A tip before you start: You can switch between the sheep by tapping their portraits in the top right corner of the screen, in addition to tapping them. Sometimes tapping their portraits is easier than tapping them, especially if they’re close to the move arrows or are next to each other.

Level 1:

This one is simple: use any of the sheep to knock over the board and then run all of them across. The only reason you would want to replay this one is to try and beat your best time.

Level 1

Level 2:

While this one is pretty easy too, it introduces the idea that Shirley is best for knocking things over: drive her into the stack of hay bales and they’ll quickly fall over. Timmy, on the other hand, is useless for that task, and Shaun can do the job, but he’ll take longer than Shirley.

Level 2

Tip: Put Timmy and Shaun on the hay bales after they’re knocked over and have Shirley plow into them. She’ll create a tidal wave that will carry the other two sheep to the end with her, shaving a few seconds off your time.

Level 3:

This one may seem simple, but here’s where the game starts getting tricky. You need a larger sheep, like Shaun or Shirley, to start the swing’s momentum; Timmy won’t be able to do it. The swing will also slow down, so time your jumps carefully, and remember that Shirley can’t jump nearly as far as the other two; she needs to wait until the swing is practically right next to her.

Level 3

Level 4:

Use Shirley to knock over the box and use Timmy to hit the switch on the other side of the door, since he’s the only one who can fit in the tunnel. As in level two, you could use Shaun to move the obstacle, but Shirley will get the job done faster.

Level 4

Level 5:

Here’s another level where momentum plays a critical role. Start with Timmy and get him across first, since he’s the easiest and he won’t make the stacks start swaying. Then move Shaun and Shirley across. Hopefully you can keep the stacks as still as possible while moving Shaun, so Shirley has an easier time.

Tip: Use the arrow keys to adjust each sheep’s jump while it’s in mid-air. That will allow you to land as close to the middle of the top of each stack as possible, which will minimize the amount of swaying. The stacks start swaying when you land too lose to one edge or the other – if that happens, quickly move the other way and try to counteract the momentum. You probably won’t be able to make a stack become perfectly still after it starts swaying, but you can calm it down a bit.

Level 5

Level 6:

Use Shirley to move the trampoline and then have each sheep jump to the top of the green structure. You need to time your jump button taps for the precise moment when the sheep touches the trampoline; that will propel them higher.

Level 6

Level 7:

This one seems tricky, but don’t overthink it: use Shirley to weight down the left side of the plank and use Shaun to push the box off the right side. Then have Shaun jump across, followed by Timmy and Shirley. Make sure Shirley gets a good running start.

Level 7

Level 8:

Put Shirley and Shaun next to the brick wall so they form a platform. Have Timmy jump on top of them and then over to the platform on the left; use him to push the box onto Shirley and Shaun and then onto the brick wall. While Timmy can push the box across the brick wall, you may want to use Shirley for that task, if you’re looking to shave seconds off your time.

Put the box on the switch and send all three sheep through the open door.

Level 8

Level 9:

Use Shirley to push the trampoline next to the door. Then use either Timmy or Shaun to jump up to the cabbages and push them over the right side of the red platform, so they bounce off the trampoline land on top of the building on the right. You just need two of the cabbages to land on top of the building so that one of them will end up on top of the switch, which opens the door.

Tip: Push the cabbages off the side one by one. If you push two or three at a time, you’ll find that they’ll knock into each other when they bounce on the trampoline, and they could end up rolling around on the ground, where they won’t do you any good and they’ll get in the way of the other sheep. To make space between the cabbages, run back and forth across them to get them rolling. Then drop down next to one and start pushing.

Level 9

Level 10:

Even if you’re not playing to beat your best times, you’ll need to hurry at the beginning of this level, since once the tire lands in the crevice, only Timmy will be able to squeeze through to the exit. Put Shirley next to the door and put Shaun on top of her; Timmy will be able to jump on Shirley, then on Shaun, and then over the door, so he can run over to the switch and activate it.

Level 10

Level 11:

Put Shirley next to the hay bale, then have Shaun jump on her and over it. The goal here is to create a ramp with the hay bale. You can do that by using Shaun to push the hay bale to the left, so it falls over and Shirley can prop it against the piece of wood, which will fall over when Shaun stands on it. This can be tricky, given the game’s physics, but the bottom line is you want to arrange it in such a way that all three sheep can get across. If any of them fall between the brick wall and the red structure, they likely won’t be able to get back up.

Tip: Remember that Timmy is the best jumper, so get Shirley and Shaun across first, just in case their movements shift the hay bale and the piece of wood.

Level 11

Level 12:

Run Timmy through the tunnel at the bottom of the steps, since he’s the only one who can fit through it. Put him on the right side of the teeter-totter; you’ll notice there’s a little platform he can stand on.

Use Shirley to push Shaun against the steps, then have Shirley jump on him so she can climb the steps. When she gets to the top, have her jumpy onto the right side of the teeter-totter, sending Timmy over to the other side where he can press the button and raise the ramp.

Tip: As soon as Shirley jumps on the teeter-totter, switch to Timmy so you can guide his leap with the arrow keys; push the right arrow to make sure he lands on the other side.

Level 12

Level 13:

Use Shirley to push the lower safe to the right, up against the brick wall, and then use her to push the other safe against the brick wall on the left. Put Shaun on top of the brick wall on the left, then have Timmy jump on him and up to the bottom platform. Have Shaun join Timmy on the bottom platform so Timmy can jump on him to get to the next platform up. (Have Shaun get a running start from the safe that’s up against the brick wall and he should be able to reach the bottom platform.)

You’ll be tempted at this point to have Timmy jump across to the platform with the box on it, but resist the urge: Shaun needs to jump off Timmy so he can reach the top platform, from which he can jump to the top of the middle structure. Now Shaun can simply jump across to the other side and Timmy can push the box off the platform and jump across too.

Last, have Shirley jump on the box and from there onto the safe and then to freedom.

Level 13

Level 14:

Stack Shaun on Shirley on the far right side of the green platform and then have Timmy jump on top of Shaun. Timmy can now jump to the tall brick wall in the middle of the screen. Don’t let him fall off the right side, because he needs to push the piece of wood there to the left – after he does that, he can push it all the way to the left, where it’s out of the way. Then he can jump to the top of the brick wall on the left and push the wood piece off to the right, where he can shove it out of the way in that direction.

After Timmy has cleared the way, Shaun and Shirley simply need to jump down and leave the level too.

Level 14

Level 15:

Move Timmy and Shaun to the right side, against the brick column, and use Shirley to push the trampoline to the left side of the brick house, where she can jump and knock the wood plank off and on top of Shaun and Timmy. Be careful: don’t push the trampoline too far to the left, or Shirley won’t be able to push it back to the right.

After the plank falls on Timmy and Shaun, use Shaun to push it to the left so that it rests on top of the large brick and forms a ramp. Now move Shaun to the far right, against the brick column, and put Timmy on top of him so that the two of them are out of the way.

Use Shirley to push the trampoline up the ramp and next to Shaun and Timmy. Now Timmy can simply jump on the trampoline and over the brick column, followed by Shaun and then Shirley.

Level 15

Level 16:

Use Shirley to push the bottom step all the way to the right. Don’t worry, you might think it will fall into the chasm, but it won’t. Once the bottom step is up against the cliff on the right, use Shirley to push the next step to the right, and then the next one, until they’re all pushed to the right. Now the sheep can simply jump up the steps to freedom.

Level 16

Level 17:

You could use any of the sheep for this task, but Shaun is the best since he can easily push the mallet and quickly move into position, so have him jump over to the cliff. Have him push the mallet, which will swing down and strike the cabbage. While that’s happening, move Shaun to the left and get ready: as soon as the cabbage shoots out of the hole at the top, have Shaun plug it so the cabbage falls on his back and rolls off to the right, where it will come to a stop on the button.

Now all three sheep can jump to the right and end the level.

Level 17

Level 18:

Have Shirley jump down and push the trampoline to the right so it’s angled, as shown below. The best angle seems to be created when Shirley is standing on the ground, rather than still on top of the bricks on the left. Don’t push the trampoline too far to the right because she won’t be able to push it back to the left.

Shaun is the best sheep to use for pushing the cabbages off the ledge and onto the trampoline. You’ll need to experiment to figure out how to hit the button on the left side: you want a cabbage to ricochet off the underside of the ledge and hit the button, but you can also accomplish the same thing when two cabbages bounce against each other. You can try pushing the cabbages over one at a time or both at once.

Once the button is pressed, you can move all three sheep to the exit.

Level 18

Level 19:

Use Shaun to jump across and put the crate on the right side of the teeter-totter. Then have Shirley jump across and land on the left side of the teeter-totter, so she catapults the crate to the ground below. Guide Shirley in mid-jump so she lands as far to the left on the teeter-totter as possible – that will give her enough force to pop the crate up and over the small patch of grass. Then use Timmy to push the crate onto the button and everyone is home free.

Level 19

Level 20:

Put Timmy in the open space in the wheel first. Then have Shirley jump in and start pushing to the right. The wheel will start spinning right away, so immediately switch to Timmy and get ready to jump over to the button. Once he pushes it, all the sheep can easily get out: Shirley will drop to the bottom, and the open space in the wheel will head back toward the top, since it is bottom-heavy and naturally comes to a rest with the open space at the top.

Timmy can jump back into the open space in the wheel and Shaun can jump in and push so that it turns again and drops both of them at the bottom.

Level 20

The original Europa Universalis, which was only available for Windows, hit store shelves in 2000. It was based on a board game of the same name; unsurprisingly, one session of the board game can take weeks to play. Both the analog and digital versions of the game used the concept that is well-known to long-time EU players: control a nation between the years 1492 and 1792 and build its power through military conquest, diplomacy, and wealth. EU also gave players plenty of opportunities to ask “What if?” questions of history.

The game’s popularity paved the way for not only the second and third installments in the series, along with EU III’s expansion packs and the Rome offshoot, but also the Victoria, Crusader Kings, and Hearts of Iron series. All of those titles brought publisher Paradox Interactive to prominence, Virtual Programming came along for the ride, since we have handled the Mac versions of all those titles.

The second edition of Europa Universalis extended the game’s timeline, covering 1419-1820 and giving you more of history to play with.

EU II also deepened the gameplay, which was taken to a new level with 2007′s Europa Universalis III and its Napoleon’s Ambition, In Nomine, Heir to the Throne, and Divine Wind expansions. Playing the game with all four expansions installed, which is a snap with EU III Chronicles, lets you begin in the year 1399 and end in 1821, offering the longest timeline yet.

All this can be yours

EU III also lets you choose from over 300 countries to control (EU offered a fraction of that), and it features many provinces, such as the Americas and Africa, that you can colonize. You must oversee your fledgling empire’s economy, advance its technology and unlock new military units and buildings, manage diplomatic relations with other countries, organize your military forces, and more.

The ability to replay history is a big part of EU’s draw, and the third version and its expansion packs offer a healthy dose of that. Will the exploration and colonization of America turn out differently than it really did? Will the Holy Roman Empire quietly fade away, or will it somehow avoid its 1806 dissolution? Which European nations will fail to come into existence or form in a drastically different way? History is yours to play with.

Careful planning is key to successful conquering

If you’re new to strategy games or the EU series, Strategy Nerd hosts an excellent EU III guide that lays out the basics. Advanced players will appreciate the wealth of reference materials, including strategy and country guides, offered by the EU III Wiki. And like most strategy games, EU III has many customization options — the Paradox forum hosts a master EU III mod list that notes which ones work with the Mac version.

We’re thrilled that we could be part of such a major event in Mac gaming history, one that will drive development forward as publishers add the option to publish their UE3-powered games on Mac OS X. We’re happy to offer our services as the developer of such titles, so if you happen to work for a publisher interested in bringing a UE3 game to the Mac, let me know and I will forward your message to our CEO.

Even if we’re not involved in those releases, we’ll be thrilled to see them, since they’ll take Mac gaming to greater heights and help all of us in the industry. As Apple continues to sell more Macs than it ever has, the platform slowly but surely becomes less of an after-thought for gamers. Sure, we still have a long way to go, but as Cult of Mac noted when it reported the UE3 news: “Be sure to look out for the next-generation of Mac OS games built using the Unreal Engine 3, which are sure to be as staggering as those released on iOS, and those console titles that use the UDK such as Unreal Tournament 3 and the magnificent Gears of War series.”

The same holds true of so many other businesses, whether they’re selling iPhone cases and iOS apps or simply running a web site devoted to all things Apple. I was a contractor at Apple between 2000 and 2002, and I remember chatting with an Apple employee after Steve had introduced a new Power Mac and its SuperDrive capable of burning DVDs. “We just created a bunch of new businesses today,” he said.

He was right: the innovation that Steve drove at Apple helped build an increasingly complex ecosystem that benefited not only consumers but entrepreneurs too. Steve gave them the tools they needed to succeed. A rising tide lifts all boats, as the old cliche goes, and as Steve drove Apple’s fortunes ever higher, he pulled many people outside the company with him.

Even before Apple stopped participating in Macworld, WWDC, which used to be a conference that only engineers cared about, suddenly became a topic of discussion as people wondered what Steve would choose to unveil there. What other company has so much attention laser-focused on its product cycles? Many companies wish someone would create a rumor site about their activities, or that their customers would show up at dawn for the opening of a new store.

Sadly, Steve’s family, friends, and colleagues no longer have him with them, and that has left my heart heavy this week. But Apple will continue to thrive, thanks to the hand-picked executive team he left behind, and all of us who have benefited from its innovation will get the chance to do so for many years to come. Thanks, Steve, for making the world a better place in so many ways.

You can find the original Apple Games article here.

• When you place a tower, it takes a few seconds for the structure to rise out of the pad, so make sure you’re not relying on it to take out a final alien that’s about to exit the map with a power core.
• When you upgrade a tower, you need to give the process several seconds: the old tower lowers out of view, and then the new one rises. Your best time to do that isn’t when you need that tower to destroy some aliens in the next few seconds.
• Pay close attention to towers’ ranges of fire: place the ones with smaller ranges closer to the path, and let the long-distance guns sit back. Meteor towers are perfect for out-of-the-way spots, since they can cover long distances.
• You can click on an alien to check out its stats and monitor its health level. That’s a handy way to know if you should beef up some last-minute defenses before it reaches the exit.
• Make sure you’re prepared for boss aliens when they arrive. (The bar along the top of the screen tells you what types of enemies are on their way.) Because the bosses are so powerful, you won’t earn many resources for a few minutes while your existing towers work on taking them down.
• You’ll need quick mouse moves to survive the game’s higher levels. From the main menu, select Help and Options, then choose Controls. The first tab lets you change the mouse sensitivity: fill the bar to let your cursor move as fast as possible around the screen; empty it for the slowest speed. You can choose anything in between to fine-tune the setting, but note that you won’t see the effect of your choice until you resume gameplay.
• Don’t place temporal towers where their ranges overlap each other; they seem to cancel each other out.
• Each tower or group of towers has a force field. Aliens must go around the force field, unless their path is completely blocked. Keep this in mind as you look for ways to lengthen the aliens’ path; the farther they have to go, the more opportunities your towers have to shoot at them, and the longer it takes for them to get away with power cores.

It burns! It burns!

As luck would have it, they were introduced to Phantom EFX, which at the time was focused on developing PC casino games. Doeden remembers: “One sunny afternoon that summer, we visited the guys at Phantom and spent the day in the office, showcasing existing demos, talking tech, and simply bouncing ideas around. Near the end of the brainstorming session, Aaron Schurman, CEO of Phantom and designer of Darkest of Days, pulled out a few pages of paper. It was a scribbled outline for a time-traveling shooter that he’d been hashing over for the past few years.

Taking a trip through time

“We all took a read, sat back, and the rest is history. We struck a partnership with Phantom EFX, formed up 8monkey Labs, and got to work right away on what came to be Darkest of Days.”

Doeden notes that at the peak of the game’s production there were just 10 full-time employees on staff, and few of them had past experience creating games, but “8monkey excelled at making the most of the available resources. Most members of the team wore many hats, and folks generally went above and beyond the call of what a mere job would command. Darkest of Days has the unique feel that it does because of the team that created it.”

He elaborates: “Things like the sniper mission, the stolen Zeppelin level, and the grimly satisfying microwave un used in the endgame all grew from the ground up during our production process. Most players and reviewers have described the game as unique, and we love to hear that.”

Dreams Running Wild

As Darkest of Days’ development got underway, Doeden and the team sat down to determine which historical eras their unique first-person shooter would visit. The game begins with a seemingly typical first-person shooter battle that puts you in the boots of Alexander Morris, a soldier fighting under General Custer during the infamous Battle of Little Big Horn. After Custer meets his ignominious death, you’re saved from the save fate by a mysterious man wearing futuristic armor.

A stranger arrives to help you.

Soon you find yourself traveling throughout history, visiting the Battle of Antietam during the Civil War and the Battle of Tannenberg during World War I, as well as the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius at Pompeii. Your goal is to protect people who have played key roles throughout history, thus preserving the time stream. By the end, you’ll discover why those people were placed in jeopardy and you’ll learn more about Kronotek, the mysterious organization that has enlisted you.

How about some World War I?

“With time travel on the table, our dreams for what the project was going to be easily ran wild,” Doeden says. “We had one rule from the very start: no World War II. The market was so saturated with World War II games at the time, we knew we didn’t want to touch what was already well done, and done all too often. With the format already decided on, a first-person shooter, we knew we had to keep our focus on events that would easily cater to the classic appeal of combat with firearms.”

He continues: “Eventually we culled the list down and went with five atrocities that we felt most of our consumers would relate with, but had not yet experienced in a video game. We’ll be honest, those five time periods were also what we, ourselves, wanted to experience in a video game. Taking an assault rifle into ancient Rome was something not to be ignored.”

Mining History For the Look, Feel, and Story

While the 8monkey team didn’t have the resources to fly around the world and visit historic battlefields, they were able to get creative and use the Internet to their advantage. Doeden recalls: “We would browse through individual’s Flickr accounts of their personal vacations through European battlefields, download little-known television series, and sift through the Library of Congress archives to collect the data, imagery, and literature we needed to give us insight into these historic events and help us shape the levels.”

The team also shaped the story during that time, Doeden says: “The story of Darkest of Days takes on the archetypal theme ‘great power requires great responsibility.’ Whether it was the Book of Luke, FDR, or Spider-Man, who made the theme famous, it’s a theme that has held true throughout time.  Darkest of Days visits some of the bloodiest days in history and shows how each of these historic events would have been quite easily avoided if the powers that be could have sunk their egos, dropped their pride just a bit, or even just exercised a little patience.”

Kicking butt in Pompei.

He adds: “The one exception to all this being marching into Pompeii in 79 AD with futuristic special forces at your side and an endless arsenal of firepower. The story is a powerful device to carry on an interactive journey, but we wanted to open the gates a bit and let the player take out some frustrations by the end of his journey. For those gamers who do seek out the backstory and really take in each turn of the plot, we hope they enjoyed their experience.

As for the possibility of a Darkest of Days sequel, Doeden says nothing is in the works right now. He explains: “The task of jumping headfirst into another two-to-three-year development cycle for a sequel was quite daunting and not very high on anyone’s wish list. We took some time to regroup over the past year, diving into smaller game projects and further developing our Marmoset technology, as well as launching our Toolbag software to the public.”

Doeden and the rest of the team holds out hope, though: “There was some good interest in Hollywood for a film adaptation of Darkest of Days, so we’ll wait to see what comes of that. Hollywood always want a game to release alongside the next summer blockbuster. So if it’s a Darkest of Days sequel based on a movie that’s based on a game, count us in!”

World War I trench warfare, up close and personal.

When it debuted for PC and Xbox 360 in December 2008, Defense Grid: The Awakening offered a unique twist on the tower defense sub-genre of strategy games. Virtual Programming published Defense Grid for the Mac this past July.

Set in the distant future, the game puts players in the role of a nameless character tasked with reactivating a long-dormant defense system and stopping invading aliens who want to take the power cores that keep the system going. Only one power core needs to remain to progress to the next level; if the aliens take all the cores, the game ends.

Many of the levels feature ruined military bases and other decaying structures, and the storyline suggests that the aliens have been to the dead planet before. The computer controlling the defense grid talks to the player as the levels progress, revealing more and more about the story in the process.

It burns! It burns!

We sat down for a chat with Jeff Pobst, co-founder and CEO of Defense Grid developer Hidden Path Entertainment, to learn more about the game’s development.

Q: There are many tower defense games out there.  How did you seek to differentiate Defense Grid from the others?

A: We started on Defense Grid in May of 2007 and at the time, we did a study of tower defense games.  We found 84 different flash games and mods to great products like StarCraft and WarCraft III and felt that while tower defense games were pretty well covered in the domain of the amateur game developer or mod maker, we didn’t see anyone bringing this addictive and fun gameplay to the professional market at that time.

We basically asked ourselves what would the definitive tower defense game look like, and as we talked about it more and more we saw a vision of something that we felt should be made and that we thought we could do well.  We focused on having just the right balance of features and options that we had seen in other tower defense games (often less was better in our opinion), but then we asked a lot of questions about the emotional curve that one experiences as they go through a tower defense level or as one progresses from level to level.

We pulled from our past experiences making AAA games and realized that we didn’t see anyone out there spending time on strong intentional support for the emotional arc locally or globally, the balance for many different kinds of players, progression, immersion, visualizations, etc. that are a part of making a large retail game, and we decided that we should make an effort to fill that void.  Also, the new channel for downloadable games on the consoles and the increase in popularity of PC download channels like Steam opened up new opportunities where we felt that we could really deliver something different than what others were doing.

We felt there were a couple of opportunities as well for some new changes in the tower defense experience.  Prior to Defense Grid we found tower defense games that were either all open-map experiences or all fixed-path experiences.  As we looked deeper we found that the learning curve for fixed-path was much easier and opened up the gameplay to a larger audience.  We agreed, however, that open-map presented a more creative challenge and allowed one to really get deeper into the gameplay.  We decided to mix both map types in our game and actually have fixed paths connected to open areas in interesting level designs, and over time we allow the player to learn some of the nuances of playing in both types of systems.  We found that this hybrid-map approach seemed to bring something new to the table.

I think the newest thing we brought to the table, though, was the idea that the incoming enemies were there to “steal” something rather than just trying to get from point A to point B.  This had several positive impacts on the game experience.  For one, the emotional curve was now multi-peaked.  There was an emotional increase as the aliens got closer and closer to your cores (similar to when the aliens would get close to the exit in other tower defense experiences), but then there was a second emotional experience from the time they actually got a core (and the music swelled up more), to the time where they would or wouldn’t be prevented from escaping with that core.

Kill the thief!

There now was a new mid-game experience of stress and response where the player knew a bad thing had happened, but it wasn’t the end of the world, and there were steps they could still take to prevent it from hurting them further.

In addition, the “handoff” mechanic of the aliens being able to pick up dropped power cores (dropped when other aliens were killed) turned out be a great gameplay experience in that it helped keep the map fresh, preventing easy “front-loaded” or “back-loaded” solutions.  This was because the main hot spot on the map where you need to prevent enemies from escaping could move around to different parts of the level as the cores were stolen and then passed off to other aliens when an enemy died.

One other great thing about the power cores being part of the game is that by providing 24 possible things to be stolen, and setting up our rule that you could progress to the next level as long as you kept one of them, the levels could be self-balancing for different players of different skill sets.

Novice players saw the cores as “lives” and worked hard to keep that last life in order to be able to continue through the game.  We could balance this to be difficult to do appropriately for novice players, but not hugely difficult or impossible as many tower defense games seemed to be at the time.  Meanwhile, we could keep the more serious players engaged by awarding achievements or medals for retaining all of the cores at the end of a level, which was much more difficult to accomplish.  In this way the same level had different objectives for players of different skills.

Q: Defense Grid’s storyline is more detailed than what many other tower defense games feature.  Why did you decide to use a story in the game?

A: As part of our goal in making the experience feel more polished, balanced and professional, we felt that giving the player a bit of motivation and immersion into the world was important.  We had all played Portal, which had come out the previous year, and saw a situation where GlaDOS was hugely engaging even though you were busy doing something else most of the time she was talking. Even the comments made by the turrets was cool and interesting.  So, we decided that we wanted to take the next step and provide a story to give the player some context and a bit of meaning.  Paramount to the story design, though, was that it couldn’t get in the way of gameplay, and that turned out to be a challenge.

Our initial design was to create a story between the AI and the player.  The actual player wouldn’t really converse, but what we’d do is simulate as if you were “typing” on the screen asking questions to which the AI would respond.  In this way we kept you anonymous allowing it to really be “you” in the story, but we effectively put words in your mouth and had the AI character respond to those typewritten words.

The original script was great.  The design team at Hidden Path put together the general story arc and progression and brought a lot of ideas to the table, and then worked closely with a couple of exceptional writers, Sam Ernst and Jim Dunn, who brought new ideas as well; they helped bring the story to life and got the dialogue just right.

At the time, they had written a “West Wing” episode that was well known, had worked on some other games, and had done some very good writing, so we were excited to collaborate with them.  As we were working together they told us about a TV series they were pitching based on Stephen King’s “Colorado Kid” story, and of course we now know a couple years later that they were successful in getting it made, as it debuted this year: “Haven” on SyFy.

So we had a great script, everyone loved it, the writers were very happy, we were happy, and we started implementing the dialogue and story in the game.  It became quickly clear, though, that waiting for the player to type something out and then have the AI respond created a lot of undesirable waiting time.  In addition, if we sped it up, or played around with different presentations, your eyes kept moving from the playing field to the text and back and it was easy to feel uncomfortable and unfocused. We’d be really messing with the timing of the game.

I’ll never forget the call we made to Sam and Jim when we said:  ”Hey guys, you know that two-character interaction that you nailed so well?  Well, what would you think about converting it to a one-character monologue where we just ‘imply’ what the player may be asking or wanting to know?”  If you ever want to break a writer’s heart, you would walk down such a path and boy did we feel awful about it.  It was clear, though, that our original idea of the player and the AI going back and forth was getting in the way of the pace and the play of the game.  We could give a voice to the player, but we didn’t like that idea of it then not being or feeling like it is “you.”

To their credit, Sam and Jim simply said, “We don’t know if this is going to work, but we’re up for giving it a try,” and after a few iterations, we all stood back and were amazed.  It was actually a better script with just one character.  I think everyone was stunned by that.  It of course went into the game in a very straightforward manner, and as we played, it all fit together perfectly, and this was with the stand-in voice acting.  Later when we got the actual actor to perform the lines, we all got very excited with the realization of the entire story process and how it was performed.

Q: How did you ensure there was the right balance between available towers and the various types of aliens?

A: Our background in working on many past AAA games allowed us to take the lessons from those games in balancing systems and apply them to this game.  The balancing was one of the toughest things to get right and something we spent a tremendous amount of time doing. For us that was probably the key differentiating factor of what we thought would make a top tower defense game: so many of them aren’t balanced, have only one way to solve them, or aren’t true puzzles where you can solve them many different ways.  For us, Defense Grid levels had to be solvable by lots of different people in many different ways and the only way to really accomplish that was to balance the towers, balance the levels, balance the alien waves, and make it all work tightly.

The aliens become harder to kill as you progress through the levels.

It turns out, for example, that the difference between a boringly easy level and a too hard to complete level could be as little as three percent of the hit points the aliens have.  So, it couldn’t be “close” and be successful the way we wanted to be successful, it really had to be much more precise than that.

With respect to the different tower types, each was designed to give the player a different play style option, and each alien was designed to prevent certain simple strategies from being all you need to do.  There are of course towers that target single aliens, or those that target groups.  There are those that pack a strong impact less often, or those that continuously hit for small damage over a longer period of time. There are aliens that come in packs that can overwhelm towers that just target single aliens, or those that move quickly to escape short range towers.

At the end of the day the goal was to create different towers that could be more or less effective where they were placed on the level, and alien waves that would challenge the player without causing such difficulty that players would feel that the level wasn’t solvable.

Q: What are your favorite strategies for success in Defense Grid and why?

A: I tend to prefer longer-range towers when I can use them, but they do have a downside: decoys.  Just like most aliens in Defense Grid, decoys are designed to prevent the “one strategy solves everything solution” and their special power is that they can’t be seen by towers that are more than a grid or two away from them.  Meteor towers pretty much never see them, and cannons often aren’t very effective against them since both those tower types have an inner radius of fire as well as an outer radius (so they can’t shoot at an alien when it is too close to them – and in this case they can’t see it unless it is close to them).

There are in my opinion a couple good anti-decoy strategies.  The obvious one is to have more gun, inferno, Tesla, concussion and laser towers around, which will see them and shoot at them when they are near.  Also, combining those or other short-range towers with a temporal tower to slow down the decoys is good so that they can get a lot of damage done to them while they are near a set of short-range towers.  Second, command towers not only help provide more resources in an area, but they also illuminate decoys so that other towers can see the decoys – even from far away – when they’re near the command tower.  So, a small killing zone with some short range towers, a temporal tower, and a command tower not only do a lot of damage to a decoy, but they also allow cannons and meteors in the other parts of the map to see the decoys and attack when they’re near the command tower as well.  This typically can do the trick.

Q: How do you feel about Hidden Path’s success in finding a niche as an independent developer?

A: It’s kind of funny to us, actually. The staff at Hidden Path — there are about 25 of us right now in the studio — mostly have experience shipping retail games.  Our team averages 11 to 12 years in the industry and averages something like 7 or 8 games shipped prior to working at HPE.  We’ve also worked at HPE on some games you haven’t seen yet that are larger than Defense Grid and were made for publishers that have put those projects on hold or have moved on to other projects — typically when a key person we were working with has left.  Someday you may get to play these games, or games that evolve from them — I hope you do, because I think they’re hugely fun for where they are at in development.  But that said, we loved the opportunity to be able to put our own money into the development of Defense Grid and see it work out so well for game players and for us.

Recently we’ve been working with the folks at Valve and in conjunction with the folks there we released the first major update to Counter-Strike in six years, fixing a lot of past issues, adding achievements and stats, and features that people are coming to expect in games they play on Steam, and working to update the technology and features of the game.

At the end of the day, we love making and playing great games, and Counter-Strike is a great game.  We’re proud to be working in that franchise and proud to be the creators of Defense Grid.

Q: How do you feel about the current state of indie gaming, and where do you think it will go in the future?

A: The term “indie gaming” is a funny one to me.  Valve is an “indie,” Epic is an “indie,” Bungie is an “indie,” but of course so are 2D Boy, Uber Entertainment, Twisted Pixel, Frozenbyte, Introversion, etc.  Indie is a studio that isn’t affiliated directly with a publisher and has some more freedom on charting their own course.  At the end of the day whether we’re an indie or not, we all have a customer to satisfy — sometimes that customer is internal management, sometimes it is just the folks who will buy the games and need to buy a certain amount so the studio can keep going.

I think the thing that’s really new in gaming these days is that there are many more channels available to release your game, and depending on your budget, you can make different channels work out well for you.  I think Steam, Xbox LIVE Arcade, PSN, Direct2Drive, Impulse, OnLive, WiiWare, Deliver2Mac all provide new and exciting opportunities for game developers to reach an audience without having to have the kind of financing required to make a retail game product.  The prices are different there too, so consumers are more willing to give something a try, more willing to take a chance, and have different expectations than they do for the next big retail game.

As long as I’ve been in the game industry, and I suspect for much longer than that, there has been a cycle of large publishers locking in game franchises and talent by buying up game studios.  As big publishers get larger and larger, they make more product, some of which works out well, and some of which doesn’t work out.  To try to keep the balance sheets working for them, they then lay off a portion of their staff every so often or people leave because the culture has changed and doesn’t work for them any more.  Some of those folks often form new studios, and some of them have success, and there is this constant cycle of studios being bought, publishers getting too large, new studios being formed, studios being bought up, and so on.

I think the thing that is different this time, is that the small studios can potentially make it longer on their own and don’t necessarily need to do the publisher buy-out as the main way to make their independent studio work out and survive.  I credit the new channels online to reach customers and find ways to make it all work.

Virtual Programming has shipped the Mac version of Supreme Commander 2, and Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor sat down with me — in a virtual sense; we talked by email — to discuss the game. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that this popular real-time strategy game came to the Mac: just the week after it was released, Taylor was at the 2010 Game Developers Conference gushing about Valve’s move to support Macs. He even described the Mac’s market share gains as “super exciting.”

Sometimes beachfront property isn't the best buy.

Still, I was legally obligated to ask Taylor how he felt about Supreme Commander 2 arriving on the Mac, and he replied: “I love it. I’ve been a Mac fan for years, and have always been a big supporter of our games on the Mac. It’s a great platform, and made especially so because Macs use Intel processors. Macs are fast and a lot of people have laptops, which should be able to run the game great.”

Focusing on What’s Important

Supreme Commander 2 is part of a new generation of strategy games where sometimes more can be less: advances in technology have enabled the implementation of bells and whistles that were mere pipe dreams years ago, but if developers don’t keep their eye on the big picture, the end result can be unwieldy and frustrating to play.

That’s why Taylor said that the biggest lesson learned from the original Supreme Commander and its Forged Alliance expansion pack was “that creating a big game means really needing to focus on what’s important. We were very ambitious, and that meant we wanted a huge list of features.”

Fewer units, sure, but you can still launch major battles.

One example of the way they winnowed that list was the decision to go with fewer units this time. “That was part of our goal to have more production polish, and units that had more meaning throughout the entire game,” Taylor said. “Fewer units meant we could spend more time on each one and create more interesting relationships between them.”

He also pointed out that his development team tried to not get crazy with the units’ physical designs: “It’s a fine line between outrageous and, frankly, outlandish creations, and things where people can go, ‘Got it, that makes perfect sense, I know what that unit does on the battlefield.’”

Of course, fewer units means each one needs to carry more weight, and Taylor explained how that tied into another lesson learned from the first game: “One of the challenges in Supreme Commander was how the Tech 1 units would not be useful at the end of the game, so we came up with the tech tree idea [for Supreme Commander 2] to allow those early units to continue to upgrade and be useful.”

So, what’s Taylor’s personal preference for unit management in the game? “I like to build Rock Head Tanks,” he replied. “From the very first unit produced, you can build a powerful army and upgrade them like crazy using the tech tree. There are so many great strategies now, like the Cybran engineer army, but when we were in development, I liked my strategy because it stress tested the design theory.”

Invasion force

The LAN’s the Thing

This year’s major strategy release, Starcraft II, hit the shelves with big sales numbers: 1.5 million copies moved in 48 hours, according to PC World. However, it also has one glaring omission: a lack of support for LAN play, which has some Starcraft fans up in arms.

Asked about LAN play in Supreme Commander 2, Taylor responded: “Well, we know this is a very important part of the way RTS games are played, and despite the fact that games are moving online, we know there are many cases where LAN gaming is still very popular. Our LAN play requires Steam authentication, but it’s pretty seamless.”

Yes, those who purchase the Mac version of Supreme Commander 2 also receive Steam codes, giving them the necessary authentication for LAN play. They even get a free copy of the PC version too, which is a nice bonus.

Spiritual Succession

A spiritual successor with really cool robots.

As the conversation wound down, I asked Taylor about the idea that the Supreme Commander games are spiritual successors to his Total Annihilation series. “I think they are indeed the spiritual successors, because of the way I approach RTS design,” he responded. “I don’t like a lot of rules, and I like big, open worlds. Some might say the economy systems play a role in that, but I think it goes much deeper than that. I think many folks will see our upcoming Kings and Castles game as a continuing extension of those previous RTS titles.”

How do you make learning fun? For Margaret Johnson, CEO and co-founder of Sabi Games, the answer to that question came when her daughter had major surgery and was playing Xbox games during her recovery. Johnson was a member of Microsoft’s Xbox team at the time, and she had long struggled with figuring out a way to create a game that was more than simply an “interactive worksheet,” as she describes typical education titles.

“I saw the power that games have with kids, that feeling of success when they complete something,” Johnson recalls. “And I saw that in my daughter.”

Inspired by that experience, Johnson led a Microsoft research team tasked with figuring out how to bring that sense of empowerment to an educational game. The technology giant eventually decided to end the project, so Johnson and some of her team members left the company to form Sabi, whose name comes from “sandbox interactive.”

The group brought along seven patents, including a crucial one that forms the foundation of Sabi’s first title, ItzaBitza: Living Ink, which brings children’s drawings to life and lets them interact with their work. “Researchers told us drawing recognition was too hard of a problem to solve,” Johnson says. “That just made our engineers want to solve it even more. They said: ‘What do you mean it can’t be done? We’re gamers – we can do anything!’”

Starring Sketchy

“We looked at Living Ink from the standpoint of ‘How do kids learn to draw?’ and started from there,” Johnson relates. “We also purposefully avoided school curricula. We worked with people like Dr. John Bransford, a University of Washington Professor of Education and Psychology, who helped us create a new learning model. We wanted to figure out how to change behavior so that learning is a byproduct of play.”

ItzaBitza stars Sketchy, who asks children to draw things that he or she (depending on Sketchy’s gender, as chosen by the child) puts to good use. For example, Sketchy will grow or shrink to fit into a house. Then Sketchy will ask the player to complete a task to earn a star, such as drawing additional items for Sketchy to use, or finding hidden objects.

Speech bubbles containing simple words also appear. When the child holds the mouse over each word, Sketchy says it, enabling the child to not only identify those words but also understand the concept of reading words from left to right, top to bottom. As children draw objects and point at words, they also develop valuable computer mouse skills.

As children complete tasks and accumulate stars, they unlock new areas of Sketchy’s world. ItzaBitza features five environments: Home Sweet Home, Let’s Go Camping, Play in Space, A Farm Life, and A Very Scary Haunted House.

Johnson notes: “A lot of parents who don’t get gaming want to help their kids with the tasks in ItzaBitza, but you have to let them figure it out. It’s like Call of Duty: you pick the wrong weapon and you get killed, so you figure out which is the right one. You can learn problem solving skills from games and apply them elsewhere in life.”