Kill Ten Rats

The English-localized version of Recettear launches today. I played through the demo, and I wanted to share a few thoughts. Put me down for “weakly recommends.”

Recettear is “an item shop’s tale.” You know those merchants back at town in your fantasy adventure games? Recettear is your shop, and you are Recette. Your father was one of those adventurers, and he went missing (presumed dead) after taking out a substantial loan with your house as collateral. Tear is your partner, an accountant fairy from the financial company who provides you with advice and collects periodic, increasing loan payments.

The basic game is an economic sim. Continue reading Recettear Demo

MMOs broke me of reading manuals. I used to read them, all of them. I am a junkie for rules and design — I have read rulebooks for far more pen-and-paper games than I have ever played. I have read ~200 page manuals for 4X games.

I now rely on tutorials. Almost all games come with them. Even games without explicit tutorials have a way to ease you along the learning curve.

MMOs broke me of reading manuals because the manuals were wrong. I do not blame the manual writers. What they wrote was presumably correct when they wrote it. Then two classes were cut in the last month of beta, one was re-done, one changed its name, twelve abilities changed names the week before the game went gold (including several that swapped names), and half the numbers changed. Then everything changed within the first three months, so only the general class descriptions were correct. Then the vision of some classes changed a year or two later. The developers’ online documentation is rarely completely correct, so let us not even hope for the printed version that needed to be finalized a month before the release date. (And people buy printed guides as they would for single-player console games, ha.) Some MMOs learned this and made the manual uselessly vague, which is another non-solution.

Even a decade ago, you went to the fan sites to learn how the game really worked. Now every game has a wiki and multiple forums with new user guides. It has become a measure of how newbie-friendly a game/community is: you need some small number of helpful, literate people to write the guides, so either the game is popular enough to have several of those people (good sign) or a small game has enough concentrated awesomeness in its community to have several (good sign). If a game is worth playing, people will be encouraging you to get started.

Now I get many games via digital distribution. Do they come with manuals? A few games have something on the start menu that directs you there, but I do not know if they included PDFs of the manual. Maybe it is in a folder somewhere? It would be helpful if the Steam library included a “manual” button, but the prominent one is “play.” So I play, rely on the tutorial, and that usually sees me through.

: Zubon

I really want to write about design that is forgiving of error, but a more basic point in The Design of Everyday Things keeps interfering: much user error is design error. If users keep doing the same things wrong, there is probably something about the design that is encouraging them to do the wrong thing. That is not their fault. Problems that keep arising are design problems; fix them, work around them, or admit that the problem is too hard for you. Do not blame users unfairly.

Veteran players forget this. You know what to do because you have done it twenty times, and maybe the current design even feels intuitive because you know what the developers were planning, how the system has evolved over several years, and how it interacts with or mirrors other systems. You will hear people decry the ignorance of newcomers; why can they not go through a simple 20-step process across only four screens where only two of the commands are undocumented? And look, if you just install these two mods, rebind these keys, and change these settings, that dungeon is easy mode.

This relates to my refrain from Gordon Walton that hardcore gamers will crawl through barbed wire to reach the fun while most of the market will not put up with that crap. There are virtues in that, as it allows quicker iterative development and lets players get a closer connection to the game and its development. But it means having an unpolished game with sharp edges and pitfalls. The new guy did not expect pits of broken glass on the path to the picnic. That you know the workarounds does not mean that there are not things to be worked around. That someone does not want to learn them all does not make him lazy, at least not in a bad way; I pay to play, I get paid to work.

Anti-social behavior in the game is also designed in. If players keep doing the same horrible things, game design probably encourages it. If the game rewards sociopathic behavior in groups, you will see more of it. Designers do not intend to reward people for acting against the interests of their groupmates, but game designs certainly do so.

If the players are not playing your game how you want them to, you should look at what the design encourages them to do. And remember that other design issues may also be giving people trouble in playing your game at all.

: Zubon