Animal Crossing integrates features into its landscape

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is coming out at the end of September and I've been getting excited about it, so I went back to my New Leaf town. I decided to make things how I want them! I admit that when I first started playing I was really into collecting furniture, bugs, fish, and bells. But now that I've done that I'm much more interested in the personalization aspect of the game. You can design cute little shirts and dresses! What's not to like? And I think Happy Home Designer will make it easier to make things "just so." 

The in-game integration of many play aspects is one of AC:NL's strongest design features. Instead of having a pop-up or extra window, there's a place or person you can go to in order to explore other game features. It makes it so the UI can be simpler; instead of having a special menu that you have to go to to enable a feature, there's a place within the game you go to instead. Here's some examples from the game:

• Achievements: When you earn a medal, a special walrus shows up in your town. When you talk to him, he presents you with the medal you earned. It's much less invasive than a corner pop-up! 
• To visit another player's town, you go to a train station (how cute is that?). You can also "open" your town for visitors.
• To play multiplayer games you go to a special island. 
• To visit another player's "dream town" (a snapshot of the town that anyone can visit/mess up at any time without any consequences), you go to a dream spa-like place. 
• Making "pro" designs and their QR codes can only be done at the clothing shop. 
• Moving furniture, adding patterns to the ground, digging holes, and other "editing" aspects are done with your avatar (like Minecraft), not an "editing" menu. Sometimes this is really frustrating. I suspect it makes it easier for children and people who don't play lots of other games to figure out how to manipulate things quickly.
• Ordering furniture and managing your money are done through special kiosks. 

Nintendo games are really good at using in-game locations for game features; I know Fantasy Life and Pokemon Black/White have similar places you go to do multiplayer stuff. It only works with games that have persistent locations or towns where it makes sense for some building or feature to be standardized. Sometimes I think AC:NL goes a little too far with it, especially with the inventory management (you can only access your large inventory from lockers/shelves in your house, and there's no way to auto sort, and there aren't very many inventory slots). But it's an extreme example I think we can all learn from. 

Now I have some other thoughts and a bunch of screenshots from the game... view them here after the break!

Our Personal Space is live!

I'm happy to announce that Our Personal Space is now live! Download it here for Windows, Mac, Linux, or Android. We're giving it away for free!

My sister Andrea and I started on this game when we realized we wanted to see more games that explored a married relationship, and my sister-in-law Clarissa did all the character art. I had been playing around with Ren'Py a little, and it was a great way to get something working right away. 

I'm always hesitant to experiment with coding. It's one difference I've noticed between me and experienced coders like my sister and my husband--I'm always worried I'll mess stuff up, but they're quick to experiment and see how everything works. My "coding" was limited to things like changing variables and "if-then"-type clauses. But I did feel pretty cool when something I wrote worked!

Our Personal Space is like a dating sim in that you have a romantic relationship with a fictional character. But you're married, so it's more about the little choices you make from day-to-day than the excitement of "will we kiss?" at the end of a date. Like in real long-term-relationship, you have other things you're worried about too, like how stressed you are and, in this case, if your colony on another planet will survive. When I look back on the games with dating elements I've enjoyed, many of them have other elements to worry about. Since Persona 4 is part time-management game, when you choose to spend time with someone, it feels more like you're indicating you like them somehow (although if you're playing strategically, wanting to level up a relationship has other motivations). Each month in Our Personal Space you can choose to spend time alone, which decreases your stress more, or spend time with your husband, which increases your relationship (but doesn't decrease stress as much). 

One part of Our Personal Space that we might have gone a little overboard on is on choices. The above screenshot is from a New Game+, and the options in italics are only available if you have a certain skill at a certain level. So, on a first playthrough, you might only see one of these options in italics. We wanted to make the game fun to replay, not just to get different endings, but also to see what other options are available (like if you choose to have a baby or not). It's kind of a slow build-up, but I think it's pretty fun! Please try it out, and if you do, I'd love to hear what you thought of the experience--good and bad! There's some discussion going on over on the Lemmasoft forum. Here's the trailer:

Note: Content-wise, I think this game would have a T rating. There are some parts where it's heavily implied that you and your husband are having sex, but it's not explicit. If you were reading it I'd call it a "clean" romance. So feel free to let your teenager play!

How to make Checkers boring

Yesterday on Pinterest I came across a blog post about how to use traditional board games in "untraditional ways" to "make learning fun." I am all for educational games, but the ideas in the post made me cringe.

The first idea was to write subtraction problems on a checkers board, and then have students say the answer to the problem to move to that square. This sounds like a glorified worksheet to me! Checkers teaches good skills already, like strategy and sportsmanship. The other repurposes were similar--have students say the answer to a math fact before going to a dot in Twister or putting down a piece in Connect Four. I saw another, similar post on a different blog that had kids reading sight words in order to play Break the Ice. This kind of modification makes games less fun, because it introduces tasks that are irrelevant to game mechanics. How about using games that involve math facts or words directly, instead of inserting them into otherwise perfectly good games? We go to educational games to get away from the worksheets and flashcards. When a game uses math or reading relevantly, it helps motivate children to learn those skills (I anticipate that this academic article discusses that, but I can't access the PDF. This one looks really good too. U_U). It's not going to hurt a child to drill them on math facts as part of a game, but I think it isn't as enjoyable as it could be.

I had some ideas of games that would use educational material more relevantly:

Math fact games

• Subtraction War: Like regular War (the card game), except each turn players turn over two cards each. They must subtract the lesser from the greater card (or the second from the first if you're using negative numbers too), and whoever has the greatest difference gets all the cards. Maybe that's too difficult? You can take out the face cards or just assign them all a value, like 10.
• Prime Climb / Primo: This is an upcoming board game that is kind of like Sorry in that you can oust your opponents' pieces from the board, but instead of rolling two D6s, you roll two D10s. Also, the board is numbered from 1-100. You add, subtract (and multiply/divide if you like) the numbers you rolled from the numbers your pawns are on to move them. This one might be too difficult for lower graders... but maybe not?
• Dice games like Farkle can be modified to practice addition and subtraction. Here's a great PDF with different card and dice games to practice math facts. 

Language and reading games

• For sight words, a game like Spot It! only with words seems like it would be pretty fun and effective. They sell a basic English version. Admittedly, this one isn't something you could replicate exactly at home--the algorithm for making a set of cards with multiple images and having one thing always matching between two is actually rather complex. 
• A matching/memory game using sight words. I wonder if some kind of speed matching would work too, or if that would just stress kids out. 
• A maze game with images/objects in the floor and written instructions which refer to those objects. 
• More games for language development on Sublime Speech. 

It seems like almost any game is going to be getting kids to think about things in a different way (unless it's too easy), but some games address school curriculum needs better than others. 

Virtue's Last Reward fixes all the annoying things about 999

Remember when I was whining that visual novels should learn a thing or two from sequential art/comics? I think a designer over at Chunsoft must have felt the same way, because Virtue's Last Reward (VLR) solved most of the problems I had with 999. VLR is the sequel to 999 and is in the same genre: visual novel with periodic escape puzzles.

The worst thing about the writing in 999 was that it was redundant to visual information. It was like they were expecting a blind person to play the game and describing physical attributes and degree of passion on comments when we had a picture of the person and their expression to learn that from. Thankfully, VLR cut back on this annoying literary technique. It made the dialogue go by faster and helped it feel like a game where characters are talking to each other and not a novel being read to you.

By far my favorite part of VLR, which I think other branching stories should adopt, was the story flow chart.

After you get one ending, instead of starting from the beginning and skipping through lots of text, you can go back to the last story-branching decision and choose the other option. Or you can go to some other branch and see how that part unfolds. You still end up skipping a lot of text, but compared to the alternative it is relatively painless.

The other nice part is that after you escape from a room once, you don't need to ever solve it again to escape. This feature isn't used very often though, because the designers made it so every single path has a different puzzle room to solve. So the writing is better and the branching story is easier to navigate.

Another aspect I liked was that the things you learn in some branches of the storyline unlock other parts. It made it feel more like you were building up to the "true" ending and less like you were just seeing all the possible endings. The fact that your character can sometimes remember things from other timelines makes this like... a modernist visual novel? Or you know, just ridiculous sci-fi. There are so many crazy reveals and it made me look forward to each ending. I can't believe I actually LIKED the ridiculousness of it all. I'm looking forward to the sequel.

Orson Scott Card on writing in videogames.

The Orson Scott Card writing in videogames workshop was today! It went from 8:30-5:30... so it was a long day. Luckily Card is funny and engaging. The workshop was made possible from a grant a UVU faculty member applied for... so good on him!

Highlights: Card is so amazingly fun to brainstorm with. I found myself being critical of other people's ideas, whereas he ran with them to make some really interesting scenarios (see the notes for details). Maybe I need to work on brainstorming more, since turning my critical mode off would really be useful once in a while.

I'm a fan of the Ender series, so hearing an author I like talk for a while was kind of mind-blowing (authors are real people!). I admire that he's done so much on his own and how he tries to show both sides of issues, and how there isn't always a right and a wrong to a situation, which I think videogames could really use (thanks, Bioware). But then again, since combat is such a big part of so many genres, there's kind of a need for an everlasting, ever-spawning enemy, which limits the kinds of stories you can tell.

Drawbacks: Card kept complaining that he hadn't seen any awesome SF/Fantasy writing in videogames... but he's not all that into videogames. He's content to play Civilization II, which is fine, but he made a lot of generalizations about the industry that I felt weren't as accurate as they might have been ten years ago (he hadn't heard of Skyrim or Minecraft... just sayin'). He was aware of Kickstarter though, and how the publishing model is dying, so he's not completely behind the times. 

Card is a writer and as such, was pretty focused on linear storytelling in games. It's what he does best! But I'm also interested in how story and gameplay can merge. 

I've scanned in my notes below in the interest of archival-ness and maximalism. 

Proof that this actually happened

Things games haven't touched: how to get pregnant, mysterious illnesses, and housekeeping.

Blogs of the Round Table, or BoRT, is back. Part of the topic this month is about what subjects games haven't explored and what they should focus on.

One thing games do well is simulation. I can grow a garden in Cultivation and maintain a dam in The Best Dam Simulation Ever. These are complex situations with multiple variables. I think the same technology could be applied to help women learn about their fertility cycles.

This sounds weird, but stick with me. I've been trying to get pregnant for a year and finally stumbled upon the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility, which discusses how a woman's waking temperature and cervical mucus can indicate if she's fertile or not (I discuss it in gruesome detail over on my non-gaming blog). There are a couple of different hormones that contribute to things. And knowing about how these variables are connected can help women understand when they can get pregnant or if they have emotional patterns associated with these variables. Do you see where I'm going with this? It seems like the perfect setup for a simulation! Easy mode could have completely typical hormone levels and simple goals like conception or avoiding conception, while more difficult ones could involve weird illnesses or thyroid disorders.

There are a lot of other topics I find would be good subjects for videogames. The game TRAUMA looks at a woman's experience with some kind of, well, trauma. It's one thing to have a sickness that doctors can identify and treat, but quite another to have real symptoms but no diagnoses. Wouldn't it be interesting to play a game in the shoes of someone who suffers from Fibromyalgia, and feel the frustration of not knowing what your body will throw at you next? I suppose that doesn't sound very fun, but I feel like games have such a potential for us to understand minority or simply unusual circumstances that I'm surprised there aren't more autobiographical games like dys4ia.

Another type of simulation I'd love to see is a relationship simulation with a significant other--someone your character is committed to and has already courted, and preferably they live in the same space. It could even be a roommate I guess. And then figuring out how to resolve various conflicts, like whether or not you want to kill the invading mice or who does the dishes or what kind of budget you have (basically housekeeping things). It just seems like the logical continuation after Princess Maker 2 or any game that ends with your character getting married.

I keep dreaming of a simulation game that involves all these things, but I recognize that I don't yet have the skill to implement it. I know game journalists wanting to make games is kind of cliche, but I'm definitely curious. And studying Python. :-)

Jigsaw Puzzle Design: It's about being able to predict what pieces fit

I recently had the pleasure of putting together a wooden jigsaw puzzle. It was so much more fun than the old cardboard puzzles. I got to thinking about why cardboard puzzles suck and thought I could do a little analysis for you. 

Ravensburger puts out like a million of these

mini Japanese puzzle has even fewer piece types

This is from your typical cardboard puzzle. There are about six major piece types, and some rarer border and corner pieces. Since all the pieces look the same, you are pretty much stuck to looking at the colors on the pieces for figuring out where they go (oh, and the border-first thing). Having fun with this kind of puzzle relies heavily on having a diverse puzzle-picture, and having access to that picture. 

Wentworth puzzle

These pieces are from a puzzle I picked up in England. Since each piece's shape is very different from the others, it's possible to build this kind of puzzle by looking at the shapes alone. There are edge pieces, but some middle pieces also have straight edges. The pieces are wooden and have a satisfying feeling of fitting, unlike cardboard pieces where the cardboard gives a little even when you're putting together pieces that fit. There are still some conventional shapes, for which you can usually guess which way is up. Little "whimsy pieces" are shaped like things and it's easy to tell which pieces fit around them (for instance, you can see the silhouette of the horse-rider's head in one of the pieces here). 

the border is scalloped. This is a corner taken apart.

 This last puzzle I found the most devilishly clever. The pieces are all unique shapes, but they're similar in shape and are completely unpredictable in their orientations. Even the pieces surrounding the whimsy pieces weren't immediately apparent. For this reason I found that I was using all the available clues--shape, color, texture, whatever. It was even more satisfying to look at a piece and know it was exactly the piece I needed, before fitting it in (this rarely happens when I put together cardboard puzzles).

This moment of epiphany, when I could see the solution before enacting it, is crucial to a good puzzle game. It's the same feeling I get when I play falling-block games or things like Portal and Catherine. It's what makes puzzles fun for me. 

piece orientation is unpredictable. Artifact Jigsaw. 

Another aspect of jigsaw puzzles is that I've liked is that they're easily multiplayer. If someone else sees you working on a jigsaw puzzle, they can instantly tell how far you are and what kind of puzzle it is. Piecing together a puzzle isn't timed, and it's cooperative. You can start without having to wait for it to load and play for as short or as long as you like (if you're willing to re-do your puzzle). I haven't really found a puzzle game that's as good at multiplayer as a good old jigsaw puzzle.

Are videogames objects to analyze or experiences to have?

In any art there's a disconnect between "fun" and "analytic" mode. Recently I've been practicing to substitute for our church organist. Music at worship services is usually a spiritual experience for participants. My practicing, which is highly focused on finding where my fingers and feet should go so I can slip seamlessly between notes, has little room for spiritual thoughts. But I don't think all music performance has to be so detail-focused; if I were more proficient at the organ I might find it pleasant and uplifting.

On the other hand, all the self-criticism that enables my practice to actually improve my practice makes me a harsh critic when it comes to enjoying others' performances.

The same problem can apply to videogames. When a game is really difficult at first, it's not all that fun for me. But as I continue playing, I develop some mastery and the game becomes more fun, simply because I've learned a skill.

As I learn more about how games work, I get more critical about small details. In Warp, the rebound from releasing the analog stick sometimes causes the cursor to go in the opposite direction, causing my instadeath a few times. A rhythm game I recently played had no penalty for "wrong" key presses, making it really easy to get a high score through button mashing. Dragon Age has no option to skip combat and dialogue one has already seen after you've beaten the game (okay, I admit that one is a personal preference). If I'm too critical of a game, I'm enjoying it in a different way--as an object to dissect. Sometimes though, I just need to stop looking at games as objects and start looking at them as experiences.

Bad quest design: Things changing because you talked to someone

I like that most of the quests in Dragon Age: Origins are pretty easy to figure out. Go kill some guys or put a red X on their doors and then you're done. I also like it when I need to gather information, but I feel like this just sets up a bad situation.

One example is finding the cartel in the dwarf town. The bandits who have the key you need don't show up in their little room until after you've talked to the lady who knows their leader. Before you talk to her, you can go inside and it's just an empty room. There seems to be no logical connection between talking to the woman and the bandits appearing other than quest progression. The same thing happens a LOT in Touch Detective. If I'm stuck in Touch Detective, it's because I haven't talked to everyone twice. Sometimes someone I'm supposed to talk to doesn't even appear until after I've talked to someone else. It's way frustrating.

I've identified this problem, but I'm not sure what a good solution would be. Have all the pieces of the puzzle laid out already, and risk the player encountering them out-of-order? Put a little exclamation point over someone you need to talk to? A request where you need to gather more information before proceeding makes sense. The thing we need to get rid of is the empty rooms changing unnoticed. But if every change is visible, it damages the conception of the game world as a place that is changing even when the player isn't looking (for some reason this is important, right?).

Designing games for 5-year-olds

Many five-year-olds can't read. They have smaller hands and attention spans. They hate dying. We know these things, but I think designing games for the kindergarten age group is more about making deathless constant action games. Children at this age are content to explore even if they aren't "winning." They play their favorite levels over and over. Because of these tendencies, I believe in some ways it's harder to design for small children and difficult to predict what they will like about video games.

about two years older than this. But still, tiny hands!

I have been babysitting a 5-year-old, whom I'll call Pepper, and he plays video games about half the time, sometimes with me. I'll use his experience to back up my suggestions for designing games for five-year-olds,  which can probably extend to 4 to 6-year-olds.

1. Have custom avatars: Kids want to pretend they are in the game, and they want to have an avatar that looks cool, preferably that they can change at will. Pepper's favorite part of Little Big Planet is selecting the "random costume" button and saving them, and decorating his pod. He was reluctant to play Kirby's Epic Yarn because Kirby is pink ("I want to be a guy" "He is a guy").

2. There doesn't have to be a big bad boss, it's good enough to just have a fantasy world to explore. Pepper's favorite LBP levels involve driving, roller-coaster riding, and pretending to swim with the sharks. The cantina in Lego Star Wars, where you can just run around attacking anyone at random, is also a favorite. I'm bored by roller coaster levels ("I'm just pressing down R1 this whole time..."), but he thinks they are fun. I think other kids are similarly motivated by fantasy in the video games they play.

3. Make it really easy. Kids this age can learn to do things more complicated than jumping, but they don't have a very high frustration tolerance. Many of the puzzles in Lego Star Wars are too hard for him to figure out without my help. Not just puzzles, but basic controls should be simple. I feel like the wii is a little nicer for this, but when you add in the nunchuck there are still lots of buttons, which might explain the popularity of ipad games with this group. Having the buttons doesn't mean you need to use them; point-and-click PC games are also really fun.

4. Potty jokes are hilarious, but it should also be exciting (but not actually dangerous)! Things like playing house, pretending to cook, eat, and sleep, come naturally to pretend play without a video game, so it feels natural in a game setting. That said, there should be something attention-catching about a game for this age group--something they already like, like monster trucks, dinosaurs, trains, roller coasters, Mario, sharks, jungles, etc. They want the feeling that the game is dangerous, but they don't want to die in the game (so, some kind of fire-y background is great).

It's easy for adult gamers to keep insisting that video games should be taken seriously and want more serious games, but I think it's also important to remember kids in video games. THEY LOVE THEM.

Is Marriage too Boring for Video Games?

This month's Blog of the Round Table (BoRT) is about love: can games communicate love? This means OPINION time.

The games that try to communicate deep romantic love are piddling at best, because they are based on a fantasy. The closest thing to a real relationship in a video game is a dating sim where your character builds up a gradual relationship over time and they have conversations and help each other with problems. I still haven't finished Dragon Age but I can believe that it includes these aspects of a romantic relationship. Even in these games, it seems like every conversation option makes or brakes the relationship (or gets you favor points).

In real life, romantic relationships contain more instances of mundane activities and conversations, like what to have for dinner or what kind of car insurance to get. Obviously, in a fantasy world, players don't have to worry about these things. The most mundane part of the relationship, in a video game, might be travelling together, or buying something for the sake of the relationship (self-improvement objects or gifts). In video games with conversation options, the player has time to contemplate them--nothing is said in the heat of the moment, and I don't think I've ever seen a game where a character's crankiness changes based on hunger or tiredness.

source

Maybe it's more accurate to say that initial dating relationships can be simulated fairly well, but games have yet to simulate a believable long-term or married relationship (Skyrim marriages don't count). I'm not sure why there isn't more marriage in games; marriage is a fantasy for a lot of people. I think a simulation game (not just for a relationship, but with a job or something too) with various scheduled activities and stats ("relationship health meter") could be really fun. Do you know a game that simulates a romantic relationship in a way that's satisfying? Would a marriage sim be too boring? Let me know in the comments!

What visual novels should learn from sequential art

Recently I've played a few visual novels, or games with visual novel elements (999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, Katawa Shoujo, Re Alistair++, and Trace Memory). I understand the focus on story and having lots of text is from the visual novel tradition. I just don't understand why it isn't better.

I think visual novels qualify as sequential art, and should start acting like it. Here's some things visual novels need to work on (I had ambitious visions of side-by-side manga and visual novel screenshots, but please do some imagining in your head):

-Visual and textual information should be complimentary, not redundant. 999 drove me crazy when a character would appear on-screen looking surprised, and the text itself would tell me this character was speaking and felt surprised. We're familiar with the convention that the person on screen is talking, or if there are multiple people on screen that their speech bubbles have their name on them. Even picture books can get this right--little tidbits of additional information should be contained in the accompanying illustrations.

can we please just show all the refinement and dignity in the artwork?

-Replace redundant visual information with relevant. Most visual novels are pretty good with showing people in a flashback. But how about more closeups of salient details (people were always eating in Katawa Shoujo and I almost never got to see the food)? I also like seeing what character I'm playing and how they react to conversations (Touch Detective uses the entire top screen for this, and it is darling). I like it when my character has his own ideas about choices I make, though granted many visual novels have limited options. I don't like seeing the same artwork over and over.

maybe a whole screen is a little much to dedicate to your character's reactions... but it's soo cute!

-Pace text faster than a novel. I know it's called a visual novel, but if I'm going to the trouble of reading on a bright screen, I want a polished, fast-moving story. Conversations and plot/action should alternate--my least favorite comic books are the ones with talking heads (and sometimes just one head, for those inner monologues that seem to be endless). Trace Memory did an excellent job of steadily revealing more and more information about the game's mysteries and alternating with action--a puzzle, or discovery of a person or secret passage (the best part was when a puzzle revealed something about the plot). If you don't read manga, think of Calvin & Hobbes--even if the entire comic strip is just a dialogue, at least they're sledding down a gigantic hill.

-Use animations resourcefully. If we classify animation as many static images linked together, it can still technically qualify as sequential art, and I think that qualification makes sense in the context of visual novels, which sometimes include small animations like head nods and toe-tapping. Animations in a character, when reused in the same contexts, make mannerisms. Mannerisms can be part of an interesting and dynamic character.

I know that many of my complaints are because of budget/time constraints on visual novels. But not all of them are! I like the idea of the visual novel and I think it is a genre that is a little neglected. It's possible that I should give up on visual novels and concentrate on finding a really good simulation game--do we have a modern Princess Maker 2, and is it something other than The Sims? I like my simulation games to have some story to them (edit: maybe Cherry Tree High Comedy has what I'm looking for? I'm stoked!)!

Let me know in the comments if you agree that visual novels need to reformed, or if I'm completely misunderstanding the genre! I love having conversations about this kind of stuff.

Alternatives to grinding

Repetitive elements in games (e.g., grinding) make players feel like they've "earned" their triumphs. Making a game take a long time to beat seems like a cheap way to make players attached to their progress in a game. A better way to make players attached to their progress might be to a) make gameplay really difficult, b) create engaging characters, or c) have players come up with their own story.

Making gameplay difficult doesn't have to make a game frustrating; I think Portal's puzzles are sufficiently difficult to make players feel smart and that they're really learning something (they're learning to think of physics in a different way). I'm sure there's a way to effectively teach more complex tasks through games, and I think learning is a ritual worthy of repetition and the challenge is enough to make it interesting. Adam and I have long discussed a kanji-learning game where instead of pushing A, you're reviewing kanji through flashcards. You can still get the boring/comforting thing, but maybe with a bit more brain involvement (also, if you want to help make this game, I only know so much about computer art).

Creating characters that you care about can only go so far. It's usually only part of the picture that makes a game addictive, and loving or hating characters seems to effect some players more than others. And if there's a character everyone likes, it only makes ending the game more painful (but impassioned fans make for good discussions?).

The last option, having players come up with their own story, is the emergent gameplay that characterizes Rohrer's art games (you're imagining the story based on what you're doing; no one is telling you in words what just happened). It feels different from playing a game where the story is in your face. It feels like you're doing the story instead of it happening to you. I agree that emergent narrative is one way to use video games to tell a story that no other medium can replicate. The types of games with emergent narratives are fun to explore and figure out their rules. But sometimes all I want is an interactive story that someone else made up. I would, however, like to see a Dwarf Fortress that is a little more user-friendly.