussed in my review, this would have been a bad decision, since there are several extremely long and frustrating achievements (and overall, I felt that the in-game achievements weren't designed as well as they were in Amorphous+).
Much to my relief, however, the Kongregate hard badge ended up being for 100 achievements, which in my opinion hit pretty much the perfect spot. You had to play the game a fair amount and with some amount of skill, and get at least a few of the more difficult achievements, but you could earn the hard without having to do the worst achievements in the game. I think it represented an excellent compromise, and while it (naturally) took flak from both sides, the super Zilch fans who thought that all 120 would make for a great badge and the people who found Zilch too boring (probably because they were trying to do it all in one sitting) and thought 100 was way too many, it really was a very reasonable badge level.
In conclusion, balancing the design of in-game achievements with Kongregate badges is often a tricky act; there are certainly games with well-designed achievements which make a good starting point for badges, but there are also games with poorly-designed achievements which Kongregate is probably better off ignoring entirely. Still, I think that Zilch demonstrates that the balancing act can be pulled off successfully, even if you can never make everyone happy in the process.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Badge spotlight: Draw-Play 3
Preschool Artist (medium, 15 points) -- Complete level 18.
Today I'd like to post something a little different; rather than talk about badge design principles, this will be a lighter (and shorter!) post highlighting one of the oddities in the Kongregate badge system.
The Draw-Play 3 badge is unique: when it was originally created, it was actually a badge for Draw-Play 2. I reviewed Draw-Play 2 here, but if you don't want to read that review, suffice it to say I was not a fan. Many other Kongregators felt similarly, apparently, and over time the game accumulated a fairly large amount of negative comments and its rating dropped to a pretty low level (I think it was around 2.50, although I don't remember exactly; I'd be hard-pressed to say that rating was undeserved, though).
Rather than, say, try to fix the obvious shortcomings in the game, Eggy, the developer of the game, instead responded by replacing the game with some writing about how Kongregate was full of awful people and didn't deserve his game (again, I don't really remember the exact details, but as I recall that was the general gist). This left Kongregate in an awkward position -- it was the first time that there was a badge on the site which was no longer available (although not the last time; I'll probably revisit this problem in the future).
Fortunately, the time that all of this transpired, Eggy had released Draw-Play 3, a sequel which did in fact improve dramatically on Draw-Play 2, so Kongregate elected simply to transfer the badge over to Draw-Play 3, which neatly solved all of the problems -- Draw-Play 3 was probably deserving of a badge anyway, so this gave it one; people who had already finished Draw-Play 2 didn't have to play any more of the series if they didn't want to; and Eggy got attention for a much better game instead of its worse predecessor.
I am often astonished by how petulant developers can be when it comes to badges. Yes, it's certainly true that badges can often draw negative attention to a game, but badges are still something that mean tens of thousands, at least, of gameplays, and that will translate directly into money for developers. While Eggy's reaction was probably the most egg-regious (sorry), he's far from the only offender; I was certainly disappointed in both TaroNuke (DJManiax) and mastermax (Ultimate Assassin 3) for the way they responded to complaints about the badges for their games.
Despite there being several opportunities since then for Kongregate to employ this solution, this badge remains the only badge to ever be moved in Kongregate's history. Probably the best opportunity since then was Caesary, which received badges but then was pulled from Kongregate for legal reasons; although the possibility of shifting the badges to another similar MMO was suggested many times in the forums, Kongregate declined to do so, for reasons that weren't entirely clear to me. Perhaps in the Draw-Play case the move was fair because it was by a game of the same developer, but moving badges to a game by a different developer could end up being seen as being unfair to one (or both) of the developers. Still, I certainly think it's generally a reasonable solution, and I wouldn't object if Kongregate decided to do this in the future.
Preschool Artist (medium, 15 points) -- Complete level 18.
Today I'd like to post something a little different; rather than talk about badge design principles, this will be a lighter (and shorter!) post highlighting one of the oddities in the Kongregate badge system.
The Draw-Play 3 badge is unique: when it was originally created, it was actually a badge for Draw-Play 2. I reviewed Draw-Play 2 here, but if you don't want to read that review, suffice it to say I was not a fan. Many other Kongregators felt similarly, apparently, and over time the game accumulated a fairly large amount of negative comments and its rating dropped to a pretty low level (I think it was around 2.50, although I don't remember exactly; I'd be hard-pressed to say that rating was undeserved, though).
Rather than, say, try to fix the obvious shortcomings in the game, Eggy, the developer of the game, instead responded by replacing the game with some writing about how Kongregate was full of awful people and didn't deserve his game (again, I don't really remember the exact details, but as I recall that was the general gist). This left Kongregate in an awkward position -- it was the first time that there was a badge on the site which was no longer available (although not the last time; I'll probably revisit this problem in the future).
Fortunately, the time that all of this transpired, Eggy had released Draw-Play 3, a sequel which did in fact improve dramatically on Draw-Play 2, so Kongregate elected simply to transfer the badge over to Draw-Play 3, which neatly solved all of the problems -- Draw-Play 3 was probably deserving of a badge anyway, so this gave it one; people who had already finished Draw-Play 2 didn't have to play any more of the series if they didn't want to; and Eggy got attention for a much better game instead of its worse predecessor.
I am often astonished by how petulant developers can be when it comes to badges. Yes, it's certainly true that badges can often draw negative attention to a game, but badges are still something that mean tens of thousands, at least, of gameplays, and that will translate directly into money for developers. While Eggy's reaction was probably the most egg-regious (sorry), he's far from the only offender; I was certainly disappointed in both TaroNuke (DJManiax) and mastermax (Ultimate Assassin 3) for the way they responded to complaints about the badges for their games.
Despite there being several opportunities since then for Kongregate to employ this solution, this badge remains the only badge to ever be moved in Kongregate's history. Probably the best opportunity since then was Caesary, which received badges but then was pulled from Kongregate for legal reasons; although the possibility of shifting the badges to another similar MMO was suggested many times in the forums, Kongregate declined to do so, for reasons that weren't entirely clear to me. Perhaps in the Draw-Play case the move was fair because it was by a game of the same developer, but moving badges to a game by a different developer could end up being seen as being unfair to one (or both) of the developers. Still, I certainly think it's generally a reasonable solution, and I wouldn't object if Kongregate decided to do this in the future.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Badge spotlight: Realm of the Mad God
Naked and Famous (hard, 30 points) -- Earn 400 fame with a single character.
To Kill a God (hard, 30 points) -- Complete any 7 dungeons with a single character.
Having just finished Realm of the Mad God (by which I mean, gotten all the badges), I have some thoughts that I'd like to write down, so this post is going to be a little different than the previous ones -- it's more of an in-depth look at this particular game and its badges rather than generally applicable lessons (although I hope there will be at least some useful thoughts). Overall it's a very interesting, if flawed, game, and I think the badges match that.
So let's talk about the game itself. Realm of the Mad God describes itself as a "co-op fantasy MMO shooter", and I think that's about as good a description as you can get in four words, but let's go into a little bit more depth. At its heart, Realm of the Mad God is essentially like a classic 2-D "bullet hell" shooter, where everything on the screen, friend and foe alike, is pretty much constantly spraying bullets in some form, except that now it's massively multiplayer; up to 85 people can be in a "realm" at any given time. Realms are quite large, so it's quite easy to wander off by yourself if that's your thing (although the area with the toughest monsters will pretty much always be populated), but finding people to group with on an ad hoc basis is also quite easy (especially in the area with the toughest monsters). The game even makes this even easier by allowing you to teleport to anyone else in the realm instantaneously, with the only restriction being a short cooldown before you can teleport again. The graphics go for the retro-pixelated look, and, as mentioned earlier, the game has a fantasy theme -- the typical fantasy classes are represented (wizard, warrior, archer, priest, etc.) which meshes somewhat awkwardly with the shooter concept, in that even sword-wielding classes still attack their enemies by shooting at them (although with a small range); not quite sure how that works.
By far the most distinctive feature of Realm of the Mad God is that when you die, your character goes away. You don't just respawn in some safe location with everything intact, or maybe with a small experience penalty or having lost some of your equipment; no, you start over with a new character at level 1. (You do have a very small vault in which you can stash some equipment which a new character can use, but any equipment on your character at the time of death is permanently lost.) This is certainly not atypical for a shooter, but in a MMO-type game, it's highly unusual. The game claims that this isn't so bad, since leveling from 1 to 20 (the maximum level) is something you can do pretty quickly (maybe half an hour once you get used to it), but this is only half the truth at most -- reaching level 20 is nowhere near maximum power. After you reach level 20, the next step is to find potions which can permanently increase your statistics, one point at a time, until they reach their maximum values, and to find the best equipment possible, and this process can take quite a long time indeed. So if you lose a really powerful character, that can be many hours of work lost (and even half an hour is nothing to sneeze at).
Now, by itself, I think that "permadeath" (as the game generally calls it) is a good feature -- it's certainly a bold design decision, and I definitely like games taking risks like these. This is true even though it's really easy to die quickly -- a couple of seconds of carelessness in the wrong place is more than enough to seal your fate. Although one key is always sufficient to immediately teleport you to safety, certainly my reflexes on that key were not always fast enough to avoid my demise (and there are certainly things in the game that are capable of killing you instantly). Sometimes you can even be slain by things outside your control -- while the game generally does a very impressive job of maintaining good performance despite what must be pretty heavy demands on the server, occasionally you will get a spike of lag which can cause a lot of enemies to appear at once, and this is certainly capable of causing an entirely unearned demise. But that's not what I see as the flaw with the permadeath system.
The thing that frustrates me about the permadeath system is quite simple -- in a game like this, you'll naturally have to figure out what enemies and situations you can handle, and pretty much the only way to do this is via trial and error. The game gives you precisely one piece of advice on this subject at the beginning: "Stay near the beach at first. Harder monsters live inland." Everything else, you'll need to figure out by yourself. (It's also true that the game gives you quest monsters, which are generally appropriate to your level; however, in later levels, going after the quest monsters will often lead you through areas which are way too tough for your character. So this is a mixed bag at best!) Certainly, once you've learned how difficult a given situation is, it's relatively easy to navigate through the world, but obtaining that knowledge comes at a price -- and that price will take up a pretty substantial chunk of time, and become increasingly frustrating as the game goes on, since the cost of error only gets larger the better you do.
So this brings us to the badges. The first thing I find unfortunate about the badge design is that both of them require achieving a given feat in a single character. Given the issues discussed above, I think it would make a lot more sense to have one of them be a single-character badge and one of them be a lifetime achievement-type award, so that earning the badges isn't quite so dependent on avoiding death. Ths game certainly has an obvious option for this -- upon attaining a given amount of fame in a given class, you're awarded a star, with more stars coming at higher fame levels, and these stars stay forever. So you could easily set a badge which requires some amount of achievement in all classes (and if you're particularly bad at one class, you could easily balance that out by doing better in another class). I think somewhere in the 30-35 star range would have worked nicely; it would remove a lot of the luck and frustration involved in getting the two existing badges.
Moving on, each of the two individual badges is also problematic. The first requires you to accumulate 400 fame on a single character (after you reach level 20, the XP you would have gained is converted into fame instead; you can also gain fame by completing quests, dungeons, and so forth). In and of itself, this is certainly entirely reasonable; for instance, one can easily imagine a badge for getting 400,000 points in survival mode in an ordinary single-player shooter, and this is pretty much comparable. Unfortunately, the way that fame works in Realm of the Mad God is kind of strange. Up to approximately 240 fame, fame accumulates at a quite reasonable rate -- you can probably reach that threshold with a level 20 character with an hour or so of playing around in low-risk areas. Above 240, though, the rate at which you gain fame slows dramatically, so that even if you start hanging out in extremely dangerous areas (which, of course, increases the odds that you'll get killed and have to start all over again), it will take you many hours to reach 400 base fame; I never got particularly close to this threshold, because dying after putting in such a large time investment got very frustrating.
However, when you die (which is when the game actually awards you your fame), your character receives additional bonuses for accomplishing various achievements during your lifetime. Most of these achievements, however, you won't get just by playing the game ordinarily; there are a few, such as the accuracy bonus, but most of them are for doing unusual things (such as not killing any cubes). If you do know that they exist (which generally means looking them up in a FAQ) and are willing to do them (which generally just makes the game slightly more tedious), however, they're pretty easy to get, and you can accumulate enough so that the bonuses can easily double your fame earned. So, at this point Greg's principle #4 applies: given a choice between earning 400 fame naturally, which takes forever and is by no means an easy task, or looking up the multipliers, grinding a character to 200 fame quickly but tediously in such a way as to get these multipliers, and then deliberately dying, the choice is pretty easy. Unfortunately, it's just not a choice which results in a particularly enjoyable gameplay experience.
The second badge (which is, at the moment of writing this, the 8th-least earned badge on Kongregate, and for good reason) requires a player to complete a certain number of dungeons. At the outset, it originally required all 9 dungeons in the game at the time (a 10th has since been added), but after player outcry, this number was lowered to the current 7. Even at that threshold, though, it is a beastly hard badge. Dungeons are periodically dropped by monsters, and you (and anyone else nearby) can enter them and try to conquer the challenges within. There are a few relatively easy dungeons which can be handled by inexperienced players, but not enough to reach that number of 7 -- in order to get the hard badge, you are going to have to traverse some very difficult dungeons (the most difficult dungeon can easily kill even a very well-equipped and potioned level 20 character in an eyeblink). And the problem with the dungeons is that they make the trial and error process of learning even more difficult -- when these dungeons can kill even tough, experienced characters quickly, you'll naturally want to be quick on the escape-to-safety button. But the problem is, once you flee, it may be a long time before you get a chance again; while the lower-level dungeons are easy to drop, some of the high-level dungeons are extremely rare, and you could easily play for a substantial amount of time before getting the chance next. (Apparently, when dungeons were first introduced, they dropped as keys, and then the player with the key could use the key in a populated area, thus making it easier to find dungeons that you were looking for. However, this was changed at some point before I started playing -- I don't know which situation was in effect when the badges were introduced -- which means that finding dungeons, or players to help you with a dungeon, is now much more difficult.)
The other problem with dungeons are the multiplayer dynamics. Some of the dungeons (especially the mid-level dungeons) tend to drop in areas where there aren't generally a lot of people around, so unless you have a highly organized group ready to help out at the drop of a hat (I didn't), you'll have to do these dungeons solo (which is certainly doable, but especially for the mid-level dungeons can make for a pretty tedious experience). On the other hand, some of the dungeons drop in very heavily-populated areas, so if you can manage to find them (which is usually the hard part), there'll be plenty of people. So it's easy in that case to just hang back and let the more experienced people do the hard work, if all you want to do is get the badge. The worst is, of course, if you find a rare, difficult dungeon but there's no one else around to come in with you; in that case, you may have to watch your opportunity go by, as dungeons only remain open for a very limited amount of time. None of these really results in an ideally fun situation, though.
(As a sidenote, one pitfall in designing badges for MMO-type games presents itself here. While Greg and rawismojo, the current Kongregate badge makers, generally try to play through games before badging them, the extreme time demands of many MMOs make this rather impractical. As a result, they'll naturally solicit advice from the current players of the game. This has two drawbacks, however: first, you'll naturally be getting the most enthustiastic players of the game, so they may enjoy things that the majority of the Kongregate population won't; and second, since they're the most experienced players, they'll tend to underestimate the difficulty of tasks. As discussed above, many things in Realm of the Mad God become easy when you've accumulated enough experience, but to a new player starting out, they can be quite difficult. Even simply reaching level 20 on a character, which is pretty much a formality for an experienced player, is quite the challenge for a first-time player. So the fact that even the hardcore players thought that a badge requirement was too difficult was quite unusual, and should say something about how tricky this badge is!)
Anyway, behind it all, there is a lot of fun to be had in Realm of the Mad God, and I don't want this post to give the impression that I hated every minute I spent playing the game. But it did have enough frustrating moments that I can't say I had unalloyed enjoyment, either. And unfortunately, the badges definitely came down on the side of exacerbating the frustration. I think there's a lot of potential, but neither the game nor the badges quite reached that potential in the end.
Naked and Famous (hard, 30 points) -- Earn 400 fame with a single character.
To Kill a God (hard, 30 points) -- Complete any 7 dungeons with a single character.
Having just finished Realm of the Mad God (by which I mean, gotten all the badges), I have some thoughts that I'd like to write down, so this post is going to be a little different than the previous ones -- it's more of an in-depth look at this particular game and its badges rather than generally applicable lessons (although I hope there will be at least some useful thoughts). Overall it's a very interesting, if flawed, game, and I think the badges match that.
So let's talk about the game itself. Realm of the Mad God describes itself as a "co-op fantasy MMO shooter", and I think that's about as good a description as you can get in four words, but let's go into a little bit more depth. At its heart, Realm of the Mad God is essentially like a classic 2-D "bullet hell" shooter, where everything on the screen, friend and foe alike, is pretty much constantly spraying bullets in some form, except that now it's massively multiplayer; up to 85 people can be in a "realm" at any given time. Realms are quite large, so it's quite easy to wander off by yourself if that's your thing (although the area with the toughest monsters will pretty much always be populated), but finding people to group with on an ad hoc basis is also quite easy (especially in the area with the toughest monsters). The game even makes this even easier by allowing you to teleport to anyone else in the realm instantaneously, with the only restriction being a short cooldown before you can teleport again. The graphics go for the retro-pixelated look, and, as mentioned earlier, the game has a fantasy theme -- the typical fantasy classes are represented (wizard, warrior, archer, priest, etc.) which meshes somewhat awkwardly with the shooter concept, in that even sword-wielding classes still attack their enemies by shooting at them (although with a small range); not quite sure how that works.
By far the most distinctive feature of Realm of the Mad God is that when you die, your character goes away. You don't just respawn in some safe location with everything intact, or maybe with a small experience penalty or having lost some of your equipment; no, you start over with a new character at level 1. (You do have a very small vault in which you can stash some equipment which a new character can use, but any equipment on your character at the time of death is permanently lost.) This is certainly not atypical for a shooter, but in a MMO-type game, it's highly unusual. The game claims that this isn't so bad, since leveling from 1 to 20 (the maximum level) is something you can do pretty quickly (maybe half an hour once you get used to it), but this is only half the truth at most -- reaching level 20 is nowhere near maximum power. After you reach level 20, the next step is to find potions which can permanently increase your statistics, one point at a time, until they reach their maximum values, and to find the best equipment possible, and this process can take quite a long time indeed. So if you lose a really powerful character, that can be many hours of work lost (and even half an hour is nothing to sneeze at).
Now, by itself, I think that "permadeath" (as the game generally calls it) is a good feature -- it's certainly a bold design decision, and I definitely like games taking risks like these. This is true even though it's really easy to die quickly -- a couple of seconds of carelessness in the wrong place is more than enough to seal your fate. Although one key is always sufficient to immediately teleport you to safety, certainly my reflexes on that key were not always fast enough to avoid my demise (and there are certainly things in the game that are capable of killing you instantly). Sometimes you can even be slain by things outside your control -- while the game generally does a very impressive job of maintaining good performance despite what must be pretty heavy demands on the server, occasionally you will get a spike of lag which can cause a lot of enemies to appear at once, and this is certainly capable of causing an entirely unearned demise. But that's not what I see as the flaw with the permadeath system.
The thing that frustrates me about the permadeath system is quite simple -- in a game like this, you'll naturally have to figure out what enemies and situations you can handle, and pretty much the only way to do this is via trial and error. The game gives you precisely one piece of advice on this subject at the beginning: "Stay near the beach at first. Harder monsters live inland." Everything else, you'll need to figure out by yourself. (It's also true that the game gives you quest monsters, which are generally appropriate to your level; however, in later levels, going after the quest monsters will often lead you through areas which are way too tough for your character. So this is a mixed bag at best!) Certainly, once you've learned how difficult a given situation is, it's relatively easy to navigate through the world, but obtaining that knowledge comes at a price -- and that price will take up a pretty substantial chunk of time, and become increasingly frustrating as the game goes on, since the cost of error only gets larger the better you do.
So this brings us to the badges. The first thing I find unfortunate about the badge design is that both of them require achieving a given feat in a single character. Given the issues discussed above, I think it would make a lot more sense to have one of them be a single-character badge and one of them be a lifetime achievement-type award, so that earning the badges isn't quite so dependent on avoiding death. Ths game certainly has an obvious option for this -- upon attaining a given amount of fame in a given class, you're awarded a star, with more stars coming at higher fame levels, and these stars stay forever. So you could easily set a badge which requires some amount of achievement in all classes (and if you're particularly bad at one class, you could easily balance that out by doing better in another class). I think somewhere in the 30-35 star range would have worked nicely; it would remove a lot of the luck and frustration involved in getting the two existing badges.
Moving on, each of the two individual badges is also problematic. The first requires you to accumulate 400 fame on a single character (after you reach level 20, the XP you would have gained is converted into fame instead; you can also gain fame by completing quests, dungeons, and so forth). In and of itself, this is certainly entirely reasonable; for instance, one can easily imagine a badge for getting 400,000 points in survival mode in an ordinary single-player shooter, and this is pretty much comparable. Unfortunately, the way that fame works in Realm of the Mad God is kind of strange. Up to approximately 240 fame, fame accumulates at a quite reasonable rate -- you can probably reach that threshold with a level 20 character with an hour or so of playing around in low-risk areas. Above 240, though, the rate at which you gain fame slows dramatically, so that even if you start hanging out in extremely dangerous areas (which, of course, increases the odds that you'll get killed and have to start all over again), it will take you many hours to reach 400 base fame; I never got particularly close to this threshold, because dying after putting in such a large time investment got very frustrating.
However, when you die (which is when the game actually awards you your fame), your character receives additional bonuses for accomplishing various achievements during your lifetime. Most of these achievements, however, you won't get just by playing the game ordinarily; there are a few, such as the accuracy bonus, but most of them are for doing unusual things (such as not killing any cubes). If you do know that they exist (which generally means looking them up in a FAQ) and are willing to do them (which generally just makes the game slightly more tedious), however, they're pretty easy to get, and you can accumulate enough so that the bonuses can easily double your fame earned. So, at this point Greg's principle #4 applies: given a choice between earning 400 fame naturally, which takes forever and is by no means an easy task, or looking up the multipliers, grinding a character to 200 fame quickly but tediously in such a way as to get these multipliers, and then deliberately dying, the choice is pretty easy. Unfortunately, it's just not a choice which results in a particularly enjoyable gameplay experience.
The second badge (which is, at the moment of writing this, the 8th-least earned badge on Kongregate, and for good reason) requires a player to complete a certain number of dungeons. At the outset, it originally required all 9 dungeons in the game at the time (a 10th has since been added), but after player outcry, this number was lowered to the current 7. Even at that threshold, though, it is a beastly hard badge. Dungeons are periodically dropped by monsters, and you (and anyone else nearby) can enter them and try to conquer the challenges within. There are a few relatively easy dungeons which can be handled by inexperienced players, but not enough to reach that number of 7 -- in order to get the hard badge, you are going to have to traverse some very difficult dungeons (the most difficult dungeon can easily kill even a very well-equipped and potioned level 20 character in an eyeblink). And the problem with the dungeons is that they make the trial and error process of learning even more difficult -- when these dungeons can kill even tough, experienced characters quickly, you'll naturally want to be quick on the escape-to-safety button. But the problem is, once you flee, it may be a long time before you get a chance again; while the lower-level dungeons are easy to drop, some of the high-level dungeons are extremely rare, and you could easily play for a substantial amount of time before getting the chance next. (Apparently, when dungeons were first introduced, they dropped as keys, and then the player with the key could use the key in a populated area, thus making it easier to find dungeons that you were looking for. However, this was changed at some point before I started playing -- I don't know which situation was in effect when the badges were introduced -- which means that finding dungeons, or players to help you with a dungeon, is now much more difficult.)
The other problem with dungeons are the multiplayer dynamics. Some of the dungeons (especially the mid-level dungeons) tend to drop in areas where there aren't generally a lot of people around, so unless you have a highly organized group ready to help out at the drop of a hat (I didn't), you'll have to do these dungeons solo (which is certainly doable, but especially for the mid-level dungeons can make for a pretty tedious experience). On the other hand, some of the dungeons drop in very heavily-populated areas, so if you can manage to find them (which is usually the hard part), there'll be plenty of people. So it's easy in that case to just hang back and let the more experienced people do the hard work, if all you want to do is get the badge. The worst is, of course, if you find a rare, difficult dungeon but there's no one else around to come in with you; in that case, you may have to watch your opportunity go by, as dungeons only remain open for a very limited amount of time. None of these really results in an ideally fun situation, though.
(As a sidenote, one pitfall in designing badges for MMO-type games presents itself here. While Greg and rawismojo, the current Kongregate badge makers, generally try to play through games before badging them, the extreme time demands of many MMOs make this rather impractical. As a result, they'll naturally solicit advice from the current players of the game. This has two drawbacks, however: first, you'll naturally be getting the most enthustiastic players of the game, so they may enjoy things that the majority of the Kongregate population won't; and second, since they're the most experienced players, they'll tend to underestimate the difficulty of tasks. As discussed above, many things in Realm of the Mad God become easy when you've accumulated enough experience, but to a new player starting out, they can be quite difficult. Even simply reaching level 20 on a character, which is pretty much a formality for an experienced player, is quite the challenge for a first-time player. So the fact that even the hardcore players thought that a badge requirement was too difficult was quite unusual, and should say something about how tricky this badge is!)
Anyway, behind it all, there is a lot of fun to be had in Realm of the Mad God, and I don't want this post to give the impression that I hated every minute I spent playing the game. But it did have enough frustrating moments that I can't say I had unalloyed enjoyment, either. And unfortunately, the badges definitely came down on the side of exacerbating the frustration. I think there's a lot of potential, but neither the game nor the badges quite reached that potential in the end.
Friday, June 15, 2012
Badge spotlight: GemCraft Labyrinth
Remind Me of the Babe (hard, 30 points) -- Complete the final stage of the labyrinth.
Today I'd like to talk about the length of badges. This is actually a subject I suspect I'll be revisiting a couple of times over the course of this series, but GemCraft seems like a good place to start the discussion.
I'm generally a completionist when it comes to games, and I like getting achievements (which is obviously part of what draws me to Kongregate and has kept me there). On the other hand, there are limits to my completionism; when, for instance, I looked at the achievements for Team Fortress 2 and saw the one for healing a total of one million HP as a medic, I decided I was perfectly content not getting that achievement, since I enjoyed the game, but not enough to play it several months continuously (all as a medic, even). And in general, for games on Steam or consoles, designers don't really have any incentive not to add ridiculously long achievements -- once you've sold the player the game, you might as well try go keep them playing it as long as possible. Kongregate, on the other hand, doesn't have these ridiculously long kinds of badges; it's #2 on Greg's principles of badge design, and I think it's an excellent idea. Part of this is because most Flash games don't support that kind of replayability, of course, but that's not the only reason. There's also the fact that, unlike in the Steam or console ecosystems, where achievements are created by the game developer, Kongregate creates the badges itself, and the strength of Kongregate is in its breadth, not in the depth of any single game. So it's better off encouraging people to play a wide variety of games. In addition, avoiding the super-long badges also makes it seem like all of the badges are attainable, which is a very appealing feature to a gamer like me. Overall, I think this strategy of Kongregate's is one of the best features of its badge system.
However, the flip side of the coin is easy to see. For any game with a well-defined ending (i.e., not counting games where the goal is just to get the highest score or build the biggest empire or whatever), awarding a badge for reaching the ending is pretty much a no-brainer -- the only thing really left to do is decide what difficulty it deserves. That's all well and good if we're talking about relatively short games, which the vast majority of Flash games still are, but what if a game takes a really, really long time to reach the ending? And what if a lot of that time is relatively repetitive content -- or does that matter? Does it still deserve a badge for finishing the game even in that case?
And that brings us to GemCraft. GemCraft is a wildly popular series; the first two installments both spent considerable time in the top 5 of the Kongregate rankings, and while Labyrinth comes in a little lower (currently #44 as of the time of this writing), it's still rated 4.37, which is an incredibly high rating by Kongregate standards. Plenty of people are huge fans of GemCraft, and while I've never quite been one myself (I've always preferred the free-build tower defense games to fixed-path ones), I certainly recognize that GemCraft is pretty much the pinnacle of fixed-path tower defense games. It's very solidly designed and has an extremely polished presentation; Labyrinth even borrows a few elements from juggling-based TDs, as well as eliminating the most annoying feature of earlier GemCraft installments, and it has tons and tons of depth, with a bevy of gameplay modes, additional challenges, and secret achievements all available to the GemCraft enthusiast. The game also does a good job of making a lot of different strategies available to the player, and encourages the player to develop a wide range of strategic options for dealing with different sitautions, which is another hallmark of good design.
But here's the thing: GemCraft Labyrinth is long. The aforementioned badge is for simply completing the game, and after completing the game there's plenty of additional content if you're crazy about GemCraft, but even completing the game takes a long time. There's a total of 165 normal levels, and they're not easy for an average player -- while you may get through many levels on your first try, some will take several, and this being a TD, an average level is going to take several minutes to complete, so you're looking at a pretty substantial time investment. Now, in fairness, you don't have to beat every level to reach the center -- if you follow the optimal path, in fact, you only need to beat 76 levels (but you'd have to know the optimal path by looking it up in a FAQ, since the game doesn't tell you). However, that's not necessarily going to save you time, since beating levels gains you XP, which makes your character more powerful, so if you take the optimal path, you'll be incredibly weak (relative to where you "should" be) by the time you reach the center of the labyrinth, so only a very skilled player (which of course takes a lot of time on its own) or one who has spent a lot of time grinding to gain more levels (which, of course, also takes a long time) could survive that way; I ended up playing through every level and still had a lot of difficulty in the later levels, so there's really no way to reach the end without some significant time investment. (Labyrinth also, to its credit, discourages mindless grinding; you can't just replay the same level over and over and keep gaining XP. Instead, you only gain experience by besting your previous performance, which requires either beating the level with harder difficulty modifiers, or simply playing better.) And of course 76 levels is still not exactly an afternoon's playtime.
So, is completing the game simply too long for a hard badge? This is a difficult question to answer, but my inclination is as follows. I think that the default assumption should be that any game worthy of badges should get a badge for completion, with exceptions only in the cases where the game is not very good (just above the quality threshold for badges) or completing the game is exceptionally tedious. While GemCraft Labyrinth is certainly very long, it is an excellent game, and while there is naturally some repetition involved in completing the game, the designers have done a good job of throwing a wide variety of challenges at you, so it's not horribly tedious. So in this case I think that having a badge for completion is justified. (And similarly, while it would certainly be possible, given the large number of additional achievements in the game past simply completing it, to assign a badge for further activities, I agree that not having such a badge is also for the best.)
That said, though, it's pretty much never that Kongregate doesn't add a badge for game completion to a game for which that's possible, and I do think that there are a few more cases where it would be a good idea -- it doesn't have to be many cases, but I think that more than nearly zero is quite reasonable. I don't want to go into a long list of badge-bashing, but just to provide an example, LethalRPGDestiny 2 is a game that I would have found tedious at 1/10th the length, and yet it still got a badge for game completion -- a much shorter badge I think would have not hurt anyone's experience, and of course people who still wanted to complete the game could. So perhaps a little more aggressiveness on the part of Kongregate in this field would be a welcome idea -- it would cut out some of the most unpleasant badges on Kong without really hurting anything.
Remind Me of the Babe (hard, 30 points) -- Complete the final stage of the labyrinth.
Today I'd like to talk about the length of badges. This is actually a subject I suspect I'll be revisiting a couple of times over the course of this series, but GemCraft seems like a good place to start the discussion.
I'm generally a completionist when it comes to games, and I like getting achievements (which is obviously part of what draws me to Kongregate and has kept me there). On the other hand, there are limits to my completionism; when, for instance, I looked at the achievements for Team Fortress 2 and saw the one for healing a total of one million HP as a medic, I decided I was perfectly content not getting that achievement, since I enjoyed the game, but not enough to play it several months continuously (all as a medic, even). And in general, for games on Steam or consoles, designers don't really have any incentive not to add ridiculously long achievements -- once you've sold the player the game, you might as well try go keep them playing it as long as possible. Kongregate, on the other hand, doesn't have these ridiculously long kinds of badges; it's #2 on Greg's principles of badge design, and I think it's an excellent idea. Part of this is because most Flash games don't support that kind of replayability, of course, but that's not the only reason. There's also the fact that, unlike in the Steam or console ecosystems, where achievements are created by the game developer, Kongregate creates the badges itself, and the strength of Kongregate is in its breadth, not in the depth of any single game. So it's better off encouraging people to play a wide variety of games. In addition, avoiding the super-long badges also makes it seem like all of the badges are attainable, which is a very appealing feature to a gamer like me. Overall, I think this strategy of Kongregate's is one of the best features of its badge system.
However, the flip side of the coin is easy to see. For any game with a well-defined ending (i.e., not counting games where the goal is just to get the highest score or build the biggest empire or whatever), awarding a badge for reaching the ending is pretty much a no-brainer -- the only thing really left to do is decide what difficulty it deserves. That's all well and good if we're talking about relatively short games, which the vast majority of Flash games still are, but what if a game takes a really, really long time to reach the ending? And what if a lot of that time is relatively repetitive content -- or does that matter? Does it still deserve a badge for finishing the game even in that case?
And that brings us to GemCraft. GemCraft is a wildly popular series; the first two installments both spent considerable time in the top 5 of the Kongregate rankings, and while Labyrinth comes in a little lower (currently #44 as of the time of this writing), it's still rated 4.37, which is an incredibly high rating by Kongregate standards. Plenty of people are huge fans of GemCraft, and while I've never quite been one myself (I've always preferred the free-build tower defense games to fixed-path ones), I certainly recognize that GemCraft is pretty much the pinnacle of fixed-path tower defense games. It's very solidly designed and has an extremely polished presentation; Labyrinth even borrows a few elements from juggling-based TDs, as well as eliminating the most annoying feature of earlier GemCraft installments, and it has tons and tons of depth, with a bevy of gameplay modes, additional challenges, and secret achievements all available to the GemCraft enthusiast. The game also does a good job of making a lot of different strategies available to the player, and encourages the player to develop a wide range of strategic options for dealing with different sitautions, which is another hallmark of good design.
But here's the thing: GemCraft Labyrinth is long. The aforementioned badge is for simply completing the game, and after completing the game there's plenty of additional content if you're crazy about GemCraft, but even completing the game takes a long time. There's a total of 165 normal levels, and they're not easy for an average player -- while you may get through many levels on your first try, some will take several, and this being a TD, an average level is going to take several minutes to complete, so you're looking at a pretty substantial time investment. Now, in fairness, you don't have to beat every level to reach the center -- if you follow the optimal path, in fact, you only need to beat 76 levels (but you'd have to know the optimal path by looking it up in a FAQ, since the game doesn't tell you). However, that's not necessarily going to save you time, since beating levels gains you XP, which makes your character more powerful, so if you take the optimal path, you'll be incredibly weak (relative to where you "should" be) by the time you reach the center of the labyrinth, so only a very skilled player (which of course takes a lot of time on its own) or one who has spent a lot of time grinding to gain more levels (which, of course, also takes a long time) could survive that way; I ended up playing through every level and still had a lot of difficulty in the later levels, so there's really no way to reach the end without some significant time investment. (Labyrinth also, to its credit, discourages mindless grinding; you can't just replay the same level over and over and keep gaining XP. Instead, you only gain experience by besting your previous performance, which requires either beating the level with harder difficulty modifiers, or simply playing better.) And of course 76 levels is still not exactly an afternoon's playtime.
So, is completing the game simply too long for a hard badge? This is a difficult question to answer, but my inclination is as follows. I think that the default assumption should be that any game worthy of badges should get a badge for completion, with exceptions only in the cases where the game is not very good (just above the quality threshold for badges) or completing the game is exceptionally tedious. While GemCraft Labyrinth is certainly very long, it is an excellent game, and while there is naturally some repetition involved in completing the game, the designers have done a good job of throwing a wide variety of challenges at you, so it's not horribly tedious. So in this case I think that having a badge for completion is justified. (And similarly, while it would certainly be possible, given the large number of additional achievements in the game past simply completing it, to assign a badge for further activities, I agree that not having such a badge is also for the best.)
That said, though, it's pretty much never that Kongregate doesn't add a badge for game completion to a game for which that's possible, and I do think that there are a few more cases where it would be a good idea -- it doesn't have to be many cases, but I think that more than nearly zero is quite reasonable. I don't want to go into a long list of badge-bashing, but just to provide an example, LethalRPGDestiny 2 is a game that I would have found tedious at 1/10th the length, and yet it still got a badge for game completion -- a much shorter badge I think would have not hurt anyone's experience, and of course people who still wanted to complete the game could. So perhaps a little more aggressiveness on the part of Kongregate in this field would be a welcome idea -- it would cut out some of the most unpleasant badges on Kong without really hurting anything.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Badge spotlight: Amberial: Nebulosa Realms
Spherical Ninja (hard, 30 points) -- Complete every level with an Ace and a Thunder finish.
I'm directing today's spotlight onto Amberial: Nebulosa Realms (reviewed previously here), but really I want to talk about an issue that's pretty pervasive in designing badges for Flash games (a problem that I'll bet people designing achievements for the PS3 or Xbox don't have to worry about), and that is that the quality of the computers that people use to play Flash games varies widely. Some people are playing games on decade-old machines or woefully underpowered netbooks, while others are playing on rigs capable of running Crysis 2 without any problems. As a result, a game that will play fine for some people may be unbearably slow for others.
For the majority of games, playing the game on a slower computer merely means that things happen more slowly, which (especially for fast-paced shooter-type games) can often give the player an advantage. Indeed, I will admit to deliberately playing some games on a slower computer to give me an edge on some of the more difficult badges on Kongregate. While you might think that this only would affect really graphics-intensive fast-paced games, it affects a pretty wide swath of Flash games, probably due to the fact that writing poorly performing Flash code is pretty easy. It even affects some games you would think wouldn't be dependent on processor speed at all (99 Bricks is my standard example -- although the game appears to proceed at the same pace on slower machines, your tower sways noticeably slower, which confers a significant advantage). And often even a small, nearly imperceptible difference in speed can make the difference between an impossible badge being attainable (at least for me) and truly unattainable.
If that's the only issue to worry about, the solution is pretty obvious -- play a game on a sufficiently fast computer that there's no slowdown (I would assume that Kongregate has such machines) and assign the badges based on that, and just accept the fact that people with slower computers have an advantage. This obviously isn't a perfect solution, but it's clearly better than the alternative of making badges targeted at slower computers which may be impossibly (or at least unreasonably) difficult on faster machines.
Of course, things are often not so simple. For instance, while most games have a well-defined top speed, some will just get faster and faster with computer speed; there are some games from 2008 on Kongregate which are nearly unplayable now due to the speed that they go on an average computer from today. Other games actually get more difficult on slower computers. In Vector Runner, for instance, while the pace of the action doesn't appear to get slower (at least it didn't when I tried on a slower computer), the controls get mushier, so having a faster computer is an advantage. There are even some extreme cases like Typing Ninja Hunter where the game is actually unplayable on a slower computer (the keys are so unresponsive in the boss battles that you simply can't get them to register in the allotted time).
The reason I've chosen Amberial: Nebulosa Realms as the spotlight for this discussion is that it has one of the most frustrating manifestations of this problem of all that I've seen. One of the requirements for its badge is to get a Thunder finish on each level, which requires beating a certain target time. On one level, I had a tremendously difficult time beating the target time, and it seemed to be due to one place where I had to wait a couple of seconds for a moving platform to reach me. It wasn't like there was any obvious way for me to catch it earlier, since merely saving a few tenths of a second wouldn't help; I would have to improve by a significant amount to catch it earlier, and that just didn't seem possible. So I looked on YouTube to see if there was some strategy I was missing. Nope -- they did the first part of the level pretty much exactly the same as I was doing it, and arrived at the moving platform at pretty much the same time, except instead of the moving platform having already left, it was just arriving! Apparently my computer was faster than the one in the YouTube video, causing the moving platform to be just faster enough to make the target time ungettable. So I finally resorted to somewhat questionable means -- I played a video in the background and suddenly, I could catch the platform and get the target time relatively easily. This is the only time I've had to resort to such shenanigans, and it's rather unfortunate that it was necessary.
As these examples illustrate, this is a pretty thorny field, and I don't think there's necessarily a clear-cut answer. I mean, it's clearly impractical to expect Kongregate to support 100% of its users' computers, given the wide diversity, so I think it's OK for Kongregate to sometimes say, "if you really want this badge, you might need a better computer". But where do you draw the line? Personally, I think it's OK to set the line at maybe a slightly below-average machine and accept that machines slower than that may have problems, but this may simply reflect my bias that the machines I've used for Kongregate (except for when I've deliberately played on a slow computer) are generally pretty middle-of-the-road. And this doesn't really solve problems for games like Amberial where the natural progress of computer quality may make the badge ungettable -- I don't think there necessarily is any solution to this problem other than to hope that game programmers take these issues into account when doing their timing routines!
One last note: This fact also tends to skew feedback on badges, and I think it's actually a pretty large factor. When people say that they found a (speed-based) badge very easy, my first thought is usually that maybe they just have a slow computer (or even a fast computer which they were doing a lot of other stuff on). I wish more people would take into account this factor when evaluating Kongregate's badge difficulty, since at least in my experience, it tends to be pretty solid.
Spherical Ninja (hard, 30 points) -- Complete every level with an Ace and a Thunder finish.
I'm directing today's spotlight onto Amberial: Nebulosa Realms (reviewed previously here), but really I want to talk about an issue that's pretty pervasive in designing badges for Flash games (a problem that I'll bet people designing achievements for the PS3 or Xbox don't have to worry about), and that is that the quality of the computers that people use to play Flash games varies widely. Some people are playing games on decade-old machines or woefully underpowered netbooks, while others are playing on rigs capable of running Crysis 2 without any problems. As a result, a game that will play fine for some people may be unbearably slow for others.
For the majority of games, playing the game on a slower computer merely means that things happen more slowly, which (especially for fast-paced shooter-type games) can often give the player an advantage. Indeed, I will admit to deliberately playing some games on a slower computer to give me an edge on some of the more difficult badges on Kongregate. While you might think that this only would affect really graphics-intensive fast-paced games, it affects a pretty wide swath of Flash games, probably due to the fact that writing poorly performing Flash code is pretty easy. It even affects some games you would think wouldn't be dependent on processor speed at all (99 Bricks is my standard example -- although the game appears to proceed at the same pace on slower machines, your tower sways noticeably slower, which confers a significant advantage). And often even a small, nearly imperceptible difference in speed can make the difference between an impossible badge being attainable (at least for me) and truly unattainable.
If that's the only issue to worry about, the solution is pretty obvious -- play a game on a sufficiently fast computer that there's no slowdown (I would assume that Kongregate has such machines) and assign the badges based on that, and just accept the fact that people with slower computers have an advantage. This obviously isn't a perfect solution, but it's clearly better than the alternative of making badges targeted at slower computers which may be impossibly (or at least unreasonably) difficult on faster machines.
Of course, things are often not so simple. For instance, while most games have a well-defined top speed, some will just get faster and faster with computer speed; there are some games from 2008 on Kongregate which are nearly unplayable now due to the speed that they go on an average computer from today. Other games actually get more difficult on slower computers. In Vector Runner, for instance, while the pace of the action doesn't appear to get slower (at least it didn't when I tried on a slower computer), the controls get mushier, so having a faster computer is an advantage. There are even some extreme cases like Typing Ninja Hunter where the game is actually unplayable on a slower computer (the keys are so unresponsive in the boss battles that you simply can't get them to register in the allotted time).
The reason I've chosen Amberial: Nebulosa Realms as the spotlight for this discussion is that it has one of the most frustrating manifestations of this problem of all that I've seen. One of the requirements for its badge is to get a Thunder finish on each level, which requires beating a certain target time. On one level, I had a tremendously difficult time beating the target time, and it seemed to be due to one place where I had to wait a couple of seconds for a moving platform to reach me. It wasn't like there was any obvious way for me to catch it earlier, since merely saving a few tenths of a second wouldn't help; I would have to improve by a significant amount to catch it earlier, and that just didn't seem possible. So I looked on YouTube to see if there was some strategy I was missing. Nope -- they did the first part of the level pretty much exactly the same as I was doing it, and arrived at the moving platform at pretty much the same time, except instead of the moving platform having already left, it was just arriving! Apparently my computer was faster than the one in the YouTube video, causing the moving platform to be just faster enough to make the target time ungettable. So I finally resorted to somewhat questionable means -- I played a video in the background and suddenly, I could catch the platform and get the target time relatively easily. This is the only time I've had to resort to such shenanigans, and it's rather unfortunate that it was necessary.
As these examples illustrate, this is a pretty thorny field, and I don't think there's necessarily a clear-cut answer. I mean, it's clearly impractical to expect Kongregate to support 100% of its users' computers, given the wide diversity, so I think it's OK for Kongregate to sometimes say, "if you really want this badge, you might need a better computer". But where do you draw the line? Personally, I think it's OK to set the line at maybe a slightly below-average machine and accept that machines slower than that may have problems, but this may simply reflect my bias that the machines I've used for Kongregate (except for when I've deliberately played on a slow computer) are generally pretty middle-of-the-road. And this doesn't really solve problems for games like Amberial where the natural progress of computer quality may make the badge ungettable -- I don't think there necessarily is any solution to this problem other than to hope that game programmers take these issues into account when doing their timing routines!
One last note: This fact also tends to skew feedback on badges, and I think it's actually a pretty large factor. When people say that they found a (speed-based) badge very easy, my first thought is usually that maybe they just have a slow computer (or even a fast computer which they were doing a lot of other stuff on). I wish more people would take into account this factor when evaluating Kongregate's badge difficulty, since at least in my experience, it tends to be pretty solid.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Badge Spotlight: colourPod 2: dimensionPod
Fear Not the Darkness (impossible, 60 points) -- Complete all 24 missions.
I'm going to kick off this series with what I think is one of the most underrated badges on Kongregate, but first a little talk about impossible badges. As the name suggests, these are awarded for some of the most difficult achievements on Kongregate (although, fortunately, not literally impossible), and they tend to draw a disproportionate amount of attention. While there are (as of this writing) only 44 impossible badges, a new impossible badge, or the possibility of one, is always guaranteed to get a lot of discussion. As a result, there's a lot of pressure to get the impossible badges as right as possible, and this, in addition to the fact that most games simply don't have a task which is really suitable for an impossible badge, has resulted in a gradual decline of the number of impossible badges on Kongregate. This is certainly fine by me -- given that the impossibles, not surprisingly, often require an outsize amount of time to complete, I would certainly prefer having them awarded only to games which are really a great fit for the impossible badge idea rather than trying to make a greater quantity of not-so-great impossible badges.
Given how people like to complain on the Internet, for pretty much every impossible badge on Kongregate, you can probably find someone complaining about it on the forums: it's too easy, it's too hard, it's too luck-dependent, it requires too much pixel-perfect positioning, it takes too much grinding, etc., etc. Some of these complains have some validity, but I'd say that probably most don't. The impossible for colourPod 2, though, I don't remember anyone complaining about, which is in many ways the highest compliment a badge can get! (Of course, part of this is due to the fact that it's one of the older badges on Kongregate, I'm sure, but even still, the impossible for Pandemic 2, which came out at about the same time, is certainly not safe from criticism.)
So, why do I think this makes a good badge? Well, first, a brief description of the game: at first glance, it's a pretty ordinary shooter. You control an immobile turret in the center of the screen, and enemies ("fragments") approach from the edges, and you have to destroy them from before they hit your turret. The fragments can appear in either of two dimensions, so you have to switch between the two dimensions (by pressing the space bar) to be able to hit everything. Colored fragments will also appear, and if you catch them on your "lens" (mounted on your turret opposite the gun), you will gradually gain additional powers, with different colors conferring different powers. As you have some control over the colors that arrive, choosing your colors wisely is a very important skill.
Anyway, this badge has what I find by far the most satisfying quality in a badge: at first (in this case, because it seemed that the badge was so dependent on reflexes, which, as I've mentioned, are not my strength), it seemed truly impossible. Then, I gradually got better, and it seemed attainable, and by the time I reached the end, it almost seemed easy; although, of course, that was an illusion -- it was still hard! It was just that I had practiced so much that made it seem easy. And in fact, there are plenty of places where you can improve your skill -- for instance, since the game only very gradually introduces you to the different color abilities, there's a lot to learn in which ones are best in which situations, and which sets work well together. The other area where I really found myself improving over time was simple -- the game demands that you be doing a lot of things at once, and sometimes it will exceed your ability to do everything (probably true no matter how good your reflexes are, but certainly true for me). But as I went along, I discovered the key was triage -- not necessarily trying to do everything at once, but learning which things were the most critical and which wouldn't hurt me too badly, and this skill was definitely something I could see myself improving at as I played through the game.
As you can see at the top, the badge requires you to complete 24 "missions" (the game's name for various achievements), which is also a quality I generally like in a badge -- I tend to prefer badges which require a variety of tasks rather than one extremely difficult thing. Many of the missions simply boil down to playing the game well, but there are also many which require you to use or not use a particular color or colors, which adds an interesting layer as well -- they get you to experiment with abilities you may not have used normally, so you really get a chance to see the whole game.
In conclusion, then, this is why I think the badge is a solid one: The game itself was good (obviously a necessary prerequisite), the badge requirements were challenging but attainable (and you could work to get better at it), it really felt like it rewarded your ability, and it provided a good variety of different tasks rather than being completely repetitive. In some ways, in fact, this is the badge I'm proudest of; it's not the most difficult or rarest, but being in a category of game that I normally do poorly on, the fact that I was able to learn, gain experience, and improve my play to the level where I could get the badge really gave me a positive opinion of the game and the badge.
Fear Not the Darkness (impossible, 60 points) -- Complete all 24 missions.
I'm going to kick off this series with what I think is one of the most underrated badges on Kongregate, but first a little talk about impossible badges. As the name suggests, these are awarded for some of the most difficult achievements on Kongregate (although, fortunately, not literally impossible), and they tend to draw a disproportionate amount of attention. While there are (as of this writing) only 44 impossible badges, a new impossible badge, or the possibility of one, is always guaranteed to get a lot of discussion. As a result, there's a lot of pressure to get the impossible badges as right as possible, and this, in addition to the fact that most games simply don't have a task which is really suitable for an impossible badge, has resulted in a gradual decline of the number of impossible badges on Kongregate. This is certainly fine by me -- given that the impossibles, not surprisingly, often require an outsize amount of time to complete, I would certainly prefer having them awarded only to games which are really a great fit for the impossible badge idea rather than trying to make a greater quantity of not-so-great impossible badges.
Given how people like to complain on the Internet, for pretty much every impossible badge on Kongregate, you can probably find someone complaining about it on the forums: it's too easy, it's too hard, it's too luck-dependent, it requires too much pixel-perfect positioning, it takes too much grinding, etc., etc. Some of these complains have some validity, but I'd say that probably most don't. The impossible for colourPod 2, though, I don't remember anyone complaining about, which is in many ways the highest compliment a badge can get! (Of course, part of this is due to the fact that it's one of the older badges on Kongregate, I'm sure, but even still, the impossible for Pandemic 2, which came out at about the same time, is certainly not safe from criticism.)
So, why do I think this makes a good badge? Well, first, a brief description of the game: at first glance, it's a pretty ordinary shooter. You control an immobile turret in the center of the screen, and enemies ("fragments") approach from the edges, and you have to destroy them from before they hit your turret. The fragments can appear in either of two dimensions, so you have to switch between the two dimensions (by pressing the space bar) to be able to hit everything. Colored fragments will also appear, and if you catch them on your "lens" (mounted on your turret opposite the gun), you will gradually gain additional powers, with different colors conferring different powers. As you have some control over the colors that arrive, choosing your colors wisely is a very important skill.
Anyway, this badge has what I find by far the most satisfying quality in a badge: at first (in this case, because it seemed that the badge was so dependent on reflexes, which, as I've mentioned, are not my strength), it seemed truly impossible. Then, I gradually got better, and it seemed attainable, and by the time I reached the end, it almost seemed easy; although, of course, that was an illusion -- it was still hard! It was just that I had practiced so much that made it seem easy. And in fact, there are plenty of places where you can improve your skill -- for instance, since the game only very gradually introduces you to the different color abilities, there's a lot to learn in which ones are best in which situations, and which sets work well together. The other area where I really found myself improving over time was simple -- the game demands that you be doing a lot of things at once, and sometimes it will exceed your ability to do everything (probably true no matter how good your reflexes are, but certainly true for me). But as I went along, I discovered the key was triage -- not necessarily trying to do everything at once, but learning which things were the most critical and which wouldn't hurt me too badly, and this skill was definitely something I could see myself improving at as I played through the game.
As you can see at the top, the badge requires you to complete 24 "missions" (the game's name for various achievements), which is also a quality I generally like in a badge -- I tend to prefer badges which require a variety of tasks rather than one extremely difficult thing. Many of the missions simply boil down to playing the game well, but there are also many which require you to use or not use a particular color or colors, which adds an interesting layer as well -- they get you to experiment with abilities you may not have used normally, so you really get a chance to see the whole game.
In conclusion, then, this is why I think the badge is a solid one: The game itself was good (obviously a necessary prerequisite), the badge requirements were challenging but attainable (and you could work to get better at it), it really felt like it rewarded your ability, and it provided a good variety of different tasks rather than being completely repetitive. In some ways, in fact, this is the badge I'm proudest of; it's not the most difficult or rarest, but being in a category of game that I normally do poorly on, the fact that I was able to learn, gain experience, and improve my play to the level where I could get the badge really gave me a positive opinion of the game and the badge.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Announcing something new!
So I've been playing games on Kongregate for a while now, and in that time have accumulated a fair number of achievements, so naturally I've thought for a fair amount about the topic of achievement design. The achievements were what really got me into Kongregate in the first place, and I think the general quality of their badge design has been a large factor in keeping me there. In 2009, Greg McClanahan, the man who, at the time, was solely responsible for the badge design on Kongregate (now, he at least has someone to assist him with this task) and arguably the most visible person on Kongregate as a result (you will still find people who are under the impression that Greg founded and/or owns Kongregate), wrote an article for Gamasutra on the subject of badge design, and I think that the principles he lays out are really excellent ones -- I think it's contributed a lot to the success of the Kongregate badge system, and conversely, I think in the cases where he has produced bad badges, it's a result of (hopefully inadvertently) violating these principles. But other than that article, it doesn't seem to have been a system that's been thought about too much (as one can see from the wildly differing approaches to achievements on other platforms, for instance).
So I'd like to share a few of my thoughts with whomever is around to read them. I think the best way to do this is with a "badge spotlight": each post, I'll take a look at a badge which is particularly interesting or controversial, and talk about the issues around that badge's design, hopefully illuminating some more generally applicable principle. I've already written up a few, to ensure that this project gets somewhere, and will probably run to about 20-30 posts before I run out of ideas (or steam).
Naturally, the bad badges tend to get the most attention, and of course it will be instructive to look at cases where I think the badge process has erred, but I don't want to get completely into a negativity trap, especially since I think that would obscure the fact that the vast majority of badges on Kongregate are indeed well-chosen. So I'll try to also shine the spotlight on badges that I enjoyed and were particularly well-designed os that we can get some examples of what makes a badge good, as well.
Finally, a few words about my own preferences. I don't expect everyone to agree with these, of course. My own gaming strengths lie more in persistence and cleverness than speed, so I tend to prefer games which reward thinking and learning over pure dexterity. I really don't like achievements which require you to do something perfectly over a long period of time, since I find there to be nothing more frustrating than being great for five minutes and then screwing up at the end and losing it all. I'd much rather have a task with a lower cost of failure (even if it is overall harder), especially since that ties into my first point -- if dying only costs you a few seconds, but you have to try a large number of times, it gives you a lot more opportunity to learn and get better than if you have a smaller number of longer attempts.
Anyway, I hope this series will prove interesting to whoever reads it, and I also look forward to any feedback or other comments you may have!
So I've been playing games on Kongregate for a while now, and in that time have accumulated a fair number of achievements, so naturally I've thought for a fair amount about the topic of achievement design. The achievements were what really got me into Kongregate in the first place, and I think the general quality of their badge design has been a large factor in keeping me there. In 2009, Greg McClanahan, the man who, at the time, was solely responsible for the badge design on Kongregate (now, he at least has someone to assist him with this task) and arguably the most visible person on Kongregate as a result (you will still find people who are under the impression that Greg founded and/or owns Kongregate), wrote an article for Gamasutra on the subject of badge design, and I think that the principles he lays out are really excellent ones -- I think it's contributed a lot to the success of the Kongregate badge system, and conversely, I think in the cases where he has produced bad badges, it's a result of (hopefully inadvertently) violating these principles. But other than that article, it doesn't seem to have been a system that's been thought about too much (as one can see from the wildly differing approaches to achievements on other platforms, for instance).
So I'd like to share a few of my thoughts with whomever is around to read them. I think the best way to do this is with a "badge spotlight": each post, I'll take a look at a badge which is particularly interesting or controversial, and talk about the issues around that badge's design, hopefully illuminating some more generally applicable principle. I've already written up a few, to ensure that this project gets somewhere, and will probably run to about 20-30 posts before I run out of ideas (or steam).
Naturally, the bad badges tend to get the most attention, and of course it will be instructive to look at cases where I think the badge process has erred, but I don't want to get completely into a negativity trap, especially since I think that would obscure the fact that the vast majority of badges on Kongregate are indeed well-chosen. So I'll try to also shine the spotlight on badges that I enjoyed and were particularly well-designed os that we can get some examples of what makes a badge good, as well.
Finally, a few words about my own preferences. I don't expect everyone to agree with these, of course. My own gaming strengths lie more in persistence and cleverness than speed, so I tend to prefer games which reward thinking and learning over pure dexterity. I really don't like achievements which require you to do something perfectly over a long period of time, since I find there to be nothing more frustrating than being great for five minutes and then screwing up at the end and losing it all. I'd much rather have a task with a lower cost of failure (even if it is overall harder), especially since that ties into my first point -- if dying only costs you a few seconds, but you have to try a large number of times, it gives you a lot more opportunity to learn and get better than if you have a smaller number of longer attempts.
Anyway, I hope this series will prove interesting to whoever reads it, and I also look forward to any feedback or other comments you may have!
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