Our groups idea for TV show

Jekaterina wrote the synopsis of our "Do you even Cult" - reality TV series.

The post can be found here.

StarCraft 2 in 2018

It has now been 8 years since StarCraft 2 was released. That also marks 20 years for StarCraft franchise.

I remember the day when the game came out: all of my friends playing it, new custom maps made every day and flourishing fanbase. There were multiple YouTube channels casting the games and they would get almost 100 000 views each that was much for the time.

Recently I won a giveaway for some in-game items and decided to try out the game again. Contrary to the popular belief of the game being long dead I was surprised to see almost instant queues for matches and all difficulties of co-op missions.

This made me think of what has changed. Back in the days SC2 was perceived as a super competitive game (it still is) so the more casual players didn't last long. Now Blizzard has made the game free, added co-op missions with good progression system and fleshed out the ladder system.

RTS as genre has been very niche now for a long time so adding features like co-op that haven't been previously done seems to be the way to go forward.

Music video analysis

Nightwish - Amaranth

One of my favorite songs. Nightwish is a metal band that picked Symphonic Metal as their genre. This can be distinguished from normal metal from the usage of instruments. The synthesizer is a big part of this.

In this video women are displayed as the main focus and men as supporting characters. The singer is displayed in a revealing outfit and has the background band has a bit more formal wear. Their emotions are also completely different: singer having more passive emotions with constant eye contact and the band having no eye contact with very aggressive movements that display anger.

This could be related to the other half of the music video that focuses on escorting a fallen angel. The angel is found by 2 boys. While they carry her, the main focus is always on the angel and the boys are on the side. Similar way the angry villagers are also displayed briefly in closeups showing their anger and disgust.

The interesting part about this video is that the Nightwish band is displayed singing and playing underground. The fallen angel is presented as something clean and pure but becomes hated by the people, only the boys caring for her. This could be interpreted as the authors fear of being hated by people and then becoming something greater and overcoming those fears. It's a pretty dark world view since it feels like everyone is scared of something new and try their best to get rid of it.

Megadimension Neptunia VII - analysis

During this holiday I finally had time to pick up a game from my backlog and this time it was Megadimension Neptunis VII. This is a JRPG that has quite a big following with 4 games in the main series and multiple spin-off games.

I have played 2 of those before (Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 1 & 2). As the names probably tell with the combination of being Japanese the games are pretty over the top. There is a lot of dialogue that has no choices but are well structured and the main story has both English and Japanese voices.

Here's a 1 minute video showcasing some of the battle effects available.

Overall Neptunia games are pretty generic JRPGs when it comes to mechanics: turn based combat, big numbers, bad tooltips with many different stats and big boss battles.

Of course that includes cute anime girls too.

The previous games had multiple endings based on the way you played. This one in the other hand only had 3 endings and those were based on how many dialogues you found. I had to play the game on New Game to reach the "True Ending" that required some grinding that I had skipped on my first playthough.

Since I already had played some JRPGs before (Kingdom Hearts, Dark Souls) and a ton of MMORPG games the grinding for me is nothing new. That is probably the first point that turns off a lot of people since Neptunia games tend to require quite a lot of optional monster hunting to progress.

However with Megadimension I felt like there was in fact less grinding than the previous games. There were maybe around 3 times during the story where I felt like getting ripped apart by enemies. Those were mostly due to the way the game separates the characters at certain point of the story so you might end up having to play someone who is multiple levels behind your main character.

What I found really interesting compared to the previous games was the New Game playthrough. This time there was a new Hidden Treasure feature added that gives the player incentives to return to old dungeons and complete secondary objectives to unlock extra rewards. That combined with the possibility of reaching True Ending made the second playthrough (with high level characters) really enjoyable. Also the fact that you don't lose any of them during the new playthrough is a huge plus to me.

62 hours well spent.

Pikku Kakkonen Game Jam

I did mention in my post about Mobile games for children that I'd be attending Pikku Kakkonen Game Jam. That took place last weekend and it was really cool. This will be a small coverage of what took place there and what we got done.

I'll just start this post with the video (made by me) about the game my team created.

Our main concepts for the game came from children who sent their ideas to YLE. There were a lot of different kinds of characters made by 3-7 year old. After we took out 2 of our favorite ideas, we then proceeded to form teams and refine them further.

The second day we started working. Our team consisted of 4 artists, 2 coders and a music guy. The core idea for the game was to create a driving game where the player can see and interact with various characters created from the concept pictures.
We managed to split the workload well with our team (I did 3D model for the car and 2 characters).
After the day was done, we already had a working demo that was only missing the finalized assets.

On the third day we started to wrap up the project. Pieces started coming together fast and the final game was done well before the deadline. Later that day we had a bunch (around 20) kids visiting the studio and getting a chance to test our games.

It was really cool to see the reactions and different approaches they had to our games. We were not allowed to say anything about the game so it was interesting to see what approach they took. I think everyone who played our game really enjoyed it.

The cool guys at YLE even gave us some rewards (stickers and patch).

My Mindtrek 2018 coverage

Now that Mindtrek is over it's time to share my experiences of the event. I did participate on both days trying to attend most of the game related topics (although second day didn't really have any).

Day 1:

In the morning there was an interesting presentation about improving the Chinese education structure. It was mainly targeting kids who attend primary schools since there is massive differences in the quality of teaching. What needs to be improved is the Chinese society as whole since the family structure is very attached to schools. Their solutions were creating more open study structures and trying to keep parents involved in education process by utilizing online communities.

After the first presentation ended I headed to a much smaller room that held the academic presentations about game related topics. The first 3 topics were about utilizing gamification to make chores more bearable.

First one of these research topics was about letting the players decide what kind of game they want. They then analyzed the game elements players chose and tried to come up with the "best" set of elements. The interesting part was that even if the elements are widely accepted as good, they might become worse if combined with others and vice versa. That makes it relatively difficult to determine "one-size-fits-all" kind of element set.

Second research was done with an online store. Their goal was to gamify a storefront and test the difference between tangible (physical) versus intangible (virtual) rewards. The results did show that the tangible rewards were increasing the user activity by around 25% whereas the intangible ones had almost no effect. It was interesting to see that the results with intangible rewards we so bad but I feel like they just didn't implement it correctly. Making a good virtual reward system would require a pretty large upfront investment and I don't think they had that.

Third research was about motivating people to move by making a game out of it and displaying the results in a public place. The game itself didn't seem to have much effect but when it was displayed for others to see people did start moving more. I felt like the sample size was a bit too small for this study and the target group was already moving so it was something that would motivate people who already move to move more.


After these, there was a small analysis on how Game Jam design process was different from a normal design. That felt kind of pointless because the sample size was 1 group and the presentation didn't really show any results of the research.

We also had a guy that had done analysis of the players reaction to The Division -game (7 people) and how / why their opinions changed during the gameplay. It was nice to see that someone can actually pull of an academic research about a topic like this. Personally I felt like the guy doing this just wanted a 60$ game for free.

Analyzing F2P games from paying players perspective was an interesting topic. However, this research was done in 2015 and their target audience barely had any mobile game experience so it kind of misses the point of "whales". There were certain good points like the difference between value of cosmetics and progress but it barely scratched the topic of P2W and big spenders.

The same group who did the analysis of game elements also made analysis on user preferred elements in live streams. The elements itself were well analyzed and their ratings recorded. I think this research could be used as a baseline when trying to understand what kind of elements are available for streamers but none of the elements are actually needed for having a successful stream.

And at last for day 1 we had a small study done to analyze the abuse targeted to minors in DotA 2. In this research, it was found out that the minors are less affected by the abuse than what was hypothesized and that the minors do tend to end up in the punishment queue more than older players. I feel like this research could have had more interesting outcomes if their target group was larger than 30 people and if they analyzed the data on more angles than just the age. For example players skill, country, gender and voice chat usage were not considered at all.


Day 2:

I was in early, figured out that it would be nice to go and listen the discussion about data analysis. The speaker did nail quite a few good points about how companies are utilizing data and how everything collects it but not many people know how to utilize it. It was a pretty straightforward presentation and the main giveaway was that they had developed an add-on (global consent manager) for browsers that automatically tells the websites how the users data can be used. Not really my favorite topic but I feel like it would be nice if it was possible to just tick "no" everywhere by default.

After a short break, in the same hall, we had a completely different kind of presentation. This one was about a country called Liberland. It's about 2 square kilometer large piece of land between Croatia and Serbia. Their goal is to create a tax heaven that uses bitcoins as their main currency and has an open source government. Currently there is over 500 000 applied citizens for the country.

That presentation really felt like an advertisement for bitcoin millionaires who just want to launder their money. It's an interesting idea by itself but it just feels like the "people in power" are spending their times visiting different lunch parties.

And that was the end of Day 2 for me. I wanted to visit the Internet OS presentation but it got cancelled 15 minutes before the start and that meant another 90 minutes of just standing around before the next presentations.

By far the best part was the food, it was very good on both days (and free). It was nice to get an insight on what kind of papers qualify as research on game related topics. I think the even itself felt pretty empty, might be due to the ticket prices being quite ridiculous for everyone except students. The topics themselves were also mostly targeted to people who are in the education field.

A quick look into the current mobile games aimed at children

Next week Yle is hosting Pikku Kakkonen Game Jam at Mediapolis (Finnish kids TV show). I'll be participating in that as a designer so I thought it would be nice to take a quick look at what kind of mobile games are made for kids nowadays.

The first list I read was 30 of the best Android games for kids between the ages of 2-8 that was created last year so the games are relatively new. There are a few things that most of the games in the list have in common:

1. Very easy controls (usually involves only tapping)
2. Mostly animal themed characters
3. Doing stupid things
4. Many educational games
5. No IAP / Ads (in most cases, looking at you Disney..)
6. Destroying things

Many of these games also had an upfront cost that is rare to see in other mobile market. I guess that's due to parents finding them and rather paying 1-3€ than having the game infected by ads or IAPs.

The most popular game in list with 50+ million downloads "Toca Kitchen 2"

The other list was the official Pikku Kakkonen Games list. These games are played as mini games inside the official app. There is also a website that has archived all the previous games. What stood about these was that most of them are 2D games and don't really offer any unique features on the first glance.

Example of a minigame from Pikku Kakkonen app

The website itself was pretty well designed with lots of interactive elements that make sounds or play some kind of animation. The buttons itself first played a video explaining what is behind them that is something I haven't seen elsewhere.

Overall I think the games aimed at children don't receive that big of a budget due to them not being very profitable. There are a few exceptions to this, especially the ones that are made by big companies like Disney but those games usually involve either ads, IAPs or both.

When designing something that  is supposed to be played by kids younger than 8 it's important to keep in mind that it needs to be super simple and engaging, otherwise the player might feel overwhelmed or bored and end up losing interest. Another way to make the games more engaging is adding seemingly useless things like interactive objects that don't necessarily add anything to the core game play but makes the games more immersive.