Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Bite Sized Hardcore

cliffski

The press and publishers often try to split gamers into two groups, the hardcore and the casual. Here are rough descriptions:

Hardcore gamers play serious games, deep games, and they play a LOT. They have a lot of time, and they get invested into games. They play mods, they read strategy guides, they are probably 14 year old boys. They like zombies and killing stuff. They play games like Skyrim, Call of Duty, Men of War, Starcraft. Their favorite color is dark brown, stained with the blood of orcs.

Casual gamers play fun cute games. They play simple games, and only in short chunks. They cannot cope with 2 mouse buttons, or reading instructions. They hate violence. They are all 40+ soccer moms and they like kittens and cooking. They play games like farmville and peggle, and match-3 games. Their favorite color is the fluffy white of a pony’s mane, draped across a basket of flowers.

But of course this is bullshit.

I am *time poor* when it comes to games, but I love deep hardcore serious strategy stuff, with orcs and blood, and ok, maybe the odd kitten, but it’s a kitten with razor sharp claws who battles his enemies and earns steam achievements.

What I think game designers may have missed, is that the 14 year old hardcore starcraft players of yore, are now 30+ with kids. maybe even 40+ like me. They understand and love serious hardcore games but are time poor. Right now I genuinely play more battlefield 3 than anno because anno takes longer to load for me.

What they want, perhaps… is bite sized hardcore? I present to you, the first draft of

THE BITE SIZED HARDCORE MANIFESTO.

What we demand is…

1) No pandering to casual gaming stereotypes. No gratuitous kittens or ‘cute’ cuddly characters.

2) No time wasting. No splash screens, intros, or FMV. We have 30 minutes tonight for gaming. Ensure all 30 minutes have us interacting with the game.

3) No Grind. We have day jobs. leave the grind to the kids in the F2P MMOs where it belongs. Give me decent, varying content, without filler. And don’t reward grind either, with bonus achievements for time played, or 1,000 low level rats clubbed.

4) No nickel+diming. We have proper jobs and disposable income. If the game is good, we will buy outright. Don’t keep breakign immersion to try and sell us $0.05 worth of magic pixie dust.

5) No oversimplification. We can cope with 2 mouse buttons, maybe even 3, and a wheel. We can cope with right clicking, tech trees, customisable units and mods.

6) No mandatory training levels or tutorials that cover the obvious. This is my 245th first person shooter. I can guess that WSAD moves, the mouse looks, and the mouse shoots. At the very least, let me skip tutorial stuff I don’t need.

7) Don’t patronize us. We shouldn’t get an achievement for hitting the jump key, or told we are awesome soldiers for hitting a tin can. Leave that crap for kids in kindergarten.

8) Be original. We have gamed before. We have fought in many a crate-strewn corridoor, and killed many a rat and returned their hides to someone who is too lazy to do it themselves. We have heard many tales of lost kingdoms and evil wizards. Surprise us. Please.
What needs adding?

58 thoughts on Bite Sized Hardcore

  2. Here here!

    Over xmas, friends gave me DE:HR, Witcher 2 and Defense Grid. I’ve barely played three hours of the first two, yet ten of the tower defence. I just don’t have the time to sink a solid day into gaming at the moment, so I’ve found quick bite size battles are a far more rewarding way to spent my limited down time.

  3. 9.) I should be allowed to save anywhere, at any time, for any reason. And if not “not being able to save on demand” is a feature in the game, checkpoints should be plentiful or I should be able to pause and minimize the window for hours if needed.

    A request from a 30 something father.

  4. I completely agree, Cliff. If anything I think you’re underestimating the size of the demographic though – I completely empathise with you and I’m in my mid-20s. I too am short on gaming time, yet willing to spend good money on games with high fun density.

  5. No skinner boxes at all. That kind of goes with ‘no grind’ and ‘no nickel+diming’, but takes it further. Don’t treat your customers as things.

  6. I’ll second Mike’s #9. I need to be able to pause quickly, and then get distracted for a few hours, then come back. Ideally, it should handle me closing the laptop and putting it to sleep gracefully.

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  9. “Bite Size Hardcore” = Indie

    At least my idea of Indie games, original bite size games that just don’t fit into the casual clone categories.

  10. Not sure if this is general enough to be included in a manifesto, but I think it’s worth mentioning. In RPG games, I’d like to see a way to do crafting and marketing “in the field”. I find a great deal of my time in RPG games consists of leaving the field, going to town, doing crafting and marketing chores, and then returning to the field. It’d be nice if I could do this all this while still out adventuring.

    Torchwood took a nice step towards this, by giving you a pet who could be loaded with loot and sent off to town to sell. But I want to be able to do more, using some game-universe-appropriate means. In a fantasy world, perhaps I could be accompanied at all times by a smith and a merchant. In a sci-fi world, perhaps I could use a portable teleporter to transfer goods to and from a shop, and do crafting by feeding ingredients into a portable nanolathe. Whatever the case, marketing and crafting shouldn’t take any more time than that needed to click on the items I want to buy or sell or craft.

  11. So there with you Rob – “#10: Don’t ask me to spend my only 30 minute play session tonight traveling to and from common locations. Film invented the jump cut to keep from boring us with inane travel scenes – interaction doesn’t make them any less boring”

    Also “#11: Give me fun content within the first five minutes of launching your game. Don’t ask me to play for hours to get to the good stuff – I won’t. I’ll go play someone’s game who cares about making every minute of gameplay awesome.”

  12. Excellent points, Cliff! This is exactly how I see it! My husband, who’s more of a hardcore gamer & developer than myself, certainly seems to agree. I’m definitely too short on time to play any game with empty, stretched content. And when I rarely have the time to play, I’d really like it to be a fun, refreshing experience.

    A possible addition to the list: if there are long pauses in-between playing sessions, it’s nice to be able to easily dive into the world, and not spend the whole 30 minutes wondering what on earth it was you were supposed to be doing again. A quest log of some sorts usually comes in helpful.

    Actually, it’s almost as if you’ve been reading my mind. (You haven’t have you? *Glances behind shoulder, with a very suspicious expression.) We’ve been discussing these points on multiple occasions throughout our own game dev project. I’d certainly like to see more games that take the bite-sized manifesto into account!

    Anne and Ville: parents of two lovely (and amazingly fast) toddlers, and one bite-sized RPG called Driftmoon. :)

  13. I’ll question that 10 and 11. Some of the most fun I have in games like Darklands, Betrayal at Krondor, Oblivion and Two Worlds (while I think I was the only one that enjoyed that title) was wandering around, seeing the sights and bludgeoning baddies. One of the biggest shortcomings in the Witcher franchise is that each chapter was constrained to a single area or two. Another example is Amnesia, where the game is absolutely frenzied at times, but it does a good job of balancing that with quiet periods (at least at first, the later areas are a bit more in your face).

  14. As a 30-something with a full time job and a 3 year old, I completely agree. A bite-sized game doesn’t necessarily have to be short either, just easy to drop and pick up again. Load (and save) times are important when grabbing a quick 20 minutes between domestic jobs. Being two clicks and five seconds from a saved exit, and the same again to get back to the game, is real selling point for me. One that, unfortunately, I never know about until after purchase.

    Also, don’t make me keep replaying the same thing. I have too much new content in games to see (damn you Steam sales), without having to repeat the same section several times. This is more a gripe against scripted or linear games, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution lies incomplete as a testament to it. Procedurally generated games flip this on its head by making me want to do the same thing over and over.

  16. I think you just described the typical modern roguelike, at least in some aspects. You can play an in-depth one like Dungeons of Dredmor, or quick ones like Desktop Dungeons, Cardinal Quest, Shoot First, and Spelunky. And I only mean “quick ones” in that (with the exception of Desktop Dungeons, which is designed for 15 minutes or so of time) you will likely be killed quickly. :P

  19. i hope i dont sound like im shilling here, because im not, but when i read this blog post the first thing that jumped into my head was “infested planet”… http://www.rocketbeargames.com/infestedplanet/index.html

    its been scratching my bite-sized hardcore itch for the last few days, and even as a beta i have to say, its just made of awesome. missions go fairly quickly (mostly with death, because of a map generation bug in the latest version, but thatll get fixed next patch im sure) and theres not a lot of BS to wade through. the tutorial missions are especially quick, and very much a “learn by doing” affair, so theyre actually fun to play as you get up to speed.

    then, you get dumped into the missions (and the frying pan) and the fun really starts. totally worth the $15 bucks.

  21. Absolutely agreed. As a middle-aged gamer who started on Space Invaders & Asteroids in the late 70’s and never stopped playing, I tire of games that justify themselves in terms of how many hours of play there are. Especially when most of those hours are either repetition & grind, or cutscenes.

    I want to be surprised and delighted, either by variety, or depth, or innovation. I want to interact, not watch while the creators try to be movie directors. I don’t care if the game is over fairly quickly so long as I get that – lack of padding is a plus, not a minus.

  22. brilliant, just brilliant.

    Is there a FB group for this I can like and spam all my mates with?

    FB gaming is pretty big and theres plenty of gamers out there you could reach with this message

  23. “If the game has a clear ending, let me reach it in less than ten hours; games I really love rarely take more than four.” F3. Can get to the ending in 10h or play 100h wandering around and doing random quests. At first I though it was a game weakness but now…

    Also I agree with 9). I’ve stop playing R6:Vegas because of this.
    And I love ‘easy as possible’ difficult level in FPS. I’m able to beat game in normal or hard, but have no fun in playing same difficult part of game over and over again each 30minutes I have time to play (in this time I can beat one level in CoD, whole game, few hours long, took me a month to beat on easy ;)

    I love playing Hearts Of Iron but I have no time for Grand Campaing (start in 1946) so some small scale scenarios (like war in Spain in HoI2) are ‘must have’.

  24. Completely agree. I already bought both of the indie games (Driftmoon and Infested Planet) mentioned in the comments to this post! :-) And I like them both. Keep them coming ;-)

  25. I think that FPS developers should return to a more modular game design i.e. level based: 15 minutes spent completing a Doom II level, with the stats screen (kills, items, secrets) at the end of it gave you a sense of accomplishment that you simply won’t find in multiple hours of Rage!

  26. Too right – don’t make me grind, don’t make me watch your logo, don’t waste my time with ballast and allow for interruptions (the last one is why I am revisiting turn based games I would have never played when I was younger. They don’t fail you when the doorbell rings or husband walks in talking, or the dog/kids pounce)

    I would also add
    – don’t make it so obvious that you think we’re all 15, frustrated, immature, male, white, desperate. Because we’re not – and even the 14 year old gamers are not as immature and desperate as you seem to think – not like you remember being, back then. Games are mainstream and we are diverse and we like to not be pigeonholed.

    actually I would contradict you on zombies. Tired of zombies… been doing people in helmets and zombies since the 90s… – because honestly we all know that zombies (and robots) were added to get around limits in the technology. So we can’t make characters that move naturally or hair/face that looks all that natural, not without too much effort? Can’t come up with much plot or story for vilains worth their salt? I know, let’s make them a)demons and skeletons (the 90s answer) b)soldiers in helmets (the early noughties answer) or c)zombies (the current answer)

    Unless it’s kitten zombies. Kitten zombie hidden object needs doing…

  27. @Iphigenie: “because honestly we all know that zombies (and robots) were added to get around limits in the technology”

    I would dispute this. I think it’s less “zombies and robots are easier to render with limited technology”, and more “zombies and robots as antagonists are easier for Moral Guardians to swallow than people as antagonists”.

  29. Add Mod support in all games!

    I’m frequently trying to find mods to add more stuff to games or to make them more complicated, but these days lots of games seem to store all their assets in archives, which makes modding more difficult.
    If you really must develop games for consols first and then port them to PC, at least make them so that they can be easily modded.
    Games like HL2 wouldn’t have been nearly so popular if they didn’t allow modding.

  30. @Niall: sadly, making AAA titles easily moddable is getting financially prohibitive, both for developers and gamers. The development of full level editors, with all the features needed to build the higly detailed worlds of those games just requires too much resources, so the big companies will end up using max/maya/etc (with some plugins) as their only level editor. I read that even at id software level designers work a lot in modo, while using the in-house tool only for making base architectures. The absence of a freely available level editor, and the very high price of max/maya, will discourage a lot of modder wannabes.

  31. @houser2112 “zombies and robots as antagonists are easier for Moral Guardians to swallow than people as antagonists” << you're right of course. Even for me, sometimes, and I'm a long way from a moral guardian. But I hate killing NPCs in certain games (or wolves, for that matter…). If the human character is another player, not an NPC, then we are clearly playing pretend and I love trouncing them :)

    As soon as you put realistic human opponents in a game it creates a wish (except for certain kinds of shooters) to have options to try to avoid wholesale killing. And I appreciate a game that gives me that option and allows me to feel clever about doing it (good old Planescape stands out there)

  33. The very first point is made trite and juvenile by the second sentence. That is an aesthetic consideration and has little to do with the quality of the game. To be perfectly honest a bright and vibrant ‘cartoonish’ colour palette that goes with ‘cute’ characters is infinitely preferable to the brown and grey slop with unreadable silhouettes that seems to go with hardcore games. Seeing what things are and where they are is one of the distinct advantages to gameplay of having simplified character designs and bright colours. Check Plants vs Zombies (or just about any Popcap game for that matter) and Team Fortress 2 for examples of this. Hell, any Mario game in the last 25 years will demonstrate this.

  34. /signed

    I think one of the reasons of the succes of the CoD franchise is their length. You finish them in 6hours max. Which means the fun is pretty packed.

    Grind and time wasting suck the fun outta games

  35. @Thomas
    Nice to hear that you liked Driftmoon! :) Wait till you get your hands on the next Alpha (it’s in the final stages of testing)!

    @Niall
    Yes, mod support is a really nice feature in a game, or at least I like to think so! It is some work for the developer, but it’s especially great if there’s a handy editor that allows the players to create even totally different games. If the main game gets a lot of nice mods, and they’re easily playable, you might actually find yourself with (a) a bunch of interesting mods that vary aspects of the main title, as well as (b) separate mini-games to enjoy for those amazing 15-30 minutes of game-time. ;)

  36. I have to agree with Gregory, it’s pretty ridiculous to declare a game casual because you find the art style to be too cute for your taste.

  37. I generally agree with these points, and I’d like to see more games like this, and with this demographic in mind. There have been several recent games where, during a particularly long load screen or tedious cutscene, I’ve picked up my iPhone to start playing a game on that, which is just awful.

    That said, I can suggest a few titles that I think fit most, if not all, of your requirements. Super Meat Boy is definitely designed to keep you playing as much of the time as possible, SpaceChem is a great puzzle game that does not waste much time with tutorials and is very quick to get in and out of without losing anything, and Super Crate Box is a great (free) platformer that’s very deep and challenging, but the average game can last just a few minutes.

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  40. If your game is a platformer or racing game INCLUDE CONTROLLER SUPPORT. Not everyone has an XBox controller, but decent Playstation-like PC controllers are cheap and have been cheap for years now. Through the 80s and 90s, nonstandard controllers were a problem that led to mouse + keyboard becoming standard (and FPS and RTS developers discovering how useful mice were for their genres), but that’s not the case anymore.

    Mouse + keyboard is THE way to play FPSs. Console-style controllers are THE way to play platform games, racing games, and other relatively niche (on the PC) genres. Don’t undermine the playability of your game by forcing me to use a suboptimal control method. Even the old DOS platformers can be played with a modern controller thanks to DOSBox keybinding.

    (Note that a few platformers, such as VVVVVV and Canabalt are a grudging exception to this because they have so few buttons. Still, I’d REALLY like controller support for VVVVVV, it’s just that I tolerate playing without a controller because I can play it with three fingers of one hand.

    Oh, and browser-imbedded flash platformers are also an exception for technical reasons. They tend to have a small number of buttons anyway)

  41. Oh yeah, one more thing: cute != casual. There are an awful lot of subversively violent games with kid-friendly graphics and “cartoony” violence that are very, very hardcore. Anything by Taito, especially New Zealand Story and Bubble Bobble, as examples.

    All of the games from Carpe Fulgur, so far, star teenage or tween girls in Disney-inspired pastel-shaded worlds. The main characters, their enemies, and pretty much everything in the games are the very definition of “cute”. However, the gameplay is extremely, extremely, hardcore. Recettear expects you to fail early on a few times in order to progress (because stats carry over, because it’s that kind of game), and Chantelise requires you to replay individual levels for secrets.

    Fortune Summoners is basically a fully-featured hardcore action-RPG which happens to have a 2D side-scrolling interface and stars a young girl who has to fight monsters on her way to school each morning.

    So maybe “cute” isn’t the best word to describe not-hardcore.

  42. I started reading the list first and immediately thought, “I want to join this game jam, the rules are exactly what I want.” Then i read the article and realized it’s not a game jam rules page.

    To bad. I think it should be. I would love to play a bunch of bite sized hardcore games that are fast, simple and totally merciless.

  43. I agree 100% and would add another item, inspired by trying to play Civ games this way. When I load a Civ game that I saved a couple of days ago, I can easily burn 30 minutes just trying to figure out what was going on — what cities were producing what, which enemy I was building up to war with, and so forth. Even though it follows your other rules, it still fails.

    As important as the pause/save, then, is the unpause/resume — games with tons of “hidden state” are hard to pick up again.

    So I propose #12: Quick information screens that allow you to quickly see all of the known state of your game in one place.

    RPGs have been moving fast toward this one — in the last few years the “what quests are pending and what is my next action on each” screen has become ubiquitous, for instance. But big strategic games IMO have yet to invent good idioms and visual design to help players relearn their own situations.

  44. yes that’s very true. Anno 2070 suffers a bit from this. I load it up and think “what on earth was I doing?”

  45. You hit the nail on the head… 8 times at least. A lot of your points are reasons I get frustrated with games. I’m a 30-something with 2 kids, and a full-time job that involves a commute.

    Your points are spot-on.

    If I play a game and have to replay 30 minutes or so of it because I died, or got pulled away and couldn’t save, there’s a very good chance I’ll put it down indefinitely. Also, if I do pick it up and spend more than 10 solid minutes trying to figure out what I was doing for quest X, that turns me off even more.

    I also agree with being able to save/pause anywhere.

    Here’s one more for the numerous list of points:
    Let me store my saves on the cloud.

    I suppose this applies mostly to PC games, but it could apply to Internet-connected consoles as well. Save games data is small, but the time invested in “getting there” can add up. If my hard drive crashes or my OS gets corrupted, I would love to be able to re-install the game, log in to an account, and play again from where I left off. MMORPGs are great at this, but that seems to be where it stops. Bring this to single-player RPG/strategy games, and it would be awesome.

  46. Am I missing something, or was my post deleted for some weird reason even though there was nothing off-topic or rude in it?..

  47. Would you say a Play-by-email game like Solium Infernum meets the mark? Massively hardcore deep strategy title, but you only have to spend a half-hour every once in a while to make a turn.

  48. Quoting Anne Mönkkönen..

    ——————————————————————————
    “if there are long pauses in-between playing sessions, it’s nice to be able to easily dive into the world, and not spend the whole 30 minutes wondering what on earth it was you were supposed to be doing again. A quest log of some sorts usually comes in helpful.”
    ——————————————————————————

    What ALL story/mission based games need (for us parents who only have 30 minutes gaming time) is this one word.. “PREVIOUSLY”.
    You know, like you see at the start of modern TV dramas.

    Imagine, you start up Half Life 2.
    It looks at what you’ve done since the beginning, and spends 30 seconds summarising it.
    Better still, it looks at *how long* it’s been since you’ve played, and varies the depth of the ‘Previously…’ accordingly.

    * Played yesterday = short recap
    * Played 3 weeks ago = longer recap.

  49. =======================================
    Comment by Wouter Lievens

    Obviously Gratuitous Kitten Battles needs to be made pronto!
    =======================================

    I’d say Wing Commander fills that role pretty well. :)

    While I agree with most of the manifesto points, I do like well done FMV and cut scenes, especially at the end of the game as a “reward” for finishing. For those who don’t want the extras, have check boxes in the options menu to turn off splash screens, intros, and cut scenes.

    Several ideas mentioned in the comments are also important to me including quick save anytime and quick game save and exit to desktop. The game recaps/overviews would be a nice feature as well.

    A couple more ideas (not necessarily manifesto worthy):

    Give me the option to jump ahead and play the parts of the game I want to play. Most players don’t finish the games they buy due to lack of time, or disinterest in parts of the game. How about the option to choose any mission at any time rather than the typical linear “Complete Mission #1 to Unlock Mission #2…”? If I’ve already put 10+ hours into a game, I may not want to put in 10+ hours more to get to the final boss battle.

    Also, if there are 20+ hot keys (especially user defined ones) in the game give me an option to print them out on a single sheet of paper so I can glance at them before and during the game rather than having to stop everything and find them in the options menu, help screen, or scattered throughout a PDF manual.

  50. We need more permadeath in games! I still remember some of my nethack characters from the 90’s because of their unique adventures. I still remember sweating out every race in NFS: Porsche Unleashed because once you committed to a race, there was no getting the money back.

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