“or are you truly claiming that gamers want a challenge first and foremost?”
Right. Gamers want immersion not challenge.
Are people still arguing about this? Talking about FoF likes it’s trying to “beat” GH in some manner? Obviously the general public will never even sniff FoF, they buy console games. FoF appeals to the hard-cores, the people who want to edit/import their own songs and possibly those who don’t want to pay for GH (or the upgrades necessary to run it on PC). There is no point at all in comparing them, this post was a waste. When you boil it down GH has better graphics and a guitar controller. FoF is free and you can add unlimited songs to it. So take your pick!
Frankly I believe this was an ad disguised as a post because it is one of the most illogically conceived posts this blog has ever had. I was shocked when I read the lambasting that FoF got here, I thought Jeff was a “developer’s developer”. I guess not if he can’t recognize the difference between someone’s pet project that has happened to catch on and a full-blown game dev.
The question is an ad for what??
Really I think Jeff just wanted an example and perhaps choose badly. Two mainstream bought games would have made a better example, as would two open source/free games. Showing how just making the UI more appealing can make a ‘free’ game appear more mainstream and therefore more acceptable to the general public. Clearly there are two different aims between fof and gh just as dwarf fortress isn’t trying to be like Civ 4 comparing the two would be pointless.
@clasickis:
I’ve used software packages that cost us 80.000 euros per year and when we send in a support request email to a general support address nothing happens. 3 weeks later we get back an email saying, “I’m sorry, I was on holiday”! But this was a very big company with more than 1 support engineer. So why no automatic forwarding of my mail?
On the other hand around the same time, I had a problem with SoapUI, send a mail to the forums, within the hour had an answer and within half a day had an answer exactly right for my problem! It seems there was a bug and 2 days later I had working patch.
And these are not my only experiences like that.
I’ll take open source support any day over commercial support!
Why?
Do you want to be supported by some guy who has to work at the helpdesk but rathers wants to program, or by some guy who loves his program so much he is willing to work on it in the evenings and weekends? I’ll pick the second one.
person 1: hey, guys… there’s an open source clone of GH, it’s cool but the presentation is bad…
person 2: really? lemme see. wow, that’s cool… maybe i can add some nice stuff to make it look good… it’s open source, eh?
person 3: how’s goin dudes? hey is that GH? no? well, it kinda looks bare to me, can i help to spruce it up a bit? really? cool…
person 1: i can help you guys, too… i think we need to add more of this here and some here… and-
THEN, Barney appears…
I’m sorry Jeff, but in this case you MISERABLY failed.
- FoF is free and its GUI is polished
- GHIII GUI is too cluttered
- With FoF yuo are able to load your favorite songs
- FoF costs 0Eur, GHIII 80Usd
- FoF is multi-platform (but reading this blog you seem only to care about M$ compatible stuff…)
- FoF GUI lets you actually perform better than cluttered GHIII GUI
Honestly you don’t seen a good gamer.
The good gamer searched for funny games, not good-looking games.
Take as example warow (warsow.net). In your opinion this game should never been born.
Instead, apart being open source and free and multi platform, has been included in some E-Sports leagues. And it ISN’T sposored by any mega-corporation.
Do you know why?
Because the playability is GREAT.
A good video game player has this list to rate a game:
Mandatory:
- Fun
- Playability
- Speed/Responsiveness
I spent most of my spare time from age 8 to 16 learning to play the guitar and these instant gratification things just annoy me.
That said, I agree with the point that presentation is far more important that people think, and the example is a reasonable one. Please stop focusing on the specifics here - Jeff’s trying to make a very reasonable point.
Techies start from a data model and then wrap it with some half-assed forms from a generator - I know we do, I’ve done it myself lots. I learned that this doesn’t work because the logical view of the data isn’t the user’s view. Not listening to their pain and trying to help them get to where they want is arrogance. For example, on a system our users use (and I didn’t write) they hate the way it takes forever to open the person details screen and all they ever want is the email address or phone number - a techie generated the user form out from the data model and joined it to the logically correct place. Imagine how much extra effort it would have been to put the phone number and email address on the summary? Hardly any, but it doesn’t fit the cod-head approach. I would lay money the coder has never talked to a user or watched one use the system.
The sexy unwritten thing isn’t at all new. I worked on many projects in the pre-web days where the client had “bought the powerpoint”. Then they kicked us lots because it was all a lie.
I’m sorry Francis but you missed the point of that post.
That posts is 75% a critical review of FoF and a public advertising for GHIII, written not by a professional gamer but someone who would actually gain something selling copies of GHIII.
h**p://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000W5UNLY/codinghorror-20
There is a serious part of the post and is at end.
But for the remaining is definitely mere implicit advertising, masked by a blog.
This is sad, not only because everyone wouldn’t want to see any hidden advertising in one of most famous blogs, but most of all because things written against FoF are absolutely false.
Not only wrong but false. Extremely false.
Really have you ever played FoF and GHIII? Well I did (Pc, Xbox360) and honestly the first lets you play better due its EXTREMELY polished GUI, the latter is so clustered you hardly can compare the fun of the first. When you play the hardest songs you don’t care about all lights’n’flashes, you want t neat and polished GUI and FoF just offer this.
FoF = just works
GHIII = works but less playable due to clutterness
I know many guys that having Xbox360 bought GHIII for guitar then are playing on Pc at FoF (Linux or Win32 isn’t an issue).
Because when you want to have fun you need to have clean graphics and not omg-all-flashes-lights-I-don’t-see-anything…
Is like comparing GMail and Hotmail/M$ mail.
This is the point. Why using such a topic about presentation-plays-big-role-too and then using such a false comparison?
Because of
h**p://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000W5UNLY/codinghorror-20
What a sadness…
Jeff, maybe you wanna try VOS also, http://vos.hlwong.com/ it’s piano based, simple one. I find it not so bad.
I’d like to comment on the “implied” purpose of the article for a second.
It appears most commenters are coming on here and posting about their experiences creating windows forms GUIs and how those are typically not presented well. I realize Jeff himself tried to steer the post into this territory but it’s a silly thing to compare this with creating exciting game graphics. Business users != Game players. Different domain, different actors, different expectations. Saying “the presentation needs to be good” is far too general and easy to zig-zag on. Presentation is important. Yeah, duh. I believe he’s posted on this multiple times.
But things like this…
“This isn’t just a personal deficiency of mine-- it’s a presentation problem with real world ramifications. Better presentation would win many converts to the Frets on Fire camp, and woo them away from the alternatives.”
… are a little sad to read. Camp? What camp? Alternatives? Last I checked FoF is the alternative.
It’s become apparent that Jeff has probably completely sold out and he likely hasn’t programmed any real pipeline-level 3D graphics in his life. No, I’m not talking about WPF, I’m talking about OpenGL and actually understanding the theory. It’s not simple stuff and programming good, smooth graphics is a lot harder than using a tool to do it. Get it working first, make it pretty later is the name of the game, and that is exactly what FoF has done. Oh, and have you ever seen screenshots of “in development” games? Pretty ugly, right? Yeah. You might as well have just posted a big GO TO AMAZON AND BUY THIS link instead.
After commenting prior and now reading all the comments again in favor of computer-based guitar games, whether it be FoF or GH — do all of you have a crazy big monitor and/or computer in your living room?
Regardless how the game looks or how well it plays, the last thing I want to do is gather around my computer and squint at my screen. It’s a 19" screen, so it’s far from small but certainly not the 32" I have in my living room. And if other computer spaces are like mine and those of my friends, it’s in the office where there’s not a lot of room to move around.
I can’t imagine even attempting to play a guitar game without having room to move around, flail, jump, shuffle…all while clearly being able to see the screen of music. And what about multiplayer and spectators?
Video games for spectators
http://www.morningtoast.com/index.php/2007/07/video-games-for-spectators/
Much like the Wii, these guitar games require a complete rethinking of a gaming space. Prior to all these “active” games, all you needed was a crate to sit on and you could play in a closet. Now that we dance, swing, and rock out untethered, we need space. Sweet, sweet space.
The GH3 Mac/PC affiliate link is there because I always affiliate link any products I’m talking about. There is no special treatment in this post; you can browse my older posts and find the same thing.
As I said in the post, I admire what the Frets on Fire folks have done. I’m not attacking anyone. I am a huge, huge Guitar Hero and Rock Band fan, so I thought I would love FoF, too. I downloaded four huge song packs and I was ready to rock!
Instead, much to my surprise, I found that I could not get past the presentation. It’s not just the lack of 3D backgrounds and guitarists, but the overall fretboard, the scrolling, the “feel” of the game. It’s just… wrong. I knew FoF was bare-bones, but I didn’t appreciate how much of a difference this would make. As others have pointed out, and I tried to point out in the post, I never would have predicted how heavily the presentation colored my interaction with the software.
My hope is that the FoF folks will see this and get motivated to polish the overall feel and presentation. This will absolutely make their software more popular!
Jeff I’m sorry but you still miss the point of our arguments.
If you seriously try to play GHIII and FoF you will notice that the polished FoF GUI will let you play better herder songs.
In multi-player mode then FoF is even better than GHIII.
I played both for a long time.
As I pointed out, in a videogame presentation matters only for screenshots and newbies. Once you start playing what you need is CLEAN and POLISHED GUI because when notes run away you won’t have time to look at your 3D alter ego or at the lights’n’stuff.
See? The fact you can’t go through ‘presentation’ doesn’t imply that once you play GHIII and want something MORE polished then you switch over FoF and start REALLY playing and stop watching the eye candies.
Again, in many cases people buys only GHIII for the guitar and then play at FoF.
As a gamer I can only say that you failed and this seemed only a partial pre-christmas review. Sooo sad…
And again, FoF is becoming a brand new phenomenon, look at
http://www.google.com/trends?q=Frets+on+firectab=0geo=alldate=allsort=0
not only because it’s free but even because the playability is GREAT.
You missed this point Jeff.
I think FoF’s presentation is just fine. However, it’s stability leaves a lot to be desired. On all systems I have tried it on, crashes are incredibly frequent, and appear at seemingly random points.
Bad programmer technics are sometimes similar to this: “This is my code: redundant, structureless, but fast to write as lightning (my boss is happy) and it works!” I suppose we all agree this is bad, he/she would change his/her ways, doesn’t he? (boss too).
Now imagine a world where people judges mainly by appearances. You can try to change it, or you can be a lazy programmer, becuse you notice that going with the flow “sells more”.
A future world guided by appearances instead by contents frightens me. Lazy programmers want to be lazier, they believe it’s better, but experienced programmers as you see the future, and know that lazy methods will turn into problems tomorrow. If you ask children to choose whether cleaning or not their teeth after eating lollipops, they will prefer “Noooo!”. They don’t see the future, but you do.
Don’t you also see the future when you imagine a world that judges mainly by appearances? I choose fighting my instinct, look 80% inside, 20% outside, and say that Frets on Fire is not so different from Guitar Hero III.
Oh so true.
Too many programmers overlook that other side of their brain that tells them to hand in something that looks nice instead of only working the functionality.
Look at other software out there. Make yours look pretty too.
Excellent blog, Jeff.
Jeff, an FYI:
Next time you pitch a concept using your blog here, you might consider putting a little more polish into the specific appearance of the post, particularly if they include things like languages, video game screenshots, or UI. I think you’ll find that people often over-focus on those evocative and easy-to-debate, yet superficial, details of a presentation that distract from the underlying point one’s trying to make.
LOL
I agree that aesthetics are of paramount importance, but so is elegance. For example, I would take a well designed ASCII interface over a poorly designed high-res 3D interface any day, even for a game like this. (Note: I play a lot of roguelikes… so I may be somewhat biased.)
Amazing blog by the way!
Man, I don’t know - Amplitude was a kick-ass rythem/music/pattern game, and for me about 1/3 of that appeal was from the fact that you could make your own remixes of songs. Guitar Hero doesn’t allow you to do that - I know all the reasons why it wouldn’t be an easy feature to implement. But akward as it may be, the option to create your own custom tracks in FOF gives it a huge leg up on Guitar Hero.
Same thing for first person shooters and real time strategy games - Time Splitters might not be the very best FPS for console, but it’s one of the ONLY ones I know of that lets you make your own levels WITHOUT any hacking or modding.