Swing and a Miss

I showed the tutors today my calming iteration and got some good feedback. It turns out I was too focussed on creating a narrative from my footage and it took too long to express the atmosphere of tranquillity I was going for. The fade to white technique I was using definitely expressed "calm" and Elle suggested using white space with a aural bridge to enhance the transitions between shots. Having reworked my iteration it now begins with the pills being taken then fades softly between clips, fading sound in and out to match the atmosphere. There is a slow heartbeat playing through about 70% of the clip which matches up to the shot of the blood flowing in veins and the match cut (if it is possible to have a fading match cut) to the river. Using this better understanding of the assignment the other two iterations should be more accurate. I also checked that the technique of repetition was strong enough to express the effect I wanted for my 'addiction' iteration and I will need to combine it with other techniques to try and make it more disorienting.

Redirecting Attention

I figured I was overdue for a progress update on MDDN 211. 243 had pretty much all my attention over the weekend so I still have a way to go with my clips but my 'relax' clip is near completion. The primary editing technique is still pacing but it makes use of a couple of cross-dissolves and whatever the sound equivalent of a cross-dissolve is. The softness of such a transition is perfect for calming feeling I want this clip to express. As far as the other clips go I had an idea on the sound design for my addiction clip. To match the sporadic cutting between clips I want to put a mash-up of different sounds that create more and more noise before the screen goes black and a sharp breath can be heard. The 'upper' clip would play through at a high speed and I would allow some of the original noise to be played through at a high speed as well though the primary soundtrack would be a song. I won't spend too long focussing on sound as it is primarily the editing techniques that this assignment is about, but I feel some consideration in that area could enhance my work.

Presy Preview

Before my presentation tomorrow I figured I'd show what I've been working on over the past couple of days.

As my blog covers my broader research I want to focus on just the mechanic of 'death' and how it affects player's behaviour. My presentation will be primarily image-based with simple bullet points to summarise the ideas I'm talking about. Images such as the following will make up the backgrounds of these slides;

For each of my selected games there is a separate slide to visually break my presentation down and hopefully provide a bit of humour :)

The three features that rework death in a game to carry a message of sustainability that Iv'e been thinking of are a mix of what deems a player to be "dead" and what the consequences of death are.
My first is the one I mentioned in some of my early posts where the player's character is a mobile life force which can animate particular objects to make a body. To put things into specifics the character could be sentient electricity that animated mechanical objects. Around the map various items could be collected to make body parts to keep the player mobile. The player would be deemed dead when they run out of things to inhabit. This could make for some interesting game sequences where players have to use improvised items to accomplish tasks such as using a lawnmower engine or a fire extinguisher to act as makeshift jump booster to get to higher ledges while it has fuel. It also slaps players in the face with RECYCLE!
The second feature, also mentioned earlier could come from the same game. There could be segments were the player uses small portions of their personal power to make otherwise broken objects functional, such as navigating a circuit-board maze to find the switch to unlock an electronic door or illuminate a dark hazardous room for long enough to escape it. If their personal power depletes then the character dies and a restart is required (different difficulties could vary between restarting from a checkpoint/level or from the start of the game). This would inspire players to be conservative of what resources they have at their disposal and look out for tools/methods that are reusable.
The final feature could be that when a player dies there is a permanent mark left on the game world. What could be once glorious cities and beautiful landscapes could become corrupt or destroyed by players' repeated failure. As an example the player's character could be an immortal with infinitely re-spawning bodies so death only puts them back at the last checkpoint. If the player has to collect a dragon's eye for a witch they end up provoking a dragon which destroys the closest town in rage if the player dies fighting it. The player will of course re-spawn not far off but by the time they kill the dragon and take its eye, the city is ashes and they can no longer shop/rest/hide there. By the end of the game the player's success would be mapped by how much of their world is still functioning. This should make players more weary about how they approach certain challenges or their future game will become more and more difficult/inconvenient. On a less subtle tone the very world around them dies every time they muck up.
Now it's just a matter of getting some visual representations of these features looking all pretty and ready to present :)

Research Recap

Before I rip into putting my presentation together I want to provide a quick recap to tick all the last boxes of research. So here is a more concise version of my last post with a bit more development:

Devil May Cry Series:
- upon death use of a "gold orb", "continue" or "main menu" are selectable. Unless the mission is quit (by selecting "main menu") death carries a score deduction (amount of deduction varies between games).
- gold orbs allow an on-the-spot resurrection, enemies stay in whatever state they were in upon player death, but carries with it an "item used" score reduction (again, amount of deduction varies between games).
- continue restarts the player from the closest checkpoint on full health and all enemies reset as well.
Features that build on the death mechanic are the gold orbs as a purchasable item, the final mission score as death deducts from it, decreasing how many rewards the player receives. The fact that the game assesses the player's performance means death has meaning and good players will want to avoid it.

Dark Souls:
- upon death player re-spawns at closest bonfire.
- all collected souls and humanity are lost and enemies reset. Player becomes "hollow".
- if body is reached without suffering another death all souls and humanity can be restored. Player returns to being human.
- while online, players can leave behind bloodstains that can be examined by other players. This plays a cinematic of their last moments, allowing the viewer to learn from other's mistakes.
The loss of souls and humanity can be devastating, especially if the player has been saving up for a long time. Humanity also brings with it several advantages, such as gaining souls at a faster rate or having more health. This means that death, despite having infinite re-spawns, is still undesirable (even if it is the game's primary method of teaching).

Pokemon Series:
- upon a Pokemon fainting they are removed from battle and another Pokemon must be sent forth. If the player has no more Pokemon then they lose the battle and must flee to a Pokemon centre (this is referred to as "blacking/whiting out").
- a player who whites out loses money.
- obviously a Pokemon that has fainted cannot be used in battle which puts the player at a disadvantage for the rest of the battle.
- Pokemon that faint often enough begin to distrust the player and misbehave in battle.
Whiting out is almost the equivalent of a player dying. Certain battles must be won for the player to progress and if your Pokemon are misbehaving from fainting too often, battles are harder to win. A damaged relationship between the player and their Pokemon can take a while to reverse and as one of the main themes of the Pokemon series is companionship, letting Pokemon faint undesirable on an emotional level too.

MDDN 211 - Project 1 Proposal Submission

The theme of my video clips will be the consumption and effects of drugs. By using primarily pacing, jump-cutting and adjusting the speed of the footage, I will edit the videos I find to imply three different relationships people have with drugs.

The first will look at how downers can calm people and relieve anxiety. The initial pace of cuts and movement within the footage will be relatively quick until a close-up of pills being taken is shown and the imagery afterwards will be calmer, slower and quieter. The change in pace is a visual map of the drug user’s experience. It could also represent a physical effect such as a slower heart rate.

The second will contrast the first clip by representing uppers. The footage will increase in speed each time the pills are taken with a montage of high-energy clips. This could be combined with exciting music to show the rush the drugs provide. The clips, like memories, go by too quickly to fully comprehend.

The final clip will look at addiction and repeat a lot of footage from the other two clips but gradually return to more and more clips of taking the drugs, as well as introducing new and less glamorous clips. The clip could end when the videos of drugs has taken over in a violent mix of jump cuts. The sporadic nature of this iteration is meant to be confusing and almost sickening, as some of the cuts don’t make sense. The soundtrack could also be mismatched and the increasing repetition of the drug imagery represents the growing dependence the user has with them.

Aesthetics of Gaming and Presenting

Today's class helped give me direction in where to go with my presentation and I decided on a basic style and aesthetic. The basic presentation will be a mix of text and imagery on display like a power-point. I'm in the process of drawing some caricatures that will be on display while I talk about my findings and such. What I have so far is just the basic outlines but I intend to use posterised colouring on them.

The intended final image will have a lot more refinement to it.

Cutting the Crap

Now that I have collected a substantial amount of footage it's time to start cutting out the junk I can't/don't want to use. Some of the videos I found have good imagery in them but are part of documentaries and have a lot of interviews with professors and other professionals that I need to cut out. My plan is to go through the footage this weekend and filter out all the good shots and start piecing together draft iterations. Once I have a basic collection of sorted footage I'll be able to see what other shots I need to find to get my message across for each iteration.

Life is Good

Looking over the mechanics from my earlier posts I decided to settle for the morbid mechanic of death. Dying in a game is very, very common and comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it is humorous, such as watching a flattened Crash Bandicoot waddle around after being caught under a falling wall. Sometimes it is gruesome, such as having your head torn off by a Necromorph in Dead Space. And sometimes it is just weird, such as being blown up by a wave of exploding, zombified sheep in the bonus scenario missions in Warcraft III.
There are numerous ways in which games deal with death; three particular examples I want to address are from the Devil May Cry series, Dark Souls, and Pokemon. Strictly speaking the death mechanic in Pokemon is only fainting but it functions the same way as death does in most RPGs; the character's health/stamina/hit-points are reduced to zero and they are removed from combat or cease to function. All of these games treat death quite differently but the circumstances of dying are not as permanent as "death" would suggest. In the older arcade games death meant you lost, game over. Now with the accessibility of personal consoles, games were expected to last longer and provide more than just a simple concept such as "get the circles" or "shoot the aliens" (then again, some haven't stretched very far).

Stick with what you know I suppose...

Not every game abandoned the lives system but in contemporary games the status of "dead" has become only temporary. A decent length story would be wasted if it was cut short every time the player dies. The consequences of death are no longer as severe in terms of progress as they used to be, but by no means does that result in death losing its bite.
Devil May Cry is a masculine series of games, let's be honest. The main character is a big man who doesn't feel pain, wields big guns and an even bigger sword to kill demons and the female characters wear slightly more clothing than the average stripper. So when you die in these games it hits you where it hurts; pride. There's nothing stopping you from continuing the mission post-casualty, but there's nothing stopping the game from slapping you in the face with a great dirty "D" at the end of your mission for it. The first and third games in the series were particularly difficult in that an easy mode was  unavailable, somewhat mockingly, until the player had died a number of times in the normal difficulty.

The latest instalment by Ninja Theory, DmC: Devil May Cry, made death less critical as the player retained their "style points" but lost 20% of their final score. In the previous games death meant a loss of all style points accumulated up to that point because, let's face it, dying's just not cool. So death has the consequence of dissatisfaction at one's personal performance. It makes the player feel inadequate. You don't want to die, not because you will 'lose' the game, but because you want to feel like a man.

"SSS" could also stand for "Something So Satisfying"

Dark Souls is game that reminds players that just because there are infinite re-spawns, doesn't mean the game will be easy. It punishes players over and over with death. Death results in the player losing all their collected souls and humanity and if they die again before they find their body it is all lost. Dying doesn't just put the game on hold for a moment, it can actually cost you progress. You also get this lovely little message every time as if to say "hey, you suck".

But one must not be discouraged. Dying, in a twisted way, becomes a form of progress in its own right. You walk down a corridor and something comes from behind and stabs you in the back. Right, look both ways before taking a corner. You return to your place of death and continue down the corridor only to have corrosive ooze fall from the ceiling and engulf you. Sidestep here. Eventually you escape the corridor and encounter an enormous demon whose abilities are far beyond your own and he one-hitter-quitters you. Looks like you need to level up son. And there we have progress. Painful, gruelling, masochistic progress.
The consequences and brutality of death are also what gives the game part of its hook. While games like Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog remakes still cling to the lives system, death is practically meaningless and the tension it holds is lost. Dark Souls speaks to a generation of gamers who are looking for something to fear, to have real challenge rewarded with a sense of real triumph.

Awwwww yeah!

Lastly, we have Pokemon. The death mechanic in Pokemon is substituted with "fainting". In a combat situation it is like most RPGs in that the fainted Pokemon is unable to continue fighting and cannot be used, yet can be revived with special items, much like reviving "KO-ed" characters with "phoenix downs" in Final Fantasy X or giving unconscious characters potions in Kingdom Hearts. And a game aimed at children (aimed at doesn't necessarily mean it hits) isn't going to have death in it when it requires you to build a party. If your Pokemon died every time their hit-points was reduced to zero the game's inherent difficulty would mean one of the main messages it speaks would be lost. The Pokemon games are all about companionship and the development of your relationship with your Pokemon. Fainting doesn't just mean your Pokemon is out of the battle, there are several features that come with this. Firstly, if all six of your Pokemon faint in a battle you essentially lose the battle and lose money. Secondly, your Pokemon's happiness and trust decrease, meaning they will be weaker when they evolve and sometime will disobey in battle. Fainting, if a regular enough occurrence, has lasting negative effects. Because of this mechanic, players are encouraged to look after their Pokemon and are rewarded with stronger and more loyal companions.

Some in the online Pokemon community have gone against the mechanic of fainting, following a self-enforced set of rules that has come to be known as the "Nuzlocke challenge," named after the comics it originated in.

I got this but it took three tries

This style of play is supposed to forge stronger bonds between trainer and Pokemon as the fear of death is once again present. Not knowing if your next battle will be your last with your beloved Pidgeot adds to the intensity of the game.

Hugs, Not Drugs

Unless drugs get my assignment done... as a topic, I mean. I decided last week that the theme of my iterations for my video will be the consumption and effects of drugs. I plan to use montage style sequences of related imagery to suggest the drug's effect differently through each iteration. I've been trying to find appropriate videos from archive.org and have gathered a decent range of footage. The iterations I'm thinking of at the moment are one where the drugs seem to have a calming effect as the pace of cutting and actual speed of footage will slow after the drugs are taken. Another iteration will show things doing the opposite and speeding up with more of a night-life appeal. The last will be more focussed on addiction with lots of repeated imagery of the drugs themselves as well as showing more negative footage.
I'd upload some examples but blogger doesn't take video well if it's not on youtube...

Settling Down

Right, it's time to start filling out brief specifics. The first mechanic I want to focus on is the mobility a grappling hook provides. In my earlier post I mentioned Just Cause and Worms, but another game that has heightened mobility from a grappling hook-like mechanic is Attack on Titan flash game. It is very simplistic but the grappling hooks allow you to propel yourself through a city of titans with incredible speed so the player can reach the titan's weak points on the back of their necks. The game required players to react quickly to escape the titan's attacks and move around to their back in time to strike. Despite its simplicity it was an incredibly entertaining game.
Other games that give the player a tool that provides heightened mobility is the Portal series. This is different to pulling yourself up to a ledge but the mode of thinking it provides is very similar in that no place is out of reach and exploration of the tools abilities becomes a large part of the game experience. Imagine if a grappling hook or portal gun was available in Assassin's Creed? I would totally be down for some portal assassinations.

The second mechanic I find interesting is that of the 'lives' system. This points to the mechanic of 're-spawning' as it is pretty much the only reasonable alternative. Looking at the old arcade games like Pacman and Missile Command, or another personal favourite; Crash Bandicoot, lives are a way of telling the players how many mistakes they can make before they have to suffer particular consequences, be it losing all your progress since your last save or losing the game entirely.

The arcade games were a lot harsher with their lives system because the games weren't designed for extensive progress-making, instead more of a 15-30 minute burst of excitement. They were supposed to be played by lots of people over a short amount of time to earn maximum profit. Games like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro were more of an investment by gamers in that they were to be played on a personal disk, therefore played over several sessions. Having a less critical failure system made sense.
It is arguable that this type of thinking was what developed games that use the re-spawn mechanic. Players can die and return to the action within seconds with few, or no consequences. The games flow becomes much faster paced and progress is a natural part of the game. Games like Dark Souls require the player so die so that they learn where certain obstacles are. There is still risk involved for losing your best loot but the dying itself doesn't ruin a player's game.

Other games like Halo incorporate re-spawning in such a way that dying is only a minor setback which can be overcome with only 10 seconds of patience. In the campaign it may mean starting again from the last checkpoint but there are no other real penalties.

The Devil May Cry series used the mechanic of re-spawning after death in such a way that if characters did die, starting from the last checkpoint was easy enough (and even had items that resurrected you on the spot) but you would take a heft score penalty post-game. The main consequence of death was the player's own dissatisfaction of their final score and the mist determined players would try to get through without dying. This meant that the value of a re-spawn was determined by the player's own standards.
The last mechanic I will focus on is that of a time limit. Many, many games utilise time in one way or another. Be it a time limit to survive by, a way of earning better rewards/score or a means of competition. I will be looking particularly at count-down timers an what they represent and encourage. In Starcraft there is a mission where the player must defend their base from waves of enemy onslaught for half an hour as evacuation vehicles arrive. This mechanic changed the player's behaviour in multiple ways. Firstly they knew exactly how long the mission was going to last for and had to attempt to get as many resources and upgrade accomplished as they could before it ran out. The timer also encouraged players to fight more and more desperately because as the timer ticked down, enemy waves became more intense and the longer they played the mission for the harder it got. When there was only 30 seconds left all hell would break loose and strategies such as using your basic workers to hold the line was valid as long as you held out for that 00:00.

A countdown timer in a game such a Warcraft takes the form of a "cooldown" time where a spell or ability, once used, has to wait a predetermined amount of seconds before it can be used again. This balances out the game so that more powerful abilities take longer to recharge and using them becomes quite a strategic choice. Often such abilities will tip the balance in the players favour and they open a fight with it, or they save it for when they are desperate. Abilities with a smaller cooldown are used far less sparingly because the player can count on being able to use the ability multiple times within a fight and it is just a matter of micromanaging fast enough.

Lastly, a countdown timer could be used as a length through which an ability lasts for. In Spyro there were fireball and flying power-ups that only lasted for a short amount of time This set a challenge to a player to make the most of the ability before it depleted. It was never critical to progress in the game but rewarded more skilled players who were quick enough with better rewards and a higher completion percentage. Putting a time limit on parts of the game automatically creates tension for the player. They have to perform under circumstances that they have no control over. Unless the game specifically has objects/abilities etc. that affect the time, that clock is going to keep on ticking down regardless of what you do. Sometimes that can be incredibly exciting as you make it with .17 of a second left (see my "Never tell me the odds" achievement on Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, I nearly cried, it was beautiful) or they can be endlessly frustrating as you fail time and time again because of one mistake you made just before you finished.

Brainwave!

Okay so a particle of inspiration collided with my brain on the way home this evening and I thought of an additional mechanic to go with my cloning/teleporting/respawny thing. The character can not only send out their life force to reanimate piles of junk but they could send out little probing version that when they strike other object create certain effects, e.g. shooting a charge at a spotlight could reveal blacked out sections of the map or shooting a smoke machine could reveal laser tripwires. A charge could be shot down an electrical socket and a maze-puzzle could take place as the player navigates the charge down the cord network. If the player lacks an attack mechanic then they would be required to use items set in the environment to trick or eliminate foes.
A good targeting system I saw was similar to that of Missile Command was from a game called Intrusion 2. Not only does this game have a series of amazing boss fights but it is very simple in how the player plays the game.

The yellow triangle is the targeting cursor which the player's avatar shoots at. It is simple and effective and allows for accurate aiming. If the game required the player to make shots under pressure then the point and click style works well.

Cloning, Grappling Hooks and Death

Having looked over several mechanics I'm getting closer to a solid one I want to work with. I was looking at the cloning/ghost mechanic of Company of Myself in ways that it could be used in a different ways. One variant was to replicate the ability to summon clones of yourself in a fight of some sort that have a memorised attack pattern that you program them with prior. They would run their course then dissipate and you could execute this a number of times in one level. Certain moves could only be available from specific parts of the game meaning hanging on to particular clones could promote strategic thinking. This would be similar to the mechanic in Megaman X where players can cycle through weapons utilized by past bosses to attack in different ways.

Some weapons allowed you to access items that were otherwise unreachable. This sort of mechanic with the summoning clones to attack would have to have a limit on how often it could be used otherwise the better moves would just be abused.
An alternative to the cloning idea was that the player would be able to launch their character's life force across the map, targeting special objects that can be animated to recreate the character's body. This could manifest as a pile of junk being animated into a robot that crumbles when the life force leaves it. Certain areas could be inaccessible unless the player animates something within range that's in a different area. It would function rather similarly to the grappling hook mechanic that games like Just Cause and Worms have.

 The grappling hook allowed for incredible manoeuvrability and some rather silly gameplay that made an entertaining experience and if it was mastered became an incredibly powerful tool. Implementing this would of course require a decent physics engine.

Yahtzee Souls!

And that was the title of the game Andrew, Chris, Mark, Joe and I created this afternoon. It takes after the Dark Souls game in that the first iterations were incredibly difficult and we ended up dying a lot, mainly me... In a nutshell the game was a combat focussed RPG using a combat system that revolved around the scoring system of the game Yahtzee. The 'hero' would face off against foes that increased in difficulty in an attempt to slay the strongest enemy, in effect winning the game. The outcome of combat was determined by each party rolling their dice to make a combo from Yahtzee; three of a kind, full house, low/high straight etc, using the ranking of these combos to determine the victor. Before beginning the game the hero was able to choose one of three classes that had a set of unique abilities each. These could be used once per fight to adjust the odds in the player's favour.

These abilities went through several changes as to balance the game so that the hero couldn't just sweep through the levels but also that they held enough strategy that made them valuable. We also introduced a levelling mechanic that made players grow in strength if they defeated key opponents. One last balancing mechanic we introduced was a arbitrary die that had to be used by both parties. The opponents had four dice to make combos with this middle die but the hero had five, having to discard one before their final combo was taken into account. Only Chris was able to get to the final battle and win so the difficulty curve was desirable as he swept through lower levels with ease but once he got to the last three or so fights each one was really intense.

Mechanics Part 2

I found the article by Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek to be a  lot easier to decipher than Sicart's. The analogy of golf 'mechanics' being the clubs, balls and course hazards really simplified the idea of game mechanics. I suppose a personal definition could be that game mechanics are the means by which the player engages with the game world and how the game world affects the player's experience.
A simple arcade game I love is the classic Missile Command. The mechanics of the game are easy to learn and as the player advances through the game very little actually changes. The increase of speed of the missiles that threaten the player and the amount of missiles released is a very minimal change but the difficulty ramps up steadily. An interesting thing I noticed that nearly all the arcade games had was the lack of an ability to "win". The end state of games like Pacman and Asteroids is determined by when the player runs out of 'lives' or some other mechanic. The player has to lose to win and have their score recorded.

The Game Mechanic

It sounds like a frustrating job. Game mechanics, in the non-punny sense, are interesting indeed. I've always found it fascinating how some games can be deemed fun and others not, and arguably it take just one well executed mechanic to make or break a game. Think of Tetris without the ability to rotate blocks.
Miguel Sicart describes game mechanics to be "methods invoked by agents for interacting with the game world," and argues that there is a fuzzy line between what is a mechanic within the game and what is a rule. With a bit of leniency on the exact definition of a "game mechanic" I have a couple of examples from games I've found of what I though to be interesting mechanics.
Here is an excellent example of how a game with only a few well done mechanics makes an enjoyable puzzle experience. This free online game is called called The Company of Myself and implements a mechanic where you can create solid duplicates of yourself that follow your last path of motion. The game also has a friendly way of teaching users how to play.

The goal is simple: get to the green door.

This is an example of the much loved sub-genre of real time strategy games known as tower defence. The primary mechanic is the ability to plant towers on specific zones that automatically attack nearby enemies. An important mechanic that builds on this is that the towers behave differently. The variation in statistic and effects allows the strategy to enter the game as players decide the best places to put the different towers.

The enemies also had varying statistics, validating the range of different towers available
and heightening the strategy and need for careful planning.

This game had a particularly good reward system. The completion of each mission rewarded players with either one, two or three stars which can be spent on upgrades for your towers. This acts as an incentive to replay earlier missions to get higher scores once you've obtained better abilities.

There are two mechanics that define the Devil May Cry series; the ability to attack enemies with a multitude of different moves and a score system (arguably a 'dynamic') attached to these moves. These manifest in the aesthetic of a "style meter" that features in every game released to date. The style meter increases when different moves are linked together in quick succession, encouraging aggressive but intelligent play. The player is shown to be doing well by higher style marks and is given an overall higher grade at the end of missions which can go towards buying upgrades.

The latest Devil May Cry game made the style meter even easier to understand with real time visible additions to the players score and each addition reference something the player had done. This way players knew if they were doing well or not and could figure out ways to improve themselves.

The score mechanic is as old any game. A representation of the player's skill within a game brings with it many different things, as mentioned above, including competitiveness. Competition, with others and oneself, addresses a primal instinct to prove dominance over others and self-improvement. It feels good to be the best at something and game score mechanics make it easy to monitor how good you are at that particular game.

Upgrades have been mentioned several times already and on their own are key mechanics to many games. The ability to improve yourself in a way that can be monitored within the game gives players a reason to keep playing. The more upgrades they get the less difficult it will be to overcome future obstacles and achieve greater things. Sometimes these upgrades take the form of in-game statistics. It is a self-merit system.
Take Pokemon for example, where leveling up and evolving your pokemon gives them higher stats, making defeating opposing pokemon easier to achieve.

Many games have mechanics that provide players with numerical representations of their abilities within the game. Whether these numbers are low or high has in-game effects that makes the experience different depending on what each number represents.

The mechanic of being able to produce light from a torch in the Penumbra series contributed greatly to its atmosphere. The whole series was designed to provide an atmospheric experience that immersed players within the world, allowing the games to have an intense psychological effect. The use of a torch with limited batteries illuminated rooms well and provided comfort but also made players conservative of the torch's use. Either they brave the dark now and save for a more crucial moment or make use of the comfort it provides and risk their future mental state.

I'm Such a Fanboy

Hopefully the title didn't put you off. But it's true, I am. I found a pair of videos that I think are excellent. The first is a fan-made video from the game Devil May Cry 4 and for someone who doesn't play it is a very long clip but some of the transitions between footage are quite cool and some are rather beautiful. I also like how the footage is composed with the chosen music as well (the gameplay is sped up to match the tempo of the songs however).

The second is a bonus video unlock at the end of the game Kingdom Hearts Final Mix which I find has a stunning blend of music and imagery. The video start off with a pace that gradually becomes move and more climactic that matches the build of music. The glitch aesthetic isn't overdone as to look tacky and combines well with the mix of old and (at the time) new imagery. I also love the use of text throughout the clip and I remember getting shivers from the countdown when I first saw this :)