Last week MetalJim highlighted some freeware digital cardboard that’s out there in his post. Since this is near and dear to me both as a hobby and now as a profession, I checked some of these games out. Well, I checked one game out: Ra, a game I know fairly well.

It turns out that in 2007, it’s still mostly true that you get what you pay for. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Here’s a shot of me losing a 5–player game pretty badly. Oh, that doesn’t really bother me, since unlike MetalJim I’ve never considered myself strong at Ra. Truth is, I started out great but after a few quick games I started zoning out and making mistakes. Not just tactical mistakes, but also interface ones, like passing on an auction when I thought I was just hitting a “continue” button. I think 5–players is the most “random” way to play Ra anyway, but let me just stop there with the making of excuses. The AI plays pretty well. No complaints there. Apparently it uses a neural net approach, rather than an expert system (preconfigured play expertise).

But the game itself? Well, ugh. First off, it’s not a licensed product: some guy just scanned the art and implemented the rules and ran with it. It’s going to disappear from the surface of the ‘Net sooner or later. Once you get the hang of the user interface it’s more or less playable, but someone needs to read a few books on user interface. Even just keeping the crappy little art, a lot more could have been easily done to lay out the presentation in a more playable way.

And maybe add some sounds while you’re at it. I sure don’t need to hear some looping pseudo-Egyptian theme song when I play a game on my PC, but a few dinging sound effects to serve as cues to the game’s state and action – those go a long way toward making a game more playable. Don’t want to hear them when you’re playing at work? Fine, make them an on/off option, or a volume slider.

There’s some text prompts as to what’s going on at the bottom of the screen but it’s hit-and-miss. Again, a better screen layout and game-flow structure is really what’s needed. When an epoch ends, the game could really use a “scoring” summary view – instead it’s just “poof”, here’s the new scores. It would also have been good to have an “expected” score shown next to each player’s “actual” score, since every Ra player I know already does this – tries to figure out where everyone would stand if the epoch were to end now.

Notice that I’m mostly busting on user-interface, and not the shiny-shiny stuff. I mean, sure, maybe it would be cool to have little 3D objects popping up out of the game tiles and all that bling, but that’s a different, and very much secondary, concern. I guess it’s an open question as to how much gamers really care about varying degrees of polish and presentation.

Meanwhile, the game is one-player only against a variable number of computer opponents. No net play. Not even local hotseat, which would be plausible with a game like Ra because there’s no hidden information. So it’s a little solo time-passer.

The funny thing is, I can say as a professional computer programmer that the guy who wrote this game (Gabriel Rocklin, from Carnegie-Mellon if his email domain is to be believed) was pretty competent: the game doesn’t crash, it fully implements the “state machine” that is the Ra rules, and provides for decent AI. That’s a lot to be proud of. However, I think if he could have found someone with some art skills and UI design skills to help him lay out the front end of the game, then he would have had something much, much better to show for his hard work in the end.

Or maybe not. The question being, do any gamers out there care?

For myself, it will be interesting to see whether I return to Ra as a little 5–minute distraction in my day as time goes on, or whether the ungainly front end will be enough to dissuade me from playing. If I keep playing that might just make me a hypocrite, and I’ll apologize if that’s the case!