Porter's World

What Not To Do

One of the biggest mistake game developers make, is having a game that isn’t fun, even though it is in fact playable. Sometimes this is caused by something rather simple, such as the game running sluggish. Although lag is a huge issue in many games, that’s not what I’m referring to, I simply mean the game plays too slow, the action doesn’t come fast enough. If ever there was something you don’t want to do in game design, this is it, because today’s players have even less patience than those of the past. In addition, you’ll find yourself working weeks, even months on a game, only to have absolutely no sponsor interest, and not an idea why such is the case. If you really think this doesn’t apply to you, read on. Notice I didn’t say “One of the biggest mistake new game developers make” in my opening statement, that’s because even world famous companies make these mistakes, everyone does time to time.

The best example of a game that has been entirely broken from sluggish gameplay is Final Fantasy VI on the PS1; it came with Final Fantasy V in the Final Fantasy Anthology collection. Final Fantasy VI, as many of you may know, is one of the most impressive RPG’s of it’s time, and by no means a bad game. Aside from being impressive, it also had a lot of random battles, which was fine on the SNES, but absolutely horrid due to load times between battles on the PS1. It never should have been ported in my opinion; the down time spent just waiting is so immense that it honestly ruined the game, I didn’t play more than an hour into it. I’ll remind you that when I first got it, I was psyched to play one of my classic favorites again, and have no problems with turned based battles and random encounters; the remake however, was unplayable to my standards. Although the above issue is mostly due to hardware, the company was aware of the issues before releasing the game, it was just poor judgment on their part to ever port the game.

Final Fantasy may be a console game, but that doesn’t mean that flash games can’t suffer the same consequences. In fact, flash games are more susceptible to failing because of this, due to the low patience of casual gamers. As some of you may know, I review a lot of games over at FlashGameLicense; you would be surprised how many games suffer from slow paced gameplay. Slow gameplay issues I’ve encountered vary. I’ve seen action games where the tank moved far too slow, sliding puzzle games where the block moved too slow, games where the player could outrun the bullets shot by his own weapon, and more. As cool as a game could be where you have some power that allows you to slow down time and run around bullets, that wasn’t what this game was going for, and that called for very obvious failure. You may think all of these are novice mistakes, but there are some very professional games out there with this issue, some that suffer horribly, others that could have benefited from an increase in speed in certain aspects.

All of this may sound like another novice mistake that you’re probably telling yourself you’ll never do, but I guarantee that somewhere in your future works, there will be a time when one of your games is severely hurt, or hindered by such an issue. The biggest reason for this, is that most developers generally don’t even notice these issues, this is usually due to a curtain of illusion that is thrown over a developer when they work on their own games; we as developers become oblivious to some of the most obvious faults with our games and will never notice them until told by an outside source. If you ever suspect that you’re game could in fact suffer from such an issue, take a look at Four Second Frenzy or Grid 16, they are fast paced from start to finish, exactly what the market loves. You may be thinking, well I have a puzzle game, or a defense game, same applies; even tower defense games,  such as Flash Element TD 2 offer the ability to speed up the game once you’ve got things under control. No matter what genre your game is, there are always moments when things can get dull, not always due to gameplay elements, but how slowly they’re presented. No matter how open minded about your game you think you are while testing, get others to test the game and give you feedback; you’re far better off being surprised with testers catching sluggish gameplay, rather than your players when the game goes live.

Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3

Who should bend?

If you’re a flash game developer I’m sure you’ve encountered what has got to be one of the most nagging things a flash game came do to it’s creator, or player for that matter. This nagging I speak of is lag, slow fps (frames per second) that makes a game look and run horrid. It runs fine on your computer, it looked great locally on your machine, but once it got tossed up on the web it all fell apart. This has always lingered a question within my head as I yelled back at the reviews out loud in my living room, who should bend, the developer, or the person playing your game receiving lag?

Like all arguments we have two sides to this, the first being that some people out there just need to learn when their computers are out of date. There was once a time when 512MB of ram was acceptable and got you by just fine, we also had phones that still used cords back then too, and we could only talk on them in the house. Once I became a member of the tech world, I’ve always tried to keep up enough to have my computer run the newest games on at least medium settings. I currently have an AMD duel 5600, 2 gigs of corsair RAM and a 9600 GT which was on sale for under $100 bucks. That’s a pretty good computer, and it will run any flash game perfectly fine. I often used to forget that my computer was once far above average (although still not that expensive, people just need to stop ripping themselves off at best buy and learn to put a computer together, it’s like Legos with a bit of research). This lead me to a huge discouragement when a few games of mine just didn’t play nearly as well as they should have due to frame rate issues. At the time I was highly convinced that all of the users complaining should just upgrade their computers because they were old and going on worthless.

The other side of the argument, as much as many of you will hate to admit, is the more logical side of the two. Despite the rage that some developers may have for people with lagging issues in what seems to be a perfectly running game, it’s really us the developers who should be catering to those users. No matter how bad some users computers may be, they’re another player out there, and as a developer our job is to please as many users as possible. More users equals more views, more views equals more cash from ads and happier sponsors, happy sponsors equals more business in the future. This also eliminates a lot of low votes due to people thinking the game is horrid because it’s literally unplayable, or just so slow it looks like it was made by an amateur. Having a high rating on some of the bigger sites can go a very long way, so it’s especially important to cater to those users who may drop a zero vote due to a poor playing experience.

With these few facts alone it’s rather obvious to see the damage that can be done due to a handful of users having frame rate issues. I don’t like a user complaining about the game running slow and dropping a zero vote on Newgrounds any more than any other developer, but the truth is we need to cater to those users or suffer the consequences. Perhaps one day when I’m rich from flash games I’ll buy all those users a new computer built from scratch, until then I’ll just have to optimize my games and be sure to test them on multiple machines of multiple performance.