Story-telling as Problem Solving: Defender's Quest (GDC 2013 Narrative Summit)

We (Writer James Cavin and Programmer/Generalist Lars Doucet) initially gave this talk at GDC 2013 in the Game Narrative summit. I'm posting the slides and script here as a blog post, but if you prefer a video, you can watch a recording of this talk here.


This talk has a very simple thesis: a game’s story absolutely must explain its mechanics.
Why? It’s a pretty simple answer - things are terrible when you don’t and much better when you do. Let me give you an example. This is an experience I had playing one of the bajillion 007 games that came out on the GameCube.


Here’s me as James Bond. I just picked up full body armor and a grenade launching shotgun. I just spent the last twenty minutes annihilating everything that moves in downtown Moscow. I am a bulletproof, Pierce Brosnan shaped angel of death.


Now I round a corner and am suddenly replaced by Cutscene Bond. Cutscene Bond enters the room and is confronted by this bad guy. “Stop right there, Mr. Bond,” commands the badguy,menacing Cutscene Bond with a pistol.

And instead of launching into one of the most laughably one-sided firefights in the history of the world, Cutscene Bond throws up his arms, because he has seemingly forgot that he has seventy pounds of body armor, a fully automatic incendiary grenade shotgun and also that this pistol is the crappiest weapon ever forged by hand of man, and in fact does less damage than if the villain were to simply point his finger and say bang.

I know these things because the last seven hours of gameplay have established these rules over and over and over. Body armor blocks damage. The wimp pistol does minimal damage.  The grenade launcher outclasses every gun in the game. There is no way in which this scenario poses any threat to Bond. I know this. Apparently, Bond doesn’t. Which is why his game got traded to my friend for a box of Pokemon cards.

Now, it’s important to note here that this cutscene is not bad story. It feels entirely right for a James Bond setting. I mean, how many times have we seen that exact scene play out in a movie and it works just fine? So why is it that it’s super frustrating here?

Simply put, it’s because it broke every rule the game had taught me. Which is weird, because the gameplay is also totally right for the James Bond setting. I mean, how many times have we seen 007 use some crazy cool weapon to blast through dozens of enemies? It feels totally right.
So how can it be that both the story and the gameplay feel totally right for 007 and yet are totally wrong for each other?
The problem is that the Gameplay and the Story are drawing inspiration from the same source, but arriving at completely different and in fact totally incompatible conclusions.

A cutscene bullet and a gameplay bullet are two completely different entities. This in turn makes cutscene reality and gameplay reality completely different things.

All of this could have easily been avoided if the writer had remembered the mechanics of
his own game. If the bad guy was sitting behind three feet of bullet proof glass and
pointing automated armor piercing laser turrets at me, it would have worked just fine.
Instead, Bond forgets the basic rules of the game he’s in, all because the Story team and the Gameplay team were operating in complete independence of each other.

After this experience I started seeing the same thing pop up again and again in games. Instead of writing a story that explains the mechanics of what the player is doing, Developers fall into the same trap: they pick a setting and then start developing a story that fits it and gameplay that fits it. Again and again we end up with weird conflicting elements just duct-taped together like angry cats.
This is a problem regardless of how good the individual parts are. For instance, Hamlet
is a phenomenal story... but a terrible tower defense game.

A lot of people hand wave these conflicts as just a natural part of games. It’s a
concession we have to make to our medium. Well I don’t think so. In fact, I think that if your story is written to explain your mechanics, not only will you minimize ludo-narrative dissonance,but you will also create more unique, nuanced and compelling stories.To use a perennial example, let’s take a look at Final Fantasy 7.

In possibly the most oft cited case of ludo-narrative dissonance, FF7 contains a plot point that straight up ignores the actual game. For hours upon hours the player has been taught that their characters can be killed in battle.
Fortunately, it’s a fixable problem. The player can simply use an item called the phoenix down to literally resurrect these killed characters.
Then the plot kills one of your party members,
and nobody thinks to use a phoenix down.
This is a character that, for many players, has literally died and been resurrected multiple times in the past - we’ve been taught that death is no problem in the same way that James Bond’s gameplay taught us that the sissy pistol was no problem.The huge problem here is that, unlike Bond, it’s not just this single plot point that contradicts the mechanics. The entire setting does. Gameplay has taught us that violent death is a solvable problem. For a few bucks that mangled corpse is right back and good as new! How does the entire world not revolve around this concept?


Where are the bloodsports? Where’s the dangerous jobs with no hazard pay? Where’s the crazy adrenaline junkies base jumping without parachutes just for the thrill of it?

Violence is literally of no consequence. What on earth would human culture look like in these conditions? That’s a world I want to explore.

If Final Fantasy 7 had tried to explain its mechanics, not only would it have avoided this
basic inconsistency, it could have been a groundbreaking piece of speculative fiction
with a setting completely unique in the games of its time.
It's an incredible missed opportunity all because the writers didn't feel like connecting their story with the gameplay in any meaningful way. Once again, this is a problem that arises regardless of how good the writing and gameplay are in and of themselves.
Failing to give story justification for your mechanics will always put on the path to serious ludo-narrative dissonance and deprives you of interesting and unique story opportunities.

When it came time to create our own game story, we wanted to avoid these pitfalls. While we weren’t perfect, I felt our system gave us a much better overall product than if we had just picked a theme and started writing.
So, our goal was to have a story that justified our gameplay mechanics and explored their consequences on the world. We wanted to avoid ludo-narrative dissonance and seize any opportunities to explore the unique narrative consequences of our mechanics.

Before we had a single word of story written, we created a grand list of every mechanic we knew would be in the game.
As a tower defense RPG hybrid, this was a lot of stuff. We looked at our huge master list and asked ourselves “What story would justify all these things in the simplest and most elegant manner?”

And boy, did we have a lot of mechanics to explain. Defender's Quest was going to be a tower defense RPG mash up. There would be something to defend,
...and a horde of single-minded path, following enemies to defend it from.
We borrowed the film term "mcguffin" to describe our arbitrary object to be defended because “arbitrary object to be defended” gets a little unwieldy over time.
So there's a mcguffin and enemies that want it. These enemies march onward towards their target along specific paths with no thought for their own safety or survival.

The player defends against them by placing towers. In our case, these towers were persistent RPG characters – they leveled up, gained new abilities, had equip-able gear that boosted their performance, etc. However, our defenders still had to function like towers – they were placed one at a time, appeared instantly out of nothing, couldn't move at all, and when they received too much damage they were removed from play. Removed characters could be re-summoned into the fight. And all of these actions cost the player some kind of currency that was gained by defeating enemies.And that was just the battle mechanics. Outside of battle, there would be an overworld to explore, new units to meet and recruit and shops with purchasable items.When we looked at this grand list of mechanics, we were immediately confronted by serious story problems.

1. What kind of enemy behaves in the way our tower defense creeps did?
2. What kind of currency comes from beating up bad guys? Why can I use it to summon my friends?
3. For that matter, why do I have to summon my friends? Why aren't they here all the time? Also, why can't they move while they're here?
4. What was the McGuffin? Why did the enemy want it?
5. Why would characters want to join the player's party?
6. Where did all these bad guys come from?
7. What kind of world is full of hostile forces, but also shops brimming with useful gear?
8. Why would the mcguffin ever have to move? If this is a defense game, why don't you just build yourself a castle?

So, first we tackled the question of our enemies. It became immediately apparent that no rational creature would ever behave in the way we needed our enemies to, so any story that required individual enemies to be human or other intelligent entities wouldn't work.

In fact, the more we thought about it, the fewer things we found that would make any
kind of sense with a path following, no thought for survival, single-minded desire for the
mcguffin.

We finally settled on zombies – they met all of our criteria for enemy behavior: singleminded, travel in hordes, no thought for self preservation. They also provided a satisfying enemy to fight – smashing a zombie feels way cooler than smushing an ant, even though an ant would have also met our requirements. I do want to underscore something - zombies are admittedly a bit cliche, but we chose them because they were a story element that answered the questions our mechanics raised, not because, "Hey zombies would be cool."

So we had our enemy cast, but we still had a bunch more battle mechanics to answer. Why was it that currency was gained by killing zombies? And why could this currency be used to summon defenders?
We started thinking about things that zombies would have that could also be used to power our summoning mechanic. The most elegant solution we could find was...magic. This meant that our zombies were no longer just Day of the Dead style infected corpses that could be stopped by destroying their brain. Now they were necromantic zombies driven by dark magic,...which could harvested when they were defeated.
This approach already began developing the story for us: if these are magical zombies, where is the magic coming from? The basis for a necromancer villain had already been created.Next we had to answer why the player needed magic to summon friends, and why friends had to be summoned in the first place. Immediately we saw that this mechanic could not be explained in the real world. It would make no sense to be walking along with all of your friends, get attacked by zombies, and then suddenly it's tower defense time and you have to pay magic to place your buddies one by one when they were standing next to you just a second ago.

The natural solution we found was to simply remove our battles from the real world. Yes, you and all your buddies are walking along, but when the zombies attack, you are suddenly pulled into the spirit world. Now you have to use magic to pull allies in with you.

Once again, this explanation started the ball rolling for other story points. Who's doing all this spirit world entering business? The groundwork was set for our protagonist – someone with ability to travel into the spirit world and bring others with them. The more we played around with this concept, the more we found it fit really well. Of course characters wouldn't be able to move in here – it takes our protagonist an incredible amount of concentration to bring them into it. And if they get hit too much, this concentration is broken and they get kicked out of the spirit world.

We then decided to make our spirit-world traveling protagonist and tower-defense mcguffin one and the same.

It was a simplification that made sense. Someone that can enter the spirit-world and kick zombie butt has got to be a rare and valuable individual – exactly the kind of thing our Necromancer villain would want! Just by answering the questions that naturally arise from our mechanics, we've begun to create the bare bones of plot and motivation.

We still needed to answer the question of why people would want to join up with our protagonist. After all, if this person is constantly being hunted by zombies, being in there general vicinity is the last thing you want to do.

As it stood, the only people that would sign up for team Mcguffin were absolute altruists and that really doesn't make for an interesting set of characters. We wanted a diverse collection of heroes with varying and sometimes conflicting motivations that would fight and bicker and joke and feel like a collection of real people.

So what unifying desire would cause all these people to work together for the mcguffin?
What if the mcguffin was the only chance for escape from the zombie hordes? We've already established that the protagonist is in possession of incredibly rare if not unique abilities, so what if they are the only person that can do this? And what if that's the only way to kill zombies?

We've already established that our zombies aren't the shoot 'em in the head variety – they're magic. So what if the only way to kill them is to enter the spirit world and fight them on their own turf. And the only one that can do that is our mcguffin.

This made signing up for team mcguffin a little more of a logical step, but we felt that we
needed a little extra push to justify all the diverse character we wanted. Our solution was to make our setting a miserable place everyone wanted to escape from. Standing between them and escape is all of our hordes of zombies, so the only way out is to team up with the one person that can kill zombies.

So what setting would provide this kind of motivation?

How about a plague colony?



This actually answered a whole slew of our problems in one go. Everyone here is trapped because they've been cast out by the rest of society – there's a plague on and the risk of infection is too great to allow survivors back. So now all these people are trapped in this prison colony that's full of zombies. Why is a plague colony full of zombies? Well, because it's full of corpses – the perfect ammo for a necromancer to build an army. This handily explains the source of the hordes of enemies our mechanics required.

It also explained why our dangerous world provided just enough civilization to allow for the item shops we wanted – of course survivors would band together in small, defensible settlements and trade for weapons and gear.It also provided a motivation for the protagonist to move – you don't want to just turtle up and defend the mcguffin because you want to find an exit and get the heck out of this dump.

What felt amazing was that by answering all of these mechanics questions we had not only dodged ludo-narrative dissonance, we had also begun to create a setting far more compelling and unique than what we would have arrived at on our own.

A unique spirit walker wonders an apocalyptic plague colony in search of escape, while keeping one step ahead of a dark necromancer, hell bent on their capture for his own dark reasons.
We had unique zombies, an unusual world, a compelling protagonist with understandable motivations, a mysterious enemy all without writing a single word of story. From here I could begin my work as a writer, populating our world with interesting characters and compelling mystery.

Best of all, we could do it without fearing that story and gameplay would contradict
each other. It was a world that was founded on the rules of our game – meaning a bullet was always a bullet, in story and in gameplay.

~Fin~

Youtube and the new AudioVisual Literacy

I've been thinking about writing, journalism, and Youtube a lot lately, and I just realized something: we're moving to a new form of "writing" based on recorded oral culture.

Traditionally, "oral tradition" had no recording method other than people's memory (which can be surprisingly reliable, a far cry from the dismissive assertion that oral tradition is nothing more than "a game of telephone").  But what happens when you take an oral tradition and bring modern day electronic recording to it?  I first heard of this from a research paper my wife did in college, about Somali poetry, based in oral tradition and recorded on cassette tapes.

I think we're seeing a similar thing happening on the internet. My generation of internet nerds grew up "reading" the internet, but I feel the next generation has largely grown up watching it.

The proof is in the pudding, so to speak - popular Youtuber's like TotalBiscuit, the YogsCast, and other prominent "Let's Play"-ers are now capable of driving more traffic to a game than a positive article in a traditional game review magazine.

I don't think writing's dead, to be sure, but I figure it's best I bone up on this new form of "writing," since an entire swath of the population is now used to getting their information this way.

So, with that introduction managed, we've decided to start doing a series of "Let's Play" videos of our own game, with a commentary bonus track like you find on DVD's. This should be an entertaining and accessible way to reach a new audience and also give everyone a look behind the scenes of how we developed the game.

To be sure, I'll still keep writing the old-fashioned way - with words - but I think we all have a lot to gain by studying this new form of "literacy."

Steam Linux Sale : Results

Shortly after we published our giant sales report, Defender's Quest: By the Number, part 2, the Steam Linux client officially went public and was accompanied by a site-wide sale.

The Linux sale featured every single Linux-compatible game on the service, including Defender's Quest.  In preparation for this article, I asked the good people of Reddit's /r/linux_gaming subreddit what sort of data they'd like to see, and today I'd like to answer both their questions and yours.

Steam Sales

Over the course of the Steam Linux sale, we grossed $16,958 and made 2,079 sales. Let's compare that to the various other Steam sales we've participated in:

 

And here's a graph for easier visualization:

In case you didn't know it already, this graph clearly shows that we made most of our money on Steam during sales periods ;)

As for the Linux sale, there were only about 50 or so games that took part, a small enough number that every single one of them could share equally in the spotlight of the main sales promotion page.

Platform Breakdowns

The question on everybody's mind is : how many Linux users are there anyway?

Apparently a lot. I was surprised to see nearly three times as many Linux sales as Mac sales, as conventional wisdom has it that Linux is a much smaller market than Mac. There's several possible explanations for these results - pent-up demand from Linux users, Defender's Quest being one of only a handful of Linux games available, and the Linux theme of the promotion itself. There's also the possibility that we've simply been under-estimating the Linux market all along (especially considering the results from the various Humble Indie Bundles).

As a quick aside, the fact that our game is multi-platform has generated bonus revenue above and beyond what we've earned from Mac and Linux users. If not for our Linux build, we wouldn't have been invited to the Steam Linux sale, and the majority of that came from Windows users.


Methodology matters just as much as raw data, so here's how Steam calculates "linux" and "mac" users: "Mac/Linux sales are based on platform of purchase; or after 7 days, the platform with the most minutes played."


That's pretty straightforward, except for an ambiguous edge case - what happens if someone buys the game on Windows, plays for a minute, and then logs 60 hours on their Linux box 10 days later? Are they counted as a Windows user or a Linux user? (I've written to Valve for clarification on this). I'm not sure there's enough cases of this sort of thing to grossly affect the data.

UPDATE: Valve confirms: "Hi Lars, Great question.  The correct interpretation is #1, steam looks at the player’s play time and reassigns their platform category once and for all."


In any case, data from a one-week, Linux-themed sales period isn't exactly typical, so I compared these results to our lifetime direct (non-steam) sales stats. These numbers only account for sales made directly through www.defendersquest.com.  Whenever someone purchased the game from our site, they got links to Windows, Mac, and Linux builds of the game. Our storefront software, FastSpring, tracks how many times users click on each link.

Just as on Steam, Windows clearly dominates, and at least for our direct sales, Mac has a slight lead over Linux.

Our Linux builds came in three flavors - DEB, TAR.GZ, and RPM, to accommodate the various different Linux distributions. Of these, the DEB package accounted for 52% of downloads, the TAR.GZ had 36%, and the RPM package came in last at 11%.





This data set accounts for overall download attempts, not individual users. Our storefront provider, FastSpring, lets user download each file up to 6 times before a fixed expiration date, after which we have to manually reset the link at the customer's request. (Needless to say, this "feature" makes me want to replace FastSpring at the first opportunity).

Adobe AIR

One thing to keep in mind is that our game is built on Adobe AIR, which Linux users famously hate with a passion (along with Flash).  Since Adobe dropped support for AIR on Linux after version 2.6.0, Linux users have had to manually install the run-time, which can be a painful and error-prone process. To aid them, we created a special help page with step-by-step instructions, and put a prominent link to it on the front page of our site.

For the Steam build, my wonderful Linux guru Alexander Sturm was able to create an easy-installer script that provides all of the dependent libraries Adobe AIR needs, and then installs it with one simple click when you first launch the game from Steam. This works great on most distributions - especially Ubuntu and Mint, and we're ironing out the kinks with decent success for more obscure distros like ARCH.

So, keep in mind that our Linux sales could have been higher if we weren't bearing the stigma of Adobe AIR. (One of many reasons I'm seriously looking into using Haxe for our next project).

Conclusions

Last week on this reddit thread and Twitter I initially reported that our direct Linux downloads were about twice that of Mac, but clearly I had miscalculated -- my apologies! Still, all together Mac and Linux represent 18% of our direct revenue, and Linux revenue is not far behind Mac.  The results from the Steam Linux sale clearly put Linux over Mac, though only time will tell whether it maintains this lead moving forward.

Since I like to use technologies that makes it easy to target multiple platforms, I don't have to put an enormous amount of effort into "porting" a game to Mac or Linux. It's usually just a matter of changing the export settings on my compiler and doing a little troubleshooting when per-platform bugs crop up. I'd estimate we spent less than $1,000 worth of labor getting our game to run on Linux. All in all, that's a small price to pay for what turns out to be a significant chunk of revenue.



Maybe Linux gaming will take off, maybe it won't. Maybe the Steambox will be a huge game-changer, and we'll reap the benefits of being a launch title, or maybe not.

Whatever the case, I see three things in the Linux gaming community: a passionate and under-served market, little competition, and plenty of room for growth. That's the perfect place for an indie to be.

-Lars Out

Indie Solidarity - Telepath Tactics

Today a bit of a personal post.

We have been pretty successful with Defender's Quest as of late, being fortunate enough to get on Steam, GOG, and reap the benefits of that attention. We're still not filthy rich, but we're now generating enough sales that if this keeps up I can switch from doing game design as a risky part-time hobby to a full-time job.

However, a seemingly inescapable trend in this and almost any other field is that the "rich get richer." In order to make sales you need attention, and to get serious attention you need "social proof," which you get from... either having made a lot of sales or having got a lot of attention.  I'm not sure if this is an intractable problem, but I promised that if I ever got my head above water in this business that I would do my best to help other projects succeed.

So, when I saw my friend Craig Stern was launching a Kickstarter for his Strategy-RPG Telepath Tactics, I decided to put my money where my mouth is. I pledged what I can, but even with our game's recent success my contribution is just a drop in the bucket.

What I do have is the magical ability to create free copies of Defender's Quest, which people seem to think is worth something. So, right now, if you pledge at the $100 level or higher, you'll get a DRM-Free copy of Defender's Quest that runs on Mac/Windows/Linux, as well as the Soundtrack, AND you'll get a Steam Key. And that's on top of all the other swell rewards that Craig is handing out. Most importantly, you'll be helping a cool dude make a really cool game happen.

Unlike some other Kickstarters, this one's a slam dunk. Craig has a great track record of finishing really fun games, is an excellent designer as evidenced in his many thoughtful posts about RPG design

Those of you who know me personally might be familiar with my philosophical/economic views, which tend towards Distributism/Georgism as an alternative to both Capitalism and Socialism.  The two key tenets of Distributism are "Subsidiarity and Solidarity."

A really great book on the subject of Distributism

Subsidiarity means that power and control should be pushed down the social hierarchy as far as possible - ie, individuals, communities, and local governments should have more control over their lives than a distant and aloof authority.  And yes, this principle applies both in government and in business.  The Independence Movement in games (a term I prefer to "indie") is all about this - being empowered to make games the way you want to make them, not the way a publisher, distributor, or greenlight committee demands.

To actually achieve subsidiarity though, you need to escape the control of the powers and bureaucracies who Have All The Money who demand your freedom in exchange for funding. And that's where Solidarity comes in. Without solidarity, subsidiarity becomes plain ol' individualism, and we all die alone.

Solidarity means pulling together as a community for the common good.  I wouldn't be here today if it weren't for other Indies who have freely given their time and effort to contribute to the commons. Adam Atomic and the volunteers on the Flixel project gave me a great game engine, the FlashDevelop project gave me a great development tool, Daniel Cook and the FreeSound project gave me some great public domain assets to get started with, and on and on and on.

It's time I gave back.  This is just the first step.  I'll be thinking of more things I can do in the future, but this is the least I can do for a great, deserving, FUN project that needs to get off the ground. Even better, he's got a playable demo of the game you can try out right this minute.

Seriously, why are you still reading this?

Go give Craig some money.

PS:

Also check out these awesome Indie RPG's. It's almost a crime they haven't gotten more coverage.

Frayed Knights
3D dungeon-crawlery type game, with an emphasis on characters and humour. Dev is currently working on a sequel.

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S'makh-Daon 

Greenlight Game

By: RampantCoyote

Now Available (including a free demo version) at FrayedKnights.com Frayed Knights: The Skull of S'makh-Daon is a 3D indie computer RPG for Windows featuring turn-based combat, old-school sensibilities, and...

NEO Scavenger
Pitch: Ex-Bioware dev, post-apocalyptic survivalist skill-based "western" RPG

NEO Scavenger 

Greenlight Game

By: daniel_c_fedor

NEO Scavenger is a turn-based, rogue-like RPG where you must survive in the wasteland long enough to figure out who you are. Each turn you must decide where to go, how to scavenge for supplies, and how to deal with...

Phantasmaburbia
JRPG-style game about teenagers vs. the supernatural, emphasis on story, has an Earthboundy-vibe to it. Except it's way, way, better than Earthbound, IMHO.

Phantasmaburbia 

Greenlight Game

By: banov

"... the essence of a great game. It's fun, it's deep and it's a game that anyone would do well to try, even those who aren't necessarily RPG fans. " - JayIsgames...

I can't promise I'll be able to give a nod to every project that comes my way, but I'll do my best to point out all the ones I think our audience would like, and could use the attention :)

Tourette Quest - Media, Magic, and Nostrils!

The reaction to my super-dinky "Tourette's Quest" prototype has completely floored me.  For those of you just joining us, a few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about a new game project of mine, where I explore what it's like to have Tourette's Syndrome through the lens of game mechanics.

To put it mildly, people were interested!

Shortly after finishing the article and sending a single tweet to Sophie Prell of the Penny Arcade report (who'd expressed interest in the project earlier), the game was covered on The Penny Arcade Report, IGN.com, NBCNews.com, The Huffington Post, IndieGames.com, IndieStatik.com, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun. And that's not including all the tiny sites that just re-post the content!*

*Except for NBCNews.com. That one seems like a word-for-word reprint of the PA Report article, included in the above list anyway because it's freaking NBC!

Let me put that in perspective. Our last game, Defender's Quest has gotten some pretty great critical reviews and we've been constantly trying to get press for it. It often takes dozens and dozens of tries to get just one review or mention of the game. And that's for a mature, polished, critically-acclaimed, successful indie game. So about 50 to 1 in terms of (marketing effort) vs. (results).

With my crappy 2-week Tourette's Quest prototype, the ratio was more like 1 to 10 in the other direction!

I guess the internet is fascinated with Tourette's Syndrome, so I'm going to keep working on this.  I still have plans for a Defender's Quest follow-up, but given this massive response I think TQ needs some real attention.

So here's where I'm at!

Here's the latest prototype, available now right in your web browser! Go ahead and give it a spin and afterwards we'll talk about everything (Click the picture to play)

It's totally unbalanced and not very challenging yet, there's not a lot of room variety, the exit sometimes spawns ridiculous close to the entrance, etc. I'm working on it. Please use the cheat codes as necessary to adjust the experience to something interesting.

Switching to HaXe

I'd been using Game Maker Studio for the prototype, but I kept running up against my unfamiliarity with it. It was really easy to do simple things, like instantiate enemies, create maps, deal with collisions, etc, but really hard to do complicated things like randomly generate a dungeon or mess with data structures. Furthermore, I wasn't able to really nail the controls in that environment. Seeing as TQ is all about taking control away from the player, the basic controls themselves have to be top-notch.

So, I decided to go back to what I was familiar with - Flash. However, I had been following HaXe for a while, and meaning to learn about it, so this seemed like a good way to start. HaXe is a language very similar in syntax to Actionscript that creates source code for other programming languages as its output. These "targets" include actionscript, C++, Java, Javascript, and more. I installed HaxeFlixel and got to work.

Bottom line: I'm hooked. Documentation is a little sparse, but it's more than good enough to test my ideas out and the flash output seems just as good as writing natively in As3. The C++ build needs constant babysitting and tweaking, but it's cool to know I have a pathway to a C++ port that doesn't involve writing one from scratch.  The main advantage to using HaXe is that I'm not locked in to one platform - I can get a browser-based build of the game by exporting to Flash, and then also get a hardware-accelerated native C++ version, too. At least in theory :)

Now back to the game.

Time instead of Keys

I'd previously been using keys to open doors. Now, I've replaced keys with hours, displayed as little clocks. Opening a door takes 1 hour. If you have any spare hours at the end of the level, you get that many hours of sleep, which reduces your stress. So if you explore all the dungeon, that takes more time, and you have less time for sleep, which means starting the next level with more stress.

I wanted time-management to be part of the resource game, but having it abstractly represented via keys was just too much of a stretch. The time and sleep connection is clearer now, and taking 1 hour to open a door is a little less one-to-one than costing 1 key, but I figure it's not too bad.

New Tic: "Nostrils!"

The new prototype has a new tic, this time a verbal one. Previously, stress thresholds would make your character randomly cough, creating noise that would awaken and irritate nearby enemies. Now, in addition your character will sometimes say the word "nostrils." I plan on adding more words in the future. Since the main character is a wizard (among other things), having verbal tics is a liability - magic is done by incantation, so accidentally saying "nostrils" will summon a "Nostrilok," a man-sized pair of detached nostrils that wanders around the dungeon.

Tics come in regular and "critical" varieties and the warning thought bubble now indicates this. Critical coughs are bigger in radius, and critical "nostrils" summons two of them instead of one.

Spellcasting System

The biggest new change is the spellcasting system. I've been playing with this idea for years and I think TSQuest is a great place to try it out. Basically, you construct spells from modifiers and action words. So, you start with an action word like "fire" which shoots a fireball. You can add "big" to that to make it bigger and do more damage. And you can add "fast" to make it faster. Positive modifiers ("big", "fast") make the spell more costly, and negative modifiers ("slow", "small") make it cheaper.  This kind of similar to the system used in Magicka.

Creating the spell, "Big, Fast, Fire"

You have 7 spell slots in your inventory and can construct new spells at any time from the magic words that you know, and you can equip spells just like any other item. The spell-creation interface needs a lot of work, but it gets the job done for now.

Casting "Big, Fast, Fire"

Here's where Tourette's Syndrome comes in. Each tic ("cough", "nostrils", etc) has a random chance of happening every second, which starts at 0 and increases with your overall stress level. Every time you cast a spell, it checks against this same random chance for each of your verbal tics. If the die roll succeeds, than instead of casting the spell you meant to, it swaps out the action word with a verbal tic.

So instead of casting, "Big, Big, Fire" you can accidentally summon "Big, Big, Nostrils." Therefore you have to be careful about using magic if your stress level is too high. At max stress you have so many verbal tics that spellcasting becomes almost impossible and you are better off retreating and trying to recuperate.

Nostrils, Nostrils, everywhere!

When a spell "misfires" due to a tic it doesn't cost you any magic, but you have to deal with the new threat in the room. Currently summoned monsters aren't persistent (leaving the room deletes them), but I'm going to try to change that in the next prototype.

If I decide to model coprolalia (involuntary cursing), it will function similarly. In addition to learning new spell words, you can find curse words, in the literal sense - magical action words that do very bad things. So, picking up a spell book with three awesome new spell words might also contain a curse word or two. If you let those words into your vocabularly, then when your coprolalia flares up, the curses will randomly insert themselves into your spell and you'll have to deal with the consequences.

If I go there, I'll try to find some way to sanitize or obfuscate the words themselves.  Kids as young as eight and ten with Tourette's Syndrome are already contacting me about this game, and I expect the last thing their parents want me to do is give them something with curse words in it, especially because I know first-hand that doing so would exacerbate symptoms for kids with coprolalia.

From a gameplay and education standpoint, the only important thing about the words is that they are curse words, not which specific ones they happen to be.  If that makes a small part of my audience cry "self-censorship!" then so be it.  It's a natural extension of how I choose my words in real life to deal with my condition.  The game is heavily data-driven, at any rate, so any purists who want a more "authentic linguistic experience" can just mod their version of the game when it's released. :P

What It All Means

So, a lot of people have been asking me about my thematic approach and what it all "means." I think it's easiest if I start by saying what I'm not trying to do.

I'm not trying to show what it's like for me, Lars Doucet, living in the 21st century in middle-of-nowhere, Texas, to deal with Tourette's Syndrome.  That'd be a very boring game.  My adult life is very stable thanks to my kind and loving wife, as well as a lifetime of carefully constructed rituals and having a safe, controlled environment.  I don't have many tics these days, though all it takes to bring them raging back is to throw me in a different environment.

I'm also not trying to construct some convoluted metaphor for Tourette's Syndrome using monsters as stand-ins for society and nostrils as a representation for childhood angst or the Alienation of Man.  I know enough English majors to know how bad I am at literary criticism, and going for conceits like that creates a tangled mess that often communicates the exact opposite of what I meant.  That said, there are metaphors here and there, but I'm trying to keep things as close to the surface as possible.

What I'm really trying to do is answer this question:

"What if Link had Tourette's Syndrome?"

We gamers have all been Link before: running around a dungeon fighting monsters, casting spells, and swigging potions. Since everyone knows what it's like to be Link, I can use that basic foundation to explain what it's like to have Tourette's Syndrome, simply by giving Link the symptoms.

Ultimately, I'm going for a procedural approach over a literary one. I want to show what the internal experience of a Tourette's patient's mind is like, with the core experiences being: premonition, compulsion, helpless panic and dealing with it.

Most of the time you know what tics you're about to have. This is premonition - you (usually) get a little warning, which is accompanied by a buildup of tension. This is followed by compulsion - tension explodes and you have to release the tic. Lest anyone think this is just a lack of willpower, try to will your way out of having to blink or poop the next time your body compels you.  

I feel like the current prototype does an okay job of modelling those two concepts. In order to nail helpless panic and dealing with it, though, I need to give the player something to do that Tourette's can then interfere with, hence the dungeon-crawling.  So you're Link Leif, in a dungeon, fighting monsters, getting loot, trying not to die. I've intentionally borrowed the visual presentation and mechanical style of The Legend of Zelda, as well as the popular action/roguelike* it inspired, The Binding of Isaac. So for those who think I may be "cloning" or "ripping-off" those games - guilty as charged! :)

*As people keep reminding me, this new genre is technically a "roguelike-like" since we're departing more and more from the original game, Rogue.

Serious Roots

I first had the idea for TouretteQuest years ago, but the original design doc had a more mundane setting. It was a "real-life simulator" where you'd try to go through daily tasks in high school or college and have to manage your symptoms, etc, not unlike The Sims or the super-old Text Adventure, Starfleet Academy.  

I scrapped that idea because it felt boring. I started my career in "Serious Games" research, and with a few notable exceptions, the committees I worked for constantly assumed that to make games "relevant" to our target audience, we had to model their everyday lives, and dispense with usual video game tropes like fantasy elements, power ups, and enemies.  This despite the fact that our own focus group research showed inner-city kids (one of our targets) had a strong hankering for dragons, Naruto, and SpongeBob Squarepants.

I feel like Serious Game designers cut themselves off at the knees with this thinking. "Education" vs. "Entertainment" is a false dichotomy. You can make things that are fun and thoughtful by making a regular, good ol' fashioned Video Game, and then just do some research.  That's what I tried to accomplish with my own games CellCraft and Super Energy Apocalypse. Another good examples is a recent gamasutra article on realistic sword combat. When I looked back at that old TS Quest draft, I saw those old pressures in the back of my mind - "This is a serious topic. Make it more serious."

But you know what? This time I'm the target audience, at least in part.  I actually have Tourette's Syndrome. And you know what's relevant to me? 

VIDEO GAMES. 

*Mic drop*

Free 2 Play and the Four Currencies

One of my most popular articles was "Piracy and the Four Currencies", which explains the economics of piracy in terms of four "psychological currencies": money-dollars ($M), time-dollars ($T), pain-in-the-butt dollars ($P) and integrity-dollars ($I). Purchases don't just cost money; they also cost different amounts of time, pain-in-the butt, and (sometimes) moral integrity.

Quick Summary

In the article, I argue that piracy, though it costs 0 $M, has a non-zero $T, $P, and $I cost, because the pirate must know where to search, risk exposure to malware, and do something illegal (which has a variable $I cost depending on one's outlook). Developers can compete with piracy by removing invasive DRM and practicing good customer service, which lowers $T and $P costs.  How much weight an individual gives to each currency varies widely.  For example, a wealthy person may value convenience over money, a busy person may value time the most, and someone with strong convictions might refuse to compromise their beliefs ("spending" $I*) for money's sake alone.

*Exactly what $I represents varies with ideology.  For example, Richard Stallman would put a large $I cost on using proprietary software, whereas I do not, and strict vegetarians might assign an $I cost to fur coats.

Free 2 Play

Now, let's apply the  four currency model to Free 2 Play games.

F2P is clearly here to stay.  It's seen big success with Angry Birds, Team Fortress 2, and given a new lease on life to MMO's that aren't World of Warcraft.  However, we've also just witnessed the spectacular implosion of F2P standard-bearer Zynga, and seen article after article about popular, critically-acclaimed F2P games that garner little revenue.

The debate is heated, so let's step back, put down our pitchforks (on both sides), and see what's going on.

Analysis

First of all, F2P competes well with piracy, because the barrier to entry couldn't be any lower.  Downloading an F2P game costs no $M, little $T, no $P, and no $I (for those who feel guilty about piracy).

Though FTP has no $M cost, it inserts $T and $P costs throughout the game to encourage players to pay $M instead.  This is the opposite of a traditional game, where there is no extra $T, $P, or $M cost once you've bought the game (invasive DRM, DLC, and bad design notwithstanding).

According to some best practices of F2P design, developers should intentionally inject inconvenience into games, which players can remove in exchange for money.  This means barriers, time sinks, and "dual-currency" systems where players can pay real money for rewards, or grind for hours instead.

In this way, traditional games are like laser printers: expensive to buy, cheap and easy to operate.  F2P games are like ink jets: cheap to buy, but expensive and sometimes a pain to operate, especially if the company has questionable business tactics.

On the one hand, F2P gives players options. Lots of people have no money but plenty of time and/or plenty of pain-in-the-butt tolerance.  Furthermore, it enables players to purchase things "a-la-carte," in case there are only certain aspects of the game they really want.  These are good things.

On the other hand, F2P adds inconveniences and compromises the "magic circle" by constantly asking the player for money.  These practices are why some designers call F2P "evil," and not just because they're luddites* who are afraid of change, as some have implied.  If anything, F2P is a return to the past as much as it is a step towards the future.  We've been here before, and it's called The Arcade.

Despite my reservations and general grumpiness, I do think F2P can drive great things - you only have to look at Team Fortress 2, League of Legends, and Triple Town to see that.  But it still deserves a critical eye.

*As an aside, the historical Luddites have been grossly misrepresented by industrialist propaganda and (incorrect) associations with religious fundamentalism.  I highly recommend the book Rebels Against the Future by Kirkpatrick Sale for an alternative viewpoint.

When (and why) F2P Fails

Let's look at some F2P games that have failed and see if the four currencies can tell us why.

The developers of Punch Quest and MonkeyDrums have suggested that their games failed because they were too nice - i.e., they embraced F2P but still hung onto the idea that they could "delight" their customers into paying more for the experience.  I feel for these teams and applaud their willingness to be so open with such a painful experience, so let's see if we can learn from it.

As I mentioned in Pay What You Want and the Four Currencies, the simple act of making something free removes the $I cost of not paying.  This is why donationware doesn't work - nobody pays because you gave them permission not to.  By making too much content easily accessible or free, customers feel no obligation to pay.  If you ask for the sale, however, there's a good chance you'll get them to pay, especially if there's a free sample.

Traditional game design has trained us to maximize the value we are giving players for their money, charge them once for it, and call it a day.  F2P requires an entirely new perspective that doesn't focus on delivering all the goodies in one big package.  It seems these developers had a hard time choosing between F2P and traditional design.  So, let's take a quick look at tradition.

The Evolving "Traditional" Model

In the past, video games were sold in retail stores as packaged goods that you bought sight-unseen. Retail is certainly on the decline, but those who use this fact to decry up-front pricing* are attacking a straw man. "Progress" doesn't happen in only one direction, and the traditional model has been evolving right along with the others.

*In fairness to Dan, he's right that charging 99 cents for all of TripleTown would be insane, and I'm largely a fan of his approach to F2P design.  That said, I can think of more than just a few indie developers who use the up-front pricing model without relying on mega-hits to succeed.

Traditioooooon!

We'll use ourselves as an example of the "neo-traditional*" model. With Defender's Quest, we relied on a lengthy, compelling, browser-based demo to drive sales. This allowed us to make good revenue without the benefit of major portals like GOG and Steam, although we were eventually able to attract their attention. We  survived by selling directly from our own site and free Flash portals like Kongregate, where we leveraged their microtransaction engine to sell an online version of the game.

*We seriously need a better name than that.

Furthermore, although the price is up-front, it's by no means "fixed." We started at $6.99 when we launched in January but made so many coupons available that anyone paying attention could nab it for $4.99.  Meanwhile, we handed out free promotional codes left and right.

We eventually raised the price to $14.99 for the gold edition launch but started with a "launch sale" of $9.99 through the first week on Steam.  And as everybody knows, Steam and GOG are fond of periodic sales with deep discounts, and we will be participating in every event they invite us to. Furthermore, we have some crazy plans of our own, so stick around for our one-year anniversary next October 30th.  Because players know that games often go on sale, they can exchange $M for $T by waiting for a price drop.

The ability to sell a game year-round, at variable prices, while keeping the majority of the revenue is a far cry from the old days of having a one-month shelf-life in a retail store and collecting a few percentage points in royalties - if you were lucky. That's the old traditional model, and I'm happy it's dying.

However, the advantage of the new traditional model is that it gets the financial exchange out of the way up front, which lets developers focus solely on game play rather than a string of tiny sales pitches. Furthermore, it avoids fracturing the game's shared cultural experience into low and high-paying tiers.  I realize that the traditional model has the potential for a smaller player base and lost income from "true fans" and whales, but I have some ideas about that and, more importantly, have no doubt that the model will continue to evolve to meet these challenges.

Finally, and I think most importantly, the traditional model and F2P have much to learn from each other. They are points on a spectrum rather than fixed binary alternatives.  The "neo-traditional" model incorporates many aspects of both, but takes it in a different direction than a typical iPhone game or console title for sale at GameStop.

Summing up F2P

F2P brings with it new opportunities, audiences, and markets, but it's not magic. Simply put, instead of front-loading the $M cost, it sprinkles alternative $P and $T costs throughout the experience as inducements to make you pay $M.

F2P pros:

• Raises the ceiling on how much a single player can spend
• Lowers the barrier to entry almost entirely
• Opens up new genres and embraces new audiences

F2P cons:

• Not a good fit for many genres (especially those focused on narrative)
• Injects financial motivations directly into the game
• Annoys players
• Can corrupt the design (c.f. Zynga)
• 
  

Closing Thoughts

Furthermore, those obsessed with growth* as the sole metric of the industry's sector-by-sector health should be slapped with a large, wet trout.  Facebook, mobile, and other once-emerging trends are obviously here to stay, but reports about the traditional industry's decline have been greatly exaggerated, especially because NPD results are grossly misleading.  And contrary to popular wisdom, the explosive growth of mobile has not doomed Nintendo's handheld market, though I can't say the same for the PSVita.

Retail sales of console games do seem to be on the decline, but the slowdown in PC sales should not be taken as an indication that PC software developers are in trouble. For example, eventually you get to the point where everyone who wants a car has one, so although it's harder to sell new ones, more cars are being driven than ever before.  Similarly, sales of new PC's have peaked because they are powerful enough, and, with a little maintenance, a decent rig can last you the better part of a decade. This is bad news for people like Dell who need to push hardware, but for those of us who just make games that run on the dang things, times couldn't be better.

Mobile platforms will eventually reach their saturation point, too, and then the pundits will start shouting that mobile is dead, and eyePhones are the Next Big Thing.

So do yourself a favor; play a great Free2Play game or two. Then play some great traditional games by friendly indie developers. Then slap a pundit with a fish.

*Second side note: the single-minded focus on "growth" is a major fallacy of modern economic thought. See Tim Jackson's Prosperity Without Growth for an alternative viewpoint. 

Watch CNBC and take a shot every time a pundit says "growth."

Tourette's Quest

Ever since we launched Defender's Quest on Steam, GOG, and other fine stores two weeks ago, I've been doing nothing but support and patches. My brain is about to melt and if I don't carve out some time to do something different every once in a while, I'll explode.

So from now on, every Friday is my "do something else" time. My personal "20% time," if you will, to keep my creative muscles from getting burnt out.


So, I'm prototyping a new game idea. Let's talk about it.

I have Tourette's Syndrome, a fun little brain disease that was a major source of pain in my childhood but which I've since learned to deal with.  Although I'm no clinical expert on the syndrome, as a patient I have privileged access to the way the syndrome behaves.  I've often thought it could make a cool idea for a game mechanic.

Relax, relax. I'm still going to keep supporting Defender's Quest and we'll probably start working on either FreeLC or a sequel soon, this is just my new Friday hobby time project ;)

So here it is- a basic game idea based on my experiences with Tourette's Syndrome.

What is Tourette's Syndrome?

Simply put, Tourette's is a neurological disease that makes you do weird stuff against your own will.  These unintentional behaviors are called "tics" and range from simple "nervous tics" to strange, complex, obscene, or even violent physical and verbal outbursts.  There's no cure for TS, and I doubt there will be in my lifetime. Seeing as it's neither lethal nor degenerative, I can live with that.

Most people's experience with the condition is only through the sensationalized portrayal they see in television and movies. "Movie Tourette's," as I like to call it, obsessively focuses on one lurid and fairly rare symptom called coprolalia, or involuntary cursing.  It's a shame the media focuses so much on this one rare thing because it doesn't accurately represent the wide range of symptom "portfolios" that present in the Tourette's population, especially given how rare coprolalia is.

One of the most common Tourette's symptom  is compulsive coughing, which occurs despite any actual physical need to cough (such as allergies, cold, etc).  Other "mild" symptoms include compulsive eye blinking, muscle twitches, and making quick, short noises.  On the extreme physical end of things you have full-body tics, such as punching things, throwing oneself down a flight of stairs, and uncontrollable muscle jerks so severe the patient risks self-injury.  Extreme verbal tics can be just as bizarre - spontaneously bursting into song, rattling off paragraph-length chains of nonsense, and of course, obscenities.

Tics cannot be effectively "suppressed" through force of will alone. At best a patient can delay tics for a while, at the cost of making them worse later.  Beyond the physical challenges in living inside a body that constantly short-circuits, social spaces can be difficult to navigate, because Tourette's Syndrome turns you into a very annoying human being, and there's not always much you can do about it.

I could write a whole book on what it's like to live with the disease, but this is a game design blog, so let's talk about the prototype.

The game design is inspired by Spelunky, FTL, and The Binding of Isaac.  It's a procedurally generated zelda-like dungeon crawler where resource management is key. The central "resource" you have to manage is mental stress and Tourette's symptoms.  Your goal is to make it as far as you can in a dungeon without dying, and each floor unlocks a new Tourette's Symptom.  You start with mild symptoms and progress to more severe ones, all of which are chosen randomly, so over multiple play-throughs the player gets to experience the full range of Tourette's "symptom portfolios."

All sorts of things increase stress. Just walking into a room with more than few npc's or monsters in it is inherently stressful, for instance. This, and all other aspects of the game, are based on my life experiences - for instance, friends have noted that my tics sharply increase whenever there's more than three people in the room. Monsters can attack you, which makes you lose health and/or gain stress.

The more stress you have, the more likely you are to have tics. You usually get a little warning about this - you can see in the above screenshot that the character is about to cough.  He can try to suppress this by holding spacebar until the tic passes, but this will increase his stress level and make future tics more likely. Additionally, the little thought bubble overlay provides a tiny distraction and trying to juggle the knowledge that you're about to have a tic with second-to-second combat decisions is a pretty close analogue to my life, when I'm carrying on a conversation with someone and I just know I'm about to tell them "Your face reminds me of a watermelon carved into a bust of your face*"

*Actual tic. This is one of the milder ones.

Your goal for each floor is to make it to the stairwell at the end of the maze and advance to the next dungeon.  You start each dungeon with a fixed amount of keys**, which are like the "fuel" system in FTL - unlocking a room costs 1 key.  If you gun right for the exit, you'll have plenty of keys left over, which you can cash in for extra hours of sleep, clearing out your stress and giving you a leg up on your symptoms:

If you choose to burn the midnight oil, however, you can explore every nook and cranny of the current floor, and stock up on resources, items, and other useful loot, at the cost of diminished sleep and loads of symptoms to contend with on the next floor. If you run out of keys entirely, you can sacrifice a bomb to just blow the door up, or spend hearts to get through.

**The key mechanic is directly inspired by Christine Miserandino's "Spoon Theory" metaphor, which comes from her personal story about living with Lupus, and is a great way to explain the intangible "resource" costs of these kinds of diseases to outsiders.

The prototype is at a very early stage. There's only one dungeon floor, and the only tic I've implemented so far is coughing. Depending on the severity of your stress, the cough radius will be either small or large. Coughing wakes up sleeping monsters, so it's in your best interest to avoid it whenever possible. If you think your cough will be small, standing in the corner and letting it out is a good strategy because it doesn't increase stress. Otherwise, you might be better of suppressing it just to get you through the current room, as long as you can deal with the extra stress.

Coughing annoys people. Also monsters!

The real challenge in designing this prototype is that I'm modeling a system that takes away control, and a fundamental rule of game design is that you never take away control.

Rules are meant to be broken, of course, but they're there for a reason - if I'm going to yank control away with something as invasive as Tourette's Syndrome, I need to be very careful about how I do that so the player still has enough tools at their disposal so that winning or losing follows from how well they play the game.

What I'm aiming for is a play style where you don't have perfect control over your minute-to-minute actions, so you take that control back on a larger, zoomed-out scale. You have to carefully manage what situations you let yourself get into, think about what risks you want to take, and conserve your physical and mental resources.  Often, you'll have to sacrifice going after something you want if you're not prepared to deal with the symptomatic consequences.  This is exactly how I handle Tourette's symptoms in real life, and I think it could make a cool game.

If you'd like to see more Tourette's quest, then do me a favor and buy a copy of Defender's Quest for yourself or a friend so I can afford to pursue crazy side projects like this one!

Prototype version #0.0.dinky.crap

You can download the current, super terrible prototype right here. 

Update: all prototype versions are listed here:
Version 0.0.0 - November 09, 2012
Version 0.0.1 - November 12, 2012

It's windows only for now and thrown together in Game Maker. You move with the arrow keys, attack with X, and suppress tics with SPACE. If you run out of hearts, you die.

Stress is currently measured in both positive and negative units - so just like in my own life, doing things that make you happy and excited, such as getting loot, actually increase your symptoms. Stress (both positive and negative) goes down whenever you enter a new room, but goes up if there's a lot of monsters in it. Rooms are "labeled" so you can anticipate what's in there before venturing forth, which is key to risk management.  The stress system is likely to go through a lot of iterations before the end.

There's only two monster types right now - goblins and "nostriloks."  Nostriloks increase your stress but are otherwise harmless, and goblins can hurt you, but start off asleep until awoken by an attack or a cough.  The idea behind the nostrils is that the word "Nostrils!" is my most frequent verbal tic. One idea I had is that this could be a magical world where magic is done by incantation - so being a wizard with Tourette's is a severe liability. Every time you have the "Nostrils!" tic you'll say the word and summon a Nostrilok. Normally this isn't a problem, but if you have a lot of stress you could fill up the room with minor enemies and get yourself into a bad situation pretty quickly. This, along with a million other ideas, isn't implemented yet.

You can collect money, but it doesn't do anything just yet, nor can you use bombs, or magic, or anything other than your sword for right now. So, let me know what you think and if you have any feedback. I have no idea where I'm going to take this thing or even if it's going to turn into a full-fledged game or not, but I felt like sharing.

Also, graphics, sound, and visual glitches will intentionally remain terrible throughout the entire prototyping phase. I find whenever I try to polish the assets up I start getting needlessly attached and it interferes with just finding a good central design.

Enjoy.