One-night stand: Dino Park

Last night I had some troubles falling asleep, so I reprised my experiment with Android unknown games.

To be quite honest, this time I didn’t last long (zing!): luckily enough, sleep caught me after half an hour of play. In that short time, I got the chance to play Dino Park, a business simulation game mixed with swiping (?) mechanics, that allows the player to build his own Jurassic Park with more PEGI T-rated, and kid-friendly, dinosaurs.

Dino Park is a simple game, as in: after playing for a little while you probably already have seen it all, or most of it.

It starts with a short tutorial in which the player has no freedom at all, being forced to tap on specific icons on the screen in quick succession with very few explanations. Tap here to open your park, tap there to find your first dinosaur, etc. Now that I’ve played some recent Android games, I noticed that this trend is really popular among mobile game devs. The more a game is complex, the longer it takes to complete this “holding hand” kind of tutorial. The player doesn’t discover anything on his own, every crucial information is automatically provided by the game on a silver, shining plate. I started to wonder why this happens. Probably the huge amount of games that saturate the market force developers to shoot infos at players in the minimum time given, in order to allow them to play as soon as possible, and stay on the game. Or maybe is just a matter of audience, and platform: due the short time to play, you want to learn all the rules quick. Or something connected to the interface – or all these reasons together, plus more. Nevertheless, it’s intriguing.

The gameplay has nothing to reflect about that I didn’t already write: it’s a path from zero to hero paved with capitalistic dynamics, and portrayal of animal conviction (stretching a little here, but stay with me) as a legitimate form of profit.

There’s a mechanic, however, that I enjoyed for some reason. In order to obtain new dinosaurs, you have to dig – more excavation-related imaginary, yay! – and uncover fossils. To physically do so, the player has to swipe on the screen, removing some dirt, and then combine pieces of fossil puzzles. On the other hand, I felt like there was a severe discrepancy between the resources given to the player to complete the task, time, and outcome. Unlocking an excavation site has a price, which increases after every attempt, forcing the player to be more efficient – or to wait until the in-game earnings are enough to open the app again, and give it a new try. Plus, it requires too many pieces to fully complete some fossils, and those pieces are often hidden under rocks: to destroy rocks, the player has to use a pickaxe (having 3 of them at the beginning of each excavation) but they rarely are enough. So, the choice: spend a rare in-game resource to obtain 3 more pickaxes, or watch a 30-seconds ad. I found myself watching way too many ads in the first ten minute of play, with a disproportion between playtime and advertisingtime.

That’s all, an uninteresting post for an uninteresting game I guess. Next time I will try to find some more particular title on the store, for sure.

One-night stand: Drilla

There are poor name choices, and then there are VERY poor name choices.

Drilla‘s title falls into the second category, hands down.

In my second straight sleep-less night (yay!) I decided to keep observing how mines are depicted in public imagination, taking mobile games as a starting point. So, after Pocket Mine 3, the choice was Drilla: an endless idle crafting game in which the player has to turn on, and then watch working, a mechanic drill. Excitement went over the rooftop here, didn’t it?

yep, that’s a watermelon

The gameplay is quite essential: after turning on the drill, the player should tap on the screen to gather materials while the machine keeps digging in a (truly) endless vertical descent. If the drill runs out of fuel, a few taps on the screen are enough to solve the problem. If the player gathers too many materials, it is sufficient to upgrade the storage part. This is where Drilla becomes odd to me: all you have to do is tap every now and then, sometimes very fast, then upgrade the machinery in a engineering-like interface, and go back to endless tapping on the screen. While the dynamic here is the same as Pocket Mine 3 (gather, obtain money, buy upgrade, repeat), Drilla’s progression is just too straightforward to present any type of uncertainty nor contest to the player.

Plus, there are some design choices that elude me. The minimal interface doesn’t help in creating atmosphere, and tends to create distance between the player and the game. Sometimes UI elements are right in the active section of the screen, being a disturbance for the gameplay. On the other hand, I found the upgrade menu very neat, with a touch of engineering and blueprinting that fascinates me. However, I wonder: what’s the meaning of the pistols, bones, and other unrecognizable stuff that appears in the background after the drill digs towards the center of earth? What’s their purpose? What should they represent? I don’t know, maybe they are meant as comic relief. After all, there is also a level in which the machine digs through a watermelon for some reason.

As I anticipated, I can see no challenge at all in Drilla, except for the required patience that the player should invest in the game to keep going, reaching new levels and upgrading the drill with fancy (?) stuff. The player becomes almost a passive observer with no influence at all on the overall experience, except for those few moments in which he/she should upgrade the machine. It feels like the game is trying to show, through procedural rhetoric, how maintenance works. How human work is increasingly being replaced by automation, and the man’s intervention is required just to upgrade, repair, or turn on some machine. This dynamic is exasperated, as Drilla keeps working even if you leave the game in the background: while I changed tab on my smartphone, in order to take some notes for this post, it kept digging. I left it at 12.927 and resumed at 15.411. Automation at its best.

Anyway, what’s interesting for me to notice is how mines are depicted in media such as videogames: always with the same palette, items, and designs. Verticality is a prevalent, if not needed, element. Horizontal excavation has been limited to a supporting role, mostly. This brings a sense of vertigo in mining games, a feeling of entering the unknown, representing that exploration of darkness that obsesses humankind since the dawn of time – and that we see depicted in every media.

One-night stand: Pocket Mine 3

My nights have become extensions of my days, as in: I’m struggling with insomnia.

In order to fill the blank between “staying voluntarily awake” and “finally being able to sleep for a couple of hours” I’ve tried to: read, watch Netflix, browse the internet, write, listen to music, and – last but not least – play games. Yesterday I decided to make the most out of that (wasted) time by trying any interesting game in the Android store, and write a post on it the day after. So here we are.

The rules are simple: I choose a random game without reading its description nor looking at screenshots, download it, and play it until I enter snooze city.

For the first entry in this series I picked Pocket Mine 3: a roguelike, dungeon crawler, endless scroller, idle game (che alla fiera mio padre comprò).

Pocket Mine 3 in action

Pocket Mine 3 captured my attention for its title, as lately I’ve been working on some projects that involve mines, their depiction in media, and their representation in the collective imagination. It was fun to see how certain tropes found place in a well crafted gameplay, that revolves around simple mechanics and minimal input by the player: all you have to do to play Pocket Mine 3 is tapping on squares, so that your little miner can destroy said squares/blocks of terrain, digging deeper into a procedurally generated mine until you reach the bottom (or your pickaxe expires, monsters kill the miner, or the edge of the screen touches him/her). It’s interesting to notice that the player knows, since the beginning of each level, how deep he/she should dig to complete it; this is a key element that helps to manage resources – namely, the pickaxe durability or special abilities – adding a bit of tactics to the gameplay.

There are a lot of different blocks in the game: normal terrain, minerals, explosives, treasures, monsters, and unbreakable ones too. Each category gives a specific feedback, and costs a different amount of pickaxe durability to be mined, but almost everything is drawn from mine’s collective imagination. There are, as you could expect, a lot of minerals to collect in order to gain money (isn’t mining all about capitalism, and profit?); the crates contain mostly explosives, or gas, that should facilitate the progression through the mine; there are treasures, such as rare mushrooms, herbs, or antiquities, to exchange with useful goods. The rhetoric is always the same: dig, gain, get better equipment, dig more lucrative stuff, gain more money, get even better equipment, etc. Destruction brings money, money brings more tools, better tools bring more destruction.

While Pocket Mine 3 drawns from the collective mine’s imagination, it must be noted that mostly of its aesthetic choices come from western culture: the TNT dynamite, bombs, and characters meet the common depiction (already seen in Spelunky, for example) of such imagination. Aesthetics are quite pleasant to look at (even for tired eyes), and the palette is the one you would expect from a game inspired by mines: brown, gold, red, and metallic colors mixed with some pastel dyes.

What amazed me the most about Pocket Mine 3 is its well-made combination of elements: for a roguelike such as this, it was impossible not to insert a series of randomizing elements (diverse characters, equipment, etc.). Developers did it in a way that winks at gatcha games, with booster packs, collectible cards/heroes, multiple elements that involve level-up mechanics. There are even daily, weekly, and monthly challenges to unlock special equipment (so there must be a team always producing new content behind this game: cool!). All wrapped up by a veil of microtransactions, of course; however I noticed that the player can obtain certain boosts and benefits by watching short advertising videos, which is a nice compromise.

As expected by a game like this, it becomes addictive soon: a simple gameplay (with a basically flat learning curve), plus endless possibilities given by PGC tend to create a winning mix, especially for me. Nevertheless, if tonight insomnia strikes again, my partner will be another game.