The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

(Image Courtesy of UnlimitedGamer)

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Gamecube and the Wii. In this single-player adventure game, the player explores the world of Hylia in order to save his friend and prevent darkness from overtaking the world.

The game, while sharing the same elements as many other Zelda games, has a few changes. The biggest is, of course, the main character's ability to turn into a wolf. The main character, named Link by default, gains this ability when he is pulled into the land of Twilight by monsters, before being freed by one of its inhabitants, Midna. They begin to travel together, going through a process of exploring the world between each "dungeon", where they move through a maze of rooms while trying to find that dungeon's boss. After defeating a boss, they return to the story, leading them to the next dungeon. The player controls this all with the Gamecube controller or the Wiimote and Nunchuck, depending on what console they are playing it on, and movement-based controls are used on the Wii version in order to make sword-swinging more natural. Some weapons can also be aimed using the Wiimote, while others depend on using buttons, just as the Gamecube controller does. Overall, the game plays very much like the previous Zelda games for home consoles, with the art and story being slightly darker than before, as the game focuses on a man fighting against darkness corrupting the world instead of, say, a teenager having to fight an evil man just because he was tricked into helping him.

Twilight Princess started development in 2003, and originally planned to release the game in November 2005 for the Gamecube. However, the Wii was planned to be released the next year, so Nintendo wanted to create a version for their new console that could be released alongside it. Instead of releasing the Gamecube version and then later releasing an improved version for the Wii, they instead delayed both titles. While this was originally met with some backlash by fans, Nintendo spent their time wisely, improving the game and making sure the Wii controls worked well. After initially discovering that their controls were not intuitive enough, they went back and revised them, introducing motion controls as a way of making it easier for the player to attack. The game was then released as planned in November 2006. However, the Gamecube version was delayed for one month until December 2006, most likely to have the ability to play the game early as an incentive for those buying the Wii. After several years of waiting, players were finally able to play the game on the console it was originally developed for, and according to critics, it was worth the wait.

Super Crate Box

(Image courtesy of RockPaperShotgun)

Super Crate Box was developed and released by Vlambeer for the PC. A single player moves their character around the screen, collecting boxes to gain points while also avoiding enemies.

This may seem simple and easy, but it is far from it. Though enemies are constantly pouring from the same place at the top of the screen, boxes can be spawned anywhere, requiring the player to move carefully to them. But the true difficulty is only revealed when a player gets to a box: their weapon is switched to a random different one. Not knowing what weapon you'll receive next can make planning ahead difficult, because the weapons usually only work well in specific situations. For example, one weapon's bullets can bounce off walls, harming the player if they hit them on the way back (which could mean instant death if they fired while facing a wall), while another is a flamethrower that does a large amount of damage over time (which is troublesome if the player has no room to do enough damage). No two weapons are quite the same, leading to hectic gameplay that requires split-second thinking, especially since the player loses if they're hit even once! Thankfully, even though the player can choose what stage to play on, they are all more or less the same, with a hole on the top and bottom and platforms in between. These similarities provide the player with some fimilariaty when trying a new level, so they are not completely defenseless. As mentioned before, enemies spawn from the top hole, but if they reach the bottom hole (which will kill the player if they fall in), they will respawn from the top and now will be "angry", turning red and moving even faster than before! This means that the player must try to kill enemies before they reach the bottom, adding even more difficulty to the game.

Of course, one might think that with all of this, Vlambeer is a professional game studio. In reality, Vlambeer is in fact a small independent game studio based in the Netherlands. Independent game studios are run in a way that is a significant deviation from the standard studio, with their games usually being self-published and often free. Games by such studios are generally known for being innovative, unique, and sometimes "artsy". They also usually only have a few members, or in some cases, only one. In Vlambeer's case, there are two: Rami, who works as the game's developer, and business manager. His job is to code the game, and handle any issues involving money that the studio has. The other member is Jan Willem, the game's designer. He comes up with ideas for Rami to make into games, and also works with him to make sure everything turns out as planned. While they both worked together on the game's art, they worked with a 3rd party musician to make the game's music. Vlambeer is funded by the Utrecht School of Art & Technology, where both of the studio's members studied Game Design and Development. It is their hope to "bring back arcade gaming", and after Super Crate Box's success, gamers everywhere will be waiting to see what they cook up next.

Left 4 Dead

(Image Courtesy of SlashGamer)

Left 4 Dead is a first-person-shooter developed by Turtle Rock Studios, and published by Valve for the PC and XBox 360. Players experience a zombie outbreak, fighting their way through a variety of levels in order to survive.

While Left 4 Dead does have a single-player mode, where the player is helped out by AI-controlled teammates, it is usually played with others. In the game's Campaign mode, up to 4 people can play together as members of a group of survivors, who are struggling to survive due to the recent outbreak of the "Green Flu". The victims of the Flu, called the Infected, are essentially zombies, and even the characters within the game note this. The survivors fight their way from safe room to safe room, while picking up a variety of weapons and helpful items (such as med packs, pain pills, and explosives). A great emphasis is placed on teamwork, with the AI in charge of spawning enemies and items rewarding the players if they act well together, and punishing them if they don't. Besides fighting off the regular Infected, the players must also face "special Infected", who have been so mutated by the Flu that they have developed special abilities, such as the ability to shoot Infected-attracting bile, to pounce from great heights onto the players, to grab and pull players away from a distance using their whip-like tongues, and more. These Special Infected can also be played as by the players: in Versus mode, 4 players play as survivors while the other 4 play as Special Infected, switching off after each portion of the level to see who can do the best and acquire the most points.

There are many ways Left 4 Dead could have been digitally prototyped. What is most likely is that the gameplay, the individual Special Infected, and the AI Director that manages enemy/item spawning were prototyped separately, before being combined later on. The gameplay prototype would not require the AI Director's features, for they'd make the game too unpredictable to test at first, and the Special Infected were probably added as they were tested and their concepts finalized. With the gameplay prototype including just enough features to represent gameplay, those coding the AI director would have more time to get a rough version of it working in order for it to be tweaked before the final version was made. Having separate, but connected, groups working on the different prototypes would have allowed the most work to be done, and it is for that reason that I believe that Turtle Rock Studios did something similar to what I have proposed.