Game Deconstruction - Angry Birds

Just why is Angry Birds so popular?  It is one of those games which has really put the focus on indie developers.  You can make a game like Angry Birds quite easily but what was the winning formula?  Why hadn't anybody stumbled upon it before?

The Theme?  Lobbing Birds at Pigs who have their eggs.  Not sure that this was the appeal really.  If someone said to me in a bar "have you heard about that new game where you chuck frowning birds at oinking green pigs?" I'm not sure I would have been motivated to keep tabs on it.

The fact is Angry Birds was immensely successful on devices with touchscreen input.  As far as this goes the game is excellent, you can control the trajectory and power of the bird with relative ease and quite quickly it feels like a game of skill.  Everyone thinks they are ace at lobbing things through the air onto/into something else.  I literally spend many hours of my working week throwing balls of paper into the waste bin.  It would be a serious waste of time if I weren't so good at it.  This is what Rovio have managed to capture, the artistry of chucking things in the bin.  On top of that you can play it for thirteen seconds and turn it off and not lose anything which is the essence of mobile gaming - occupying micro-moments.  A reworking of a Zelda game would be a complete waste of time on a phone.  If you have to play any longer than two seconds without a save point then you are looking at a recipe for complete failure.  I haven't completed Angry Birds and feel no motivation to do so.  In fact if I had completed it what would I do whilst I'm on the bog thinking about what to think about while I'm on the bog?

That's it really, you can call it the mechanic but really I think its that the touchscreen is the perfect input device for that mechanic.  After that it is well executed.  Well done Rovio.

My Motivation for Game Development

There are plenty of developers out there that are really passionate about what they do.  They write these games that are loving homages to a genre/sub-genre.  Their audience are all those people who remember how good Chaos was on the spectrum, or Dizzy, or the original Wolfenstein or are 8-bit fanatics.  There are people out there who can pick the geneology of any game out of thin air, they've been playing and studying through play video games their entire lives.  I'm kind of one of them.  But my history of gaming is a little bit more potted.

I reckon I was about 7 so we're talking 1985 - 26 years ago (there's a sobering thought) and my parents bought home a computer.  I had no idea we were getting it and was absolutely ecstatic when it arrived.  A small black box with rubber keys and a tape recorder.  The Spectrum 48k was my introduction to the world of computing.  I spent hours programming it - it had a dodgy power connection and after a few hours of programming it would go off and I would lose all those lines of code.  But it was ok, I didn't really understand what I was doing and the not knowing what was going to happen when I ran the program was kind of like a game in itself.

The games I can remember playing were things like Tranzam, Atic Atac (best game ever), Chaos, Centipede, Digger Dan and that's about it!  The truth is I played hundreds of games but my memory for them has failed.  All I have left are remnants of experiences, most of which were delightful.  A couple not so great.  I distinctly remember the original Donkey Kong crashing on me a lot.  This is the kind of experience I want to replicate.  The feeling of 'Wowwwwww!'

My history continues in similar fashion - from Spectrum to Commodore 64, to Amstrad CPC6128, to Amiga 1200 - then the CD32 (great move that was) through to PC with a couple of stops off at the megadrive and a Nintendo 64.  I have spent some serious hours playing, beating and getting bored of hundreds of video games.  What always sticks out are the ones that you obsess about.  Where you go to bed after a 14 hour stint and still think about it.  It doesn't happen so often any more, I'm too old and too tired and games are far more cinematic these days.  The wow factor comes from the amazing graphics and not the gameplay.  But that's what I would like to bring back into the world - fun, all engrossing video games.

How do you do this?  Well I think it's quite simple, you offer people something that they've always wanted to play but don't realise it.  How you come up with that something that satisfies that formula is a matter of introspection and empathy, two assets that are generally under-developed in modern society.  Thinking critically about what you like and why you like it goes against the 'want now' mentality that has been encouraged in modern times.

And maybe there is the theme for a game - "What happens if you get everything you want?"  A player with an infinite inventory that stores everything you pick up making it very difficult to find and access the things that you actually need.  Or maybe the more you carry the slower you can run/walk and once you've picked something up you can't put it down.  Talk about a frustrating game mechanic :D

I'm not saying that I will ever achieve what is essentially nostalgia on my part but I think it is a slightly different motivation to a lot of other indie developers.

Some great gaming podcasts

Apparently podcasting is dead but just in case you are into necrophilia you can check out these podcasts.  I particularly enjoy the brainy gamer and would recommend it.

The great thing about all these podcasts is that they are hosted and produced by people who really know and love what they are doing.  After all what's the point of spending days, weeks, months tinkering with code and artwork if you don't love what you do.

They are all awesome geeks of course.

http://www.brainygamer.com/ - some interesting interviews with some interesting people.  A host with a good knowledge of the area.

http://www.gamedevradio.net/ - fairly interesting, easy going, again good interviews.

http://www.gameenginepodcast.com/ - those crazy Aussies, good discussion, light hearted.

http://www.experiencepoints.net/