Zilch: The name of the game and the amount of respect its developers have for the players

Recently a game made its way onto Kongregate called Zilch. Zilch is a simple dice rolling game similar to Yahtzee. Players take turns rolling 6 dice trying to find dice sets that score them points. They can then put these dice sets to the side and roll the remaining ones. As long as another scoring set can be found in those remaining dice, the player can score more points. They continue rolling less and less dice until one of two things happen. Either they score with all 6 dice, which lets them start the whole process over and rack up even more points, or they roll their remaining dice and are unable to find anything to score with. The latter case is called Zilch, and you lose all your points for the round. Strategy becomes similar to Pass the Pigs, where as you continue to roll on your turn and rack up points, it becomes more likely that you will roll a Zilch and lose all those points. The player must balance risk and reward and stop before he loses all his points.

Hopefully that was an ample description of the game. If it wasn’t, here’s a link to Zilch so that you can play yourself. This kind of game isn’t for me, because of how much luck is involved, but it may be your thing. In any case, this is all side talk. What I want to talk about today is the most common player feedback Zilch’s developer has received, and their inadequate response to it.

Dumber than a computer

Let’s me come right out and say what most players complain about in Zilch. The AI seems to be very lucky and very hard to beat. Zilch provides three AI opponents, called Reckless, Cautious, and Realist. Your first instinct will be to match these up to traditional game difficulties of easy, medium, and hard. This is a mistake. All three of these AI opponents have a sophisticated methodology to how they play Zilch, and all three of them have a better understanding of the rules and probabilities than a new player. Common player feedback is stuff like “The AI is rigged, he consistently gets over 1000 points on his turn”. Chances are this player was facing the Reckless AI, who tends to score very high a lot of the time and Zilch almost as frequently. He plays recklessly, after all.

New players tend to play flash games on easy until they get a feel for it. They expect an almost sandbox style of play, where they can try and grasp the game concept without having to suffer a humiliating defeat. It’s no surprise that people who play games really really like to win at them. Joining this notion is a Kongregate achievement centered around “winning 3 games on any difficulty”. For the achievement junkies that need to get those wins ASAP so they can move on to the next achievement, it makes sense to play the game on easy.

All of you are wrong because I’m right

The developer of Zilch, playr.co.uk, issued a response to all the players complaining. You can read that response here (response 1). In summary, they explain how the three AI’s work and that all the dice rolls in Zilch are fair from a random number generator. Clearly this wasn’t enough because later that day they made a more frantic response that you can read here (response 2). This time they used all caps and posted their Random code for players to audit. It is indeed random. You can almost imagine their inbox flooding with complaints. They’ve even made another response that you can read here (response 3), but it’s more of the same.

Finding the real problem

So what’s the problem here? Zilch’s developers are unable to get to the crux of the player complaints. They chose to instead defend their design choices and attempt to educate the player. Unfortunately they didn’t do this inside their game, but at their obscure company blog that maybe MAYBE 1% of players will actually read.

I will now try to lay out exactly what is happening. A player starts up Zilch for the first time. There’s no introduction or explanation, so when they pick a CPU opponent they choose the one that should be easy; mostly because they have no idea what they’re in for. “Reckless, well that’s never a good thing and it’s on the left… so it must be easy.” The game starts and players are educated while they take their turns. While this education gives a fairly good grasp of the game rules, it does not talk about strategy (and it shouldn’t). Unfortunately for the player, the Reckless AI has been employing a basic yet more effective strategy the entire time the player was in tutorial land. By the time the player is ready to take off auto-pilot, there’s a good chance the AI has the lead. As the game continues, players will notice a pattern in the way Reckless plays. He either scores large amounts of points on his turn, or he gets zilch. With no real understanding of the game and a more cautious playing style, the player will be taking smaller sums of points each turn and zilching more, simply because they haven’t yet figured out the game’s probabilities.

After reading what I would consider a typical first time experience with Zilch, is it hard to see why players send frustrated emails to the developer?

Actually making players happy

It turns out that the complaints about the random number generator are red herrings. Players don’t care about how the game works, all they care about is that their game expectations were incorrect and they were punished for it. What the Zilch developers need to do is stop trying to convince players that they were wrong. Not only will that not work, but the players are almost never wrong.

First, create a new difficulty and call it something recognizable like Beginner. Next, and this is the super important part, skew the dice rolls in favor of the PLAYER on the Beginner difficulty. Create an AI that purposely makes poor decisions. The goal here is to create an AI that approximates a new player who has absolutely no understanding of the rules let alone the strategy of Zilch. And then give that AI permanent bad luck. Now players will have a place to go to when one of the real AI’s hands it to them.

The next thing I would do, is create yet another difficulty, called Normal. This AI should contain the same lack of strategy that Beginner has, but the dice rolls are fair. Zilch has an interesting ‘problem’ in that the easiest AI to create turns out to be very competent. Typically, AI competency is directly proportional to its complexity, but in Zilch it will take more time to write an incompetent AI that is fair to new players.

Finally, take your three existing AI’s: Reckless, Cautious, and Realist, and put them all under a Hard difficulty heading. Depending on your strategically advanced opinions of Reckless and Cautious, you might want to revisit their AI’s to make them stronger. The idea is that these three AI’s are employing real Zilch strategies. Sure some are more simple-minded than others, but every single one of them is better than a new player. That’s your problem.

Personal Save Slot Systems

Personal save slots have one great advantage. Your mom (or other significant non-gamer) can understand them. This system is like a post office box. You have access to your post office box. It sits next to some other post office boxes, but you have no way of interfering with those boxes and they have no way of interfering with yours. Mom can have her very own Zelda slot, while you and your friends are sharing another one. There’s no chance of crossing over or accidentally interfering with the other player. This ease of use inherently translates to the user interface. When you start playing you select your save slot, and from then on all in-game save commands go to that slot, no questions asked.

Where’s the downside? For one, games never seem to give enough of these. As I mentioned earlier, three to four is the industry standard. Some portable games have a frustratingly small amount, like two. That was fine a few years back when gaming was a personal experience. As gaming becomes more social, however, an increasing number of people are playing on a single console or with a single cart. College locations such as dorm rooms, greek houses, and campus recreation areas are all good examples. As the most hardcore gamer among my friends, I typically need to keep one of these personal save slots open at all times for when people want to try a game out. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass has two save slots. What do I do when I have a save slot on Phantom Hourglass, my girlfriend is using the second slot, and my roommate wants something to do while he’s waiting at the doctor’s office?

Personal save slots create an extra burden on the game developer. Since the player isn’t allowed to branch their save games into multiple slots, game must be designed to let the player revisit any pieces of the game that they missed. This is sometimes accomplished with good constraints like “Don’t destroy any locations for story reasons”. But when you can’t have constraints like that, you must instead spend extra time implementing features like auction houses that let players get their hands on items they missed.

Selectable Save Slot Systems

Now let’s talk about selectable save slot systems. The most visible advantage is that you’ve got enough save room for you and everyone you know. Unlike personal save slots where the UI is simple and bothers the player only once at the beginning, selectable save slot user interfaces can easily become a hindrance by either frustrating the player or breaking their immersion. For this reason, your UI will make or break saving in your game. Having annoying warning prompts that users must constantly acknowledge yet preventing them from accidental overwriting is a difficult thing to balance. You might want to try tagging save files with a number generated at the start of a new game (or a name), and provide extra warning if the player tries to save over a slot where this identifier does not match.

Another useful UI feature is to automatically highlight the slot the player loaded from. If you were to always start the save slot selection list at slot #1 regardless of what slot they loaded from, then slot #1 would become a dangerous save place. Anyone who hammers the save button may overwrite your work. A downside to not implementing this is that cautious players end up “double saving” their work at significant checkpoints. That is, they choose a far away and inconvenient save slot like one a few pages away or at the end of the list, and save there as well. This is a waste of space.

The second big advantage is that players who understand selectable save slot systems can use and abuse them in powerful ways. Saving in a new slot before major boss battles allows you to replay the cool bosses whenever you want without having to play through the game again. If the player is required to make a choice, they might save before making the decision so that they can “taste” each decision and choose the one they like best. On the Xbox 360, careful saving can let you go back and take another shot at unlocking an achievement you missed.

(As a side note, achievements are just meta rewards so why do game designers go out of their way to help you acquire in-game rewards you missed but not achievements? It’s not okay to crumble a castle on top of a chest with a rare sword in it, making the chest unreachable. But it is okay to deny an achievement because the player failed to complete a mini-game they get only one shot at without taking any damage? This is the same basic mistake.)

This power ends up also being a disadvantage. First, the system is not intuitive. How does mom understand it? Second, if at any point players are required to rely on their ability to manipulate save slots to fully experience your game, you’ve failed them as a designer. If cool boss battles are a feature of your game, you should think about implementing a special mode that lets players replay bosses. If they must make a decision between good and evil you should properly educate them with information, or better yet (since gamers hate to read) let them try out both sides as part of the storyline and THEN choose.

The final disadvantage to selectable save slot systems is there is no universally understood organizational structure to the slots. Most games simply provide a sequentially numbered list of save slots starting at #1. How do you decide which numbers go to which players? Who will remember that information after not playing the game during a two week business trip?

The Ultimate Save System

I will end my analysis by building a save slot system that attempts to integrate the best of both personal and selectable systems. The first important step happens during the start of a new game. A personal save system with personal slots is mimicked as closely as possible, with one important difference. Instead of the name of the slot being tied to the in-game character, it is instead tied to the person who owns the save slot. This is important because if you have two purists who insist on naming the characters their official names, the slots lose individuality and players are back to remembering that slot #1 belongs to one person and slot #2 to another. Most people prefer Link to be called Link, unless they take a not-so-serious approach to Zelda games and name him something like TheCooch. In a twisted sort of way, the Xbox 360 already works like this. Super Mario Galaxy also supports this by letting players attach their Mii heads to a save slot.

Whenever a save point is reached in the game, there are still no surprises. The game is saved into the personal slot, on top of the old data. Here is where things get interesting. Players can pause a game and from a menu tell the game to create a snapshot. Snapshots are copies of their most recent save that can be reloaded at any time; but not used to save the game. So if you’re playing a game and you think a particular cutscene or enemy encounter or mini-game is particularly interesting, you can pause the game and take a snapshot. You’ll be able to play that snapshot whenever you want and be very close to the interesting part of the game. This is all totally optional, so mom doesn’t have to know about this feature if it’s going to confuse her.

Anyone who’s played Half-Life 2 knows that an intelligent auto-save system can really help the player out. With snapshotting, an auto-snapshot system can be triggered whenever the game developer thinks the player just experienced a memorable game moment. After beating a boss, for instance, take an auto-snapshot of the last save. Now the player can replay that boss whenever they want. For Xbox 360 games, auto-snapshots taken before achievements that players only get one shot at would be greatly appreciated. Another good use would be during a high adrenaline part of the story, like a chase scene.

This system intentionally prevents the player from being able to branch their saves and take another stab at the game. It does this by disabling the save feature when the player loads a snapshot. Forcing the player to juggle their saves to experience 100% of your game content is bad design.

The best part of this hybrid system is that it can be centralized on the platform so that all games can utilize it without needing to write custom code to implement it. Players could even share snapshots with each other. Imagine sending a snapshot to your friend over Xbox Live with the message: “I got to Dracula before leveling my character’s whip! Try and beat him!”

Hopefully we’ll see features like this on the next generation consoles, like the Wii-er, Xbox 720, and PlayStation 4.

All too frequently we’ve encountered doors-as-art. They look like a way to go or a place to explore, but once your character tries to interact with the door they find that it’s only some model or decal pasted onto the wall. Disappointing! Some games have tried to remedy this. If you walk up to a door and attempt to open it, you’ll get a message like “This door is locked.” While this solves the doors-as-art problem, it still disappoints the players. They really wanted to see what’s behind that door. Maybe, they’ll even become sidetracked looking for a key to the door that can never open. It doesn’t seem like this is a good solution, either.

So what can be done? You might try expanding the door message to something like “This door is locked. I doubt I’ll find a key.” Well, players don’t read the words you write. That’s not their fault, it’s mostly ours; brought on by years of banal kidnapped princess stories with no depth. You could play a little door knob turn sound effect and have the character say “Doesn’t look like I’ll ever find a way into here.” The player might get the point, but he or she might also get tired of hearing your character say that - especially if you’re in a long corridor of locked doors. You might not even have a voice acting budget. That leaves you with a door knob turning sound. This is actually a suitable solution for some games. Locked doors that the player actually needs to get through can be accompanied by a message to the in game objective system, or a pop up graphic on the screen, indicating that a key is needed.

It’s possible to get more creative. If you’re in an office building, there can be security cameras around that alert the security personnel that you’re trying to open office doors you don’t belong in. Depending on how upstanding the office is, security guards will come to yell at you or to shoot you. This is acceptable if you’ve given the player a clear location they must go to. A waypoint, or the front desk clerk telling you to go to conference room 2A will do. Asking the player to navigate a maze of doors where one leads to their goal and the rest lead to a game over screen is poor design. This, and many other easy to conjur solutions, add a little more depth than the locked knob sound effect.

There is another time where game designers are forced to put boundaries on the game world that must limit the player’s curiosity. These are invisible walls. Typically used in outdoor settings where the player feels like they can explore infinitely, invisible walls are needed to settle the conflict between curiosity and the realistic constraints of time, money, and level design staff. Many years ago, the player would simply walk into a literally invisible wall and wonder why they couldn’t push any further. This has become almost unacceptable today. Some sort of barrier is typically placed at the invisible wall, offering at least some explanation as to why the player can’t go this way.

It’s time to upgrade our barriers, however. The biggest culprit is water. Whenever there’s a beach, there’s bound to be an invisible wall about 50 feet past the water line. Even AAA games like Halo 3 are guilty of this. If the entrance is small, park a boat or military watercraft to block the way. If it’s large, consider using a “deserters will be shot” countdown or fog. Fog actually makes players feel like they are still moving when they’re just running into your invisible wall. Once they turn around they can exit the fog almost instantly.

The next offender is implausable barriers. These are things that the player does not believe would stop their in game persona. In the recently released Lost game, there was a pile of plane crash rubbish piled at the edges of the beach. My character can stand toe to toe with a mysterious murdering smoke monster, but he can’t climb over 2 feet of rubble? Does anyone really think Gordon Freeman can’t climb a chain link fence? Is there a single video game character that would actually respect the yellow police “Do not cross” tape? Fixing these is actually pretty easy. You can make the barrier really high and unclimbable, like by using even MORE plane crash rubbish. No one wants to climb a chain link fence that has barbed wire at the top. Police tape is much harder to cross when there’s a police man standing there threatening to detain you. It’s not fair to expect the player to cut you slack simply because it’s a game. Don’t just give the player a reason not to cross your barriers; give their in game characters a reason as well.

Step one is to stop thinking that portals (the warpy things themselves) are things that can be used only in Portal (proper, the game). In the same way that ketchup can make a burger, or fries, or scrambled eggs taste better, portals can increase the delectability of our current genres. Portal showed us how the gun can be used in a puzzle or action genre, but there are many genres that make up our industry.

Let’s start with racing. Imagine your car coming to a 90 degree right turn. You shoot one portal at the building in front of you, and another at the far end of a building to your left. You’ve transformed that 90 degree turn into a straight line and didn’t have to sacrifice any speed to get around it. Now you shoot your second portal at a billboard sign, so if any opponent racers decide to take your shortcut they end up launching their car into the side of the freeway.

What of stealth action games? The next innovation for spies around the world is clearly a pocket-sized portal gun. Sam Fischer, Snake, and Hitman would all have a much easier time sneaking toward their targets with portal technology. For example, your target is making an appearance at a convention. He goes over to the snack table to get something to eat. While there, you knock his fork out of his hands and under the table. When he goes under to get it, you shoot a portal underneath him and he falls into the very janitor closet you placed a portal in 15 minutes ago. Now without any suspicion you’ve removed your target from a highly visible location and can interrogate him back at the closet.

James Bond is an exception. If he had portal technology he might use it to save the world or to look up skirts. It’s a toss-up. I feel that, to teach good portal habits, Bond’s first portal assignment should be in Scotland.

The next genre is the first person shooter. Unreal Tournament has had something approximating the portal device for a long time. It’s called the translocator. You would shoot this disk from your gun that remains attached to you via a ribbon, similar to a taser. At any point you could right click and transport to wherever that disk is. This device continues to suffice for personal transportation. A portal gun used in a team game, however, can become a tactical weapon. If your enemies are holed up in a bunker and you see no way of getting them out, fire a portal through their window and walk right in! This kind of portal gun would run out of charges and controlling it would give your team a potentially big advantage until those charges were gone.

Games have been approaching realism rapidly. We’re at the point where we start to see diminishing returns on our efforts to look realistic. Now that we’re able to create virtual worlds that mimick our real world, what will the future of gaming turn to? Portal offers one answer to this question. Games can be used to explore technology that doesn’t yet or can’t exist in our world. Will we continue to play with the same technologies or constantly invent new ones?

If you’ve spent a good deal of time on your writing and truly believe your characters are saying things that your player would enjoy hearing (because you’re funny), this is a good way to motivate a generation of jaded gamers into giving your dialogue a chance. Since the reward is instant, players are already happy. And at that moment you have their attention, so if you’re going to sell your dialogue this is the time.

Please note that if your dialogue is not up to snuff and you offer random rewards, players will still talk to everyone and they will mash their controller buttons to skip the reading and get right to the presents. We don’t care that the princess is in another castle. If Toad’s got a million dollars, we still don’t care that the princess is in another castle; but thanks for the million bucks. If I’m an assassin in the middle of a banquet, and some cordial fellow with a bowl full of laughs at the entrance gives me poison daggers, I will be motivated to talk to other people at the party and go on to complete my objectives in a timely manner.

And believe me, if you don’t motivate my assassin character and give your NPC’s a reason to live, I’ll probably spend the next hour trying to figure out how to murder everyone at the banquet without getting caught. The only talking I’ll do is to stop and talk to the last guest standing to see if they say something banal like “I’ve been looking forward to this banquet for three months” instead of what he should really be saying, which is “Dear god why am I waist high in blood”.

How did the player get into this position? Let’s rewind time and visit the game designer during the making of this game. The designer decided that players should make noises and grunts when they are hit by attacks or attacking. Then they remembered that they let you create a male or female character when you start the game, so they need two sound files for each noise they want to make - the male and female versions. Then they figured since you can make a big beefy lumberjack guy with a beard or a thin and gangly Ichabod Crane kind of fellow, that they should probably add a couple more sound files per noise; one from a lumberjack and one from a school teacher. Assuming girls can be lumberjacks and school teachers as well, we’re already at four sound files for one noise.

At this point, the designer digs in his heels. A whole slew of technical constraints just entered his mind. Will he have the budget to hire all these voice actors? Will the game’s platform limit the file sizes and quality of the sounds? How many languages is this game going to be released in again? What does an alien sound like when it’s speaking French? Maybe we should avoid saying words to remain language neutral.

The designer has entered what I call a game design avalanche. It starts with one poor decision, in this case voicing customizable characters. From there the designer makes a series of choices and compromises that weaken the integrity of the feature. At release he’s left with an aspect of the game that disappoints a lot of players. To the players, their imagination is the limit. If they covered their character in fur, why isn’t there a voice set full of barks and growls? You could remove the fur from the list of options, but now all those players who want their character to be furry war machines are left unfulfilled. Make enough cuts like that and you’ll shoehorn the players into a handful of rigid character designs.

So what can be done about customizable characters that need sound effects? The first step is to remove any gender constraints. You don’t need to have a male or female scream sound for when the player gets hit. If your characters are humans, then they’re big bags of flesh and bone, and when you hit them they make a sloppy sound like a sack of meat hitting the wall. That’s your hit sound. If characters can be robots, then they’re going to make clanging noises when they’re hit, or release steam, or beep and boop. When those characters die you don’t need tons of long and drawn out EEAAAUUUGHHHHH sound files. Play a little jingle with a death toll in it. If your characters can be human OR robot, that’s fine too. Choose the set of sounds for the player based on whether they want their character to be human or robot.

Players don’t question why humans squish and robots creak.