 All right, welcome to the last panel in this room at PAX. Oh, no. PAX is over. Normally, if we go late in the con, we can say, why aren't you at the Omegathon finale? How many of you are going to the Omegathon finale after this? Me. You should be. Your hands not up, you're going to the wrong place. It's like the end note of PAX. It's the second best thing at PAX. The first best thing is not this. However, don't go get me wrong. So without further ado, I'm rim. I'm Scott. We're those of Geek Nights. Podcasts on games and a whole bunch of other stuff. Thousands of episodes all free on the internet forever. And today we're talking about Atari game design. Now we're not talking about how to write code for the Atari. Some of you might be disappointed by that. Game design is not programming. Yes. However, on the Atari, game design and programming were basically the same thing. I mean, you basically were limited by the Atari so much that you were lucky if you could even make a game happen. So we're going to talk about a bunch of Atari games. And unlike our normal lectures, where we have it very scripted, where we just show a bunch of slides, we're going to be playing these games live and talking about this. I'm confident that it'll work. I almost pulled the cord out there just now. But why Atari games? If you look at a game like Outlaw on the Atari 2600, there are more pixels in that box art than there are in the game. That's almost every possible thing you could see in that game. In fact, that JPEG of the game is probably larger than the code of the game. So because it's such a simple game, because there's, I mean, you can literally count every single pixel on the screen at every frame. And you could do it by hand. Like you wouldn't even need a computer to do it. If you open this game in a ROM, like in an emulator, you can watch every bit of memory moving around live while you play and kind of understand it. As a result, if you design a game with those constraints, it's going to be a very simple game, a very focused game, a very elegant game. If it's a good game, then it's a pure design. It's a good design. The thing is most, if you ever played Atari games, most of them are garbage. Almost all of them, right? Why? Because it's really hard to design something good when there's so many constraints upon you, right? You're limited so much. You only have like a few K of memory. How can you possibly make a good game with that, right? Well, only a very few people did most of the game sets. It's like thinking of a few K. That is every single Atari 2600 game ever made. And that would almost fit on a floppy disk. I read something just the other day that the average website now, the number of bits it takes up, is as big as Doom. So like every time you visit a website, you're downloading Doom. Doom used to come out of CD-ROM. Now it's just go to a website, Doom. But we're going to get into the games right away. We're going to bore you with these slides. But the gist of this panel, the whole reason we're talking about this is a lot of people go into packs because they are aspiring game designers. You want to make games. You just want to play games. You want to play games. You're not in a panel room at the end of packs. You're down in tabletop. You're in the X-ball hall. You're doing something else. If you're here, you must care about games enough to care about this, right? For some reason. You're going to be real. If you can't design a good Atari game, you have no business designing games. Atari games, they're so simple. If you're going to make a big game, if you've got your idea for an MMO, do not make an MMO as your first game. Make something a little bit simpler. You've got to make a vertical stack. Talk to bottom. You've got to make a game that works. Completely. Before you can move on to something bigger. The first book you ever write can't be a 10-volume fantasy series, right? You've got to start with like a novella, maybe, at the biggest. And you'll see this the world over. This famous quote, limitation makes the creative mind inventive. That's the founder of the Bauhaus School. You see this like anime is a good example. How many of you have seen like Evangelion or any of those anime? They are the way they are because of the budgets, because of the constraints. A lot of the movies you love, a lot of the games you love, a lot of the media you consume, they were great because they had good people making them, but they were also great because there were constraints, there were limitations that the people making them had to work around. Whereas they had a particular animation style because they couldn't afford to animate it any better than it did. So they would use various tricks and those tricks ended up becoming like the style and the aesthetic that was on purpose as opposed to just because we're out of money. I mean, look at Star Wars. There wasn't really CG like we have today. So they had to do practical effects. Although if they had CG back then, they might have used CG back then, but they didn't. But as a result, those practical effects and the limitations they put on the making of Star Wars caused a certain aesthetic. It forced them to make certain decisions about how the movie would turn out. Now it might not have been the vision that an unconstrained author or an unconstrained Spielberg or an unconstrained Lucas would have wanted, but it was what we got. And a lot of times what we get is better than what the unconstrained vision is. Also, if you're trying to make something, right? If like the whole world is your oyster and you can just do whatever you want, often it's very hard to do anything. It's like, well, what do I do, right? It's like you have no direction, right? When there's constraints upon you, you can at least, okay, well, I can't do any of those things. So because of that, you sort of have to find a way forward by having walls, right? With a big empty field, you just don't know where to go. Creativity becomes invention. Now we're not gonna bore you with any more slides. We're just gonna play a target game for the whole rest of this talk. Now I apologize that you're seeing my desktop, but Stella, the emulator I'm using, and yes, we thought about bringing in a target 2600, we decided that would be awful. We're gonna start with Outlaw. The best Atari game there ever was. This game is legit good. We've done multiple panels at PAX that's talking about just how great this game is. The other name for this game is Pretzel Cowboys. I don't need to explain the reason for that name. Now Pretzel Cowboys was designed by David Crane of all people, and it was designed that way. This Outlaw, if you're familiar with the history of this game, was an arcade light gun shooter. A lot of games called Outlaw, and this is the only one that looks like this. David Crane, at Atari at the time, he later went on to found a company called Activision. They made some stuff later. But he was told to make an Atari 2600 port of Outlaw, and he looked at what the Atari 2600 could do, and he said that is literally impossible. So he made a completely different game that was in the same style, the same theme. There's Pretzels shooting pixels at each other. But he made a different game, and as a result he made a good game, and this might be the best ortho game that Atari has to offer. I'm gonna play it a little bit here. So you're a cowboy, you can go up and down, you can go left and right. So think about that sound. You hear that? Those are footsteps. That's all you've got other than this. Ah, you moved. All right, get away from me. So, let's look at this game a little bit before we actually play it for real. Yeah. I mean, how'd you end this cactus here? So, if you look at this game, it's a competitive game. It's symmetric. I mean, this cactus in the middle is not symmetric, but the gameplay is symmetric. You're a dude on either side. You've got the exact same capabilities. You can move up a little bit, move down a little bit, left a little bit, move right a little bit, and you've got button. Now remember, this is Atari. There's not A button, B button, start button. There is button. You're either hitting button or you're not hitting button. I guess we can wiggle around a little bit. There's not a lot to go on here. Now, I think you just watched this game for less than a minute, but I think you already know all the rules, right? You don't wanna get hit by bullets. You can shoot them up down or straight. You can move around. You can shoot infinitely. Oh, thanks, guys. You can kill each other at the same time. I squip first person to 10 wins. Now, here's something interesting about Atari. We're gonna talk about how great a lot of these games are. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, stop it. So, Atari games, a lot of these games we're gonna say are great, but only some of the modes are great because if I start hitting the switch on the front of the physical console, I go through all these other modes. Oh, in fact, all the way at the end, check out that AI. Is that a tumbleweed or a target? It's up to you. Oh, I guess the AI wins. So, start the game again. There's a lot of modes. A lot of Atari games in that era, they wouldn't just say, hey, here is Outlaw, the game. Outlaw is 16 games. They would always advertise, like on the combat cartridge, it says like, oh, 30-something games. It's like, no, it's one game. It's combat, right? It's not like a bunch of games on there. Like you think about Mario All-Stars. Yeah, that has four games on the cartridge, right? That's four different games. This is one game, Outlaw, but they have modes, right? And all the modes are drastically different and some are much better than others. So in fact, what that shows you is that some of the design of the Atari games we're about to talk about in play was by accident in that they didn't really know what the good modes would be. They'd have a very simple set of rules to follow and then they would make every possible iteration of those rules. Like when you play an indie tabletop game and it has like eight variant rules in the bag, that just means the designer didn't put in the effort to figure out which one was actually good and just ship that one. Right, it's like, hmm, I'm designing this game. Well, how much should this building cost in this game to be fair? I don't know. All right, we'll let the players choose 6, 7, or 8, right? And then, what do you do? All right, it's a lazy game design. As much as this game has an amazing design, it also is lazy in that they leave much up to the player to decide which is best. So we're gonna play a mode here. I'm gonna flip to physical switches on the box. Now they should put us in priority mode. Come down and shoot me. Let's see what happens here. So we're gonna shoot at about the same time. We both got shot. So we both got shot. So if I shoot and Scott shoots and I shoot a little bit before him, well, I just win if he doesn't shoot at all. We both die. So in that case, it's almost more like foil as opposed to fencing. If you're fencing with a foil, or a pay, for example, it's a different kind of sport. It's just who hits the other guy first. There's no priority, there's no right of way. But if I flick these physical switches, suddenly the game changes. Oh, I shot Scott first. And now his bullet disappeared. So that seems like a really minor, tiny change. It changes the whole game. That literally makes this game go from just the one Atari game to a brilliant game. I'm gonna reset it. We're gonna legit play against each other now. And I want you to think about what- Guess who's practiced a lot. Yes, you guys. It's not that I practiced, it's that I'm naturally good at this game. Sure. Whatever you say, Sheriff. I'm gonna be the sheriff in a second. But see if you can think about this game in terms of design. We're gonna play a whole game, we're gonna play it legit, we're gonna play seriously to win. And we're gonna talk a lot about what happened during it. And we're going to trash talk. So right now, Scott's the orange one. Already, there's a problem. I can infinitely avoid his shots for effort. There is nothing to force this game to end. But if you do that, you'll never hurt me. Yeah, so you know what? I can already break the game. I'm just gonna keep doing this until you give up. Walk away from the game. And if you walk away, I win. This cactus isn't just, oh, crap. So see, you get bored and you start moving around. You might notice a problem with this game's design suddenly. Come on, it's all right. It's the frame timing. I'm gonna show you. So what happened there? Why did that happen? This mode, because it's so simple, we have unlimited ammo and we can just shoot and you're rewarded for shooting first. If you shoot before the other person, then as long as you're on target, like you're gonna hit and they're gonna hit, you'll always get the point. Plus, if they try to shoot back at you, they stop for a second and they can't dodge. It's like dodge or shoot. You can't do both, right? You can't, like, in Counter-Strike, you can't be like, oh, dodging and shooting at the same time, right? It's one or the other. Yup, and also when you get shot, now the rules actually say this. They don't say you die, they say you sit down. So that's what happened in the old Westwider, just sat down. That's how you get an E for everyone rating. So the problem is in FPSs, for example, when you get killed, they don't just spawn you right where you died, right in the sights of the guy who just killed you. They put you somewhere else. So actually this mode is very poor design. It has a snowball effect. As soon as you shoot someone once, you know that that exact same trajectory will shoot them again and again and again. Unless they move instead of shooting at you, which is fine. It's like, oh, good, they'll move, right? And then we can, I'll be in a better position. Yup, but it basically means that one good land it hit means three or four landed hits before they get out of the way. The Atari's not that fast. There's only so many hurts in there. So the game ends up actually not being fun and we're just kind of sitting here mashing the buttons. Periodically, you get to a button mash, have a button mash and walk away. Sometimes just getting the button mash and turning the tables, but it's not mode. So I'm gonna jump all the way through to a very different mode in this game. And that mode is gonna show you how to make this game brilliant. Look at those things at the top. Oh, it's getting shorter. I couldn't even see you, but I hit you. Colors are not good here. Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, what's going on here? What is going on there? Come at me, bro. Oh! So what this game is doing, and this is where we're gonna start really talk about game design. All right. So back to the room before, but look what's happening now. Because we have a six shooter, it adds a very interesting element to the game. You get six shots. So you're rewarded for shooting first, but you're punished if you shoot and miss. So that gives it a nice give and take. You're rewarded by taking the initiative. You have to reward your players for taking the initiative in a game like this. Otherwise, there's no reason for them to risk themselves because I have to come out of my little hiding hole and expose myself to be able to shoot the other person. I'm rewarded for that by the opportunity because if I shoot first, I'll hit them first and I'll win the duel. But because I have a limited amount of ammo, if I miss him, once I've run out of bullets, I cannot shoot again until he has used all of his bullets. All right, this gives you the reward for dodging, right? In the other mode, dodging wasn't like the greatest thing in the world, right? Because it's just like, okay, great, I lost some points and now I'm not on target to hit them and get any points back if I mush the button fast enough. Right here, you dodge, they lost bullets. Now you can just wait for them to run out of ammo and then walk across the cactus and blow them away. So now, let's go to let him cruise your mode. Now we're pushing this Atari as far as it can go. This is the most advanced possible version of this game. I'm still kind of amazed that Atari can pull this off. Ah, one pixel. I literally saw it, it was literally one pixel. Let's try, let's try to do something. No, that's not gonna happen. Oh, that's nice. Not quite, not quite, it didn't make it. Hold on, I can make it. No, you can't, you suck at this. Oh, can't turn around. Is that I was punished severely by using all of my ammo, by running out of ammo while he still had plenty of ammo. I was punished for that severely, but it was a skill move. You know, in a lot of games, there's some moves that are more powerful, but there's a dexterity component. Mobas do this very typically. There's a thing that is more powerful than another move, a better strategy, but it is more difficult to execute. That little walk around the stagecoach, that is the skill move that not every player is able to pull off. And there's the destructible wagon, right? So there's destructible mode with infinite ammo. That's not really that fun because people just blow away the thing and then you're back to the mode where there's no obstructions whatsoever. But destruction mode with limited ammo, it's like, oh, do you use your ammo to try to get hits? Or do you use your try to ammo to set up future hits by destroying the wagon or the cactus or whatever it is in advance? So all this combined means that the game, because it's moving, you have to constantly be reacting to your opponent. There is no place you can stand ever and be safe. So you have to constantly be dodging. It's sort of just give and take, give and take, give and take. And because you're slowly destroying that thing in the middle, eventually there'll be no barrier at all. You can just run right at each other. The game is giving you an implicit timer that's going to force it to eventually end. Wait for me, get out of here, kid. Let's talk a little bit about the aim in here. We set it there. So we're standing here, right? I can only shoot forward. I can hold up to shoot up and I can hold down to shoot down. I've only got three possible directions. And it's gonna shoot as soon as you let's go at the button, you can't be like, oh, I didn't want to shoot, just kidding, right? So if you don't shoot fast enough, the other person sees the three possible angles you have plus bounces and can move to a perfectly safe position. So I'm locked in now. So by signaling that I'm about to shoot, it gives the other person something they can react to. So as a result, the game becomes very much like fencing because you are signaling your motion by starting to move and then where do you execute? But I can still only shoot in these three directions. So even though I signal, I can change up instead of shooting up, I can shoot down. I can time it around that stagecoach. And Scott has terrible timing for some reason. I was trying to aim right where your head is. Something else you might not notice is that when you go into the shooting position, when you go into the shooting position, you actually dodge slightly down, like you're crouching, right? So you become two pixels shorter and it's pixel perfect hit recognition. So you can actually dodge a shot aimed like for your head if you shoot in advance. So here's a question for all of you. Would this game be better or worse if we could shoot at more angles and more directions if you had an analog stick of aim, because that's something that wasn't available in the entire era. We don't know if they would. You could have used the paddle to do it. That, but then how would you walk around? Difficultly. You quap style? Yeah. So would the game be better? How many of you think the game would be better if you had an analog stick for the aiming? Nobody. Well, no one fell for that bait. So everyone assumes I'm going for this point that it would be worse. The reason it would be worse is that because our dudes are so big and because this arena is so small, there's only so many positions I can be in. I can only move so far, just like in fencing. Fencing has the arena where you're moving forward in this lane, you're moving backward in this lane. You can't just keep backing up forever. Eventually you hit the back and you lose. So if we're playing a gambit, we're sort of pushing each other up, up, up, up, eventually if I get near the top of the screen, I get near the back of the screen, my options disappear. I'm cornered. It has the same kind of mechanic you'd expect in a real fight. So in terms of the dudes, same thing. If we made the dudes tiny, if we made this more realistic, a much larger environment, then what the game is testing would be very different because right now, the game is testing your ability to read your opponent, to time your shots and to react to what they're doing. If we made our dudes really small, if we made the aiming more accurate, any of those things, it would basically turn into a 2D counter strike. It wouldn't be as much about reacting to what your opponent's doing. It would be about, do you have the fiddly skill to aim one pixel degree more to the left or one pixel degree more to the right in the course of your play? It would make it a very, very, very different game, much less accessible game. But even on the surface, right, most people would look at those two different games and think of them as like being basically the same game. Oh, it's like, oh, it's two guys and you've shooted each other in a 2D space. Oh, it's the same game. It's like, but no, just changing these variables completely changes which skills are being tested, right, what the game is about, even though it looks like the exact same thing, only smaller and with higher resolution. And that is the beauty of doing this with Atari games because you can try every possible permutation of your idea and you can just play test and you can see exactly what the results will be. So before we get back to this, because there's kind of a side story of Scott and I, Outlaw is a very important game to us and playing it publicly in front of people for serious is kind of a big deal. So at the very end of this panel, we're gonna determine who is actually the share of the panel. I just won like three times, what are you talking about? Oh yeah, do you think you'll win in a for real game? Maybe. I don't think you're gonna win in a for real game. We'll find out. But I wanna go to another Atari game first. We have several Atari games along the way and we'll come back to Outlaw. This is a weird game. It's called Slot Cars. Most people have never heard this game. This is, you know, Slot Cars, like the ones where you have a track with the little lines in it and you just have a trigger and all you go is faster and slower and they go, kids don't play with these things anymore, right? We have, you know, Forza or whatever, Gran Turismo, but. Now this is an Ortho game meaning it's a competitive game just like Outlaw is. Two players, symmetric. I can accelerate. Hear those sounds? It's our engines rubbing up on us. They're on the max speed now. All right, you can turn, but the way you turn is this. If you hold left, you get this little feeler, which means you're gonna turn at the next intersection. I just really like a couple of pickles just going like this on the screen. Hey, hey, hey. Oh, so we can shoot at each other with really slow bullets. Oh, oh, it didn't work. Oh, I can collect my bullet back. My bullet's turning. Yeah, so look at this. This game is way more complex than you think. So if I hold left or right and I shoot my bullet, it'll follow the course that I gave it forever until I shoot another bullet. So this is a very slow, very planning heavy game, but bullets move slightly faster than your top speed. This game is brutal and it is 100% a game of skill. The question is, is it a good game? And is it a fun game? Well, one thing this game does really well is that when you get hit, it moves you, right? A whole bunch. So you can't just sit there wailing on someone like you could in Outlaw. Yup, because as much as I love Outlaw, the problem of you got killed by the Cyberdemon and you respawn in front of the Cyberdemon, that is a problem that we've solved in modern game design. And it turns out in the Atari era, they also solved it. Every time you get shot, you get thrown away from the action. You have a chance to recuperate. Come on, come on, come on, come on. Something else about this game is that because it's so slow, it's like you often just can't react to things. It's like, what do you do? You're gonna go towards your opponent or away? It's like, you know, it's like here, that's gonna hit, right? No matter what. It's like, there's nothing you can really do about it. Well, I could have not gone there. It was my fault. This is one of those games. It's not about Super Meat Boy being tough but fair. This game is tough but fair. It is 100% your fault if you get shot. You can see everything your opponent's doing. He's going so slow. It's like playing Street Fighter at 110th speed. You're still gonna lose to someone who's really good. Oh, I got you now. Oh, you got me. I was still getting when you got there. So, of course, there are many variations. Now, here's where the game breaks down. It seems like we're edged it up to be like, oh, this is a good game. This is a good game. You should all play it. This game is a terrible game because if you actually explore all these iterations, the game is basically impossible to play. Now you can see there are a lot of iterations. It's very mad. All right, so now there's all these open spaces. You can't even predict looking. Like, where's my bullet gonna go? I don't even know. There, that makes sense. I can't go in this slow. It is really hard to actually control this. Like, I am basically moving semi-randomly. I know it. It's like, I can't, because I'm not on the basic track, I don't even know where my bullet's gonna go or my car's gonna go. Like, it just doesn't make sense anymore. Now, if it were turn-based, I could figure that out but it's not the slightly slow real-time game. I can't figure it out and it's actually really, really hard to play. And if you wanna make it a super skill game, all it does is let you keep speeding it up. Here, let's play for real, skill game. Games of skill. This looks fun, right? I am literally just hitting buttons. I don't know why they even let it go this fast. It's like, I guess they were, you know, talking about blast processing or something. This was the era where processing was a big deal. Yeah, any kind of processing. So, this is a situation where you talk about a lot of gamers, especially game designers, because usually game designers are the people who are playing a lot of games and getting pretty good at games. The bullets haven't sped up, so. Pretty good at games. But the problem is if you're good at games and you start to feel like I want games of skill, what we're playing now is 100% of games of skill and if you practice this and learn these weird, non-intuitive heuristics for handling this game, you could totally play it at this high speed and you'd be the only person in the world to be good at it, because it's not fun. Just because the game is a good game of skill doesn't mean it's a fun game of skill. Are the bullets still hanging out there? There's an interesting mode. Just a gun. But what kind of gun has a bullet that stays there and then what kind of bullet hurts you if you step on it after it's been fired? A mine gun that shoots mines from a slot car that can somehow steer. I mean, at least that law made sense except for the pretzels. I mean, I would like to say that I'm good at this game too. I've never been good at this game. I don't think any human is good at this game. And no one cares about this game enough to be good at it. So, outlaw actually has kind of a following. There are people who like it really into that game and continue to play it to this day. No one is going to turn slot racers into the next wind jammers. No community is gonna form around this game and make it their game because it is really hard to play despite being perfectly deterministic and extremely simple, it is actually very difficult for a human to play. Now, this is a game you're probably all familiar with. This was the launch game on the Atari 2600. If you bought an Atari 2600, it came with this game for free. I've never seen an Atari 2600 at someone's house without at least one copy of this game, sometimes five. No. You might think that this sort of game is very similar to slot racers. Move a guy around and shoot. Now, yes, mechanically, they're very different, but at their core, what they are, you're moving around trying to shoot someone. You might think it's also similar to outlaw only with a tank. Check out that sound. Check out that sound. That's my tank. I'm the red guy. Now already, there's something going on here. You control the bullets mid-flight and it sucks. So look at this, I can shoot and then turn the bullet here. Stop shooting me and I'll demonstrate. So I can turn a little bit, I can shoot a bullet and then control it afterwards. But when you control it afterwards, you also rotate your tank. It's like now, it's like you tried to hook it, but you ended up spinning your tank to a way you don't want to go and you got to spin it back. Now remember how outlaw had the problem where once you get shot, you sit down in the same spot you just got shot and slot racers, a less fun game, had solved that. This game actually does it worse than outlaw. Not only do you get shot, but you get in the same spot where you can be shot again, but you're spun around so the odds of you ending up in the right orientation to counterattack are very, very low. Most likely you're just gonna get wailed on. So it disorients you, points you in a random direction and meanwhile, the person who shot you just keeps moving on their current trajectory. So they just wait for you to appear on their sights again and shoot. It's actually an awful game to play against anyone who actually tries to win. Cause as soon as they start shooting you, they keep shooting you. This infinite ammo, this girl obstructions, at least not in this mode, right? This is all kinds of bad news. Now you might think this will do it better, but what happened there? This emulator actually captures all the glitches of these games alongside Scott. I cannot figure out if that was intentional. It definitely happened in the original Atari 2600. But I don't know if they intended that in the original Atari 2600. I think maybe it was one of those things that like it happened, but then it was like, well, okay. Now, just like outlaw in these other games, but even more so here because, you know, this is almost like, remember I said outlaw, what if we made the guys smaller? This is that game where a lot smaller reavering matters a lot more than long term planning in the movie. So as a result, fiddly controls matter. So there's a skill you can cultivate if you want to be good at this game where you are able to flick shot like that, like do a shot and then flick it around a corner really quick. And remember, we're using these nice game pens that are very modern and easy to use, right? This game is meant for an Atari 2600 controller, which is a really crappy joystick with a really crappy button attached with this all digital, right? So you've got one, two, three, four, five. So this one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. There's 12 different directions you can pick. I can't even pull it off. It is possible for you to pick Scott. Maybe there's 15 different directions you can pick. It is possible. It would have been possible for me to get Scott there if I had perfect frame timing, like Street Fighter 4 level frame timing in this game. So there's another game we're not gonna talk about really much but Dive Kick. Dive Kick shows this exact same principle. People complain about, you know, Street Fighter, all these games are too complex. But if you made them simpler, if you removed all these options, they wouldn't be real competitive games. But Dive Kick is a super competitive skill game if you've actually played it. And if you haven't played it, there's no D-pad. There's just Dive and Kick. You either dive or kick or kick then dive or dive and kick or kick and dive. Kick, kick, dive, dive, kick. Those are the moves. So most people don't talk about all these other modes in Outlaw. Yeah, if someone says combat, all they think of is tanks, right? And they forget that this game is full of nonsense, right? Outlaw had all those modes and a lot of those modes in Outlaw were kind of good or interesting. All the modes in combat just make it weird and worse. Except this mode. This is a well-designed mode because it's interesting. Where's my tank? There it is. You can hear when the other person's moving and they move at a deterministic speed. What you don't know is how much they're turning and when. So you appear if you shoot and you stay on the screen until the bullet disappears. So to shoot the other person, you have to reveal where you are. Oh, I know where Scott is. Which way am I facing? I just got shot. So I have to reveal myself again to figure out where I'm going. You also reveal yourself if you bump into a wall. So this is actually a very interesting mechanic. If you start bumping into an obstacle, you'll start flashing on the screen. That's two things. One, because you can't see yourself, it's telling you, hey, you're stuck on something, dude. Try a different tank because otherwise this game sucks. But two, it's telling the other player, hey, he's stuck on something. So it tells you you're doing something wrong so you have a chance to correct your course of action. But at the same time, it is punishing you for taking that incorrect course of action. But it's not punishing you like in football or soccer, depending on where you live and how much you like that game, where a penalty kick is a huge deal. You're probably gonna get something there. In this game, it's more like a hockey penalty. Yeah, they might score because they saw you there. It's not a guaranteed score. It's not like an 80% chance of score. If you reveal yourself and they happen to be in a great position to kill you, then you're in trouble. But if you reveal yourself at the beginning, it's like, yeah, they're behind the little wall too. It's not gonna hurt you. Now another thing that we didn't get up to at this point is that in outlaw, the game ends when someone hits 10. Kind of like tennis. The game ends when someone hits some point in the score. The game is over at that point and the game is not over until that point no matter what. There's no timer, there's no other thing. Right, same as the knob, right? Calm, the game's over at 10. And that's a great system because what it means is that if you're still playing the game, you still have a chance to win, right? There's never this situation like a monopoly where you've already lost. You have to sit there for three hours waiting to lose officially, right? It's like, if you're still playing, you can still win, so you're gonna still try. And as soon as you can't win anymore, it just ends and it puts you out of your mercy. It doesn't make you keep playing. Now that makes a lot of games a very good competitive sport, but it makes them a very bad spectator sport from the perspective of how spectation is monetized. If there's a TV time slot and a game starts at a certain time, all the people who are making money off of that game would like it to end at a specific time and have advertisements at specific times along the way. A game that can just go on forever is actually not great for them. They want a game that has a timer that's counting down to zero. So what this game does, what a lot of Atari games do, is instead of the Pong system, which is a very great system if you're playing the game with your friends, is there's a timer. That score at the top will start blinking at a certain point after a couple of minutes. And eventually the timer runs out and whoever's got the highest score just wins. You can get kind of boring though. If someone's just dominating and they're already ahead by a whole bunch, you have to sit there and wait for the timer and there's no way you can catch up. It's very disheartening. Yup. Now it's interesting because this whole spectator aspect was really not a concern. No one really thought about video game design from the perspective of spectators until very recently, until eSports became a thing. There were spectator modes in games, but no one was thinking about it like we think about basketball or baseball, like a game design primarily for people to enjoy watching it as opposed to the people playing it, enjoying it. Now there's all these other modes in this game. And I would like to talk about all of them, but frankly, they're all kind of boring. Like they're actually not that good. Right, they're pretty much what you think they are. Like look, I'm a big guy and Scott's a bunch of little guys. The little guys are just better, by the way. The little guys are objectively better. Which will make it real embarrassing when I beat you. I'm having trouble with the controls, is the problem. Oh yeah. Oh, that's right, cause down and up are the ones that change direction and left and right are the ones that change speed. They flip it on you. That's what makes playing different from tanks. Notice something to think about in these games because a lot of the games we've played, while they're very good, while they're very fun, while they're very skill games, they do have degenerate strategies. There are things you can do that are not fun to do, but are objectively superior and will win the game more often. Now this happens in complex games because complex games are complex. Like Mario Kart DS, the snaking. No one intended for you to snake the entire map. But you know what? If that'll make me win, I'm gonna snake the entire map. This really hurts my hand, but I wanna win. Right, when people use the word cheap, right? When they're talking about something in a game, of any kind, right? That's what they're talking about. They're talking about something that is very powerful in terms of winning, but very easy to do in terms of skill, right? When you generally think in a well-designed game, the more powerful technique is more difficult to execute, right? It's a lot easier in street fighters to just do a jab, right? And that doesn't do a lot of damage. It's very difficult to execute some super, like I can't even do it. But if you land it, it makes a ton of damage, right? That's how it works. Imagine if like the super was one button and the jab was like some really complicated thing, right? That would be totally backwards, right? So this game, you know, a lot of Atari games that are competitive have those kind of problems. So there's something really easy to do. And if you just do it a whole bunch, you'll just win and it doesn't take much skill whatsoever. So if you're designing a very simple game, if there's a degenerate strategy in your game and you didn't see it, you've got to go way back to the drawing board. You've got to play your game and get people to play your game until those things don't appear anymore. And the worst part is just you playing or just your playtesters playing will not help you because they're all progressing at the same rate. They're getting good at the game. They know how wind jammers works. Yep. And if you want to see, if you don't believe that, if you believe that your playtesting can find all the problems, look at all of the games out there that are like continuously expanded or evolving games, right? Like games online where they keep adding heroes or keep adding cards or anything like that. It's like every time there's a new set, the players always find something ridiculous and unfair, some crazy infinite combo, and developers and designers didn't recognize even though they've been playtesting it for months. It's like, how did you not see this? It's the first thing I thought of within five minutes of seeing this card. But it's very illustrative that these degenerate strategies up here, even in the simplest possible video games. They're still there even in games where like I said, we can literally count every pixel on the entire screen for the entire game. You can have perfect frame time because you see the frames taking away. So now I want to do a completely different game. This is more typical of most Atari games. You ever played this game, Scott? I played it maybe once. So I'm the yellow guy. Oh, okay. Oh, you already died at the start of it. I died? Yes, you're the blue guy. What? We're going for the high score, but it's a co-op game, so we're going to shoot these dudes. See these little dinosaurs? I don't even know where I am. Okay. Oh, I... There we go. You're the blue guy. Shoot the dinosaurs. High score wins. I love the soundtrack so much. This thing is pretty fun, right? The game's going to escalate like more and more dangerous monsters still appearing. I'm getting better. I know what's going on now. Yeah. Now I figure where I am. Watch out. That guy's invisible. Okay, we got him. We did it. And I'm winning every thousand points. It's got to be at 300. Well, you kill the dinosaurs before he gets it. All right. All right. What do you think you do? What do you think this is? I'm playing him in the game. Oh, invisible guy got me. Whoa. What is that? That's the thing from Mario Bros. Actually, that's the thing. I murdered you. Yes. So we have a funny anecdote about this, actually. So... I never played it before. So wait, long, long time ago, we were at an anime convention in 2002 and they had a duck hunt tournament. And me and Scott and a ton of our friends entered this duck hunt tournament. And we figured, man, these kids, we were in college, right? Now if someone's in college, I call them kids, right? We were in college and they was like, oh, we're going to beat all these kids. They'd never seen a duck hunt before, right? I owned this since I was three. What are they going to do about it? So of course, like an hour later, there's 10 people still in the tournament. We're hitting every ski every time, no matter what, the game is just going on forever. Everyone is playing perfect duck hunt and the levels just keep going up and no one's making a single mistake, standing with the cord fully extended, right? And it's just perfect duck hunt by everybody. No, that is a problem in any game that is like that, where you're individually going for the high score and the only thing that ends the game is players getting eliminated. If the game skill tap cap does not keep increasing, eventually a player who's good hits that skill cap and cannot die unless they have to poop, right? It may have been that I was better at duck hunt than someone else there, but duck hunt's challenge caps out. It doesn't make them go any faster or any harder to hit or give you any less shots. It maxes out and then every level is basically the same difficulty forever. So if you can do that level, you can do every level. If it would have kept getting harder, maybe it would have separated the good duck hunters from the bad, but it didn't, right? We were all good enough to meet that level, even though some of us may have been better than others, we don't know the answer to that. So they decided to end the tournament because it was Sunday and they wanted to shut the convention down. They took all the finalists and had us play a bracket ladder, like a bracket basically of original Mario Brothers. Not Super Mario Brothers, Mario Brothers, where you hit the things from beneath and then you, you know, bump up straight. So they seeded it and of course we're good. So we get to the final round. So the final round is me and Scott in the first, like playing for the championship and two of our other friends playing for the bottom. So the whole tournament is already rigged with just our people. And we're playing for high score. They just said high score, play until everyone dies and then whoever's got the high score wins. So it was Scott and I were playing and then I turned to the guy who was adjudicating and I'm just like, so what happens if I kill Scott? I'm not good at Mario Brothers, by the way. What happens if I kill Scott? And he's like, if you kill him, you can't get any more points and I show up Scott on a fireball and I won. I'm not very good at that game whatsoever. Competitive games that are actually just like this and this is a lot of Atari games. Joust has the exact same problem. I'm gonna stop playing that annoying noise. So in Joust, in Wiz War and all those games, yeah, if you can play that game to player and it's giving you an individual score, but you're best rewarded by killing your opponent and then playing on your own, then you could ever be by going for the score entirely independent of that opponent. Right, do you see the kind of maneuvers I had to make there? I had to make not getting killed by him at higher priority than killing the dinosaurs but I couldn't ignore the dinosaurs entirely because if I just try to avoid getting killed by a rim, I'm probably just gonna let him have all the dinosaurs, right? And not have to like hunt him down. So it's like you have to balance the two things. You absolutely cannot get killed, number one, but two, then you have to kill the most dinosaurs even though it would seem that killing the dinosaurs would be number one. It's not, it's the number two priority. Now, even more interesting, if you play this game like Joust or Wiz War and you wanna play at co-op, you're like, you know what? Let's not attack each other. River City Ransom style, let's just win the game. Together, it's really easy to accidentally kill your friends. Because these games are so simple and designed the way they are, you'll accidentally kill your friend like four or five times a level, even if you're good. Especially because they got the invisible dinosaurs. Like you're gonna be shooting extra just in case he's coming out, right? And they give you infinite ammo to encourage you to keep shooting in case that invisible guy comes out. So if you're designing a game, especially a simple game, you gotta think very hard about, is your game competitive? Is it cooperative? Do not try to mix them in a very simple game because many people fail to mix them in very, very complex games. Now, we're gonna play a game called Surround. Surround is also known as Tron, not the disc throwing Tron, the bike Tron. Now, there are a lot of Tron games out there and I don't wanna say this one is the best. Because Ricochet is the best. Wow, someone actually knows Ricochet. Yeah. So I was gonna do a comparison between this and another Surround game called Snafu on the Intellivision. However, Intellivision emulators. Brrr. So also, there were so many games like this because Tron was so popular in the early 80s in terms of break a license properties related to video games, but only one game can actually be called Tron the game, or Discs of Tron. So if you wanted to make a game where you rode bikes or through discs, you had to call it. Surround! Computer man! Discs throwy! Yeah, right. So this is the one that was on the Atari 28600 and it's pretty good actually. So we're gonna play this competitively and we're gonna play, do you see there's a lot of levels here? We're gonna play every single level in sequence in a one-shot tournament. No, that's gonna be oh my god, why? Because, remember what I talked about, raising the skill cap escalation? This game will show you with a, I mean look, the way this works, that's how big the blocks are. There's not a lot going on. If you've never played this game before, the basic idea is you ride your bike and your bike leaves a light trail behind you and you can't crash into the other bike or a light trail. If you do you die, the last person alive wins. So there's so few pixels, there's so little space on the screen and all we've got is a stick and a button. The button doesn't even do anything. The button does something later. Oh, does it? Let's see how many variations on this game there can be because every variation is the previous version plus a twist. And remember, this is an Atari game we're playing here. I'm the green guy and I'm definitely going to win. I'm not falling for your trap. Oh, Scott's pushing it. I got more space than you, what are you gonna do about it? Oh, you're gonna come at the top, shit. No, I think you can walk me off. I think I messed up. I messed up real bad. I messed up real bad. Oh, I messed up real bad too. Oh, okay good. There's a little bit of an execution component because remember, this is an Atari controller. Yeah. I guess. Aren't we changing modes or not? So look at this, it's still making this play until 10. Oh, look, we can cross the bridge over like that. That's actually fun. I didn't know that, oh my God, that's not good. Uh-oh, what's going on here? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, now you're not, it's over, son. Pretty, the simplest mode is pretty fun even for some people who've probably played this game literally thousands of times. I haven't played thousands of times. Come into my parlor, step into my parlor. Just watch it right over there, here I come, here I come. Well, you can see this one, you're gonna fight to the end. It's even right now. We're not gonna play every mode 10 times. We're gonna do the next mode. All right, so slightly different mode. Let's see what's going on here. It's the same to me, it's a little faster. Actually what's going on here is the orange guy is an AI. Oh. All right, now here's the next real mode. I'm yellow. Oh, no. How fast is this gonna get? The answer? Faster than you think. Faster than slot races? We didn't even get there. Let's try to get there. Now look at this design, look how quick. As soon as it's over, it just throws you into the next round. This game is just go, go, go, go, go, go, go. So. Mutual death. It doesn't affect the game that much, but the fact that you can cross over each other adds just a very interesting point. Really? I didn't think you'd fall for that. I was trying to go one higher, I pressed the button too soon. So already we're in a mode where I guarantee you guys could play this mode for weeks. There we go. Please mess up, please mess up. Oh, right at the speed. I'm not gonna make it. That's the AI. So let's escalate again. Oh. Oh. So now you can do crazy stuff. Let's see if I can pull it off. I'm trying to go through my own stream. Oh, I thought I was gonna get in the thing. Well, you hit the one pixel that killed you. Yeah. It's not easy to, even though there's a lot of big pixels, it's not easy to figure out exactly where to turn to, to cut through. But up until now, your light trail has always been an impenetrable wall, and now it's not. Oh, I did it, I did it. That felt so good. Design wise, look at what it's doing. So it gave you something that you never had before. The other modes just added a difficulty, like a lot of speed factor. This mode gives you options now. Are you going to conserve space? Are you gonna mess up the board for the other person? The other thing you have to consider, right, is that because this is a grid and it's not a hex map, when you move diagonally, you're actually moving it basically one and a half to two-back speed, right? And, uh. You're bad at this one. So if you can figure out how to get in between those lines, right? You can really just devastate your opponent by covering so much more pixels. It lets you move faster. There's a way to overtake someone. Wow, do we literally have the same strategy? I'm coming for ya. I'm coming for ya. Oops, no, I'm not. All right. Let's see what we got now. Oh, I'm green. You can hold the button and stop dropping whatever it is you're dropping behind yourself. I'm just gonna make a wall and hide over it. Oh. That sudden speedup is not enjoyable. So now we've added a whole bunch of different styles. Wait, I got an idea. I got an idea. Don't kill me. Okay, what are you trying to do? Hold on. What are you gonna do? Are you drawing a dick? Oh, I'm gonna write packs. Oh. Let's try to write packs together. All right, I messed it up. Oh, no, I can still do an X. I'm writing the P. This is harder than it looks, guys. All right, give up on that. All right. It's close enough to packs. You can get the idea. What's going on in this mode? Well, I can't hit the button. It doesn't do anything anymore. Where'd the walls go? Where'd the walls go? Where'd the walls go? Ooh. I should leave a trap here. Oh. You saw me do it. I wasn't looking at you, I was looking at me. The buttons don't do anything anymore. It took away diagonal movement. It's giving us a new option and resetting everything else back to the ground. Right, this new option is so awesome that I had to take away all the other options. This is real fun. Everyone wants to play it, now they're just watching. It's like what they do at home. I thought I had all four corners. Were you about to say I actually think I'm gonna win? I thought I had all four corners available to myself. And I could sort of fill in a box that would just be offset and wrapping around. No, you got nothing. You got nothing. You got nothing. Oh, I thought it was, I'm not good. All right, let's see what's going on now. Is this diagonal wrapping around? It's diagonal wrapping around. And the speed up. Oh, oh, oh, oh, for once I died. All right, conservative play. Conservative play, I'm just gonna play nice and get out of here. Oops, I think I'm not good at this game anymore. And of course. Everything together. Let me tell you, this is, the reason we're not talking as much now is this is so hard. We weren't that many pixels yet. I didn't see the wrap around. So again, I mentioned this point before, but like the same thing with the Super Meat Boy. If a game, if you die in a game like in combat, because the game kinda glitched out or like it didn't feel clean or if you feel like that thing didn't hit you, the player feels really disappointed. They feel like the game robbed them. But if you lose in a game like this, or a game like Super Meat Boy, and it was really hard to do, if one pixel of the edge of one blade touches one pixel of the rainbow, he is dead. So as a result, when you die, you can't say, oh, that was BS. It didn't hit me, you know it hit you. You know it was your fault, 100%, and you see the replay of you failing. In this game, you absolutely cannot complain about losing ever, right? Both you and your opponent get the exact same everything. You start in the exact same spaces across from each other and you move at the exact same speed, right? There's absolutely no difference between you and your opponent. It's 100% symmetrical if you lose, you lost. Now there's one more mode, you ready for this one? What is the one more mode? Let's go. It's perfect control mode. It's not even, we're just drawing. Oh. Oh. I can't kill you in this mode. You cannot kill me in this mode. But I want to show you something very interesting. So I can delete stuff. This is just like a drawing mode, which when I was a kid and I had an Atari before I had an NES, this was actually a big deal. You know what I'm saying? This is like Mario Payne of the 80s. All right, now let's write packs. I'm going to reset it because we messed that up. But I want to show you something very interesting. We can't move diagonally. There's another mode. Diagonal. Diagonal free drawing. We're about running out of time. So Scott can draw packs. The moral of this and then we're going to play to see who is the sheriff of this packs for real game of outlaw is the same thing we said at the beginning. This is one of our lectures where we give this whole talk and say, well, what'd you learn today and something totally different? It's the exact same thing. If you're going to design a game, seriously, design an Atari game. Play the simplest possible games you can. And I mean, look, we just spent 19 minutes talking about this game. There's not that many pixels in this game. There's two K's. It's not easy to draw. Of course, Scott. Come on. Come on. Kearnings, Scott. Oh, no, I won't troll you. That'd be real mean. But the other thing is that you'll notice as you play these games, like the respawn thing, in the old days of game design, in the old days of game design before the internet, people would solve problems in games, like the respawn problem. And then those solutions would be a loss. And game designers would rediscover them on their own later. I mean, that happens in all sciences, right? You know, there are physicists that learn things and chemists that learn things. How many people invented calculus over and over and over again throughout history? Yeah, because just they didn't either, A, they weren't in a remote location. They didn't realize the calculus already existed or B, it had been lost at some point, right? So there's a lot of game designers, and they talk about like, oh, we haven't learned everything there is to learn. Game design is really new. And that's true. Game design, especially video game design, is really new. It's only a few decades old, not centuries or millennia old, like math is. But at the same time, right, people have not looked back, right, and learned all the lessons from Atari or early PC games that many things have already been solved and brand new games make all these mistakes. Now, this is for real. No, no, no, no. You're going to see how intense we get in this game, I'm the yellow guy, and I'm definitely going to win. Probably made you miss one, that's good. I'm not using anymore bullets, come at me, bro. So, you see how, you know, you talk about this kind of a side point, and we talk about this, other panels, but I'll keep periodically pausing because I gotta think really hard about doing this game. But, watching skilled players play a game is a very different learning experience from watching amateur players play a game. So when you're designing a game, you have to think about the amateur experience and the skilled player experience. Oops, wrong mode. I'll fix that. Are you just suddenly fixing it? It's fine. Well, you want an asterisk? I got a plan that I executed! Any ways to bullet! So, that's an immersion gameplay. You know, the windjammers, like, people discovered all this stuff about the game? We noticed that this, you sort of get sucked into objects back towards your home base. So you can fall through something like it's in the matrix. So look at this, I'm gonna shoot him a bunch of times. And then I'm gonna fall back into the object so he can't shoot me and he wasted the rest of his bullets. You keep shooting at that exact spot where if I go to the bottom... Yeah, you know what? You know what? I know what pixel to shoot at. If I can counter-strike, got to make your corners. The two counter-strike people have to... Oh, Scott, I thought there'd at least be a challenge. You're out, I'm just gonna walk over there and put you out of your misery. Oh, no. There's nothing you do about this. This was very anticlimactic. Oh, you're at nine. I'm practicing so much. Play a different game. We're out of time? I highly recommend, if you enjoyed this at all, take a picture of that QR code. There are lectures of 30 or 40 of our videos of 30 or 40 of our lectures just like this on YouTube. This one's harder to video, so I don't know if it'll ever be on YouTube. We'll find out later. I also highly recommend you go to the Omega Thumb finale like an hour from now. There's really nothing else to do in PAX at this time. I hope that was entertaining. Thank you all. Alright, have a good one.