Ball on a Stick: Official Teaser Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9beYvGhW67A

This is the first trailer for Ball on a Stick

I plan to make more, including a gameplay trailer in the next few weeks

The past week has been dedicated to testing whenever I could get people who were willing to test. Overall, there have been very few bugs which is rather exciting. Of course, given how simple the game is in general, this should be expected. It follows that classic Nintendo hardware philosophy, it has few complicated parts, making it very inheriently robust.

At this point, we are just testing on a broad range of hardware to figure out what devices and versions of Android work the best, so far it has worked on all but one device.

In the meantime, we have been fixing the bugs we've found through testing, and we also implemented some new things, including some new balancing for gameplay to make stick control feel slightly more comfortable, as well as making the game save the player's choices in the options, as well as their best times, so now each time the player turns on the game, it loads their records so they can pick up right where they left off.

I'm feeling good about the pace of development right now. I'll continue to update as development continues.

Ball on a Stick: The Rundown

Last week I covered where I was on my game for the visually impaired, but this week for me has been all about another game, one of the most ridiculous games I've ever made. Ball on a Stick.

Ball on a Stick is a mobile game I'm working on with my friend Danielle Sweet for Android. She does the art, I do the design, we share the code duty. Our goal was to make the simplest game we possibly could, while still making it fun, and making it look pretty.

And thusly, the game is incredibly simple. You have a ball and a stick. The ball is balacing on top of the stick. You can control the subtle tilt of the stick by tilting your device left and right. Doing so gently will allow you to keep the ball on top of the stick. The goal of the game is to keep the ball off the ground for as long as possible.

We've been in something of a crunch over the last week, making huge breakthroughs on key systems and late tonight, we officially made our first alpha testing build. Over the coming weeks, we will be testing the game with our friends and family to see how people react to the game and see what sorts of tweaks need to be made to it.

While the game is being tested, our goal is to now work on starting to add more of the "fancy" elements to the game. Currently, we have the core functionality at what we consider stable, all of the basic functions work as they should. Now with this second phase of design, we want to start getting fancy and really start showing off a little what we can really do.

The game at it's core is a game of concentration. So to add a challenge to the game, we want to add some "random events" to the game, to spice things up, and try to shake the player up when they least expect it. To truely master this game, a player will need to have rock solid concentration and patience.

What kind of distractions can the player expect? All of them. Don't expect any spoilers here.

Our goal is to release Ball on a Stick early this summer, keep an eye out for updates about the project here.

Visually Impaired Game [Currently Untitled]: The Rundown

This will be the first post on my new site since transitioning from my old Wordpress to this new Squarespace site. So I thought I'd do a rundown of my current projects to give some more perspective on their design, as well as give updates on these projects and their current progress.

I'm going to be starting with what is effectively my primary project at the moment, which is a project that currently has no name. My goal with this project is to design a game that can be played by those with visual impairments including and up to full blindness. To hear the story behind the inspiration of this game, head on over to the game's project page, as I'm not going to cover it here again.

What I'm going to discuss here are some of the interesting design challenge that come with this project, because there are a lot of them.

When you think about designing a game, it's very easy to take so many different visual elements of a traditional game for granted, I mean, they are literally called Video Games after all. There is a lot of information in a game that is relayed to the player visually, whether it be visual hints that teach the player how to play the game or something as simple as a HUD on screen that relays practical information like health or inventory or something as such.

And this just deals with stuff on screen, what about physical limitations? When mapping controls, you can't just assign controls to any old button on the keyboard, especially if the player doesn't own a Braile keyboard. So WASD is out, as are any other similar feeling buttons, and the mouse becomes all but useless for the most part as well.

So needless to say, you can't design this kind of game the same way you would a game for sighted people. A lot of the tropes that designers fall back on today are immediately thrown out the window, because beyond the considerations mentioned previously, it's possible that you could have someone playing your game who has never even played a game before because they've been blind their whole lives.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of these types of things, and it has really tested my instincts as a designer, causing me to reimagine a lot of the different kinds of feedback you can give a player to help them understand your world.

It has also given me a new appreciation for sound design in a game, something I definitely feel is something that is possibly overlooked by some game designers as a very useful tool.

It has also really helped me improve my skills in programming. When I graduated college, I'd say while my programming skills were passible, I really lacked any confidence. I still talk to the programmers who helped me with The Rat Boy a lot and to this day, I'll still bring my code to Laurence, who was the lead programmer on that project, for advice. (I'm sure a lot of people ask him for programming advice though, he is a beast at programming) 

But ever since embarking on this project, my programming skills have really become signficantly more advanced, since this project has really caused me to have to use some really advanced techniques to make it do what I think it needs to do. Among other things, I;ve learned how to procedurally generate levels using a spreadsheet (with help from Laurence of course). Because of this, in a great twist of irony, I can't see the levels that I'm designing when I'm designing them.

As it stands now, the project is nearing the end of pre production and getting ready for full production. I've been trying to get all of the sounds I need to make all of the core materials in the game make the sounds they are supposed to make when the player interacts with them. The challenge here is the Pennsylvania winter, which doesn't end until about a week before summer starts these days. As I write this, it is April 9th, and there is snow on the ground outside. The inclimate cold and wind make it difficult to get outside and record the sounds I still need.

Once the summer starts though, I'll be able to get out and record everything I need to bring this world to life.

My goal for the design of this project, is instead of having one long game with a big, drawn out narrative as is often seen in big 3D games these days, is instead breaking the game down into short scenarios for the player to play, making it easier on the player, and comparmentalizing the gameplay in a way that the player gets to experience the core gameplay as simply as possible, without distractions.

As of now, most of the core code is where I'd like it to be. It's just a matter of waiting for the weather to break before I can really get to recording, then designing.

I'll continue to post updates on this project here as I make progress

Brilliant Games: Crash 2 and Naughty Dog Games In General

So I just got done replaying though Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back for the first time since I was a kid and originally played it on an actual PS1. I bought a digital copy for a friend of mine so he could see what old school Crash was like. He of course knows Naughty Dog for their more contemporary games such as Uncharted and The Last of Us. I on the other hand have been playing Naughty Dog games since Crash Bandicoot 1. I might have started playing games when I was 4 with a Sega Genesis and an NES, but once Playstation came along, I was (and still am) a Playstation guy.

What I was interested in seeing, in addition to just revisiting one of my favorite games from the past, was how the game holds up all these years later. And I can say with certainty that that game definitely holds up.

When I was buying the game, I had trouble deciding between Crash 2 and Crash 3, because both are just such incredible games, and each had it’s strengths and weaknesses, but there was something about Crash 2’s aesthetic and atmosphere that made me decide to go with Crash 2. Particularly the early levels like the surfboard and sewer format levels just had such a cool feel to me.  Between the music and the colors and just the flow of the gameplay, I just really enjoyed the feel of Crash 2.

And thats something that really stood out to me during this playthrough. I was probably in elementary school last time I played Crash Bandicoot, so I really didn’t have any of the knowledge about game design then that I have now. As I went back through the game, all of these elements that appeal to me as a game designer really stood out, and I even began to notice things that hadn’t changed much even in today’s Naughty Dog games. Chief among them being their killer pacing.

A common thread between all of Naughty Dog’s games is a sense of rhythm and pacing. The game play flows with a sort of rhythm and timing. Nothing changes too abruptly, but nothing gets the chance to become boring. Any good game has this quality, but Naughty Dog in my opinion have mastered this trait in their games. You are never doing a certain type of gameplay for too long, things are always changing. And yet, theres never a feeling of any segment feeling too short, but they still always leave you wanting more.

In essence, they are masters at mixing things up at regular intervals,  and with perfect timing. Whether it be something as subtle as changing the direction you are moving relative to the camera, or a totally different style of gameplay altogether, things are always staying fresh. And it’s all done in a rhythm that just flows perfectly.

And they use these tricks in clever ways that also help keep things running smoothly from a technical perspective. I suspect that the reason the path weaves so often in Crash (besides the fact that it looks great) is because they are hiding the fact that parts of the level are popping in just out of view so that the game runs at a consistent frame rate while still looking really good. They are still doing something akin to this trick to this day.

In The Last of Us, you may notice that other than the loading screen when you initially start the game, there are no loading screens. You may also notice that from time to time, a character will close a door, or you will drop down into an area you can’t climb back out of, or something along those lines. I suspect that this is being done to cover the fact that the game is doing what is called additive scene loading. This is a process where a game loads a new scene into memory while the current one is still loaded.  It effectively blends two scenes together without the player being able to notice. But with the way the game is paced, it doesn’t even really register with the player, because they are too immersed in the story and gameplay to even really give it a thought.

Another thing I noticed about Crash is that even gameplay wise it held up. Even though I was able to beat this game when I was about 9 years old or so, it was still challenging to me 17 years later. This is truly a testament to the quality of the design of this game. It means the design was good enough that a child could learn the game and master it, and yet still be challenged by it as an adult. Granted, I 100% beat the game in about 9 days as compared to a few weeks when I was a kid, but part of this is due to the fact that I remembered a few of the old tricks and secrets from my first playthrough. But the fact that I was able to pick up the game like muscle memory all these years later is just a statement about how much I loved this game as a kid, and the quality of the game itself.

This is in part due to the fact that this game is so amazing at teaching it’s player how to play it with subtlety. They always introduce new mechanics and challenges to the player in a way that allows them to experiment with it safely, like the boost pads and electric fences in the chase format levels, or when a new enemy would come along, it would usually be near a checkpoint, and they would be alone, so you could experiment safely with the strategy for engaging it, then the game would throw you right into gameplay that required you to deal with this new element. I like to think about it like a spelling bee. They say the word, then use it in a sentence before asking you to spell it.

It gives you time to gradually adjust to this style of gameplay, so the player never feel too overwhelmed by a challenge. And due to the quick turn around when losing a life (ie no long splash screens, restarting the level or anything excessive like that), trial and error isn’t long and painful. The game even has mechanics in place to help players that are struggling, such as giving the player extra hit points after a certain amount of tries, or spawning more frequent checkpoints throughout the level to help the player progress without holding their hand.

Combine that with the fact that the game’s challenges never feel cheap, and always feel fair, and this keeps the game playable to someone of any age. You never feel like the game is cheating, and at the same time you don’t feel like you are cheating when the game gives you a hand. Everything just feels fair.

On the other hand with The Last of Us, while the game does get a little hand hold-ie from time to time with it’s tutorials in the beginning, the same pattern of teaching can be seen through the layout of some of the challenges. While they aren’t obviously laid out as separate “levels” the same way as they are in Crash, each challenge you face is separate and discreet from the previous and the next. So you’ll never really have to bust out your gun and start shooting while you are handing a puzzle like one of the swimming challenges to get Ellie somewhere. Each challenge is separated from the next into a nice, evenly paced flow, just like Crash.

The fact that the principals that made their old games great are still being carried on in their new games is impressive to me. Not many companies can say they have kept such a level of consistency for so many years. I’ve really enjoyed going back and playing this game, and I’m very happy to see that this game still holds up rock solid all these years later. If you ever need an advanced course on the concepts of discreet challenges and pacing, just pick up a Naughty Dog game. When I have the money, I might go pick up Crash 3 as well.

Brilliant Games: A Dark Room

I think free browser games are a bit of an unappreciated art form. Just because they don’t have multi million dollar budgets or state of the art 3D graphics doesn’t mean they can’t be an incredibly engaging gameplay experience. But even I was surprised by this game. It’s just called A Dark Room.

http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

This is a game that cannot be explained with words, and you don’t really get the full experience unless you go into it with a completely open mind and no idea of what it is. So before you read on, click the link and play it all the way through.

…….

……..

…………

………………………..

OK, so if you made it back here, it’s probably MUCH later than when you started, possibly another day. It took me about 10 hours to 100% this game. Pretty long for a browser game, but who really sets the rules for what a browser game can be? It saves its progress in your cookies, so you can come back to it whenever you want if you don’t wanna beat it in one sitting like I did.

What I love most about this game is how it evolves. It teaches you the mechanics gradually, and the gameplay experience is ever-changing. You start with 2 people and 4 pieces of wood, and can end with this massive production infrastructure and a booming village of workers to do your bidding. It brings in more and more things that you wouldn’t think of, and yet would make perfect sense. It gradually takes you from crude, basic cave tools all the way to interstellar technology

I also love how it expresses its narrative. It does so with something I feel has been lost to todays game writers (and writers in most forms of media to be quite honest), and that’s with subtlety. It’s mostly indirect, and requires inference from the player. They provide you with evidence and you as a player need to put the story together yourself, which I feel is one of the more fun ways to tell a story in a game. This is a method that, while not unique to games, seems to work best in games.

It really reminds me of classic text adventure style game design. The mostly black and white simple aesthetic combined with the typefaces it uses reminds me of my old Apple Macintosh I had as a kid. But at the same time, it’s all point and click, using basic buttons to do everything, including it’s really simplistic RPG style battle system which I love. The travel interface has that Oregon Trail-esque quality to it, while still feeling unique in its own way.

What it does well is it uses a few different gameplay paradigms effectively without feeling like a mishmash of genres like so many games feel like today. It feels very thoughtful about its use of different gameplay mechanics and how they complement each other in order to create a meaningful gameplay experience. It doesn’t just throw a bunch of different types of gameplay together just for the sake of throwing them together, or toss a specific type of gameplay into a game because it’s popular (like how everyone and their mother has a crafting mechanic in their games now since Minecraft came out.), it actually builds an experience. You get the feeling that your situation is evolving gradually and naturally rather than feeling like you are getting random challenges thrown at you.

And with no graphics beyond basic ASCII character arrangements, this game was really able to put a picture in my head of a very interesting world. I imagined how all the scenarios looked, what the village looked like, what the world looked like, without needing it to be showed to me.

This is a fascinating challenge to me, because designers can get lazy and rely too much on graphics or dialog to convey everything, and not think of less obvious methods for establishing an atmosphere for their game. Text adventures like this provide an interesting challenge for the designer, because they force you to use more interesting techniques for conveying your story and your world to the player. Namely, they force you to use your game mechanics themselves to expose your story, which is something unique to game design for expressing a story that is not nearly utilized enough.

It is a popular opinion in the game design community that you learn the most about game design from playing crappy games. And while I believe you do learn a lot from what bad games did wrong, I feel it’s also necessary to play great games and learn from what they did right. It’s easy to see what a crappy game did wrong, it sticks out like a sore thumb. To be able to discern the qualities that make a game great is a far more formidable challenge to the untrained eye. This is a skill that must be practiced.

Anyway, I’ve gotten slightly off track. A Dark Room is a great gameplay experience in a place not everyone would expect one. And as a designer, it is an experience one can learn a lot from.

"Loop" and "Chess Clock Jenga": Real Life Game Mods

For me, whenever I see mods for digital games, I usually don't like them for one reason or another(a notable exception being Kerbal Space Program, some of that stuff is legitimately awesome). But most of the time, these mods either don't add anything interesting to the game, it's usually some form of needless complexity that doesn't really improve the experience, or some form of unfair difficulty that just makes the game less good, or they just give the player some advantage they didn't previously have which is just more of a cheat than a mod.

But when I see a mod to a "Real Life" game, something like a board game or table game or something, I seem to love it. For example, this twist on pool called loop (yes, extremely clever)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WHBlPvK3Ek

It uses similar principles to the classic game, but at the same time wildly alters it with one fundamental change, an elliptical table rather than a rectangular one.

Now the game changes completely in this very strange an interesting way. Rather than just thinking simply based on the direction the player is shooting the cue ball influencing it's bounce, they now have to think in terms of that "sweet spot". It takes the core skills of pool and causes the player to build on those skills and adapt to a very interesting environmental change. It really adds this strange level of metagame to this basic formula which I find fascinating. I would love to see this become a real game, because I'd love to try it!

Another real life mod I've seen was based on a real life "patch" as it were to chess. It's called Chess Clock Jenga

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN_F9bNuF0I

Now, the last time I remember playing Jenga vanilla was possibly in 5th grade, and I didn't find it to be my particular cup of tea. This to me looks like a MASSIVE improvement. As was made evident previously, I am not a hardcore MLG Jenga player, but even I can tell that this game would be incredibly prone to a lot of down time. Time spent essentially watching other people play, and without time constraints, depending on the amount of players, and among those players, how many of them are particularly cautious or generally anxious people, one particular player could spend a LONG time not playing the game.

Generally, my rule of thumb for the quality of a turn based game is the more time spent trying to remember who's turn it is, the more boring the game is.

This rework entirely eliminates that problem. Now there is no indefinite thinking, no time to be cautious, and incentive for more strategic play. This change makes it so even if it isn't your turn, you are still thinking, and watching during your opponent's turn, planning your next move so you can execute it when your clock starts. It effectively eliminates waiting from the game, with such a relatively simple change.

Now naturally I wouldn't expect Hasbro to ship every copy of Jenga with a chess clock, as they currently have what must be the greatest ratio of cost to produce to MSRP humanly imaginable for a physical game, since they can get away with selling what is essentially a cardboard box with some completely undecorated pieces of wood that probably cost them peanuts to produce for 10 bucks. So instead, one has to "install" this mod on their own.

What I think makes these mods more interesting than their digital counterparts is that they actually add something interesting to the game. Often, I feel like some digital mods are just feats of programming over feats of game design. It's just someone who doesn't work for a game company who knows how to write a little code just making something to show off their skills. And this draws attention to a bigger point, and that is that digital games are not just computer programs. But that could be a story for another time.

Another factor that I think helps is that I find that a lot of old physical games have certain glaring flaws that make them obviously terrible games (see Monopoly and Mouse Trap), and this is probably because they came before the days of meticulous playtesting that modern games go through before they come to market. Chess took hundreds of years to evolve into what it is today, taking it's roots from many different early prototypes, and adding balancing changes along the way to make the game fair. These mods simply add something that the original designer didn't think of, or in some cases were maybe technologically impossible at the time of the game's creation.

Looking at things like this I think helps me as a designer to think about things I wouldn't otherwise consider. I feel like they are a great excercise in thinking outside the box, and perhaps sometimes thinking inside an eclipse instead.

Why Super Mario 3D World for Wii U is an Objectively Terrible Game

So I just watched some more Super Mario 3D world gameplay, and whenever I see gameplay of that game somewhere, I just get so frustrated, because it is SUCH a poorly designed game. I feel like theres no possible way Shigeru Miyamoto probably even heard about this game coming out, because if he did, he would have had it canceled.

It basically takes the legacy of the legendary Super Mario 64 3D camera that revolutionized camera systems in 3D games, giving the player elegant control over the camera, while also being intuitive and smart on it’s own, and shits all over it.

It makes every mistake that the original cameras accounted for in the original design. It shoehorns a bunch of the mechanics from the 3D Super Mario games into levels that are COMPLETELY thoughtless in relation to those abilities.

The main problem I see people struggle with in playing these games is a problem they solved almost 20 years ago, and whoever designed the new ones didn’t learn from. Depth Perception.

You always see people not being able to grab pickups, or unable to land on enemies heads, or, my favorite, falling off of the front of, and especially the back of the levels, because they didn’t even think to put some form of invisible barrier, something that would be COMPLETELY trivial to do, in place in areas where a normal sane person would think they would put in such a barrier because it’s completely unfair to fall in that sort of way.

They have a lot of sections where the game might as well be 2D, but they still insist on having you be able to move on the Z axis, where it is not only pointless, but most of the time detrimental to the gameplay. Even Sonic Generations accounted for this INCREDIBLY basic problem in it’s 2D sections, and it’s a SONIC game, the king of neglecting basic playability features and shipping before the most basic functions of the game have been tested. (You know I love you Sonic games, but sometimes you just can’t be out by Christmas…)

Another place where they are completely thoughtless in the mechanics of the game in trying to conform to old traditions, is trying to use something similar to the paradigm of Super Mario World/New Super Mario bros where they have the traditional 3 hit system with powerups, with Small, Big, and Powerup states. This would be fine, if it was like the old 2D games where the power ups were actually powerups. But no. A lot of the powerups give you exploration and traversal abilities, and a lot of the gameplay in the levels basically requires you to have these powerups….But if the player gets hit….they lose these powerups…..so what do you do then? Just wait to die because you can’t play the level? Possibly, but then theres also the fact that they throw so many of the required powerup at the player, combined with the fact that if the player already has a powerup, they can stock additional powerups in the style of Super Mario World and deploy them whenever they get hit and lose the powerup.

So this then presents a question. HOW THE HELL IS THAT A POWERUP? It’s not. The player pretty much constantly has the powerup because you basically need it to play the game, and it’s double terrible because that gives you the added terrible bonus of pretty much giving the player infinate health, so enemies are pretty much invalidated. You know, other than their ability to knock you off the level with ease, because of that previously mentioned problem with depth perception and unblocked edges.

But of course, having infinate health doesn’t matter when you run out of time. Yes. In a 3D game where exploration of a large, expansive world is sort of the point…..they put in a timer. But don’t worry, they give you extra time pickups anywhere they want you to explore…….

….So again I ask….WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT!?

And the worst part of all this, is that all of these bad mechanics have a funny way of pointing each other out like sore thumbs, because they all somehow work in tandum to make incredibly frustrating gameplay experiences when they work together. And even worse than that, is that it seems like the designers deliberately exploited these flaws.

None of the gameplay or challenge in this game results from fair challenges. Pretty much the only way you would lose a life in this game would be because of some combination of these terrible mechanics. Whether it be because of the way the powerups work, ESPECIALLY the new Catsuit powerup, which seems to only exist for the sake of existing, in combination with the complete lack of depth perception, or falling off the level while trying to get a pickup thats places awkwardly in one of their “might as well be 2D” sections, or the best of all, when all three conspire against you in the boss fights. There is no real challenge to the boss fights, no challenging pattern recognition, no interesting attack patterns, they are all very bland and played out, and not even well executed most of the time. The only challenge is hitting the enemy, because most of the time the room is a clusterfuck of things happening, and not being able to see where you are, or perceive your depth reletive to your enemy so jumping on their head is almost impossible. Combine that with the fact that they are practically CONSTANTLY throwing powerups at you, because the boss requires you to use a powerup to fight it, and you probably end up dying NOT from some clever attack of the enemy or even falling off the level due to not being able to tell where you are. No. You usually run out of time. Because the boss fights have clocks on them too.

If you look back at the earlier 3D Mario games, you’ll notice that they had already thought of pretty much all of these problems. And dealt with them in intelegent, super elegant ways. And this game just didn’t learn those things.

Early in 3D games, one of the first things to get jettisoned to the game design wayside was gameplay clocks. They made no sense for the type of exploration experiences being designed, not to mention people who were having trouble adjusting to the switch wouldn’t find it fun to have a gameplay clock killing them off while they were still trying to learn the game. Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda only used clocks for very small timed challenges like timed switches, so they could preserve that type of challenge without ruining the entire gameplay experience

You’ll also notice that Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy had powerups. And they were even required for solving particular gameplay challenges. But you never lost them because you got hit. They all ran on timers as well, and instead of taking powers away from you for getting hit, they just gave you a health bar. It gave you the ability to use Powerups in the game, keep them as actual powerups, and still have enemies and health be relevant factors in gameplay. Easy solution.

One of the things that made Super Mario 64’s platforming gameplay revolutionary for it’s time in addition to it’s camera, was something very subtle. A shadow. Between the close up, dynamic camera, and the shadow, the player could always gauge about where they were in 3D space, especially during a jump, there was never any losing visual contact with Mario or his shadow, you always knew where he was. In Super Mario 3D world, they have an incredibly static, practically dead camera that is always SUPER panned out to as wide of a shot as possible, making the characters amazingly small on screen. Now of course, this is so the game can be co-op, and that gameplay experience is a whole different can of game development worms. One that could be a post of it’s own. But suffice it to say, it’s basically just a worse version of the LittleBig Planet camera (Again, LittleBig Planet, you know how I feel about you, but you must even know your camera isn’t the best…)

It’s just disgraceful. It really frustrates me to see a company who basically MASTERED the platformer, botch a platformer so horrendously. ESPECIALLY considering all these problems were already solved long ago. The people who designed this games obviously must have played one of the 3D Super Mario games to know how to do most of the basic movement actions that the previous games had. They just clearly don’t understand the game design behind it, which just burns me up.

They slapped together a couple of game mechanics from a couple of Mario games and expected to get a Mario game, without understanding the underlying dynamics that made all of that work in their respective games. The new class of game designers at Nintendo clearly didn’t listen to Shigeru Miyamoto enough. Don’t blame Mobile games for your fianancial woes, perhaps you should look at the products you are shipping first.  Because it is just plain arrogence to blame players for not playing your games if they are terrible.