Why I'm Reluctant To Critique... Whatever You Created

How many here were raised under the rule from Bambi, "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all?"  I know I was.  And hence an immediate conundrum when you're out to critique a game that someone else has created.  It's especially challenging when an aspiring indie asks me to "take a look at their game and let me know what I think," or similar.

Let me back up for a moment.  In his post about his Critter Code of Ethics (an important read for anyone thinking about giving or receiving criticism), my friend Stephen Parrish writes:

There are three kinds of writers: those who aren't interested in criticism; those who, when they ask for criticism, are really seeking validation; and those who incorporate criticism and improve their work.

This is a fundamental truth that a lot of folks don't stop to consider.  I know that I was personally in that second group for most of my younger life -- I'd ask for criticism, expect praise, and then sulk if I got actual criticism.  This helped no one, least of all me, and wasted the time of the person who was giving me critiques. 

Taking Criticism Effectively Is Hard
Even back in college, when my wife would give me perfectly valid (and quite insightful) commentary on my own fiction writing, I was known for having an overstrong emotional reaction.  Part of the problem was this: when we were younger, and I was a worse writer, she pretty much just gave me praise, oohing and ahing over what was good and ignoring the rest.  Then as we both grew older and wiser, she started actually trying to give me better feedback; she'd stayed in the field of literature, which I'd partly abandoned for computers, and she'd picked up a lot of stuff I had not.  However, in that same span I had also grown as a writer as most people do with time, and so my experience was that I had gotten better and she was suddenly critical.

Of course, that wasn't what was happening at all.  It was merely that she was more sure of herself and of me, and that I was far enough along the path of my abortive literary career that I should have been ready to hear her criticism.  There was some undeserved static from me in the meantime, but eventually we worked through that, I managed to mostly put my emotional reactions on hold, and we both managed to learn a lot together from the process of editing my novels.

However, Taking Criticism Effectively Is Worthwhile
So, happy story, right?  Put your emotions on hold, suck it up and delve into the criticism that will make your work better.  It's certainly a big theme at Arcen, where everyone on the team tries to put their egos on hold as much as possible and there's a more-or-less free flow of constructive criticism between the members of the team.  That's largely something we conduct in private for reasons of decorum, but what's quite public is the suggestions forum for AI War, which is one of the favorite sections of our forum system: it's seen over ten thousand posts in the last year, and we've completed more than 1,400 individual items during that time.

What makes this work?  I would say that one major factor in both cases is the sense of trust.  When AI War was new, and the player community was only partially formed, I had a much harder time emotionally dealing with all of the suggestions.  It's like sticking your head into a fire hydrant of "you should have done this, why didn't you do that?"  It can feel very negative, very draining, and like the people who are your supposed "fans" aren't actually liking your work much at all.  Amongst staff members, it can feel like professional rivalry or worse.

That's when there is not a sense of trust.  I think I did a pretty good job of swallowing my feelings despite myself in those early days of AI War, and I don't think I publicly let on overmuch how I was really feeling.  But I was miserable, I was stressed, and I was worried that nobody really liked my game all that much.  In short, I was having huge bouts of insecurity, which is natural for anyone who has taken great pains to create something, and then has thrust it out in front of the world for criticism.

And that's around the time when that magical missing ingredient showed up: trust.  As last summer wore on, and the popularity of my game grew, the volume of suggestions grew high enough that I couldn't hope to address them all.  That might make it sound like AI War isn't very good, but actually players are just bursting over with suggestions and ideas for pretty much every game ever created.  In most cases they simply don't have an outlet for those suggestions, so they just gripe on forums.  But in the case of AI War, they did have an outlet.  And that's where the trust came from.  There were too many suggestions for me to do them all, everyone could see that, but they could also see that I was listening, and trying.  They could trust that they had a voice, and I'd do my best to make everyone happy. 

Similarly, I began to see that these actually were fans of the game, as true of fans as you could possibly ask for.  Not only did they enjoy the game, but they spent enough time thinking about the game and playing it that they were willing to write up ideas for me to consider.  Once I could no longer keep up with the flood of ideas, I soon learned that it wasn't the actual implementation of any specific idea that would keep players happy, but rather that I'd at least consider all the ideas, and take them into account as I improved the game.  Sure, everyone prefers it when their own actual idea is used, but people are pretty reasonable about the circumstances when there are thousands of them and one or two of us.

So, long story short, an environment of trust happened to form, and the feedback cycle of suggestions and improvements became a daily or weekly routine rather than an unexpected and emotional event.  As more staff were added to Arcen, they came into this environment and that attitude of trust formed amongst our small team as we worked together, cautiously testing the waters with one another with constructive criticism, notes, and ideas outside our direct areas of expertise.

In short: there are a lot of benefits to having these sorts of sources of criticism, but the environment has to be suitably safe.  And that doesn't happen overnight.

So Why Don't I Like Critiquing What Others Create?
Well, as anyone on my staff can tell you, I'm certainly full of critiques.  If something is so much as one pixel off, I'll comment on it.  Not in a mean way, but I value precision and correctness, and I think everyone else on the team agrees.  They comment on things I've done quite a lot, too.  This is a two-way street.

So when I say I don't like critiquing the work of others, I'm referring to people that I don't have that level of relationship with.  My inclination is to absolutely pick apart whatever someone shows me, not to be mean, but to make it better.  However, in almost all cases if the other party has not had that intensity of criticism before, they're going to get overwhelmed and probably will have a negative reaction to it.  And I'll have wasted my time.

It happens to the best of us.  Stephen Parrish, the author of the Critter Code of Ethics above, sent out an email asking for comments on an event-specific website he had created a while back.  Knowing his views on literary criticism, and having a long history of web design, I really let loose on the site he was working on.  I thought a lot of aspects were good, and overall I very much liked his site, but that didn't stop me from writing over five thousand words of criticism about a 7-page site.  He and I have always been on great terms, but that particular endeavor of mine was a waste of several hours of my time, suffice it to say. 

I had another critique partner years ago where the result wasn't as happy.  We'd talked online for a few months and had similar outlooks on writing, and we decided to swap manuscripts.  We'd both had some near misses with agents, and felt like we were on the verge of picking up representation (as it turned out, she was but I was not).  I diligently critiqued the first 8 chapters of her manuscript, and by the end of that process I had written as many words in red as she had originally had in the chapters to begin with.  This was very poorly received.  She handed back my first chapter with notes that she felt the protagonist was arrogant and unlikeable, and little else.  It was written in the first person, in my voice.  Go figure.  We didn't really speak much after that.

Suffice it to say, my track record is not overly great with individual critique partners.  To me, it's a minor miracle that the Arcen staff and community works together so smoothly, and I'm not entirely certain how that came about.  Call it blind luck, divine providence, or whatever, but I can't tell you how to recreate it.  I guess it's just having the right mix of personalities.

Critiquing Versus Evaluating
I'm making up some terminology here, but I'm going to make a distinction between "critiquing" something and "evaluating" that same thing. 

Personally, when I critique something, I rip it apart.  The slightest flaws are mentioned and explored, possible alternatives are suggested for every last non-perfect facet, and red ink is thick on the ground.  You can hand me my very favorite games ever, what I consider masterpieces, and the effect of this would be extraordinarily diminished but not erased.  There is no game or literary work that is above all reproach.

Normal games, anything not at the absolute pinnacle of its genre, don't stand a chance under that kind of scrutiny.  In all seriousness, my process for tearing apart games is very much the same as that in Zero Punctuation.  I only discovered ZP in the last few months, but I've watched almost all the videos and I'd say I agree with about 70% of what he says.

Except what he's doing is evaluating a game, to use my newly-minted terminology.  I presume that he, like most people, fires up a game and starts playing it, intending to enjoy it.  Then every time something jumps out at him as being sub-par or wrong, he makes a mental note of it.  In the games he likes, very little jumps out at him.  In the games he rips into on his reviews, things were jumping out at him left and right.

In the case of a critique, there's a different process I go through: I'm not playing this to enjoy it.  I don't even care if I enjoy it.  I'm here to find every last flaw I can, to make the work stronger.  I've worked with a couple of professional editors in the last decade or so, and their approach was much the same: they were here not to destroy, but to break down to help me to rebuild.  As one put it (to paraphrase), "I quite enjoyed your book, but you'll notice that just about every page is covered in red.  Take this for what it is: a mark of respect.  In the book industry, editors only give so much feedback for authors whom they feel would actually benefit from that much effort.  If I didn't think that all this feedback would help you in making this the best possible book you can make it, I wouldn't have spent the time."

That editor forever changed my perception of criticism.  I wasn't being nit-picky all those years, I was just doing what she was doing.  Which is, admittedly, picking nits.  But assumedly you want a nit-free game or novel, which is why you asked someone to critique it... right?

All too often, the answer is no.  Most of the time, people are just looking for validation of their work, and that's it.  They approach professional authors with hopes of either getting some validation from someone who already made it into the business or even in hopes that the author will think the work is so amazing that he will recommend it immediately to his agent and editors. 

That almost never happens, because generally manuscripts that are that amazing have already found an agent or editor without going to those lengths.  Most manuscripts that haven't are in need of a good nit-picking before they're really ready, and the best you can hope for from a professional author is that they'll rip into your stuff.  And that's generally devastating enough for you that it's a waste of their time.

Critiquing Is Critical Thinking
Why critique?  It's because you want to make something better.  If we never saw the flaws in anything, nothing would ever improve, right?  And thankfully almost nothing in our world is perfect -- if there was too much perfection, there would be nothing left to do, no more room in which to grow, and that would be the most depressing thing I can think of.  Fortunately, there's room for improvement all around us, in everything we have made and do.  Fifty years from now, everything in your house will seem cheap and outdated, if current trends hold.

Part of critical thinking also involves recognizing what has been done right.  Unlike Stephen Parrish, I also believe very strongly that it's important to tell people what they have done right.  He thinks that's useless as a general rule, but I think the utility lies in the fact that often people just do things instinctively, and don't consciously know what others react to well, or why they react to it well.  I get a lot of positive commentary on AI War as well, and quite a lot of it has also been instructive to me.  And when it comes to the staff, I give out at least as much positive commentary as I do negative.

Simple, honest -- and hard to swallow, if you were just looking for effusive praise.

So, What Was "Evaluating" Again?
I never really explained that, did I?  Critiquing is actively looking for flaws, whereas evaluating is not.  Normally when I play games for recreation, I'm just in evaluation mode.  I play to enjoy, and I note things that I particularly enjoy, or that particularly impede my enjoyment.  Small flaws or things that I would do differently slip right under the radar, because I'm not actively trying to find them.  Heck, I'm here to enjoy the game, after all!

But at the same time, any author should be evaluating every book they read, and any game designer should be doing the same with every game they play.  And authors should read, just as game designers should play games.  It's the only way to grow, as it's the only way to spark ideas that don't come solely from within yourself.  Working in isolation is not a very conductive path to growth.

So anyway, most of the time I try to stay in evaluation mode just to see the forest instead of the trees, to use a different analogy.  Then if I spot something specifically of note (for good or ill), I might delve into the critique mode for just a bit.  When someone does something strikingly well or poorly, it can be very useful to think about it more actively to really understand why it worked as it did.

Conclusion
Hopefully my reasons are now clear for avoiding requests to critique the games of others.  Personally, I've had very little luck with that, and often wind up spending a lot of well-intentioned effort crafting a critique that is of no use to the other party, demoralizes them, and gets them mad at me.  Because all too often I misinterpret what the person was really asking for, and they don't understand quite what they'd be getting into with me.

And for the record, if you're looking to break into the business you're far better off going directly to the distributors and press with a suitably awesome game.  Other indie developers that have already had some level of success are rarely in the position to open any doors into the industry for you.

Lest this post spark even more requests for critiques than I normally get, I should also note that time is particularly thin on the ground for me.  I love answering questions and try to make blog posts to help out other indies with ways for them to improve their work or to help them break into the business, but there is rarely the time for me to do full critiques these days.  I'm going to be a new dad within the next six weeks, and I'm already finding it really hard to balance all of the various jobs I have.  I don't mean any offense to anyone, but I have to tend to my family first, then my own job, and at the moment there is very little left after those two things.

The best source for critiques isn't other developers or even reviewers, anyway.  It's players.  It's the would-be fans of the games you create who just couldn't get into it for whatever reason; the genre experts on the genres you wish to inhabit; and the actual fans of your game, who even so will have ideas on ways to make it better.  If you want the best possible feedback for making your game everything you want it to be, seek out those people and get their opinions.  Having a designer friend or two to toss ideas around with doesn't hurt, but it's the players that are collectively more expert than all of us in terms of knowing what they want and what they like and don't like.  Just listen to them.

This Blog Now Featured On GameDevBlogs

Pretty cool!

In 2009 Christopher founded Arcen Games, an indie company who have already made a handful of PC and Mac games. As such, his articles on achieving success as an indie developer, and working with the press as an indie both have a lot of weight.

Very recommended reading for anyone interested in that side of the games industry.

That's not to say that Christopher is just about the business side of things. There are also lengthy articles on game design topics that are well worth reading.

So just what is GameDevBlogs?  Well, it's new, but here's their spiel about themselves:

GameDevBlogs' mission is to become the best resource for finding new blogs written by video game developers. Whether famous or unheard of, student or experienced, a developer's writing will be listed here. If you are interested in finding something new to read, select a blog category, pick a site at random, and enjoy.

Or, as they described it to me in an email, "a site dedicated to listing the blogs of game developers, so inquiring minds can find good reading material more easily."  That seems like a very worthy goal to me, and it's always great to see new resources (especially meta-resources like this) appear for new and aspiring indie developers.  There are a lot of developer blogs out there, so I imagine they'll have their hands full archiving all of them, heh.  Good stuff!

On Writing: Frequent Offenders In The Manuscript Analyzer

I recently got the following note via email, which I thought asked a great question:

I had recently discovered your Manuscript Analyzer program, which I've been using for a better understanding of the editing process.  But, what I don't understand is why the word "were" is a frequent offender?  When properly used with a verb, especially with one ending in -ing, the word "were" is perfectly acceptable.  Would I have to use my own discretion, or is there another explanation?

That's a really great question.  Here's my response:

With any of the frequent offenders, bear in mind that you have to use your own discretion and judgment -- the tool tries to give you a good overall idea of areas you might need to check, but these are at best red flags, not definitive notices of error. In most cases, anyway -- in the case of some of the frequent offenders, you've got words that are always wrong, like irregardless.

In the specific case of were, it's not even that the word itself is too much of a problem, but that if it is too prevalent it can be indicative of sentence structure that isn't varied or creative enough.

For example: "They were eating lunch.  The horses were in the pasture.  They could see the clouds were passing by overhead."  This is pretty unimaginative, and is something that tends to pop up in the first drafts of a lot of manuscripts. 

Much better construction might be something like: "They ate lunch on the terrace.  Horses grazed in the pasture below, with clouds drifting lazily by overhead."

Again, there's nothing wrong with saying "they were eating lunch."  You'll find sentences like that in any manuscript, and peppered throughout published books.  Sometimes that's the exact right thing to say, for reasons of pacing, tone, or simply because it sounds right.

On the other hand, you often read a lot of amateur manuscripts, or rough first drafts even of professionals, where the sentence construction reads almost like a monotone because of all those "was/were x-ing" constructions.  It's always up to the individual writer or editor to make their own judgments, and certainly in a rough draft it's better to just get the thoughts down on paper without worrying about the flow of the language, but when it comes time for revision this is one of the areas where a lot of writers spend a ton of their time.  I know I do!

The Secrets Of My Success As An Indie Developer

So, in my last post I talked about how I botched the PR for Tidalis, and mentioned that I'd started out with very poor PR when AI War first came out, too.  In the case of AI War, the game was utterly invisible until it actually came out, and then for the first two weeks after it was out, it had literally zero sales.  How did AI War get from that dismal spot to now having sold around 30,000 copies (including copies of the expansion) and still counting?

And, for that matter, how is it I'm planning to rectify the botched PR with Tidalis?  Read on...

Step 1: Make A Good Game
Perhaps this goes without saying, but this only works if the game in question is good.  However, I put this step in here because some folks will inevitably assume that the following steps are some sort of "marketing magic" that can make a bad game sell like hotcakes.  Nothing can do that, at least not on a shoestring budget.

The other reason I bring up this step is because a lot of folks think that this is the only step that is needed in order to achieve success.  "Build it and they will come," and all that.  I'm here to tell you that only works in that one movie!  When you build it, almost no one will come, because no one will know you built it.  That's why these other steps exist.

Step 2: Tell People About Your Game
Maybe this seems self-evident, but more indies seem to skip this step than you might expect.  If you build an awesome game and then just post it on your brand-new website, how many people have you told?  Probably almost no-one.  If you get posted about on one of the many indie-related blogs, how many people have you then told?  Even if they have a readership in the thousands, that's still not many people.  A lot of those thousands of people won't like the genre of your game, or just won't be grabbed by it, or whatever.

Or, put another way: however many copies you want to sell, you probably need five hundred times that many people to hear about your game.  I just made that number up, but that's probably undershooting it.  Average "conversion" rate for people who download a demo is something like 2% or 3% who will buy it.  That means that for every 1 sale you make, you need 33 to 50 people to actually download your demo.  I have no idea how many people it takes reading about a game to get one to download the demo, but I wouldn't be surprised if the conversion rate there was 1% or less.

So: if you've only told a few thousand people about your game, and your game is awesome, expect a couple of dozen sales unless you're really lucky.  Most sites have lower daily readerships than you might expect, and even on really high-volume sites in terms of traffic, not nearly every post or article gets read by all visitors.

Step 3: Keep Telling People About Your Game
When you're a new indie, you'll get the cold shoulder.  A lot.  Press won't be interested in posting about your game, by and large, and most digital distribution sites won't be interested in you, either.  It takes time to look at your stuff, and there are a thousand other hopeful indies out there also vying for attention.

You want to cast a wide net because you never know who it is that your game will particularly strike a chord with.  As soon as you get some positive press, you can often translate that into more positive press, but until you have any you're going to really not get much attention at all until you find just those right early people to take a look at your work.  That also goes for digital distribution sites, incidentally.

Step 4: Make Sure There Is Something New To Tell People About Your Game
So, what happens if you send out a bunch of emails to press and distribution sites, and you get no response?  Do you:

A. Quietly give up?
B. Keep sending them the same message over and over again every so often?

Answer: neither, if you really want to be an indie developer.  If you start spamming press and distribution sites with the same message, how long do you think it will be before they actually flag your address as a spam address so that they don't have to see your stupid identical messages over and over again?  Even if you mildly (or heavily) reword your message, odds are you'll receive a chilly response.  You need something new to tell them, and you can bet they're expert at recognizing content-less emails, which they received a lot of.

So, the real answer to the above question is actually secret option C, which is to make sure that if you re-contact press or distributors, you have something genuinely and significantly new and interesting to tell them every time.  How do you do this?  By continually updating and improving your game.  Add in some fun new content.  Make it something significant and interesting, something that you could picture reading about from some other developer on Blue's News or ModDB.  Anything less is just going to be spam to a lot of folks.

Step 5: Keep Updating Your Game
I know I just said this in #4, but this is important enough to warrant its own step.  You need to keep adding to and updating your game, improving it based on player feedback, that sort of thing.  Every so often, do a big release with all your little changes summarized, and the most exciting ones highlighted.  Send that to the distributors, and to the press that would be interested in that sort of thing.  If you've had some positive reviews lately, you can also mention those (especially to distributors), but they aren't news in their own right.

This fifth step is also important in that:

•  It actually makes your game better, and your players happier.
•  It's legitimately news-worthy.
•  It keeps your existing players playing the game longer, and talking about it.
•  Best of all, if you like your game (hopefully you do), this is fun and rewarding.  You wanted to make games, right?  Rather than rushing off to the next title, why not spend some time making your current title the best it can absolutely be?

Granted, if your game is not already solid, this won't work.  If everyone thinks your game is terrible, and no-one will talk about your game or play it much, then the advice a lot of other successful indies give is correct: it's time to treat that game as a learning experience and move on to the next one.  Don't try to salvage it, you're just as likely to make it worse as anything else.

This whole process is assuming your game is already good or great, right?  But I've yet to see a game that couldn't be made better at least in small ways with a few tweaks and additions.  It might be some little side quest.  It might be more settings options or some improvements to the controls based on player feedback.  It might be a new enemy or a new item or weapon.  It might be some improvements to art, or a new music track, or improved sound effects.

Step 6: Be Hyper-Critical With Your Own Work
This is really a corollary to step 5.  I have never met a professional game developer, a professional novelist, or a professional creative of any sort, who thought their work was perfect.  Perfection is the delusion of amateurs.  Professionals are always look at their work in a critical way, seeing all the seams a cracks that almost no-one else will see. 

Since you're trying to sell and distribute digital games, you are in the unique and fortunate position that you can revise and extend your work at will.  You should never have an initial release that is full of known bugs, but it's inevitable that players will find some that slipped past you.  Fix them.  If you're at all like me, you were probably also boiling over with other ideas that didn't actually make it into your initial release of the game.   Release some of those ideas in patches, as "free DLC" that just comes right with the standard patches of the game.

Step 7: Take Suggestions From Players
Even better than step #6 above: solicit suggestions from players.  You might have to swallow your auteristic pride a bit at first, but once you get used to it you'll find that players are absolutely full of cool ideas you would never have thought of.  Every person views the world a bit differently, and that's really something useful in your case.  Players love to make suggestions, and if you implement those, they'll be really thrilled.  And your game will be better for it, if it was a good suggestion.

You want a way to build player investment and word of mouth?  Make them a part of the process.  Show them you value their opinions and their ideas.  These are exactly the sorts of things big companies never do.  Doesn't it drive you nuts?  Isn't that feeling of powerlessness with the major AAA games part of the reason you started making your own games in the first place?  Well, many of your players will have that same sort of feeling with your work unless you actually let them have a voice.  It's a good thing to do, for you and for them, and you'll be surprised at the positive community that can form around this.

Step 8: Give Away Free Stuff
You notice I said "free DLC" in step 6?  Yeah, all of this stuff only works for promotional purposes if you're giving it away for free.  If you try to nickel and dime the players for every little addition (or worse, ever charge them for any bugfixes), they'll quickly leave in disgust

The best part of giving away free updates to an existing game is that it's only free for players who actually buy your stuff.  This gives existing players a reason to stick around and continue to give you suggestions and talk to their friends and such.  But it also gives people who have yet to try your game a strong incentive to check it out.

Think about it this way: if I tell you a game is a year old, how do you think of it?  Is it mildly crusty and not a newsworthy sort of game?  Maybe you'll play it anyway, or you might be the sort that thinks there is enough new stuff that you'd rather see the latest and greatest games, instead.  But what if I tell you a game came out a year ago, and has had free monthly or bimonthly updates for the entire last year?  How does this affect your perception of both the game and the developer of that game?  See what I'm driving at here?

Granted, this doesn't mean you can't do paid expansions and DLC.  But those should be really meaty and worthwhile, in addition to all the significant stuff you're already giving away.  Players know when you're not giving them a good value, so strive to always do so.  And hey, it's just the right thing to do in general.

Step 9: Have Patience, Have Persistence
Don't go spamming any press or distribution sites, and for goodness sake don't make a marketing-y bother out of yourself.  Don't be sending messages to the same nonresponsive press/distributors any more frequently than monthly, and make sure you have noteworthy new news every time you do contact them.

But goodness, don't give up after one failed contact, either.  For AI War, it took us 3 months after initial release to reach 1,000 sales, or to get our first really big reviews.  It took 5 months after initial release to get on Steam.  It took 6 months after initial release before we had a MetaScore.  It took us 7 months after initial release to hit 10,000 sales.

During that timespan I added literally thousands of features to AI War (over 46,000 words of release notes just to version 2.0, no joke), and I sent hundreds of emails and inquiries, over 90% of which never received a direct response. 

But press eventually did respond, and once there was a certain amount of momentum some of them even contacted me directly.  Impulse wound up being interested in AI War early, and then GamersGate was, and then finally Steam and Direct2Drive came around to it.  For other developers the order is different, or all the distributors might not even be interested.  There are definitely still a few distributors that won't give me the time of day or answer my emails, and AI War was a massive success as far as non-contest-winning indie games go.

I perhaps went a bit overboard with how many features I added to AI War, but I was having a fun time doing it, and the player response was really great.  If I hadn't had all that encouragement from players, the press, and ultimately from the distributors, I wouldn't have done that much.  Put another way, if you're not gaining any traction, then the advice of the other indie developers is right and you should just move on to another game.  But assuming you are making progress with the players, press, and sales, you should keep at it: persistence wins the day, just not always very fast.

Step 10: Discounts Never Hurt
Another way you can get a lot of "free" publicity?  Discount your game for a brief period.  I put free in quotation marks because you pay for that publicity in the form of all those discounts you're giving.  But it's vastly more effective than advertising, I've found, so it's quite a good investment.  And having a big rush of new players is great for the ongoing publicity and word of mouth of your game, too.

If you can time your discount promotion with or near the release of some new free additions to the game, so much the better.

Conclusion
There are many, many ways to build a successful indie company.  I only know the way that I did it, and that this worked very well for me.  It's been a solid business model for Arcen, and it's made our players really, really happy in the main.  Want to have a dedicated fanbase?  Show them that you're willing to go above and beyond what you'd have to do.  Also?  That, again, is just generally the right thing to do, anyway.

On the PC side, I can't think of many other developers using this same strategy as us, but there definitely are some doing it.  Dwarf Fortress essentially does this, BOH seems to do this, and so on.

On the iPhone, though, this sort of thing is incredibly common.  All the most popular iPhone games (and even many of the less-popular ones) are getting updated all the time.  Doodle Jump, Defender Chronicles, and Angry Birds are just three examples of many I could name.

This sort of thing really works.  And doing right by your customers is always a good idea.  Good luck!

Wearing Multiple Hats Is Tough, And PR Is Important

This has been a productive week for me, in terms of me getting a lot of things done, but it wasn't the work I'd intended to get done, or the type of work I am normally accustomed to -- so I've been feeling guilty and stressed.  Ever have that happen to you?  It's been something I've faced my entire life, but I never figured out what was going on until now.

Background Tangent: This can happen with any job
Back when I was in high school, I was a cashier for a local hardware store.  I really liked doing the sales and troubleshooting type work (helping people find the right solution for their problem, or at least finding a product in the store), but most of the time I was just on register.  I worked there for a year, and by the end it was clear I was good at the troubleshooting stuff, so I was let out onto the sales floor more and more.  And I was frequently nervous, guilty, or stressed.  I did the job fine, and customers seemed happy, and management seemed happy, and I was certainly happier with that work, but I felt guilty for not being on register.

Right after high school I got my first job in the software industry.  It started out as data entry for a few weeks, then I quickly became a system admin, then after two years I officially joined the programming team and shortly after became the head of the programming team during a big layoff (long story there).  And you know what?  Every time I changed positions, I had guilt and discomfort.  Sitting at my desk doing data entry, I felt idle.  Doing the system admin work I felt guilty because the work was something I enjoyed and was not that mentally taxing.  Switching over to programming more, I felt guilty because I wasn't working with my hands or using specialized knowledge that nobody else in the office had.

And so on.  I think that a lot of stay-at-home parents have the same sort of trouble, honestly.  They're used to doing whatever job, and now that they're doing the massively important job of taking care of their children, they feel "idle" despite the fact that they're doing something immensely of value.  It's often the case, so I've heard, that new moms feel guilty for not cooking as much, or doing outside work, or keeping a clean house, while they're busy taking care of the baby.  Obviously, that guilt is incredibly misplaced (without even getting into gender roles: it's clear they've got a demanding job with the baby alone).

So what's the problem specific to indie developers?
This week, my guilt and anxiety is because I haven't been programming as much.  Keith has been, and certainly I've spent maybe 10 hours programming myself, but the rest has been more "soft" skills:

• Talking to the press.
• Talking to and negotiating with potential vendors.
• Catching up on some financials, including doing more projections and assessments so that I can make decisions about potential hires during the autumn
• Talking with a potential PR firm.
• Dealing with a partner that went into insolvency without paying us.
• Getting everything ready for the next full project, Alden Ridge, so that the staff not working on Tidalis or AI War can get started.
• Getting a head start on the design of Alden Ridge itself, so that folks on the team have a better idea of where we are already heading
• Redoing the entire arcengames.blogspot.com blog and coding that into the main page of the arcen site, then transferring close to two hundred older posts and articles by hand so that they'd be categorized.
• Coordinating with both Valve and Unity 3D on some various internal things.
• Oh yeah, and I did a fair bit of technical support and had a number of discussions with players.

This happens to most new business owners (which many indies are)
Gosh, it's been a freaking busy week.  I was working 10 hour days, which is admittedly low for me if you look at the past few months, but still.  I would never demand of staff what I have gotten into the habit of demanding of myself.  It would, frankly, be inhumane.

This is a common trap that new business owners fall into, and that "one man shops" often fall into when the team grows.  The owner feels guilty for taking any time off, feels like he/she should be working every waking moment, and so on.  That's a trap to avoid, as it's not healthy and leads to spectacular flame-outs and ultimately failure of the business.  It's something I'm working on, most of all because I'm going to be a new father sometime in the next 1-6 weeks, and I sure as heck don't want any of this interfering with family life.

But that's not the real crux of what I realized, even.  The point of this post is to discuss that guilt-thing that I've noticed in my own life going all the way back to the hardware store.  What is that thing?

Here's the problem: what exactly is it I do?  What's my job?
Personally, I think it's just an inherent difficulty with wearing multiple hats.  People ask me what I do for a living, and I rarely know what to say.  I stumble through something along the lines of "I make games" or "I have a video game company" or similar (because the followup to my first response is inevitably "where do you work?" with a hoped response of Blizzard or Nintendo or something).

What am I supposed to say?  I founded a games company, but now I act as producer there, as well as the lead designer on most projects but assistant designer on Tidalis, and yeah I do all the finances except taxes, and most of the contract negotiation except when we really need our lawyer to do it, and most of the marketing and PR stuff, and I do all the HR stuff like managing health benefits and such, and I do a huge chunk of the programming though not all of it anymore thanks to having Keith now (thank God), and I keep up the website and deal with lost license keys and the occasional customer who wants a refund and and and...

It's freaking crazy that anyone could work fulltime doing all that, and then still feel guilty for not spending 40 hours programming in any given week, but that's how I feel.  With all the rest of the stuff I do, there is a good 20-30 hours of work per week just in that.  So to do 40 hours of programming means I'm working a 60-70 hour week.  If it's crunch time and I'm trying to spend 60 hours programming, and if it's tax time or time to do payroll or time to bring a new staff member up to speed or something, then the problem is only compounded even more.  I also like to answer questions for other indies (I get a few emails a month, usually), and I try to keep up with this blog when I can.

I went to school for computer science, and then changed to a business degree with a focus on management, so I do like doing most of this stuff, especially the finances and the HR stuff.  Call me weird.  But what I like doing best is game design, followed extremely closely by programming.  When I think of "what is my job," the simple, incredibly misleading answer I like to think is "I design and program games."  All the rest of that stuff isn't something I think of as my core job, it's just something I do so that I can do my real job.  It's like chores: you have to mow the lawn and take out the garbage, but when someone asks you what your job is, you probably don't think of those things.

Why this is such a problem
Okay, so we've established that the above is a problem.  For obvious reasons, mainly: it leads to unhappiness and burnout, it's probably not healthy, it destroys any semblance of a balanced life if you let it (social life? what?), and it can lead to the ruin of your company if you're not careful.

But there is an even more insidious problem, which I have seen with so incredibly many indies that it's practically an epidemic: it can lead to a skewed sense of valuation of activities.  In other words, many indies often focus on the wrong things.  They (hopefully) focus on making the absolute best game they can, pouring all their time and energy into the current project.  That's great, to a point, but the problem is that having an obsession with the game itself can lead to tunnel vision.

And then the project is -- hooray -- done!  So what does the prototypical indie developer do?  They send out a couple of emails, make a few forum posts, and wait for success to find them.  And then it usually doesn't.

I've been around long enough to know that you need a lot of marketing and PR work done after a game is finished.  So I spent practically all last week on that, and sent out several hundred emails.  Since Arcen is already something of a known quantity, we had a lot more success with that this time around compared to when AI War came out; I think the tally of press members who have opted to review the game is up to about 48 now, and that includes something like three or four print magazines.

That's a big improvement over AI War!  AI War was really well reviewed, but only in about 20 places, and that over the span of a six month period after the game came out.  With Tidalis, everything was indeed easier this second time around, and I had 20+ reviewers asking for the game within the first 24 hours of contacting any of them.

So where in this process did I severely drop the ball?  If you were reading carefully, you've already seen it: I waited until we'd completely finished the game, and were two days away from the game coming out, before I did any serious PR or marketing work.  Sure, I did a number of videos during development of the game, and I sent out several impersonal press releases to all my press contacts, but that resulted only in a brief writeup on Co-Optimus, an early review by a small blog, a preview on Gamezebo, and a mild bit of exposure on ModDB.

That is so much less than it could have been if I'd been on the ball with the press.  If I'd put in half the effort with the press during production that I did after production, the release of Tidalis could have been so much larger of an event.

The press response to the game has been overall exceedingly crazy positive thus far, so we definitely did our duty in making the game, but I dropped the ball with publicizing it.  Those people who have heard of the game seem to really adore it in the main, but most gamers have never even heard of it.  Consequently, our sales volume so far has been about 10x lower than I had expected the minimum sales volume to be.  That is excruciatingly sobering, no?  Tidalis is well into the quadruple digits of sales after being out only two weeks (a feat it took AI War four months to reach, despite the fact that game has now sold around 30k units if you count the expansion), so from that angle it's still already vastly more successful than all but a handful of indie games.

But here's the thing: if you look at the reviews and player comments that the game is getting, it's clear that it's being undersold at the moment.  Thank goodness with digital distribution this is a problem I can correct over time.  I suspect that by the end of September things will be back on track with where I'd expected the game to be, but we're not there yet and that's where the game should have been at launch if I'd done things correctly.  I'm not worried about the fate of Tidalis specifically, Arcen is in a position where thankfully we're able to compensate for my earlier mistake and the game is good enough that it should get back on track.

What concerns me, in a larger sense, is this: I don't feel much remorse for having screwed that up.  My gut feeling is instead that, while the release was not the way we wanted, that was largely outside my control -- I sent out press releases and such, after all, but nobody responded.  The basic belief being that I could have done more, but we had limited time and I put my efforts in where it was more needed, on coding and producing and such.  And in a lot of senses that is true, it's not like I had a lot of spare time to be able to spend a full week on PR stuff in the middle of that project.  In retrospect, I should have pushed the project's deadline back a week in order to make time, but it was an honest mistake on my part due to the fact that I am not, at core, a marketer or PR rep.  So as much as I do wish I'd handled that better, I it's hard to feel particularly remorseful.

Okay... yet when I take a week largely off from programming so that I can take care of the other critical business needs that I've been putting off in order to get Tidalis out the door, I do feel guilty.  I feel stressed and guilty like crazy.  This is so incredibly backwards!  And talking to other indies and reading posts by other indies, I know I'm not the only one with this sort of screwed up sense of valuation of my activities.

This is toxic.  And it can happen to you without your even realizing it's happening at all.

So what's the lesson here?
The lesson is that if you're going to be a successful indie, you have to either get lucky or you have to sometimes act against your instincts.  My instincts are to cling to designing and programming games, not because that's the part I enjoy most (though that is true), but because that's the part that seems most core to our business.  The people that love our games love them because they are designed and programmed well (and for reasons of the art and music as the case may be, obviously, but I'm not involved as directly in those).

So if all potential players were omniscient, and knew exactly what every game on the market was, where to find it, and which ones they would like, I'd have no problem.  I'd be absolutely correct in just focusing on the design and programming, since that would be the only thing that would directly affect both sales and player enjoyment.

Since we live in a world without omniscient players, unfortunately, there is the sticky business that you can make a game that someone would love, and they'll never ever hear about it.  Or they hear just the wrong sort of information, or not enough information, for them to realize how much they'll love it.  That sort of thing happens all the time, and not just with smaller games.  How many people have you heard gush about Portal or Silent Hill 2 years after the fact, after having finally trying the game to see "what all the hype was about?"  It's just that the problem is more severe with smaller games, indie or not.

For a multitude of reasons, when it comes to publicity and PR and marketing, with Arcen it's my responsibility.  If you've founded an indie company, or are thinking of founding one, odds are that the same responsibility belongs to you.  The lesson is that most of us need to do a better job of remembering this, from the start of the development process on forward

Speaking personally, I need to get over my guilt when I'm tending to the business side of things, and I need to remember to allocate time in each project for that sort of work, because it's just that important.  As the project manager, if I'm scheduling projects in such a way that the project has no time for publicity and marketing type work, then I'm not doing my job correctly there, either.

Every successful indie talks about how important publicity and marketing is.  And they all have their own method of going about that sort of thing.  A lot of them talk about how important their self-posted previews were, or their development diaries, or early previews by the press.  Even just having reviews in-hand at launch can make a big difference.  Not doing all those things is a recoverable situation, AI War is proof enough of that, but not doing those things makes the road oh-so-much-harder, and occasionally impossible.  I remember reading all those sorts of articles, but I should have actually taken that advice.  If you're a new or an aspiring indie developer, so should you.

AI War and Zenith Remnant Bundle 66% Off During Steam's Summer Sale

Today through July 4th, there's an incredible discount on AI War: Fleet Command and AI War: The Zenith Remnant via the Steam "Perils of Summer" sale! We're experimenting a bit by trying out a discount rate of 66%, which is unusually large for us. We recently did something similar with Direct2Drive, and now we're trying it with Steam, but this deal definitely won't last, so make sure and tell your friends and family if you think they might be interested (or if you haven't yet taken the plunge, you might want to get to evaluating the demo while this deal lasts).

So what's going on with AI War, anyway? AI War is still very much a living and growing game, with a big version 4.0 + Mac OSX support upcoming in a few months, and our upcoming for-charity micro-expansion, AI War: Children of Neinzul. Those are both currently scheduled for release in August, but in the meantime we've also got a current beta version chock full of updates that will become the next official free DLC release within a few weeks (around the same time that preorders for AI War:CoN begin).

So, while it's safe to bet there will probably be other sales in the future, after this summer they probably won't go this deep again until 2011 at the earliest. Just fair warning!

Response to "The Kotaku Review"

The Kotaku Review is a great article by Jordan Rivas, presenting what I think is a healthy way of thinking about game reviews. I'll let you read the full article, but the basic gist is that the numeric scores are meaningless (which lots of folks have said), and that the long-form describe-everything-in-the-game-briefly is fundamentally flawed (this is the new part, and is especially thought provoking to me). The contention being that basically the short format of the Kotaku reviews is helpful, because they highlight a few key things (bad or good), which is what we're geared as humans for doing, anyway.

Just read the article, if that didn't make sense -- the author did a much better job of explaining it than I just did.

My thoughts
There is only one counterpoint that really occurs to me, and that is the fact that people are looking for such different things out of games. So, for instance, you might love the pvp in Starcraft, whereas I might not even care at all. I'm interested in how many stars there are in Mario Galaxy 2, because I know I'll collect them all and I want to know how difficult and long that will be (my hope being very difficult and very long); but you might not care one iota.

So I think that fragmentary nature of the readership is one of the drivers behind this "everything and the kitchen sink" type of long-form review. For people who want the details on all the modes and content they might be interested in, all that length is really important. As Rivas says, the individual experience is best described by just a few key moments, but in many games those key moments will vary wildly. Certainly something like Silent Hill 2, Prince of Persia, or Braid is linear enough that probably everybody enjoys (and/or hates) mostly the same parts.

But when it comes to something like an RTS, a 4X, a simulation game, or a many-mode-bearing FPS, that's where things start to get increasingly fragmentary. I might not even play the part of the game you love the most. The only part of Left 4 Dead I've ever played is the co-op, and that in itself was a worthwhile and complete experience for me. Others that want to really make that game a daily event need more, and for those people, there are... some other modes I forget the name of.

This is the conundrum of both reviewers and game creators. Typically the public from-the-developer information about a game is pretty lame and filled with marketing spin. Often it's not even updated once the game is finished and comes out, or at least that used to be the case when I routinely looked at game websites. But the added problem is that many players are naturally skeptical of anything a developer or publisher says about their own titles (I know I sure am), so we want to hear about those things with the slant of an impartial third party. Enter the gaming press, which is therefore left to thus fill the role of both documentarian and reviewer.

All of that stems from the subjective nature of the whole business, I think. With cars or electronics, you can pretty much just relate the hard specifications data, and you can pretty much trust the manufacturer -- because if they lie, it will come out pretty quick and there will be lawsuits. Because all of that sort of thing is pretty objectively measurable. Unlike "fun," "good graphics," "great music," "long," or any of the other adjectives that often get used to describe the various parts of games. All of those terms are either subjective or relative.

My proposed way of reviewing
I think the above is why we have the long-form reviews. In many respects, that sort of documentarian role of the gaming press is super important, and I make frequent use of it. But that tends to make reviews so long that people can't read every last one. Thus we have numbers attached to games, so that players can scan a list of 100 games and choose the 5 they want to read about in more depth.

And, broadly speaking, that makes sense, I think -- we need ways to cull games down so that we can find the ones we are interested in. That's why the concept of "genre" exists, and why those numeric scores came about.

Maybe I shouldn't complain about numeric scores, because my last game was one of the best scored PC titles of last year, but I can't help agreeing with Rivas that the numeric scores are not the best reflection for games. Instead, I think we should have a short-form executive summary (in the style that he admires at Kotaku) for longer-form reviews that provide all that needed extra context. You could even pair that with a very simple pattern of "Avoid, Maybe, Yes" like Nintendo Power tends to do for their downloadable game micro-reviews.

Then if I want to know what games are good, I'd go to a site, and look at the executive summaries for anything in the Maybe or Yes categories for the genres I like. For anything that struck my interest, I'd read the full-length review.

In Conclusion
To be honest, the above is more or less what I'm already able to do with the numeric scores (most of which have a breakdown score for each component of the game -- graphics, sound, fun factor, longevity, etc -- along with description of what stands out about each component). But, I think the numeric score implies precision where there is not, and confuses some folks -- certainly causing a lot of distraction both among the press and players. When you have a lot of commentary about a game consisting of "look how many 10s it has!" instead of "look how awesome ," then I think we're hitting a level of abstraction that harms the discussion.

But, let's be realistic here; this style of review isn't likely to go anywhere anytime soon, and as far as systems for review go, it's better than many. Try to find out if a mass market novel is any good without reading excerpts from it -- that will drive you to drink.

Tidalis Beta 0.854 Released (Gargantuan Updates) and New Videos

It's been a while since we've done an update to the installer for Tidalis, but if you've been following the Tidalis forums or the budding Tidalis wiki, you already know that the game has been seeing massive nearly-weekly public beta releases since mid-April. The latest version, 0.854, represents the culmination of everything we wanted to get done before the PAX 10 contest deadline. And look! We've also now done an official trailer for the game:



So what all is new since the last time we updated the installer build (which was version 0.407)?

Visually and Aurally

• We've now completed all the visual/art themes for the game, though we're still adding animations and polish on the art. There are now 21 of these themes in all, counting three hidden ones that get unlocked during adventure play.
  
• There are now over 50 minutes of music in the game, or 90 minutes if you count the "dire" versions of the tracks.
  
• A lot of the music has been updated since 0.407; we had some trouble initially getting just the perfect sound, but now we think we've really nailed it.
  
• A ton of the art has already been polished and animated to a heavy degree; check out the Title Menu, the Open Plains theme, or the Volcano themes for specific examples. Pretty amazing, if we do say so.

Content

• We're now up to 16 game styles for the game (counting the Normal style), which will probably be the final count for release.
  
• We're now up to 31 special blocks for the game, which will probably be the final count for release.
  
• The game now has items -- 25 of them -- which will probably be the final count for release.
  
• There are now 74 (out of a planned 114) adventure levels, as well as 39 brainteaser-type puzzles. More coming on both of these.
  
• The game now has achievements -- 20 so far -- with more coming.
  
• There are now 19 story cutscenes out of a planned 40 or so.
  
• Both co-op and VS play are available on the local computer, either with two humans or 1-2 humans against the AI.

What Isn't Complete?

• We're still working on the networking, that will be done soon.
  
• We still need to finish the last quarter or so of the adventure mode and story.
  
• There are a few specific VS and co-op features that we still want to add.
  
• More polish is still being added to the art, and we'll probably add a few more sound effects, too.
  
• The VS AI is already pretty good in the specific game styles it is allowed to play in, but there are some tweaks we have in mind to make it better. All game styles are supported in human vs human play, but not all of them will be available for the AI; it's considered a fairly minor part of this game, by contrast with AI War.
  
• Gamepad support.
  
• Various other tweaks, polish, and bugfixes still remain, though our list is considerably smaller of late.
  

So, What's The Plan?

The beta is still in full swing, with the demo being free for anyone, and the full beta being available for anyone who preorders. Right now you can preorder at the main Arcen site, at GamersGate, at MacGameStore, and at myGameIQ. All of our existing partners who sell AI War will also be carrying Tidalis either at release or a few weeks ahead of release.

So when's the release? Right now we're looking at the week of July 12th, although we don't have a specific day nailed down just yet. We're still talking with our distribution partners and figuring out which day makes the most sense for everyone. But we expect to be materially complete with the game (including all the last polish, etc) by July 9th at the absolute latest, so anytime that week should be a possibility.

Check out the trailer if you haven't already, and if you're interested you might like to try the demo. Tidalis is available on both Windows and OSX (you get a license for both platforms when you buy it for either).

This game has grown incredibly far beyond what we had initially planned when we set out to make it, but that's largely due to the promise that the core mechanics showed and the team's enthusiasm for the project. Everyone on the team has the feeling that we've got something really special with this game, and so far beta customers seem to have that feeling, as well.

Definitely exciting times! We'll update with more news as the release gets nearer, and we'll also be having news in the next month about our upcoming AI War 4.0 (which will add full OSX support), and our upcoming charity-focused micro-expansion, AI War: Children of Neinzul. In the meantime, here are some other brand-new Tidalis videos that show off recent additions to the game:







About Tidalis

Tidalis is a block-based puzzle game with casual appeal, hardcore depth, and an addictive new "streams" mechanic. The basic rules of the game are this: blocks fall down into the board and have a color and an arrow direction. If a stack of blocks exceeds the height of the board, you lose. In order to clear blocks, you must right-click and drag paths through the arrows to set up chain reactions of like-colored blocks.

If this sounds simple, that's because it is -- you'll be lining up lengthy chains within minutes. But you'll be surprised how much brainpower it takes to set up combos of multiple chains, and the many brainteaser-style puzzles include some real stumpers. Tidalis has co-op and competitive multiplayer modes (offline only in this beta version); action-oriented modes and timer-less brainteasers; a lengthy, casual-friendly adventure mode; fifteen unique game modes providing innumerable twists to the basic gameplay; dozens of special blocks and items; and over fifty minutes of beautiful music to go with the painterly art.

In short, several games' worth of content are built on top of this core mechanic, which you'll quickly find to be as iconic as it is novel.

Curatorial Vs Exploratory Game Design

Two big trends in game design these days are "cinematic" game design (ala Uncharted 2), and "sandbox" games (ala Grand Theft Auto). These are trendy things to talk about, and tons of people have really strong opinions about one or the other type of game for various reasons. However, I think that both cinematic and sandbox games are the latest incarnations of a much broader division in game design that goes back to the roots of the industry or before.

As the title of this post suggests, I'm calling them Curatorial and Exploratory, and I think that all games can be lumped into being one or the other -- or, really, varying mixes of both. It's rare that anything would be one or the other only.

Curatorial Game Design
Curatorial game design has something to show you. It wants you to follow a certain set of rules, and it will take you through a progression. There may be some little deviations here and there from the main progression, but overall it's just a matter of how well you perform during the progression that determines the outcome. It's a linear test of some sort of skill, be that reflexes or mental acuity.

Examples of very curatorial games:

The Original Super Mario Bros, which has a linear progression of levels (warp zones aside, but even that is just branching linearity, there's no variance in them.

Half Life 2, which funnels the player through a heavily (and wonderfully) scripted world. Their trick is that they make the game seem more exploratory than it really is by having a few little nooks and crannies, but really it's a very linear progression nonetheless. It feels way less linear than other classics like Quake 2 because of its innovative level design.

Peggle, which primarily consists of a long string of levels that you move through completely linearly. There seems also to be some sort of Quick Play mode, but the menu organization makes it pretty clear that this is hugely secondary.

Pac Man (and most other classic Arcade games) is simply a long series of levels like Peggle.

Exploratory Game Design
Exploratory game design tends to throw the player into some situation, or a series of situations, and let them figure out what to do. This broad description manifests itself in all sorts of ways, but basically the key factor is this: the player is very frequently able to choose what their next challenge is.

Players have overall goals, and numerous other smaller goals that they can pursue, and they choose what they want to do. Ultimately if they want to win the game they probably have a set curatorial-style progression that they have to follow, but there is so much other content that the curatorial parts are just one facet of the wider exploratory design.

Examples of very exploratory games:

Grand Theft Auto and all the other sandbox games are, of course by definition, very exploratory. There is a set of central story missions, and then a bunch of other side missions, and then a whole wide world to explore and simply play around in. Personally I loved the first two GTA games back in the day but never played the story missions -- I was able to exist in that world simply by exploring around and dodging the cops and so forth, and never felt compelled to do much with the curatorial parts. I believe I used cheats to get to the second and third cities, because I wanted to go to them but had no interest in the story progression that would lead me there.

The original Legend of Zelda is a great example of a highly exploratory game. Later Zelda titles emphasize the curatorial a bit more, but still have a highly exploratory element. The original game allowed players to complete the dungeons in somewhat variant order, and the players could get all over the overworld pretty much from the start. Even just finding the next dungeon was a game in itself, and going about that was left up to the searching strategy of the individual player.

My own game AI War: Fleet Command is hugely exploratory. A very few players have complained that there was not a scripted curatorial-style campaign, but that's rather missing the point. AI War is built as the strategy-game incarnation of how I played GTA: there is stuff all around the galaxy for you to find, and there are goals big and small for you to pursue, and ultimately you have a goal but you can go about achieving that goal (and preparing yourself for that goal) in absolutely any way you want. Various other strategy games, mostly in the 4X side of things, emphasize the same: Civilization IV is another great example.

A Wide Spectrum
As I noted in the introduction, most games don't fall solely into just one category. Exceptions might be games like Sim City on the exploratory side (there's not even an overall goal, no curatorial content whatsoever) or the rail shooter subgenre on the curatorial side (there's absolutely no way to explore).

But everything else falls somewhere in between, and figuring out the balance between the curatorial and exploratory aspects is a real challenge. Clearly there are players who are very much fans of both. Personally I found that I couldn't get all that much into curatorial game Uncharted 2, while I developed a completely unexpected attachment to exploratory game Red Faction: Guerrilla. But by the same token I absolutely loved curatorial Half Life 2 (like seemingly everyone else), while having a hard time finding much interest in GTA III and beyond despite their exploratory aspects.

So clearly there is much more going on with all these games than just their curatorial versus exploratory aspects -- the actual execution of a game, plus all its interlocking mechanics, are what make a game appeal to certain players or not. And I definitely don't think that one method of game design is more "correct" than the other. I probably have some exploratory leanings, but not as much as you might expect from someone who made a game like AI War.

My big challenge back in 2008 with Arcen's upcoming Alden Ridge came from me struggling with integrating exploratory aspects into a game that had started out completely curatorial. Our current game-in-beta, Tidalis, is a pretty much even blend of curatorial and exploratory, in that it has a linear adventure mode, but that's only a small portion of the wider game modes and options that are available (and even in the adventure, there are secret levels everywhere -- almost as many of those as regular levels in the main progression).

If you look at a lot of successful contemporary games, like the Mario Galaxy games for instance (or any of the 3D Mario games, really), they have a huge mix of curatorial and exploratory design elements. There is a linear progression of levels, sort of, but each level has multiple goals in it, and many of those are optional and/or can be done out of order. You can "beat the game" by simply collecting 70ish stars/shines out of the 120 that tend to be present, and you can do so in any order you want. Demon's Souls is another game like that: it starts out linear, and the individual levels are all pretty linear, but there are a lot of side branches that are optional, and the order in which you approach the levels is something you can switch up to a fair degree. More so than the recent Zelda games, and more on par with the original Zelda, at least.

In Conclusion
All this buzz exists around cinematic games and sandbox games, but the underlying principles at work here are as old as the medium.

The more curatorial games often create experiences that are more resonant in a storytelling sense because of the increased control they give designers; and when you pair that with the "cinematic" techniques of games like Uncharted 2, the result is definitely something Hollywood-esque. There are some seriously great things about that approach, but you also lose a lot of what makes for replay value in games, and a lot of player agency is lost as well.

On the exploratory side, there is a ton of player agency, but it is a really fine line to walk to not have players just feeling like nothing really matters and that the world is boring to inhabit. That was my challenge with the later GTA games, so clearly that's something that varies by player taste -- others were really compelled by those games in a way I was not. It's also pretty hard for players to feel emotionally invested in a purely-exploratory game if it doesn't have at least a single thread of curatorial progression. I think that's where the occasional complaint of the lack of scripted story in AI War comes from. It's also why players aren't emotionally attached to Sim City in the same way that they are to, say, Chrono Trigger (my favorite game of all time, alongside Final Fantasy VI, for the record).

I think it's telling that the games that I consider to be my overall favorites, and which I had the greatest emotional response to, where all mostly-curatorial with some exploratory sections: Chrono Trigger, FF6, and Silent Hill 2. But at the same time, the recent games that I most enjoy playing, and that I think back on with the fondest memories of inhabiting, are games that have large exploratory components: Red Faction: Guerrilla, Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, Far Cry 2.

To me, the debate over the merits of sandbox versus cinematic games could not be more pointless: it's like debating action versus comedy movies. Put simply, people should make more of all of the above!

Designing Emergent AI, Part 6: The "Tempo," and AI vs. Player Agency

In the fifth installment of this series, I talked about the reasons for not over-engineering AIs and thus letting them fall into traps by making them too predictable. That was intended to be the final article in the series, unless more questions came up that I needed to address. Recently a new topic has arisen, however, in the form of a question about player agency and why the AI in AI War is deviously reactive rather than taking matters into its own hands too much. This post is actually as much about game design in general as it is about AI design, but those two areas often go hand-in-hand.

Why Does The Human Player Always Have The "Tempo?"

Q: In AI War, you've made the AI play by different rules to the player. Much of this works, but the bit that I think is a bold red, font 100 minus is what seems to me could only have been a conscious decision to make it a passive, reactive and predictable creature.

In the classic pvp strategy games, after the learning curve, each player knows at least roughly how well each of their units do against their enemy's units. At the macro level, the core game is about out-thinking your opponent, deploying the strategy that counters the opponent's current strategy, aware of the likely reaction from the opponent because of your current strategy, and being prepared to change your own strategy in the near future to stay one step ahead. It is about acting and reacting. It is this dynamic which keeps people playing, which explains why Chess and Starcraft are still going strong.

A pvp game inherently has a huge imperfect information mechanic: you don't know exactly what your opponent is going to do. Since AI War is played against an AI, one which does not actually have a macro strategy, which only reacts to the player's moves, never initiating any, you don't have this mechanic or depth. I'm hoping to get across why I think AI War's gameplay is lacking that special something to get it from 'very good' to 'excellent'

Response from Chris Park, AI War's Lead Designer:

AI Modifiers and Other Existing Features

Are you aware of the AI modifiers for cross-planet waves and no wave warnings? A lot of what you are looking for is accomplished by that alone. You may even want larger waves on in order to tailor the experience even more that direction. The macro AI is actually quite devious in terms of what it does with ships once it has a bunch of them free as threat -- a lot of what you are describing happens already in those circumstances, but if you're effective at keeping the AI Progress too low then you wouldn't see that much; it's entirely possible you're on too low of a difficulty there.

Thoughts On the Tempo, And Why The PVP Model Is Not The Goal Here

Beyond that, though, you are entirely correct that the human players are given the "tempo" in this game. That makes it much less like the AI is a full opponent, as you are noting, and more like it is a cross between an opponent and a "game master" in terms of a pen and paper RPG or similar. This, as you might guess, is by design -- this game is about the player, and what they want to do. The AI does indeed throw in some monkey wrenches from time to time, and will kill you if you're not careful, but it's not as independent-acting in a macro strategy sense (most of the time having very few free Threat ships), because that's simply not the goal.

And why not have that as a goal? Well, here's why I hate pvp RTS games, as a blanket statement: the other player is doing stuff invisibly, I'm doing stuff invisibly, and then we finally see what we are doing when we meet, and whoever randomly did the best thing wins that encounter. If you built lots of horsemen and I built lots of pikemen, I win. If I built regular foot soldiers, you win. Then, depending on how unmatched we were, one of us might completely kill the other, or the losing player might scrape by and survive and battle back. Repeat.

To me, that's all those games are, and it hasn't been fun for me since Age of Empires II when I realized what the deal was. I was very much a fan of pvp RTS in the Warcraft II, AOE, and AOEII days, and even to a smaller extent with Empire Earth, but round about that time I was done with it and haven't looked back, and have been eking out an existence in a sort of scaled-down co-op purgatory against the AIs since then. I've had a ton of players write me to say that they haven't played any RTS since the Warcraft III days or similar, but then got back into strategy games via AI War, and I think this is a large part of the reason why.

Player Agency, Comparisons To Espionage Games and Tower Defense

Because, in the end, AI War is as much a puzzle game as anything else. It's a very complex puzzle that changes slowly over time and has some ability to throw monkey wrenches at you every so often, but overall it is an engine for letting you devise very complex and long-term plans, and then see them out. Of course you have to change your plans as the AI grows and the situation changes and such, but in the main it's about you and your team's cleverness in a complex scenario.

Think of it like one of those espionage games where you play as a team of commandos that has the building schematics where the terrorists are, and you plan out a route and then go busting in to save the hostages. The terrorists react and move around and generally foul up your plan, but if you plan is well designed then overall it still goes vaguely like you had hoped. The fun parts are the initial planning, the ongoing adaptation that the monkey wrenches cause, and that feeling of satisfaction at having bested the scenario.

Actually, that's what is great about the best tower defense games, too, like PixelJunk Monsters. And it was the thing that kept me going with all the other RTS games that I played over the years, from AOEIII to Rise of Nations, etc. The AI might be doing whatever on those maps, but overall it was just a matter of finding your way through the puzzle of their stock behaviors to grind them down. That was always very fun, to a point, but once the AI became too predictable and once I had my build patterns down, I was done.

How AI War Blends All That Together, And How It Has Grown

AI War was therefore built around having the players constantly off balance and having to adjust their strategies, and having much deeper and longer-term strategies compared to the "comp stomping" in those other games. That said, the AI is always growing an changing, too -- layering on many sorts of complexity in its behavior makes for a more interesting and varied experience, and makes it more effective at surprising the player.

There was a time when the AIs just had waves, special forces, guards, and "free" ships that ran right at you most of the time. Then Cross Planet Attacks and retreat/regroup behavior was added, and a lot of the finer mechanics were tuned. Astro Trains have always provided another layer of AI behavior, but they've had mixed popularity at best. Then we added minor factions of various sorts, which shook things up almost as much as the CPAs. The recent Border Aggression feature is another major step for the AI, adding on a lot of potential complexity for them in the later game in particular.

And we're planning further minor factions and have that new "entourage" behavior for starships and fortresses and similar in the works, which should also make things varied in yet another way.

All of these things combine to create an AI that is varied and that can surprise players, and that is always getting better and doing so. It has a lot of various emergent activities at this stage that genuinely surprise me when I play, because I never programmed anything of the sort in, and it's fascinating to me to see how that sort of thing comes out of those layers of complexity based on multiple simple overlapping rulesets. That's why I keep focusing on adding more rulesets as much as possible, because that leads to even greater variance. And having more ships with varying attributes and gameplay mechanics attached is also related to that. It's something that has to be done pretty carefully over time, though.

Even So, The AI Won't Have The Tempo, And Here's A Better Example Of Why

And, of course, none of that is ever really going to lead to an AI that has the tempo, as that's something I studiously avoid for the reasons noted above. There's a reason that the terrorists in Rainbow Six don't use squad tactics and come flanking you and executing deep strategies -- that would take all of the fun parts of the strategy away from the human players in those games. I've played many other FPS games where the AI adversaries do indeed use much more strategy, but since those strategies are largely invisible all it tends to affect is how many guys you wind up facing at a time, and where.

Perhaps my favorite example of great FPS AI is Far Cry 2, because they act like real people and respond intelligently (most of the time) to what I do, but I'm hiding in the bushes and moving around sniping them off, creating distractions, and so forth. If I make a mistake and break cover that will be my death, and if I do something stupid like rushing straight into the camp with guns blazing, then they will also kill me. Heck, if I approach a camp and just sit in one position firing on them, they'll flank me and kill me, so I have to keep moving and really act like a guerrilla. Come to think of it, Red Faction: Guerrilla did much the same sort of thing, too, and I really enjoyed that there. But in both of those games, as long as I keep hidden and/or behaved so that I'm not noticeable, the AIs are entirely no real threat to me. I have the tempo and can do recon, decide when and how to strike, and then am left with the challenge of dealing with the hornet's nest that I've just kicked.

AI War is like that -- that's the intended design, and it would be a pretty fundamental thing to change it and give the AI the tempo. If the bad guys in Far Cry 2 were constantly prowling the jungle on high alert for me, that would have just made it Half Life 2, which I found to be a wonderful game but much less satisfying tactically.

In Conclusion, The Tempo Thing Is Neither An Oversight Nor Accidental In The Design

Starcraft and Age of Empires and all those other games do what they do for good reason, and in a pvp type arena they provide a lot of what I used to enjoy in both Warcraft II and Counter-Strike. There is value in that, and I'm glad that other developers continue to make games of that sort, even if I'm not specifically interested in them myself anymore. But trying to bend the Rainbow 6es, the Far Cries, the Red Factions, and the AI Wars to be more like them is not something I'd want to do.

I hear what you're saying, but it isn't like it's accidental that AI War is crafted the way that it is. I think the reasons that you mention that hold it back from being "excellent" to just being "great" is what makes some people consider it really excellent at all.

AI Article Index
Part 1 gives an overview of the AI approach being used, and its benefits.
Part 2 shows some LINQ code and discusses things such as danger levels.
Part 3 talks about the limitations of this approach.
Part 4 talks about the asymmetry of this AI design.
Part 5 is a transcript of a discussion about the desirability of slightly-nonideal emergent decisions versus too-predictable "perfect" decisions.
Part 6 talks about player agency versus AI agency, and why the gameplay of AI War is based around keeping the AI deviously reactive rather than ever fully giving it the "tempo."

Like Chess, A Game Of AI War Has Three Abstract "Phases"

Normally I don't cross-post topics from the Arcen Wiki, but this one I wrote tonight, and was so fundamental and helpful in explaining many of the intricacies of AI War in broad terms that I thought it would be a worthwhile one to share directly here on my blog.

Q: The game doesn't seem to have any literal "ages" or anything like some other strategy games do, but players talk a lot about the mid game and the late game and so on. What are those like?

A: AI War, like Chess, is perhaps best thought of in three distinct phases -- despite the fact that neither of these games has any literal delineations (no "okay, the switch has tripped, so it's the endgame now!"), there are vastly different activities being undertaken in each of the three phases of both games (for Chess: opening, middlegame, endgame). We'll divide our discussion of AI War up in the same fashion

---------------Opening---------------

At the start of the game, things are comparably easy -- but don't mistake easy for unimportant. Your first half dozen moves in Chess are usually pretty easy, too -- to the point of being memorized/scripted in many cases, which is not true in any fashion for AI War -- but in both games those early moves can set you up well or poorly in terms of position, tempo, material, and so forth. Treating the early game too cavalierly is a leading cause of death later in games.

Human Activities

• Early Land Grab
• Early Scouting
• Early Defenses
• Early Economic Setup
• Trying To Determine The Type Of AI Opponent If Playing Against Random
• In Multiplayer, You Might Start The Earliest Parts Of Specialization Of Players

No matter what your ultimate strategy is going to be during a given AI War campaign, most likely the opening phase of the game is going to be centered around a land grab where you try to take territory to improve your economy, while also trying to gate raid, put up defenses, and otherwise protect your home planet.

Advanced players will generally try to strike as hard and as fast at enemy planets as they can, disabling them before they have a chance to reinforce. This has to be counterbalanced against your need to defend yourself, which can be tricky depending on the map and the AI personality. That's part of why scouting is so important: it lets you identify targets of opportunity, as well as planets that will develop into serious threats if left unchecked, as well as learn about the opposing ship mix in general use, as well as attempting to figure out which AI personalities you might be facing off against.

All of those early information-gathering activities are critical to making good long-term decisions and ultimately crafting a victory. Which planets you choose to attack in the early game might not make a whole lot of difference to how hard the average early game will be, but it can be absolutely critical for how hard or easy the middlegame turns out to be.

Often there are high-level enemy planets right near your territory, and the choice at this stage is whether to attack them early (and thus be over-matched while the other nearby planets all get lots of time to reinforce in your absence), or to just go for the really easy captures and thus let the high-level enemy planets get the reinforcements (often which causes them to be a permanent issue for you for the rest of the game).

Counterbalanced against those concerns of the potential offensive threat of the various nearby AI planets, you have the issue of trying to take planets that will best serve your economy. That means taking planets that are rich and resources, sure, but it also means taking planets in a strategic fashion that they create bottlenecks that help protect your resources. If your planets are constantly losing their harvesters due to inbound AI aggression, then the middlegame is going to be much harder.

If you don't scout at this stage, then you're just playing blind, and that's never good. Ideally if you are on an 80 planet map, you'll get visibility into the nearest 10-30 planets, depending on the type of map and how much effort you put into it. There are so many other critical things to do in the early game (land grab and defenses most of all) that you'll often be too busy to pay much attention to scouting beyond the immediate area around your home planet. That's okay, because the main decision points at this stage of the game almost always involve planets that are 1-3 hops away from your home planet at most. First priority is to "secure your hinterland" and set up a platform for your expansion into the larger galaxy, and then you can make decisions about where to go in the larger galaxy later on.

Rate Of Human Expansion

During the first hour of a game, usually most players will be able to take 3-6 AI planets for themselves with some degree of ease. This is faster than at any other point in the game, but might be slowed down significantly if players decide to take on a high-level planet very early in the game. In the second hour, the players might then take another 2-4 planets on average, usually arriving at between 8 and 9 plants total by the time the opening phase of the game is done.

Of course that all varies by play style, and some players will prefer to be much more defensive and thus taking far fewer planets in total. Or players might find a snug little corner of the map that they decide to clear completely out and thus have a single incoming bottleneck to a smaller group of planets. The defensibility of that sort of bottlenecking certainly makes it a worthwhile thing to consider if the opportunity for that presents itself.

As with all the phases of the game, there isn't one right way to play, so expansion rates will vary quite a lot from player to player. The above is perhaps the average for someone who is neither a turtle nor a rusher, and who is playing against a fairly evenly matched AI opponent on a moderately-tough map, though.

In general, by the end of this phase you probably have between 100-300 AI Progress, hopefully on the lower end of that spectrum.

AI Activities

During the opening of the game, the AI has pretty pitiful waves due to extremely low AI Progress. The waves will grow in size as the opening progresses, but overall they are small enough that advanced players can design automated turret defenses (maybe with a few mobile ships aiding on Free Roaming Defender mode) that will hold off most waves without any need to oversee the battles. Generally this would be incoming waves of a couple of hundred mark I ships in single player.

The AI is far from idle, however. Consider these just probing raids -- they are enough to make you have to spend metal and crystal on defenses, and they may cripple your economy a few times if you are not careful, costing you precious time/resources, but usually they aren't enough to really threaten a loss.

On the other end of things, the AI is also at its weakest point defensively, but it is also at its most concentrated. Depending on the type of map, there are likely only a few planets that are "on alert" thanks to being near your planets. The AI doesn't get very large reinforcements or very many reinforcement points at this stage of the game, but what they do get is likely to be pretty concentrated.

One effective strategy to intentionally prolong the opening of the game -- to your advantage -- is to intentionally put more planets on alert. Thus the AI feels like it has even more territory to defend, but it doesn't have the power to really defend it all quite yet. That can really buy you some time, which is helpful.

Time In Phase, What Causes Move To Next Phase

The amount of time spent in the opening phase really depends on the player and their play style. On average, it's usually going to last between one and two hours. But if the AI is of a very high level or a particularly difficult personality, that's going to make the opening phase shorter.

Generally it is to your advantage as a human player for the opening phase to last as long as possible. The opening pretty much ends when you hit an impasse and can no longer make a quick land grab in an effective fashion, and can no longer defend yourself completely on autopilot (unless you're really lucky or entrenched).

Risk Of Losing

This part of the game is when you have the least buffer between the AI and your home planet, but at the same time it's when the AI is the weakest. It's also the time when you have the least resources, but you also have the smallest territory to defend, which means that your resources can generally be spent more effectively. All of these factors usually cancel each other out in such a way that it's pretty hard to lose in the early game unless the AI opponent catches you just wrong, or a map is particularly brutal, or you're playing against an opponent far above your skill level.

Losses at this stage of the game do happen during normal play, don't misunderstand, but usually not unless they happen to have a big wave of bombers/tanks or ships that pass through force fields, and you happen to be really distracted or careless. In Chess, it would be rather like being caught in the Fool's Mate, the Scholar's Mate, or similar. It's actually easier for that sort of thing to happen in AI War than in Chess, as there are far more than just two common ways for that sort of early loss to occur, but the overall likelihood is still comparably low.

The opening of AI War is essentially your preemptive strike, and you have the definite advantage in your local neighborhood during this time -- but it's also easy to squander that opportunity if you don't make good decisions that set you up for later success. Despite having the advantage, there's nothing cavalier about this phase.

Chance Of Winning

At this stage of the game, you have basically no hope of winning. The AI outnumbers you by a vast amount, and if you try to go for an early victory against the AI (assuming you can even find their home planet at this stage in the game), your ships will be so outclassed that you likely won't make it even past their wormhole. Scratch that -- you'd never make it even past the "core" planets guarding their home planet with any force worth having.

If you even try to go for a win at this stage of the game, you're just wasting your time and squandering an opportunity to set yourself up for a more solid middlegame. The best advice here is typically to just not even worry about defeating the AI, and to just worry about setting yourself up for a later victory (along with making sure that you don't lose in the meantime).

---------------Middlegame---------------

Once you hit a wall with your initial rush of expansion, then the real long-term strategy begins. Of course, everything you did up until now is going to be echoing heavily throughout the rest of the middle-game, so your early strategies have hopefully set you up in a superior situation for the middlegame. If not, prepare to spend the next while trying to dig yourself out of the hole you put yourself into.

Human Activities

This is where the meatiest strategy of the game comes in, so it becomes harder to generalize here. Generally speaking, you'll have identified some desirable targets during the opening of the game (of economic, technological, or just general military value), and you'll pursue those targets. You're likely coming into this phase of the game still not knowing where the enemy home planets are, and still being blind to half of the map or more, so scouting will continue to be of importance.

Perhaps the biggest general goals of this phase would be:

• Definitely try to find at least 3-4 of the Advanced Research Stations.
• Definitely do a lot of knowledge gathering, possibly knowledge raiding, in general.
• Maybe take some more planets for resources, or maybe adopt a resource-efficient raiding strategy if that's your thing.
• Definitely try to find at least one Advanced Factory that you can adequately defend.
• Definitely avoid putting the core and home AI Planets on alert if at all possible.

And then there's a whole mess of other possible goals that might be of huge or insignificant importance, depending on your play style and the map and the situation as you evaluate it:

• You might want to locate the AI home planets so that you can start planning a route to them, or you might not care about that yet.
• You might want to capture some large weapons, like stuff from Fabricators, or Golems, or Zenith Reserves, etc -- or at least have them ready to be captured if you later decide you need them. Or you might ignore them completely, opting for lower AI Progress instead of that extra firepower.
• If Astro Trains are on for the AI, you might take a lot of care to re-route them to avoid having them constantly messing with your defenses.
• In multiplayer, you might be really seriously specializing per player at this stage.
• In solo or multiplayer, you're probably leaning more towards fleet ships or starships by now, possibly with some mix of both.
• You might be spreading out the AI Alert in order to keep the AI from bunching against you too much.
• You might go on an AI-Progress-reducing quest against Data Centers, Co-Processors, and the like.

And so on. There are dozens of capturables, especially if you are playing with The Zenith Remnant enabled, so there are literally more good things that might be helpful to you (and more bad things that might hurt you) than you can possibly hope to capture (or destroy) on a given map. That's part of why having a good picture of as much of the map as possible is important, because even if there are awesome (or terrible) things that you want to react to nearby, there might be more awesome (or more terrible) stuff further out. It's hard to make good long-term decisions when you have incomplete data, to say the least.

You'll also be really focused on defending yourself, but this will be covered more under the AI Activities section for the middlegame.

Rate Of Human Expansion

By this point in the game, you'll probably be down to capturing a new AI planet on average every 45 to 90 minutes or so. This also means that the AI Progress will be going up slower, but by this stage the AI is already a lot more powerful, and as you try to further expand your territory, you're spreading yourself increasingly thin.

Some advanced players on very high difficulties will practically stop capturing new planets all together, except to provide supply for transports or a way for them to capture Advanced Research Stations and so on. Those same players tend to abandon those planets they capture after they get the goods, so to speak, and also tend to focus on data centers to keep their AI Progress as insanely low as possible.

On the flip side, some other advanced players go for an incredibly completionist style of play that can make a single campaign last 40-60 hours or even more, 2x-6x as long as most campaigns should really take. These players tend to take all the planets in a carefully orchestrated strategy that sends the AI Progress sky high (and AI reinforcements, too), but which is managed by careful bottlenecking and incredible defenses. These players might capture 100+ planets in all, but that's certainly atypical.

Both of the last two paragraphs actually reflect very atypical advanced strategies, and one that most players would find boring or frustrating. But those two strategies reflect the extreme polar ends of what is possible in AI War, and what a few hardcore players gravitate to for whatever reasons. Most players adopt a strategy more about moderation, and keep a middling AI Progress and capture perhaps 20-30 planets at most by the end of the middlegame.

AI Activities

During this part of the game, the AI really comes into its own and is more of a threat than ever. You'll run into Cross Planet Attacks (CPAs) every few hours, Border Aggression will start becoming a problem to an increasing degree, and even the general waves will become more of a problem.

Most waves will still be dispatched fairly easily and with mostly automated defenses, assuming that you're keeping up with your gate raiding and creating whipping boys wherever possible, but the risk of a wave being slightly more powerful than you expect and thus overrunning your defenders is ever present. It is possible -- and somewhat common -- to lose whole swathes of planets to this effect.

This is where you need some degree of defense in depth, protecting your softer internal planets rather than just creating a harder outer crust. That in itself is a challenge, though, mainly for reasons of ship cap caused by limited knowledge and resources in general. The more you spend on defense-in-depth, the less you have for your frontline defenses and for your main offensive arm, so this is a real challenge. Some players use basic defenses paired with a mobile fleet that acts on offense except when being withdrawn to defend against a major AI incursion, for instance -- thus keeping things flexible and generally offensive-oriented.

Even on engagements with the AI where you win, individual ships can sneak away and then pose quite a threat if they are not noticed. Sometimes they'll retreat out into the galaxy and then return later with friends (or at a different location), and so it's important to keep an eye on your Threat meter in the upper right of the screen for this reason. Other times a small band of AI ships will break through your outer defenses and rush through your inner core of planets wreaking havoc while you're distracted with the main force.

It's important to watch out for that, especially if there is a lowish buffer between your outer shell and your actual home planet. As in Chess, it's easy to accidentally leave your "king" open and get checked or checkmated when you weren't expecting it. So it's definitely good to make sure that your defenses are generally as automated as possible in most parts, so that you can keep an eye on the overall battle and status of the galaxy, manage your offense, and deal with any breakaway AI ships that make it through to attack you.

During this time the AI is also on serious defensive mode. By 5-6 hours into the game, some AI planets will have been on alert for practically the whole game now, and they will have 4000+ ships in many cases by this stage. The ramifications of that are discussed here. Part of your offensive and defensive strategies will involve keeping an eye on what the AI is doing defensively, and adjusting as needed.

Time In Phase, What Causes Move To Next Phase

The amount of time spent in this phase is really hard to quantify, because (again like Chess) it makes up the bulk of the game. The opening for AI War is a pretty predictable 1-2 hours with relatively fewer exceptions. The endgame is also shorter, as it mostly consists of an assault on the two AI home planets. But the middlegame fills all the rest of that space.

Most games of AI War last for around 9-14 hours on an 80 planet map if you're using non-extreme strategies. On a 40 planet map, it's perhaps more like 7-12 hours on average, and it's a bit longer with even larger maps. The smallest maps are, somewhat paradoxically, neither easier nor particularly faster to play than a 40 planet map.

Some players that are very advanced and use game settings to make a more expedient game can get a faster experience, and those that are really completionist can certainly turn a single campaign into a marathon to rival the length of many RPGs.

The trigger for moving to the endgame is pretty clear cut: the human team decides that they are ready to start attacking one or both of the AI homeworlds. Of course, plenty of games never get to this stage at all... because the humans are already dead.

Risk Of Losing

The risk of losing is actually higher during the endgame phase, but the risk is high enough during the middlegame that a huge number of games never make it to the endgame. If you're playing at a difficulty level in keeping with your skill level, this is a pretty hard game. If you play on difficulty 10 or something else equally insane, it's pretty much Dwarf Fortress hard.

The three main causes of loss in this phase of the game are, in from riskiest to least-risky:

• 1. Getting swept out of the galaxy by a massive cross-planet attack.
• 2. Having a small band of AI ships break through your defenses at some point and checkmate you on the sly.
• 3. Having your defenses unexpectedly overrun while your main fleet is elsewhere, possibly because of killing a high-level AI planet's command station early (with the risks that entails), or because of roaming Threat, Special Forces, the presence of some hostile minor faction, special forces ships, or some combination of the above.

To avoid losing, you want to make sure to do some or all of the following, in no particular order:

• Keep the AI Progress as low as you can, via killing data centers or by only taking targets that are really worth it.
• Keep really good defenses in place, and defenses-in-depth, using lots of turrets in particular, but also mines, fortresses, or whatever else you like.
• If a CPA seems far larger than you can possibly defend against, consider nuking them if a few thousand of them are all on one planet at once. Usually it isn't worth it unless you can get about 3,000 or more of their CPA ships in one blast, but it just depends -- if it's the difference between a loss and surviving, go for whatever works.
• Have as good an economy as possible, so that if your main fleet gets wiped out on the front lines, you can crank out replacements by the time the AI reaches your inner planets. If you're always running yourself at ship cap due to being that rich, you can also invest in mercenaries in the meantime, which expands your forces even more.
• Consider all your options when faced with a seemingly impossible incursion -- use lightning warheads to strike the AI when they are planning to come through a wormhole, use multiple EMPs to stun them before you go in for the kill, use the fleet starships to boost your turrets and/or other ships, try to strike the onrushing AI ships in smaller batches where you outnumber them if at all possible, etc.

Chance Of Winning

Given the definition of the endgame, it might seem to be logically impossible to win in the middlegame (the endgame starts when you decide to go for the AI home planets, and you win by going for the AI home planets). However, it is possible -- if rare -- to be able to win during the middlegame.

Generally there's a pretty defined arc to when you hit the endgame: you've really beefed yourself up to the point where you feel like you'll be unstoppable or close, and you're ready to go kick some AI butt. There's always more that you could do to beef up more, but you're confident and ready.

However, the rare exceptions come in when you notice some sort of opportunity early, and decide to take it. Maybe you just got a golem or a giant zenith reserve cracked open, and the AI Progress is low enough that you want to take a whack at those home planets without fully beefing yourself up to where you'd normally need to be. That's harder than it might sound, even with a golem, because the AI has Mass Drivers, warhead interceptors, ion cannons, and core ships galore on those home planets and the "core" planets around them. So generally you'll need to be very clever and lucky with your main fleet and/or transports to make way for the larger hardware (even starships) that you're intending to strike with.

If you go that route, then your strategies would switch over to the endgame ones for a while -- but if you fail, then you can just go right to the middlegame, lick your wounds and continue beefing up your forces, and then go for the endgame a while (sometimes hours) later.

---------------Endgame---------------

So you've survived to the point where you think you're strong enough to take out the AI home planets. Now it's time to prepare for the final assault, and then see if all your hard work and preparation will pay off.

Human Activities

You're out to kill the AI home planets at this stage. You know where they are, and hopefully you have scouts sitting on them and other key planets providing you a continuous stream of up-to-the-second intel. You can attack either planet first, or you can even try attacking both planets at once.

There's a huge jump in AI Progress (and often Threat) after the first planet, so it's wise to hit both planets at once if you can do so -- but usually it's a stretch just to get one at a time, even in multiplayer. You'll probably set up a forward base with docks and such 2-3 hops away from each home planet, which will put the "core" planets on alert but not the home planets, and then you'll likely use transports or otherwise carve a path to the AI home planets themselves.

There are a variety of strategies for actually taking the home planets out, but they vary so heavily on what ships you have and how you've built yourself up over the course of the rest of the game that it's even harder to generalize here than it was for the middlegame.

Rate Of Human Expansion

Most likely the only reason you'd take a planet at this stage of the game is for military advantage. In other words, for creating those forward bases 2-3 hops away from the AI home planets. Presumably you already have all the technology you need or want, you already have the resource throughput you desire, and everything is set up for you to try checkmating the AI. Granted, things may go wrong (and often do), so you may need to regroup and get more knowledge or resources or whatever than you thought, but as much as possible the goal is just conquest here.

AI Activities

Everything that was said about the AI during the middlegame still holds true, but the AI will also make special efforts to reinforce its home planet when threatened. If you've kept the AI Progress low and kept the AI home planets off alert until the last possible second, you might actually find the destruction of the first AI home planet somewhat anticlimactic, though certainly not a pushover.

However, this can be quite a false sense of security. Upon killing that first AI, you immediately jump around 100 AI Progress, a bunch of core ships likely go free from that planet and may make a beeline for your home planet (which you may not be watching very carefully at this stage), and if you're playing with AI Plots turned on you might get another nasty surprise of some sort (such as the Avenger appearing and wreaking absolute chaos until you either kill it or hurriedly kill the second AI, whichever seems easier).

One way or another, after you kill that first AI home planet, everything gets a fair bit harder all of a sudden. If you just barely scraped by with the first one, the second one might be even more of a nightmare. That extra AI Progress often pushes the tech level of waves and reinforcements up a notch, which makes your defenses suddenly strained even if they had not been before, and if a higher-level CPA is suddenly declared then you're in real trouble. This is why it's a great idea to be ready to do a one-two punch against both AI homeworlds if at all possible -- though often you just have to roll the dice, since each AI home planet might take 20-60 minutes depending on how well you've set things up for yourself versus how well the AIs set things up for themselves.

Time In Phase, What Causes Move To Next Phase

Really, this is pretty hard to quantify as far as time spent. It might be under an hour, or it might be a few hours. It's generally not a grind-fest, but if you alerted the home planet too early or were more ill-prepared than you thought, then it might turn into one. In those situations you can either cut your losses and regroup for a while, or you can just hammer against the AI with wave after wave.

This phase ends when either you kill both AIs, or they finish off your team. Or sometimes you might revert to the middlegame for a while, but that's less common once you've committed to trying to take out one or both of the AI home planets.

Risk Of Losing

Especially when you consider the normal danger from waves, CPAs, border aggression, special forces, and all that good stuff that's always around (and pretty dangerous by this stage), the time right after you kill the first AI is perhaps the most dangerous time in the entire game. You may have a few hundred core ships streaking towards your home planet right when some other calamity strikes, and that's a good example of when multiple events can combine to cause your defenses to get unexpectedly overrun.

And given that most of your fleet is probably either a) dead from the battle, or b) completely on the other side of the map from your home planet, your ability to bring your mobile forces home to aid in your defense is at an all-time low for the game.

Losing right when you're on the cusp of victory... hurts. So make sure not to get so caught up in your "inevitable" victory that you get stabbed in the back when you're not looking.

Chance Of Winning

This is the part of the game in which you'll win, most likely, if you were going to win. It's still quite hard, make no mistake. Some players that come to AI War from other RTS games think that victory is inevitable when really it is far from it. They look at their thousands of high-level ships, they have scout intel showing that the AI planets are undefended for the most part thanks to not being on alert, and they assume that they can't lose.

This is folly. You can lose at any point, even if you have overwhelming odds. Don't be like the Buggers at the finale of Ender's Game. The AI can -- and will -- do that to you if you're not careful. You could outnumber their home planets 10:1 and still lose horribly because your fleet was in the wrong place and your defenses weren't enough.

So proceed with caution, at any rate. Another wrong assumption that many players of other RTS games carry over to AI War is that the game will get easier once the first AI player is dead. Quite the opposite, as noted above -- AI War is a team game, when it comes to both the humans and AI players. No human or AI players are ever "out of the game" early; the game ends for everyone at once. So when you kill the first AI home planet, all you've done is really make them angry and more powerful, and both of them are still right there ready to kill you (same principle holds true when they kill one of the human players in a multiplayer game). Of course, killing one of their two home planets does get you that much closer to actual victory, so it's a needed step, but it is a very dangerous step.

If you do manage to win, it's a pretty impressive achievement, as this is quite a hard game on the standard difficulty levels. Congratulations!