SOSreload

Name Change

2011-01-27T01:25:00.003-05:00

After getting properly scared of trademark law, I was finally convinced that Aurora is a poor choice of name for my game. Today, I changed it to Auralux, and edited everything I could to reflect the switch.

Auralux makes some sense as a combination of Aura + Aural + Lux (light), but it doesn't sound right to my ears yet. Aurora had been the name of the project from the very very beginning, when all I had in mind was a vision of stars colliding in space. I'm loathe to give it up.

But alas, business sense must intervene now that I'm trying to actually sell a commercial game. And besides, purely as a matter of courtesy, it isn't good to be stepping on the toes of Aurora the awesome Unity game, or Aurora the 4X game, or any of the various Aurora flash games.

Press

2011-01-20T10:50:00.004-05:00

Aurora has been getting coverage from all over, including on:
IndieGames.com blog
Destructoid
HubPages
Some Brazilian Site
Lunarsoft

Few of them are true reviews, instead focusing on the free promotion, but it's a start!

LAUNCH!

2011-01-18T00:30:00.002-05:00

Aurora has been successfully launched.

I'm 12 hours into my "first day free" promotional thingie, and so far 64 crazy people have paid me for a free game, which means I've already broken even on my minimal development costs! Tomorrow at noon the game starts costing $5 for everyone.

The reddit thread was helpful in finding bugs, too. The most common one was a crash when the player didn't have Windows Media Player installed. It seems that XNA uses wmplayer.exe to play its music, which I can't package with the game easily. Luckily, installing WMP seems to solve the problem. The second most common bug is still out there, stalking my potential customers, unfortunately. A lot of people are having late-game performance problems, too.

I implemented some of the ideas in the comments, such as a keyboard zoom function and a colorblind mode. People keep suggesting things I want to try, but I know that if I start to work on them, the game will never truly be "done". One idea that's been bouncing around in my head is to just leave Aurora in its current state and start work on a cross-compatible, higher-performance sequel. A bunch of people have already offered their help for such an endeavour.

For the next couple days, though, I'm just going to focus on riding the momentum and making this a successful launch. Even if everything tanked from this point forward, though, I think I'd be satisfied. I didn't dare to hope it would get so much attention on reddit, or that it would make it to so many sites on the first day. I've got to be happy with that, and I am.

One Week

2011-01-10T02:38:00.003-05:00

Since Aurora has been "done", I've been continually finding things to change about it. A new endgame score display, new desktop icon, minor changes to the levels, and tweaks for display and sound. It keeps getting better, bit by bit. I recently sent the beta build to a bunch of my geeky high school friends, and soon I had a pile of really good suggestions. I can't act on all of them, though. I've started fantasizing about a sequel to keep myself content. It even has a name: Borealis.

But, as I often repeat, "works of art are never finished, only abandoned", and I fear that Aurora's time is drawing near. I've set a date: Monday, January 17th. If I miss it, I had better have a good reason. Otherwise, that is when I will release the game for real.

The flow of good suggestions from friends and beta testers has also come with a lot of good feedback. So far everyone has spoken positively of it. I'm not getting the pitying tone of voice that I usually get with an amateur game. It's immensely heartening.

"Done"

2011-01-01T23:37:00.002-05:00

Aurora is "done". All intended features and all 15 levels have been implemented. The word gets scare quotes, however, because I keep playing and finding little things to tweak. The highlights around the suns have gotten reworked. The mouse wheel zooming has been made smoother. The behavior of the stars on the menu has been tweaked (and tweaked, and tweaked).

Every time I play I find something new that I want to change, but I don't think that's a negative. I really enjoy what I've created, and I'm satisfied more and more with every change. I don't think everyone will like what I've made, but I'm pretty confident for the first time that my game is objectively good, if such a thing exists.

One out-of-the-ordinary major feature I added is a "speed mode", in which the suns create units four times faster and the units themselves move over ten times faster. The slow pace of Aurora was a core part of the original artistic intent, but once the fundamentals of the game have been mastered at a slow pace, that slowness turns into sluggishness and only serves as a barrier to gameplay. The speed mode gets unlocked after the player wins 10 levels, so the slow part is unavoidable. Also, the game records and reports the record victory times when speed mode is activated. It ends up adding a lot of longer-term value to the game, I think.

I've already drafted a website for Aurora, though it undoubtedly needs work. The next step is to craft a good installer for the game (no trivial task). Then, I need to make a kickass (or, at least, not-embarrassing) trailer video to advertise the game. Then, I plan to enlist a bunch of help for beta testing. If it's installing and running well on the vast majority of systems, I launch. The current release plan is to give away the game and hope to make money later. Call it the dot-com approach.

Aurora Levels

2010-12-26T22:08:00.004-05:00

The end of development is in sight for Aurora. I'm slowly circling around it, getting closer ever so slowly, but the game is definitely getting better and better. The last big thing to do is add new levels into the game, which I'm midway through right now. The new levels are a ton of fun to balance and play. A screenshot of one of them:

I made a pile of sketches when brainstorming the new levels. I figured I'd share what the game looks like when it's rendered entirely in awful handwriting. (The level above was the "3 rings" level in the sketch below.)

Et Tu, Minecraft?

2010-12-07T23:24:00.002-05:00

My second article for indiePub. It got a lot of attention on reddit and led to some discussion on the TIGSource forums.
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If there’s two game design tactics that indies hate, they’re grinding and slot machine mechanics.

Grinding refers to performing some time-consuming task over and over again, usually with some sort of exponentially growing reward. It takes lots of time and no skill. This is one of the things that get people so riled up about Farmville and its compatriots. Professor Ian Bogost wrote, “The ire [toward social games] isn't without rationale: these challenge-free games demand little more than clicking on farms and restaurants and cities and things at regular intervals.” He mentions this by way of announcing his own game, Cow Clicker, which neatly skewers Farmville by condensing it to a single task: clicking a cow, over and over.

The other reviled design element, the slot machine mechanic, is a blanket term for any sort of variable ratio (VR) reinforcement schedule. That’s a fancy psychological term, courtesy of the great B.F. Skinner, who famously demonstrated just how addictive gambling could be through his experiments with rats in boxes. As we slowly realize that humans, too, can be made to press a lever over and over again, Professor Skinner is getting invoked increasingly often. See references to “Skinnerian time- and money-sinks” and “an industry that so blatantly manipulates people like rats in a Skinner box”. Essentially, we’re rediscovering the power of these psychological techniques. We’re learning that we can, in fact, control minds, and it’s actually kinda scary.

But enough about all that stuff. You know what we love? Minecraft! Yes, Minecraft, the indie darling of the year. The game comes with my hearty recommendation, by the way. In Minecraft, you dig deep underground, mining for stone and precious metals, and then you use these materials to build whatever your heart desires. Some people build ships, some people build working CPUs. My friends and I dedicated our efforts towards a simple yet gigantic castle. The outer wall alone contains about twenty-four thousand blocks of stone, each harvested one by one.

Minecraft is the quintessential indie success story. It was built by one person, Markus Persson (AKA Notch), who became a multimillionaire just because gamers loved what he made. Minecraft opens up a world of exploration, adventure, and creativity. It’s no wonder that the game is so celebrated.

Until, that is, you consider some of Minecraft’s core mechanics.

The most basic verb in the game, unsurprisingly, is mining. This involves mousing over a block and holding down the button for a second or so. In return for your effort, you get a bit of some material and a nice little sound effect. Then, repeat a thousand times. It’s not a skill challenge; I could collect any number of almost any block if I just put in a little bit of effort and a huge chunk of time. Could this be... grinding? I thought we were beyond such nonsense!

Then, consider a common experience in the game: you’re deep underground, digging a tunnel, hoping to find something valuable. And for every block you hack away, you have some small, pre-randomized chance of uncovering something valuable. Re-read that, and let the horror dawn on you: even in Minecraft, the messiah of indie games, there’s a slot machine hidden in the core mechanics!

I’ve felt its hypnotizing allure firsthand. I spend hours chipping away with a pickaxe, happy to find resources that I’ll never use and thrilled to discover ore that’s both extremely rare and *explicitly useless*. The best find is diamond, which will let me play the slot machine even faster. Awesome! And if I grind for long enough, I get to customize the game world. Sounds almost like Farmville!

I’m being a little unfair here, of course. The materials in Minecraft are mostly a means to the end of building stuff, which takes strategy and creativity. And mining isn’t always just a time sink. There’s danger too, since you’re about as likely to unleash a horde of zombies or a gout of lava as you are to strike it rich. If we say that Minecraft’s fun comes from mining, building, exploring, and fighting, three out of four parts are immune to my critique. But there's undeniably some aspects of grinding and gambling, and I find it fascinating that a game that I so love can contain design techniques that I so loathe. I’m left wondering: what would happen if we removed the time sinks and the slot machines? Could Minecraft be made pure?

We can already get a taste of that with the game’s Creative mode, in which the player gets an infinite pile of every resource and is set loose to build whatever he or she wants. There’s no need to spend time digging, so you escape the need to gamble for the good stuff. And people have fun with Creative mode! But not as much fun, usually. I played primarily in the default mode. My castle is a pretty significant piece of work (or at least a ridiculous time investment), built from tens of thousands of blocks lovingly collected one by one. Any idiot could build that castle on Creative mode, I snort derisively, but it takes an especially *dedicated* idiot to build it under default settings. And for some reason, the fact that I spent (read: wasted) so much time on that castle makes it more special to me.

And realizing that makes me scream. Why??? Why is it that I get more satisfaction out of knowing that I needlessly spent more time on my buildings? If it’s all just grinding, why does anyone feel good about their giant castle or their extravagant farm or their level 80 character?

I see two possible answers, and they both scare me to death.

First, we could say that the satisfaction I get from having spent more time on my castle is perfectly justified. Not every task in life is fulfilling, and there’s virtue in hard work, even when it tends toward drudgery. By grinding, I'm proving my ability to commit to a goal. In this case, someone who wants the biggest farm in Farmville ought to take real pride in their dedication, even if it meant spending huge amounts of time and money to reach a wholly virtual objective.

Second, we could say that I’m being tricked by a brain hack, and I’m ultimately the prey of some sinister Skinnerian psychology. In this case, if I ever take pride in a game, it shouldn't be for the time I put into it, since that didn't prove anything real. The only true rewards are those that correlate to skill or strategy, i.e. those that act as some actual indicator of creativity or mental acumen. The reward should be intrinsic to the gameplay. I should be proud of what I did, and not just of how long I took to do it.

Now we've dug deep enough to reach the really valuable questions. Can there be true meaning in gaming, or is it “just for fun”? Where does the meaning come from? What do hardcore gamers get out of their hobby that slots players don't? Does Farmville require “dedication”? Is this dedication something we should value?

Depending on the answers, we'll end up in one of two places. In one case, accomplishments in Farmville are legitimately worthy of pride, and we indies need to shut the hell up. In the other case, Minecraft is flawed, and we indies need to recognize and criticize the faults in the game we love. Heads they win, tails we lose.

What do you choose?

What Is Indie?

2010-11-23T13:19:00.002-05:00

This was my first article for indiePub games, a new indie-focused site from Zoo Entertainment, a publisher. It was posted there about a month ago, but since my agreement with them allows me to post it on my blog, I figure it's probably best to put it here too.
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So… This might not be the best place to admit it, but I’m not really sure what “indie” games are. I’ve done quite a bit of “student” game development. I’ve been making games as a “hobbyist” for a while. I’ve seen a lot of self-published games, too, mostly in the casual space. But I don’t really know how to define the “indie” scene. I’m not sure I’m even allowed to call it a “scene”. Maybe that’s too hipsteresque or something. I wouldn’t know.

At first I thought that “indie” just meant that the game was developed independent of a publisher. It wasn’t long ago that any mention of the dreaded publishers elicited snarls and gnashing of teeth. My opinion on the matter was pretty much entirely shaped by an excellent 2005 article by Greg Costikyan (founder of the commendable but ill-fated Manifesto Games) that revealed the evils of publishers and retailers for all to see. They’ll never fund you unless you’re making derivative schlock! Then, if they do fund you, they’ll take your IP! And then they’ll force you to alter your game until you don’t even recognize it anymore! Suffer not a publisher to live.

But then I kept having these weird encounters where I would find World of Goo on a retail shelf, Braid on XBLA, or Everyday Shooter on Steam. Aren’t these guys now, ah… dependent on Nintendo, Microsoft, and Valve? Sure, it was just distribution, but there were also privately-owned AAA development studios that only used publishers for distribution and marketing, and nobody called them “indie” as far as I could tell. Branden Sheffield already made this point more articulately than I: “Indeed, where is the line drawn? When you're partnering with Microsoft for the release of your game, how independent are you? More or less independent than the guys who just put out games free and don't worry about commercial success? Does it matter?”

So if indie doesn’t mean independent, what does it mean? My other sources, aside from the word itself, are the presentations, forum posts, and blogs of the indie developers themselves. Defining the term turns out to be a lot easier if you just jettison the etymology and start listing the traits of the prototypical indie developer. Indies are small and agile, unlike AAA studios. They’re informal, unlike our corporate nemeses. They help each other out with feedback and encouragement. Indies are creative, have vision, and don’t let outside forces spoil their art.

There’s a spirit of community and artistic integrity that quickly starts coming through. It wasn’t immediately apparent when I was trying to understand “indie” as a business strategy, but it becomes clearer and clearer as I listen to indie devs talk to each other and talk to their fans as they craft their next masterpiece. There’s something deeply inspiring about this nascent indie spirit. David Sirlin wrote about entering the indie game summit at GDC: “As soon as I walked in, everything changed. Everything was different here, the vibe, the people, the energy. This is the kind of thing I can't communicate to you [in] words… People help each other, they collaborate, they are rooting for each other to succeed. I really have to tell you, this is not made-up hippie bullshit.”

And I also keep picking up this vibe that indie games are finally coming into their own. Five years ago, Costikyan claimed that “in gaming, we have no indie aesthetic, no group of people (of any size at least) who prize independent vision and creativity over production values,” and that “astonishing, first-rate, unconventional titles like Darwinia or Rag Doll Kung Fu exist - but not enough of them.” Five years ago, the availability of indie games and the audience for indie games were disheartening and small. Now, indie games command attention. People are excited about them. I can’t go about my daily internet life without stumbling across someone frothing at the mouth with praise for Spelunky or Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress. Fun, focused games like Gratuitous Space Battles or AaAaAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity keep showing up and intriguing the hell out of me. I enjoy a blockbuster as much as anybody, but there’s an energy associated with the indie games scene, and I can’t get enough.

So now I find myself ready to dive in headfirst, and I feel like there’s a whole community of like-minded developers implicitly cheering me on, just as I cheer them. “These guys,” wrote Sirlin. “These crazy, passionate guys. It's like they all have the same kind of blood flowing through them, and I have it too.” I like these crazy guys. I think they’ve got the right idea. And if that makes me crazy too, well… I think that’s worth it. These crazy guys seem to be having the most fun.

Imagine Cup 2011

2010-11-23T13:11:00.003-05:00

This was a bad term to enter the Imagine Cup, considering the schedules of the team members. Just getting the game up and running required an exhausting sprint, but I'm happy to say that a demo of the game was, in the end, produced. Ladies and gentlement, may I present Plasmodium:

As you can see, it's in a pretty basic state, though. The UI theme is simplistic and in some ways just shoddy. A new player doesn't get enough feedback to understand the game, and our most complicated graphics are pieces of public-domain clip art.

Still, the game is starting to play pretty well. That was the goal of prototyping, and that's the most important part of the game, after all. Right now it looks likely that the team will start up work again next term, when we all should have a little bit more availability. We'll try to do a lot of iteration, include some more (and smarter) educational aspects, and end up with a much more fun and much prettier game for our spring submission.

It Works!

2010-10-21T23:05:00.003-04:00

Near the end of my last post I speculated about some changes that might bring performance in Aurora to where it ought to be. Well, I made the changes, and they worked. Performance is as zippy as ever, and I'm happy with where it is.

I also got some custom sounds that I contracted out. It was my first time paying for an asset, so I was a little apprehensive, but it worked out nicely. I made some modifications to the sounds on my own, and not all of them fit quite as well as I'd like, but I'm satisfied. I started experimenting with dynamic pitch adjustments (which XNA helpfully provides), and the results have been quite good so far.

On a more unfortunate note, I have to delay my schedule for Aurora. I signed up to compete in the US-specific Imagine Cup competition in the Fall term. It's going to consume my next month entirely, and I have a team this time around (hooray!), so I have serious obligations to fulfill. I'll put together yet another beta version of Aurora in it current state to submit to the IGF Student Showcase and save the full release for later.

Upgrading (?)

2010-10-10T17:25:00.005-04:00

I've made three questionable upgrades to Aurora since my last blog post.

The first upgrade was to move the entire project to XNA 4.0 and .NET 4.0. I just bought and installed a new desktop computer running Windows 7. Naturally, I installed the latest Visual Studio (2010). Naturally, it only integrates with the latest version of XNA. Naturally, the latest version of XNA breaks a bunch of old code. It's all for the best, I'm sure, but I spent the first few hours of development on my new machine just trying to get the game running and get the newly premultiplied alpha values to work like the old system did.

The second upgrade was to start using LinkedLists instead of regular array-based Lists. There was absolutely no reason that two different cheap operations (adding an element to a List and making a new empty List) would ever consume 40% of my CPU time when equally frequent, more intensive calculations (like distances) took 2%. But one of my roommates suggested that maybe the allocation of new Lists and resizing of Lists during the Add functions could be triggering the automated garbage collection. And since I was constantly allocating and deleting small bits of data, that could add a ton of overhead. Using LinkedLists and just moving nodes around should be much cheaper.

The problem came when I implemented this in such a way that my units were no longer aggressively culling their list of enemies that they were "locked on" to. (Units lock on at 100 pixels and then speed towards their targets until a real collision occurs at 10.) So on every frame they would lock on to the same enemies over and over, speeding towards them at an accelerating rate, totally ruining the smooth, flowing feel I liked so much. The best solution to this will probably involve making a Dictionary of locked-on-units with keys based on some unique ID for each unit in the game.

The third upgrade was to move to a grid system of collision detection, as was suggested by my girlfriend Stephanie after my last blog post. I had considered this system before, but threw the idea away due to imagined complications. Since then, Stephanie and my roommates (better programmers than me) have convinced me that the grid system is superior. My collision detection problem is always going to be fundamentally an O(n^2) problem at close distances, but my solution was ultimately O(n^2) at all distances (albeit with some aggressive optimizations). The grid system is O(1) at great distances.

Naturally, the first implementation of this destroyed the game's performance. Naturally, that was caused by my mistakes in the implementation.

My best guess right now is that the problem lies in the way the grid stores units. It currently keeps one LinkedList for all units in each square. When a square has 4000 units of the same team all together (as the stress test starts), each unit checks each other unit to see if it friendly, then does nothing. Doing nothing is cheap, but just checking 4000^2 times every frame might be enough to bring the game to a crawl. It looks like I'll have to set up an array of LinkedLists (ugh) so that each faction can weed out friendly units in one step.

I'm really hoping that these changes will boost performance to its practical best, so that at the very least I shift the bottleneck to the graphics card on most systems. I'm working with a new profiler and an improved system, so it's hard to compare these results to what I had before, but I'm a little worried about the profiling tests I've done already. Running the game at 1fps on a stress test, the profiler reported only a little over half of the time being spent directly in my collision detection sections. Even if that were reduced to zero, wouldn't that only double the current performance? Will that be enough?

In any case, I'll keep working on it, and hopefully I'll be able to add the new levels in time for an early November release. I've got plenty of possible resources and plenty of intelligent people to lean on, so I've got no excuses for failure.

Profiling Away

2010-10-03T00:45:00.011-04:00

I'm continuing to make good progress, although I took a break from my TODO list to pull out NProf again and do some performance work. Performance has improved ten times over since the first version of Aurora, but it still chugs a bit when there are a lot of units on the screen. I like having a lot of units on the screen, so I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to fix this.

I changed some initialization settings in the code so that there would be over 3000 units for each player on screen. I thought before that performance was being limited by the sprite drawing, which can't really be helped at this point. To my surprise, though, the stress test showed 80% of computation time being spent outside the Draw function, and over 65% being spend doing proximity detection for the game's units.

Now, I knew when starting this project that my proximity detection would be the most difficult part to program efficiently. I've got three factions, each with thousands of units, with each unit floating freely on a plane, and each of which needs to know when it is within a short radius of any other. That's n^2 right off the bat, and that's bad.

My algorithm so far has been for each unit to keep a list of all other units along with the next possible frame that that enemy unit might collide with it. When that frame comes, the unit calculates the distance, checks for a collision, and recalculates the next possible frame of collision. That way, units that are far away are checking for collision with each other only every thousand frames or so, while units nearby are checking every frame.

That worked pretty well, but it's still stressing the game at high unit counts, and all the work with dictionaries and lists is holding back performance. The specific problem is that
For every unit:
For every enemy unit:
I have to check for collision and if there is none,
I find the next frame to check and look up to see if that frame is already accounted for, and
Either make a brand new list of enemy units for that upcoming frame, or else
Retrieve the existing list and add this enemy unit

Profiling reveals that during the stress test the game spent over 25% of its time on the one line of code that corresponds to the last line above. A further 15% was spent on the second-to-last line above. A further 10% on the third-to-last line above. I'm spending a half of my stress test CPU time on an if-else statement that shows up as four lines of code in my game. If I can streamline that process, I might be able to knock out yet another bottleneck. And I think I can do just that.

I think part of the problem right now is that A) there are so many possible upcoming frames to check for (when we decide whether to make a new list of enemies to check or to add to it), and B) when a group of, say, 100 enemy stars clump together on a single frame-to-be-checked, the game retrieves that frame's list, adds a single star, and puts it back 100 times rather than collecting them all first.

One way that has occurred to me to get around this is to use the current algorithm for all units within, say, 100 frames, but beyond that to check enemy units only on 100-frame increments, up to a certain known limit. That way I can create a few relevant lists and add them to the dictionary all at once, and the places where I can add them are already known. It would require more actual distance checks, but it would allow much easier look-up and it would make recording the checks much easier.

New Upgrade System

2010-09-24T23:55:00.002-04:00

One of the most important and most common suggestions that came out of the TIGSource Aurora feedback thread was that I make some suns more valuable than others. Some suggested defensive bonuses or special terrain for this purpose, but I decided to go with the most direct route I could.

So there's now a new system for upgrading suns. Each sun/seed has a maximum power, and players can upgrade up to that level. So some suns are level one and are limited to that. Others can go up to level three, making them high-cost and high-value bases. Also, the double-power stars have been removed. I think they ultimately confused things, and their original purpose (performance boosting) isn't so critical anymore. So now double-power suns just produce two stars at a time.

The new upgrade system called for a new way of displaying the different potential levels. I scaled up the suns when they got upgraded, and I put faded rings around suns to indicate when they could be upgraded further. I'm not entirely satisfied with that interface yet, but here's a screenshot of some new upgraded suns:

Development Resumed

2010-09-23T20:39:00.002-04:00

Having finished my term of employment at Bethesda, gone back to school, and regained access to my desktop computer, I've started working on Aurora once again. The only hitch is that I'm set up for a terribly difficult term, and the list of things to do in Aurora has grown steadily over the summer. Lots of new suggestions and feedback needs to be taken into account.

The goal now is to have it done by the end of October so that I can submit it in the IGF Student Showcase. It's my last chance!

Getting Ready

2010-07-24T22:26:00.002-04:00

Now that I've got a real job that both takes up most of my time and legally forbids me from working on a side-project-for-profit, things are pretty slow at home. But! One thing I can do to get ready for eventually publishing my game is getting my personal website up to speed.

emcneill.com is a small, simple thing, but it serves me well and I love it all the more for its simplicity. After reading Wolfire Games's recommendation of Google App Engine, I decided to take a peek. Since my site is all static content, it's incredibly easy to get it running on the vastly overpowered GAE.

There was one problem: GAE has a hard limit of 10MB for any file it serves, so I couldn't host Aurora or Alternex or Meridian on there. So, I turned elsewhere in the cloud and found Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service), which is made for precisely such things. So now I'm paying cents per gigabyte for reliable, scalable, no-hassle hosting!

The Wild World of Publishing

2010-05-30T01:53:00.002-04:00

When I submitted Aurora to reddit, I got several responses suggesting that I publish the game on Steam. Then I got some good feedback from my friends when they were beta testing the game. Yesterday was the seasonal open house for Tiltfactor (where I'm now a Fellow, by the way) and I put Aurora on one of the computers; people were playing it for the entire two hours, getting sucked in the whole while. One of my old professors played for an hour straight.

The upshot of all this is that I'm feeling pretty positive about the prospect of actually trying to sell Aurora. Like, for money. That would be a big first for me. And though I don't stand to make a ton of money, if I found any success at all it would force me to start thinking of myself as a professional game designer rather than just another wannabe.

I've started to lurk in the Indiegamer Developer forums, learning about what it takes to host a decent site, get the word out, set up payment processing, and all the other trivia one must know in order to actually self-publish a game. I can't work on it or sell it while I'm at Bethesda, but before I start work there, I want to set myself up to get started as quickly as possible. I'd love to see someone review the game, and getting it on Steam (maybe, eventually) would be absolutely awesome.

Literati: An ARG

2010-05-19T20:45:00.004-04:00

Another product of my Values at Play game design class. The assignment was "an ARG for literacy". This is the game brief I turned in:

Literati

Introduction

Literati is an ARG designed to help foster interest in high-level literature in high school students.

The game engages its players through a series of mysterious clues, with answers found in works of literature. By asking players to search for deeper meaning in these works, Literati serves to boost a student's nascent interest in literary analysis.

The Game

Literati begins with an anonymous email to the targeted students that introduces the in-character game masters, who imply that the game is a test of skill for inclusion into a secret and powerful association called the Literati, and includes the starting clue for the players. Players that respond correctly will be directed to a web forum at which they can collaborate on future clues, which are delivered upon satisfactory answering of previous clues.

Early clues are designed to be approachable from multiple angles due to their vagueness. An example starting clue might be:

Sounds. Economy. Visitors. Spring. Reading. Higher Laws.
These have something in common. Read the fifth among them. You're welcome to work with others on this task, but this is not a thing you can find unless you're alone.
Then tell me: How close is my nearest neighbor? What is my panacea? And what do all men fear, despite candles and Christianity?

The clue points to a chapter in Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and the questions are answered by quotes from the fifth chapter. Later clues ask players to engage in analysis or deep engagement with a text. An example of such a later clue might be:

Follow the white whale to the pitiable scrivener I spoke of before. Then tell me: what caused his death?

This clue points towards Herman Melville's short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street”. It asks a specific question about a deliberately ambiguous element of the story. To proceed, players must collaborate and respond with a meaningful analysis. If judged by the game master (probably the students' teachers) to be sufficiently thoughtful, the clue is considered “solved” and the next clue is given, although even in this success scenario the game master may choose to challenge the analysis given by the players.

Why It's Fun

This game hides its nature as an academic exercise, instead adopting exciting conspiratorial tones. By doing this, the game can move past students' biases against academic tasks and tap into the traditional fun of its elements of riddle and mystery.

How it Educates

The fundamental appeal of Literati is the same fundamental appeal of riddles, treasure hunts, and whodunit mysteries. The game hints at a hidden meaning in the world around us and invites players to find it.

The educational “trick” of the game is in its subtle transition from simple clues and riddles (like tracking down a passage and finding relevant quotes) to actual analysis of literature. The game implies that there are messages purposefully hidden and encoded in the texts for the players to find. When players dig through the texts to find these hidden messages, they will instead find the natural layers of interpretation and meaning that are a part of any rich text. “Solving” a piece of literature in the game (a fun task in the context of an ARG) is revealed to be the same thing as reading and analyzing it. Literati can thereby show students the appeal of literature from the point of view of the students themselves.

Problems and Challenges

The aforementioned “trick” of Literati may also be considered its biggest liability. The game's educational strategy is one of baiting the player with riddles and hidden meaning and switching to regular literary analysis and interpretation. If successful, this could create an impression in the player's mind that all literature exists to be “solved”. Texts might not be trusted at face value, and students might go on to try to find contrived alternative explanations for their own sake. That is, Literati attempts to turn the interpretation of literature into a game, and whether or not that is an admirable goal is debatable.

Freedom at last

2010-05-19T20:28:00.003-04:00

Aurora was originally inspired by Dyson (now Eufloria), but I wanted to make a game in which the player didn't feel constrained to narrow paths and specified points of conflict. Unfortunately, defined paths are a pretty key part of terrain (and, therefore, strategy). I tried to compromise by offering free movement within a certain radius of any player-owned base, but set out the bases such that progression through a level had to follow certain paths.

I recently submitted Aurora to reddit.com for comments. The responses I got ranged from utterly unimpressed to highly supportive. More importantly, there were a lot of good suggestions, one of which was to remove the radius movement limitation. After some experimentation, it's become clear that tethering players to their bases is really unnecessary. The gameplay and AI are advanced enough that skipping over bases during an attack is no longer game-breaking, but instead just an interesting gambit.

So, by commenting out a bunch of code (and improving performance as a bonus), the game actually becomes more fun and closer to the original vision! How often does it all come together like that?

Malaria

2010-04-28T00:26:00.003-04:00

The first assignment in our Values at Play game design class was to design a card game that would educate about malaria prevention. My game:

Malaria

Malaria is a cooperative game for 5 players, who must use nets, medications, and insecticides to stave off the threat of malaria in their village.

Setup

There are three decks of cards: the Defense deck, the Mosquito deck, and the Identity deck.

Shuffle each deck separately.
Deal one Identity card to each player
Deal three Defense cards to each player

Procedures

Malaria alternates between two phases, Day and Night, until the game is won or lost.

Day:

Each player draws a card from the Defense deck.
Players may exchange cards freely.
Players may play any number of Defense cards to protect themselves from mosquitoes.

Night:

Each player draws a Mosquito card.
If the Mosquito card shows more mosquitoes than the player is protected against, that player must keep the Mosquito card, bringing them closer to death.
All other Mosquito cards and all played one-time-use Defense cards should be placed at the bottom of their respective decks.

Defense Cards

The Defense deck is composed of the following cards:

Quinine: Protects against one mosquito. Must be discarded at the end of the Night.
Medication: Protects against two mosquitoes. Must be discarded at the end of the Night.
Bed Net: Protects against one mosquito. Does not have to be discarded. Only one Bed Net can be used per player in any round. Extra Bed Nets are wasted. Can be upgraded with Insecticide.
Insecticide: A player can place an Insecticide card on a Bed Net card to permanently extend the Net's protection to two mosquitoes per round.

Winning and Losing

Collecting 10 Insecticide cards (not including those attached to Bed Nets) means that the village can spray their houses with insecticide and kill the mosquitoes. All players win the game.

If any player collects the number of Mosquito cards indicated on their Identity card, then that player dies, and all players lose.

Aurora Update

2010-04-19T03:10:00.003-04:00

Menus are working, including cool special effects. Three unique and interesting levels are in place. Basic systems work and are fun.

More importantly, the performance of the game just got better by a factor of LOTS. At first, having hundreds of units floating around freely and constantly checking for collisions was just too much to handle. I was able to make that problem go away most of the time with a more efficient algorithm, but the problem was still very much apparent when large groups got close to each other (i.e. a battle). The game would stutter, go down to a couple frames-per-second, and recover as soon as most of the units disappeared.

I finally pulled out the adult dev tools. I downloaded and used NProf, a .NET profiler. It records how much time is spent in the different functions of the game. I discovered that 80% of my difficulties were coming from a single function. It involved a lot of checking lists for members. I figured out that I could greatly trim the amount of checking performed, did so, and figured out a bunch of other performance hacks along the way. Performance still dips during a battle, but down to a still-playable rate. I doubt anyone will mind, now. Victory!

Still left to complete:
- Endgame conditions and an end-of-game finale effect
- Improve visuals and effects for building / destruction events
- Retool all my sound effects
- Tweak the soundtrack songs to make sure they're perfectly aligned with the game beat
- Polish
- Package
- Ship

The end is in sight. I'm feeling awfully optimistic about this.

Aurora Music

2010-03-31T22:25:00.003-04:00

I did a lot of experimenting with the Aurora music system, hoping to essentially build a soundtrack out of sound effects. I could make it context-sensitive and everything! But, alas, I don't have the musical knowledge to do it right. There's a lot of potential there, but nothing sounded quite good enough to work. I also had several technical issues that put everything painfully off-sync.

Still, I didn't want to abandon the idea entirely. I found an album of free music called Rooftop 120 that was filled with great ambient tracks, all at 120 beats per minute. I can set the rhythm of events in the game to the same speed, keep my musical sound effects, and use this excellent music as background. It sounds pretty awesome, and I don't think I can do better by building it piecemeal.

I'm now working on smoothing out the AI and adding maps, and then it's time to start building menus and completing the outer structure of the game.

Values at Play

2010-03-29T13:15:00.001-04:00

This term I'm taking my second game design course from Professor Mary Flanagan. This one is subtitled "Values at Play", with a focus on encoding values in gameplay.

Last year's game design class required one game per week. I'm guessing that this year will be similar. I'll post descriptions of my games here.

Aurora Thoughts

2010-03-02T02:18:00.006-05:00

I'm making progress on Aurora. Recently I've been mostly focusing on experimenting with the UI and making the music system work (more on that later), but I'm also putting thought into the core gameplay structure. To remind you, the basic idea is that there are buildings and troops. Buildings produce troops at a constant rate. Troops can annihilate themselves against enemy troops, enemy buildings, or friendly buildings (to upgrade). Buildings can be upgraded once, doubling their production rate. It costs 100 troops to build, upgrade, or destroy a building.

In trying to create a pared-down RTS, I may have broken the genre. By removing most elements of luck and putting players on an even field, the game tends towards a stalemate. Most of the strategy involved right now involves trying to slowly-but-surely gain numerical advantage over the enemy. There are a few ways of doing this:

Upgrade your stars before they do and have a higher production rate until they catch up.
Let the enemy annihilate troops against your buildings, but not so many that your buildings die (so they are essentially wasted).
Focus fire on an enemy building and gain a production advantage until they send reinforcements and recolonize it.
Destroy an upgraded enemy building (you spend 100 destroying something that took 200 to fully build).
Let the two enemies waste their forces against each other and build up strength from afar.

In the current setup in which each of three players has an outer building and an inner building (all three of which meet in the middle) in a symmetric formation, it's almost impossible to gain enough of an advantage to win. Usually you have to use the last strategy I listed: pull back, lose your outer building, and gather enough forces at the inner building (while your enemies engage in a stalemate battle) to eventually sweep over the map.

That takes too long, and it's too passive to be consistently fun. I'm led to believe that RTSs are mostly defined by the imbalances, asymmetry, and chaos they introduce. Rock-Paper-Scissors combat mechanics, asymmetric factions, and interesting maps are examples of this. I was trying to distill the RTS down to something simple, symmetric, and direct, like Chess, but the "essential" rules to which I am committed don't offer the complexity that's required to make that scenario interesting.

This leaves me with three options.

First, I can add larger, more complex, and maybe more asymmetric maps. Just the possibility of having multiple fronts of battle might be enough to solve my conundrum. I plan to try this first.

Second, I can cave in and change my basic mechanics, thereby admitting defeat in my design experiment, and make it into something different. Multiple building types, multiple troop types, flanking effects, etc. I'll add complexity until I force strategy.

Third, I can report the results of my failed experiment like a good scientist. If it's still unfun (but also still an honest attempt at an essentialized RTS), I can release it as-is and show it off in order to teach others the lessons I learned during its design. Principled and uncompromising, but maybe unsatisfying as well.

For now, I'm hoping that the first option will be enough.

Lessons of D&D

2010-02-27T20:18:00.002-05:00

It went well. A summary of the adventure is on the campaign's blog record: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

Of course, it could have gone better. The biggest challenge to running a long weekend game was the difficulty of improvisation in DMing. I had only certain encounters prepared (most of which turned out to be too easy), so I had to put the story on rails to a certain extent. I used the same strategy seen in Mass Effect or Dragon Age in which the player is given a few tasks and can complete them in any order (with special events happening in between).

Characters were the best and the worst part of this module. The bit characters (the alchemist, the gnome dungeon keeper) were excellent and fun to play, but the more nuanced characters couldn't be developed or revealed naturally. The players weren't interested in rambling conversation, and the to-the-point conversation could only carry so much characterization in it. My biggest problem was with my villain. It wasn't clear that he was the bad guy from the start. I was counting on my players asking certain questions and getting a big reveal, but they didn't. That's my fault, not theirs.

I also had several encounters that existed mostly to provide interesting combat. When my players decided to engage their enemies cleverly (using Bluff or something), I was often not entirely sure of what to do. I improvised decently, sometimes letting the players off and sometimes driving towards a fight, but it was a lost opportunity. I could have used these encounters to build the wider story.

I'd be interested in carrying on with this campaign, hopefully on a weekly format. I think that if I handled it a few encounters at a time, the game could go in a lot more interesting directions.

Dungon Master

2010-02-18T00:16:00.002-05:00

In two days I'll be DMing my first game of Dungeons and Dragons! I've been playing 4th edition for some time, and I get one weekend to see what the other side of the screen is like.

Creating a weekend adventure has been an interesting and unique design challenge. I'm trying to create a somewhat story-centric adventure, and making sure that things make sense has been difficult. I'm also trying to figure out how to offer the feeling of freedom while keeping the total number of story branches contained (I don't have much time to revise the course of the story on-the-fly). I've already railroaded my players somewhat by requiring no mercenary or evil characters, essentially demanding that they act out of the goodness of their hearts.

Still, I'm pretty confident that it will turn out all right. I'm very much looking forward to roleplaying some of my NPCs. I think my players will appreciate the characters I've dreamt up.

Game Design Decision

2010-01-01T00:42:00.010-05:00

My first game design problem of the new year is an interesting one, and a pretty typical one. It's a good example of the stuff I think about when making games, and maybe my still-incomplete thinking on the subject will be a good example of how I try to solve these problems.

In Aurora, players have one "building" (in RTS terms), which is called a Sun and which periodically spits out troops that can be used to attack or can be sacrificed to build or upgrade a Sun. There is a small, finite number of spots on which a player can build new Suns. When a Sun is upgraded, it starts to produce more valuable troops. Suns exist at some level from 1 to 5 and produce troops of corresponding strength. The strength of a troop matters during upgrading, so if an upgrade "costs 100", you need 100 level-1 troops or 20 level-5 troops (or some other combination that adds up correctly).

So here's the question: how much should it cost to upgrade a Sun to its next level? Upgrading is a very important mechanic, since it can make a Sun up to five times more useful than it starts. I'm considering three options right now. First, all upgrades could cost some static number, like 100. Second, all upgrades could cost some number times the current level of the Sun, so building a new Sun could cost 100, upgrading it the first time could cost 200, and then 300, etc. until the maximum. Third, the cost of upgrades for all suns could increase universally, so that the first upgrade on any Sun could cost 100, then the player's next upgrade (even on a different Sun) could cost 200, etc. Meanwhile, the cost of building new Suns would stay low and constant.

My thoughts on the pros and cons of each system:

1. Static Cost
The maximum rate of upgrading accelerates, quickening the pace of the game. The player can get as much advantage out of upgrading a Sun as building a new one. Since some Suns will be better defended than others, this encourages the player to upgrade the best-defended Suns rather than expand. Players will expand slower and upgrade more, and the game space will be marked by some very valuable Suns.

2. Increasing Cost
The maximum rate of upgrading is more stable. The player can get more advantage out of building a new Sun than upgrading any. If determined to upgrade, the player is encouraged to upgrade the weakest, lowest-level Suns first before making any especially strong ones. The strategic terrain is therefore more flat, but expansion is encouraged, and so conflict may be more common.

3. Universally Increasing Cost
The maximum rate of upgrading remains totally constant. The player can get much more advantage out of building a new Sun than upgrading any. Upgrading eventually becomes so expensive that attack is more advantageous than investment, since a new Sun can be built on the remains of the enemy's. Since the location of an upgrade doesn't affect its cost, the layout of high-level Suns will be varied, like option #1.

Option 1 incentivizes a lot of quick upgrading. Option 2 incentivizes expansion and then "flat" upgrading (where upgrading is spread evenly across Suns). Option 3 incentivizes quick early upgrades (maybe, depending on starting cost) and then attacks to conquer new territory. I still don't think I understand the "feel" of these different systems.

If any one player is quicker at the start of the game than others, Option 1 ensures that that player will dominate the game before combat even starts due to the accelerating growth. I dislike games in which the outcome is decided before you even meet your opponent; it becomes a simple race or test of mouse dexterity. And yet, Option 1 offers the intriguing possibility of being able to come back from behind after some well-timed upgrading investment.

I'm bothered by the prospect of a "flat" game terrain with Option 2. I like having some targets be more appealing than others since it introduces tactics like blitzing a poorly-defended but high-level Sun. Encouraging conflict is good, but this game might not need it if I'm going for a more cerebral feel.

Option 3 introduces an interesting player decision of determining when it is more advantageous to attack an enemy than continue upgrading. And after all, interesting player decisions are what this is all about. The big negative to this system is that it slows down the pace of upgrading over time, and I worry about what that might do to the game's interest curve. But, then, maybe a stable rate of production combined with an incentive to attack would make the game more exciting in its later stages.

And there are, of course, other considerations at play. Game performance would be better with a system that encourages fewer, stronger Suns and troops, like Option 1, and that option would also allow a constant cost and therefore a simpler UI.

Right now I'm leaning towards a static cost system (Option 1).

Aurora

2009-12-28T21:00:00.003-05:00

It's about time for an official introduction to this game.

First of all, it's very much inspired by Dyson (which was evidently renamed Eufloria). Dyson is (was?) a slow, relaxing RTS that boiled the genre down to some essential elements. Your troops are your spending resources. You can spend troops to either add static defenses or increase troop production. Certain locations in the game were more valuable than others for production. These are really basic elements that combine into tactically interesting choices. Elegant complexity from simple parts. An ideal of game design!

In Aurora, I'm trying to strip down the genre even more. Defensive upgrades are gone. All locations produce troops of the same strength before upgrades. Combat is a simple matter of mutual annihilation. I'm also trying to see if I can make it work without an exploration element, i.e. all enemies in Aurora are visible from the start. It may be impossible to include this and still keep it a game of strategy rather than memorization and mouse dexterity. We'll see.

I wanted to recapture the feeling of moving large bodies of troops across the field of battle. In Dyson, your troops moved from point to point in an orderly line. I like seeing my soldiers clashing in a wider battle, or moving out to intercept the enemy. Aurora encloses the battlefield, but your troops can move anywhere within that space.

The visual style is far from complete, but I'm trying to use abstract space-imagery. Troop production buildings look like suns. Troops look like tiny stars: points of light floating on a black background. I'd like everything to move smoothly, even gracefully, until the climactic moment of destruction. I'm also trying to add a synchronized-music aspect to the game, where the soundtrack and game actions compromise just enough to sync up in an entertaining way. Hopefully it will make music out of the game's events.

Right now I'm adding in the first bits of AI. The game will be playable after that. Hooray alpha!

Here's what it looks like right now. No laughing.

Aaaaand I'm Back

2009-12-18T19:17:00.003-05:00

Just got back from a trip to Spain, Morocco, Ghana, South Africa, Mauritius, India, Vietnam, China, Japan, and Hawaii. It was pretty crazy. I'm also pretty sure it will make me a better game developer, if only because I learned and saw a lot of interesting stuff.

I had a lot of time on the ship in between ports and made good progress on Aurora, the stripped-down RTS I wrote about earlier. All the basic systems are complete, except for a decent AI. The code (which was wholly rewritten at one point) is clean and in good shape to expand. At one point I was really worried about performance issues. I think I've got it in a good spot now, though. Each army can have a lot of troops floating around, and it's only when several hundred converge in battle that things get choppy. We'll see if that ever becomes a problem.

I'm also seriously planning to spend a weekend revising Azure. The text idea didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, and the game gets boring pretty quickly. I'm thinking that if I add another handful of patterns of movement for the player to follow, the game might remain as engaging and hypnotizing as I want it to be. The game could switch between them in random order after every minute or so of success.

I also really want to get MUTE up to speed... sigh. So much to do!

World Travel

2009-09-08T06:11:00.002-04:00

In an attempt to make myself into a more interesting person, I've embarked on a journey around the world. I'm spending this fall in the Semester at Sea study abroad program, so please forgive the lack of posts on this blog until early next year. Right now, I'm typing from Cadiz, Spain.

I'm equipped with an underpowered netbook for the voyage, but that's enough for me to continue programming in-between the ports. I ultimately passed over the revisions I ought to make in favor of building a new game. The working title is Aurora; it's an RTS stripped down to its essential elements, inspired by the indie RTS Dyson. I'm hoping to have it totally finished by the time I get home.

2nd Place

2009-07-20T19:14:00.004-04:00

I'm the first loser of the 2009 Imagine Cup Game Development competition!

But seriously, I'm very excited and proud. This is a thrilling victory.

More about the IC.

Now I'm trying to figure out my next project. I still need to start getting my hands on some commercial game engines, but there are a lot of other things I want to do. For a school project last term I built the prototype of MUTE, and it would be nice to flesh that out and write some significant content for it. I'm also considering revising Alternex (I got a lot of good suggestions at the Imagine Cup) and maybe submitting it to the IGF. Plus, I really want to iterate on Azure; I think it could do better if I had multiple levels and dropped the text.

Decisions, decisions...

Destination: Cairo

2009-06-17T23:52:00.002-04:00

Against all odds, my one-man team and it's three-week game has advanced to the finals of the 2009 Imagine Cup Game Development competition. In a few weeks I'll be flown down to Cairo, Egypt to present the game and get a shot at the grand prize with five other finalist teams.

I actually found out over a week ago, but it's taken until now for the initial shock to wear off, and it's time I started working on my presentation. As with the other stages of this competition, I'd be completely satisfied if I didn't progress any further... but it'd be really, really cool if I did.

Of course, now that I'm a finalist, I'm a public figure! And so I won't spoil the details of the final presentation by giving up all my internal brainstorming as I usually do. Hopefully, all will be revealed in about two weeks when I can share some video of what I've cooked up.

Alternex UI Iteration

2009-04-30T02:42:00.002-04:00

Alternex now looks like this:

The only immediately visible change is that the numbers under the cities have been replaced with a progress bar and separate city icons to indicate their size (town, city, metropolis).

The more important change was the drastic reduction in notification popups. Rather than giving a popup window every time population grew in an unsupported city, it happens only the first time and cities emanate an obvious red glow when they're in trouble.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the way the UI turned out here; there's a lot of floating point numbers floating around the screen. It works fine, but it's still ugly. But I realized that my time is not nearly as infinite as I had led myself to believe, and I'm now just focused on finishing the high-score functionality and the extra levels. One final result of all of this UI stress is that I'm seriously considering buying a UI design book in hopes of figuring it all out. I'd love to avoid this sort of situation in the future.

Physicality

2009-04-27T14:25:00.002-04:00

Games have a feel.

It's especially noticeable in first-person games. How quickly does the player move? Does movement accelerate to a point or go at a constant rate? Is there a limit on how quickly you can turn? How fast does the game react to input? Does the player jump immediately after pressing the right button? Is there some recovery time after landing?

That's a small subset of the questions that could be asked about just two verbs: run and jump. Similar questions might be asked of other interfaces. In an RTS, do my units move as soon as I order it, or do they slowly turn and rev up first? In a flight sim, does the plane turn downwards by default or continue in a straight line (Battlefield 2 vs. HAWX)? In a tank driving game, does the tank move forwards when told to accelerate or turn to face the direction that the player is facing (Battlefield 2 vs. Halo)?

I don't think that quicker and more responsive is always better. Counter-Strike is considered more tactical than Quake III partially because the players move so much slower. Sins of a Solar Empire can be infuriating to an RTS player that's used to a faster pace, but its slowness, combined with its massive scale, turn it into a deeper-feeling strategy game. I was astonished by how slowly the player turned in the Xbox version of Fallout 3, but the game feels fine with the addition of VATS.

I wouldn't be so bold as to say that games ought to go in one direction or another; it's very probably a matter of personal preference. But it amazes me that this physical feeling of games is ignored in descriptions and reviews of games. A major element of games seems to be acknowledged only subconsciously, or sometimes obliquely in discussions about performance. It's a useful tool in the designer's box, and it ought to get the attention it deserves.

Alternex 1.1 Goals

2009-03-30T19:24:00.002-04:00

With 50 days left before the deadline, it's time for me to get started on revising Alternex, my game for the Imagine Cup competiton. Here's what I intend to do:

Improve the menu graphics by adding depth (possibly with a 3D tubes look).
Add a border to the game window. For some reason this seems to add a lot to a game; it takes it from the realm of the OS window to its own context.
Lower the information density of the main playing screen by converting some of the floating-point numbers into other graphical cues.
Add more "juice" into the user interface.
Build extra levels to play, and possibly new difficulty settings
Finally allow the player to replace plants in one action rather than sell and build separately.
Refine the endgame scoring system. Right now, it's just a barebones system, and I worry that it isn't satisfying. Perhaps a high-score list.
Find a way to notify the player of important goings-on without using the current in-game popup windows. They annoy people and break the action

Three New Prototypes

2009-03-30T10:50:00.003-04:00

Stuff I've been working on / playing with:

1) Auralstride:

An echolocation game. The player tries to navigate a maze strictly through audio cues (though the game will graphically display the player's orientation). I'm thinking of having the player go through the maze collecting limited-frequency bands of audio tracks that can be combined into a full song after they've all been collected. I worry, though, that this mechanic is too shallow. If I want to sustain the player's interest over several levels, I need to gradually increase the difficulty of this task, and simply making the maze more complex won't cut it.

So far I've got a working prototype of the basic echolocation gameplay in a maze composed of squares, but it's a long way from a functional game.

2) Maestro

I've written about this one before. You move the mouse to match a song's waveform. My goal is to smooth it out and fiddle with the data until that's fun, and then to allow the player to input any MP3 song to play. It's showing promise, but this sort of thing might be above my skill level. Look at Audiosurf and how imprecise its game-to-song matching is. Maestro works very well for some songs and very poorly for others.

It's currently the furthest along of any of these prototypes; in fact, I shouldn't even be calling it a prototype at this point. I'm still trying to find a good way to display the waveform and such graphically (since just displaying it as a graph seems inelegant), but the basic gameplay and song-importing works fine.

3) MUTE

Imagine a simple conversation game wrapped in the skin of an IM program. MUTE is a backronym for Madup University Text Express, since I imagine that the first conversation will be set in a college social context. Nothing's been implemented on this one, to my shame, but I've been working out the conceptual design since the idea came to me. The basic gameplay is simply picking a response from a preset menu.

The big flaw in any branching-conversation game is the amount of text that needs to be written. It increases exponentially with conversation depth if (as I intend to do) you avoid looping back to earlier parts of the conversation. But I'm hoping that this will be a plus, since I hope to flex my writing muscles and possibly to bring in other people to do writing (maybe within a custom-built authoring tool).

There are a couple of basic features beyond the basic conversation gameplay that I'd like to include. I hope to have several computer actors that you can initiate conversation with, as well as actors that will sign on to the IM program and contact you. I'd like to have persistent game-wide variables that can be turned on or off within the conversations, such that an ambitious author could expand the game into one involving concrete goals. And I'd like to programmatically ensure that no conversations in the game will repeat dialogue within the same game session. The point of putting this in a mock IM program is to build immersion cheaply, and I don't want to throw that away.

Imagine Cup - Round 2

2009-03-20T23:59:00.006-04:00

Earlier, I entered the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition.

I'm proud to say that my team, Epsylon Games, which comprises me, has advanced on to round 2.

The leaderboards suggest that about 600 teams from around the globe entered into the competition. 150 continue on to round 2. When you consider that I was a single-man team (others had up to four members plus a mentor) and that I started my game three weeks before the deadline, I'm immensely satisfied with achieving semi-finalist status.

My prize is a 12-month XNA Creator's Club Premium membership and, more importantly, two more months of development before I have to turn in the final product. The teams will be whittled down to six finalists for round 3, and those teams go to Egypt and get a shot at some nice prize packages.

I've started putting together a list of extra features and alterations I'd like to add to the game in these precious months. I'd like to add depth to the graphics, get rid of all the floating-point numbers, add in mouse wheel-controlled map zooming, fix the game's balance, and flesh out the playable content through additional levels and possibly level progression.

Somehow, I'll fit this all in amongst the other three small game projects I'd like to do, new work in the Dartmouth Tiltfactor lab, and three college classes.

Fast and Slow Strategy

2009-03-08T01:45:00.005-05:00

I've noticed a gulf in the RTS genre. Some games, like Sins of a Solar Empire and Supreme Commander are going big and slow; they tend to advertise an epic, never-before-seen scale. Others, like Command & Conquer 3 and World in Conflict are going small and fast; they market the de-emphasizing or total lack of base building and the high-action tactical battles. Both share an ancestry in the early RTS games, but these games are getting so different that people are trying to exile them into separate "RT4X" or "Real-Time Tactics" genres. This schism intrigues me.

I should start by noting that I'm a complete partisan here. I played and loved single-player C&C and Starcraft and Age of Empires back my formative gaming years, but my skillz have waned while my hunger for strategic depth has intensified. I was really upset that Warcraft 3 put such a heavy focus on heroes and small unit counts. World in Conflict is keeping me entertained through spectacle alone so far, and I didn't even bother buying C&C3 after so many of my friends praised its fast pace and quick-to-the-punch action.

The simplistic explanation of the schism is that it's all based in differences of pacing preference. Some of us prefer a faster, more exciting experience, while others can't take the heat and thus prefer a game that lets us adequately prepare before stepping into the strained-metaphorical kitchen. To be certain, pacing matters. And I do prefer a game that supports some real, large-scale back-and-forth.

But I think that there's more to it. There's a substantive change to the "strategic" aspect of the gameplay when you are thinking on a time limit. A while back, I wrote about time limits and puzzle solving: "In Portal, the player generally has infinite time to figure out how to proceed. Experimentation is encouraged, and the player can try out whatever and still feel creative when the puzzle is solved. Shadow of the Colossus introduces a major danger factor. You can't sit and try to analyze the colossus for weaknesses because if you stop running, you'll die."

Similarly, in a game that focuses on rapid base-building and battle tactics, the biggest determining factor of victory is the player's skill in getting a base up, running, and producing fast. In games that forgo the base-building, the most important element is maneuvering individual units. Both of these involve important tactical decisions, but it always requires a high degree of mechanical skill on the player's part: knowing the interface, clicking the right buttons in the right order at the right time, and knowing the right instant for each action. Too often, this skill aspect overshadows the tactical one, with many games having a clear "correct" build order or tactical outlook, with skill as the only differentiation between knowledgeable players.

The slower pace of "slow strategy" games allows for a more contemplative match. Discerning the enemy's strategy ahead of time matters much more, for without an effective counter, the match is lost. There's more time to alter strategies or take time to think and plan. Moments are rarely precious.

Keep slowing down the strategy, and you end up in the realm of turn-based games. Perhaps that's where I belong; Civ 2 is calling my name right now. But I also enjoy the action and flow of a real-time game, and the need to stay consistently focused (if not anxious) can be enjoyable. Games like SupCom and SoaSE offer a happy medium in the very wide "strategy" genre.

But if we so readily discriminate Turn-Based Strategy from Real-Time Strategy, I think it's time that we acknowledge that fast and slow RTSs are diverging just as significantly. I know it's getting a bit ridiculous to subdivide a subgenre, but I'm sure that I'm not alone in my likes and dislikes. Fast strategy games may as well be in the action genre from my perspective, and I'm sure that the fans of such games can't stand the snail's pace of my favorite RTS games. A new set of labels might help.

Entering the Imagine Cup

2009-02-16T20:45:00.004-05:00

Not a very imaginative blog post title, is it?

As you may have gathered, I've decided to enter Microsoft's Imagine Cup in the Game Development competition.

Other teams (of up to four people) from around the world have been working on this since August of last year. I discovered the competition three weeks before the due date. As such, I'm not too confident about my chances, and I'll have to crunch for all three weeks to get anything decent done. Still, what's there to lose, other than time? The theme is pretty much "a game about technology solving the world's problems", so I'm making a game about researching and deploying alternative energy solutions.

Not having high expectations also frees me to experiment with game mechanics. By that I'm pretty much trying to say that I have no clue of whether or not the game on which I'm working so hard will turn out to be any fun at all.

The game (still searching for a title) has two basic actions: researching (at a few different speeds) and building new power plants. It's said again and again that it's what the player does that's important. I worry that this game will be too sparse on the user-action side of things. It could be that the player spends all of his or her time waiting for a new tech to upgrade and then building a new plant. What's interesting about that?

My hope is that I can compensate for this sparsity of mechanics by increasing the pace of the game. Cities constantly demand more and more power, and new cities will pop up from time to time. Still, what do I do with the downtime in between? I'm wrestling with the question of whether or not I should let players pause the game while building; it would certainly make things easier, but it might, in the process, remove any excitement from the game.

Ultimately, the only interesting choice in the game is judging the most useful level of research and the best time to build. I couldn't simulate the game in my head quite well enough to tell if this was going to be fun, so I decided to build the game and find out. It's a gamble. We'll see how it goes.

And now my skepticism is on the record.

Azure Retrospective

2009-02-13T23:05:00.004-05:00

Azure has been released into the wild.

I have to admit that it failed in its original goal. The core mechanic is ultimately vacuuming stuff up.

That said, the game succeeded in other ways. The "what I'm going for" angle changed during the project, and the final product was intended to offer a relaxing, almost hypnotic experience. I have the advantage of always playing the game in the way it is intended to be played, but it worked for me. I find myself getting sucked in by this game, and that's enough for me to be at least a little bit proud.

It didn't work so well for other people. I playtested it on my parents and an old high school friend, and they all thought that the point was to get bigger and bigger. Only my dad got to the clouds. I tried to remedy this (iterate!!!) by adding pulse effects when the emitters sent out new motes and by limiting the size of the player's orb to a very small range, but I don't know if people will be able to figure it out any easier.

As I usually do, I sent this game in to reddit and showed it around to some people. Nobody was especially impressed. I'm not so discouraged with this result, since I knew from the start that the game was supposed to go against people's expectations about a computer game. That said, I'm not so delusional as to call this one a public success.

Halcyon --> Azure

2009-02-03T23:56:00.003-05:00

Random project update notes:

If this project were large enough to merit the term, I'd say that the game is in beta. I hope to get in some real playtesting and iteration before I show this one off.

For the first time, I've decided to change the name of my game. Halcyon remains the working title in the code, but the official new title is Azure. The color in the game is dominated by that sort of sky blue, and since I added a cloud image in the background, it seemed like the more appropriate title.

I'm surprised by how much I enjoy playing this game. It draws me in much more than my others did. It could be that I'm just creating a game to hypnotize myself, and it won't do much for anyone else. I'm not sure that that's a bad thing.

At the end of a recent coding session, I was struck with an idea and immediately grew infatuated with it. Text. Quotes. I would include beautiful and inspiring text once the player has cleared the screen of motes (and has been rewarded with a beautiful and inspiring image). I'm currently trawling the internet for quotes that fit. Some fit in the game better than others, and I'm sure I'll have to get rid of a few that I like.

Lastly, I'm pretty satisfied with how the game has turned out, graphically, even if the player's orb is just a huge blue ball. Screenshot below.

Halycon

2009-02-02T00:14:00.008-05:00

EDIT: Halcyon has been renamed "Azure".

I hit a brick wall in the development of the full version of Maestro, so I'm taking a break on that. Of course, I know that the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it bad enough, so I plan to return and conquer that one some other day, but for the time being, I'm working on a game that I started developing in parallel with Maestro.

A Dartmouth professor, teaching a class called Intro to New Media, opined that a digital game could not escape from a Western mindset since it was built on numbers; the point would always be to make more or less of something, or at least to get to the next level. I thought that was silly, and I took it as a challenge.

Halcyon is a simple game with the simple goal of catching all of the motes that appear on screen by mousing over them. I may have already failed the aforementioned challenge, since "eat up all the dots" sure seems to fall under the broad label of "Western", but I'm hoping that I can get away with it by representing it as "absorbing" or even "merging with" the motes. I hope to do this by having them change color based on proximity to the player's collecting hand, such that they are of equal color when they meet.

One interesting feature of Halcyon is a mechanic governing player movement: if the player moves too quickly, motes are discharged in the player's path. You have to move slowly and smoothly in order to reach a winning state.

Note the phrasing of "winning state". You don't win the game for good, but you've accomplished your goal. The new goal is to retain this winning state. The green dots are emitters, and they regularly send out new motes. You have to stay on top of them at the right times in order to keep the screen clear.

The prototype for Halcyon was completed fairly quickly, and I've made good progress on the main game. It's the smallest game I've made since Forces, way back in high school, but I'm satisfied with how it's turning out. I'm glad to be making a game that's at least trying to be more than "kill all the enemies". It gets embarrassing to explain to my parents and acquaintances that I've been spending all my free time making yet another space combat game. Halcyon's a nice change of pace.

Maestro

2009-01-18T01:12:00.004-05:00

Maestro is a crappy tech prototype.

What it will be is a music game that is designed to let you dance with your mouse cursor. I should explain. Audiosurf is a game that takes your mp3s and creates a game level out of them that functions as a sort of action puzzle rhythm game. I like Audiosurf, but I'm upset the fact that I can't hit all the notes and succeed. The player has to strategize frantically on most game modes, and even with the simpler ones you can't just groove out in the game. Maestro is an attempt to create a game that also uses your mp3s to procedurally create levels, but simply asks you to move the mouse around in a way that matches the music.

Another source of inspiration for me was the strange phenomenon of dancing. I hate dancing as it's most often described, depicted, and seen. But I love drumming my fingers, bobbing my head, tapping my foot, and singing along to music. If I really really get into a song, I'll gesture with my hands, moving them around with the action of the song. So I figured that I could just have the player move the mouse in a similar fashion and get the feeling I was going for.

I've had this idea banging around in my head for a while. Now that I've finished Meridian, I figured it was time to see if I could pull together a fun prototype.

So far, I'm just working out the technical details. I can load up a WAV file and display the volume in synchronization with the song, and I can measure mouse movements and graph them in real time. I'm currently experimenting with different systems for smoothing out the different waveforms.

This is a picture of one of the earliest working prototypes. The top line is mouse speed data, the middle is a smoothed version of the top line, and the bottom is mean volume data for the WAV file. The song is Girl by Beck.

Here's a slightly more developed prototype, a few hours later, using the same song. Blue is smoothed audio data, light red is mouse speed data, light blue is adjusted audio volume data, and the last line blends the previous two.

As is mostly evident, I have a lot of work to do before this gets to a satisfying state. If I can make Maestro work well, then I'll redo it as a full production, with fancy particle effects and changing colors a la Audiosurf.

Meridian Retrospective

2009-01-10T23:32:00.004-05:00

Today, after a four-month development span, Meridian was finally finished.

I wrote previously about its conception and evolution, but there's still room for the typical postmortem analysis.

It was my first project using XNA and C#, and I loved them both. Partially it's just that I'm a fan of Visual Studio C# Express, but really, everything was so easy. Once you spend an hour or two learning the basic setup, all there is to do is implement game logic, i.e. the fun part. I decided to add sound very late in the project, and XNA made it very easy. A++ would program again.

The art in Meridian was a huge step up from that in Asp. That's mostly because I didn't draw anything from scratch (except for the gates-- the worst sprite in the game by a long shot). For the backgrounds, I did what I usually do: find a cool image (thanks NASA!) and then play around with the filters in the GIMP until it looks cool. Those who know the program will note the use of the Waves and Starburst filters all over the place. For the fleet images, I found a free 3D model of a spaceship, loaded it up in Milkshape 3D, and took a screenshot of it. I also took a couple of perspective shots for use in the victory and defeat screens, which I think turned out very nicely.

I still had a single huge code file (over 3500 lines), but I used Visual Studio's #region tag to make it nice and collapsable throughout, so it never really hindered me. My commenting practices were as nice as they've ever been, and I never made any huge programming snafus that I know of.

But of course, it's design that really counts. The high-level design of Meridian changed very little. That is, I stuck to the original vision. But I had to make a lot of small rule changes in order to make that vision work.

One nice thing about Meridian is that the game states are very distinct in comparison to those in Asp. This meant that there were very few situations in which the game wasn't playing as I intended it to. One consequence of that, of course, is that the flaws in the gameplay are completely my fault. I can't blame this one on technical problems or anything like that.

The biggest problem that Meridian has is that the AI is forced to stay limited. I added boosts to break the inevitable stalemate of both sides avoiding each other. For that to work, the AI can't take boosts into account when considering which hexes are safe from attack, lest we run into the exact same problem as before. So they totally ignore defence from boosts, and suffer for it. The AI is also very vulnerable to the poisoned pawn strategy; it will take whatever it can get.

That's the primary reason I decided to include difficulty levels. I knew that once the player solved the AI puzzle, they'd have to start with a disadvantage to have an engaging experience. I know that Dice Wars is fun even after the player has solved it, and Meridian also uses randomness to provide basic variety, so I have hope that the game can stay fun.

Lastly, I'm very happy with the saving system I used. Because the game employs randomness, players might be tempted to revert back to an old save in order to get good outcomes on every chance they take. To ameliorate this problem, I only allowed one save, and the save updated after each turn and each time the player exited the game. This has the disadvantage of only allowing a single game to be active at any time, but I consider that acceptable in a game of this scope.

Commentary: Left 4 Dead

2009-01-05T20:23:00.002-05:00

Raph Koster advises game designers to figure out what a game is about and then do nothing that would detract from that focus. I think that the developers of Left 4 Dead took that to heart. Every single aspect of the game system contributes to the creation of the best cooperative gameplay experience I've ever had. I'm a huge fan of pretty much any co-op experience, from side-by-side Gears of War battles to RTS comp stomps, but L4D easily takes the cake.

The general difficulty with co-op gaming is making everybody feel important. When there's a bunch of players fighting an AI, it's difficult to feel like your contribution was necessary. L4D gets past this by making it genuinely necessary that all four players work together (at least on the higher difficulties). If one player runs ahead, he will quickly get incapacitated or mobbed by zombies. If players don't stay conscious of each other's position, they'll end up losing due entirely to friendly fire. If players don't collaborate to use their resources effectively, they'll never make it past a end-of-campaign finale.

L4D does some cool things with the level design and art direction, but I think that the gameplay is its real strength, and the game stands as a testament to the idea that doing one thing and doing it well is a ticket to success.

Breaking the Sound Barrier

2008-12-31T03:02:00.002-05:00

Meridian will be my first game to feature audio.

When I made my previous games, audio seemed like a wholly unnecessary feature. I originally chose to include it just to get some practice and to give Meridian a consistent level of production. Now, after hearing the game in action, I'm starting to realize what I was missing; I'm starting to get why Greg Costikyan wrote that Asp's nonexistent sounds "are sorely missed".

The most immediate and obvious benefit comes with interface design. By using sounds for multiple events, I can indicate the connections between them. When a fleet enters a transportation gate, when a solar system spits a fleet out through a gate, and when the rally point for transportation changes, I use the same sound cue to show that it's really the same event (interstellar travel). Battles are easier to follow when there's a sound during each attack and upon retreat. When players select fleets by different means, the sound lets them know what's going on.

Then there's the background music. I spent some time looking through a few albums of Creative Commons-licensed music and found some great tracks. I don't know how they'll hold up over the long term, but just during the short games I play for testing I'm finding myself more and more engrossed. The atmosphere conjured by the sound effects seems to be just as important as the graphics'.

I'm applying the same learning process to Audacity that I used with GIMP: play with all of the options until stuff looks/sounds good. Hopefully I'll be able to do some decent audio editing on future games. Certainly anything I build beyond a tech demo won't be silent.

Evolution of Meridian

2008-12-28T01:29:00.004-05:00

Meridian is nearing completion. Just menus, game saves, and polishing left to do. Now is as good a time as any to share how the game idea came to be.

I'd like to think I was originally inspired by the idea of a game set along a single line of battlefields, with those further back supporting the troops at the front, but in fact I was inspired by the title Meridian. It's a really cool word. Sorta like "asp".

Originally, a major part of Meridian was going to be managing public opinion on your home planets. You'd have renewable and nonrenewable resources on each planet. Using up nonrenewable resources hurt public opinion, unless they were near the front of battle and desperate. Losing and winning battles both caused the people to clamor for war (either for further victory or for revenge). If your people thought too little of you, you'd be kicked out of office and lose the game. Perhaps opinion would also affect your industrial efficiency. I also toyed with the possibility of having the option of negotiating for peace with the enemy leader, but your people would always prefer that you scorn peace and fight for glory. Peace was difficult, but the only real winning option. It would offer a (simplistic) message through gameplay.

But as I thought about the actual battle system and simulated the ruleset in my head, I came to realize that the whole public opinion aspect belonged to a different game. Meridian was, at its core, a game of managing resources and pushing an enemy further and further into a corner. Perhaps later I'll make a diplomacy game, but this is not it.

Raph Koster advised designers to figure out what the game is about and then do nothing that does not support that core game. I decided that Meridian was about "pressure": you had to methodically push back the enemy forces while they tried to do the same to you. If you push them too fast, they'll summon reinforcements in order to ensure a fighting chance. I wanted the feeling of a slow but desperate arm-wrestling match. More and more pressure until one side broke.

The basic setup was easy to imagine. I love hex grids, and the organization of forces into fleets of arbitrary size was fairly simple. I originally thought that you'd set a certain "tactic" for each fleet that would affect when they would retreat from battle, but I quickly discarded that idea and handed retreating control to the player. During the first few weeks of development I would lie in bed and imagine the game being played. I discovered a whole slew of small refinements were necessary in order to get the game I was hoping for. One critical aspect of the gameplay was hit and run attacks. Smaller fleets needed to be able to chip away at larger fleets in safety. This required that fleets be able to retreat, have the capacity to move two spaces in one turn on occasion, and have an initial first strike before the retreat. The battle system had to be just right, and it took me a while to figure out the current system.

The game takes place on only one solar system at a time, trying to fight towards the more distant systems. Originally, moving from system to system was originally going to take several turns, and both sides would bide their time before invading a new system (which might have made for an excellent interest curve). With this setup, the newly built ships of the losing side could get to the active solar system faster (since it was closer to their home systems). In order to turn this into a true advantage, ships were given an accuracy rating to represent how effective they were at destroying enemy ships. Newer ships had better accuracy ratings than older ones, so the losing side would have the most modern ships in play.

Later in development, I decided that having interstellar travel take time was not very significant from a gameplay perspective. The accuracy difference barely made a difference at all, since there were so few new ships in comparison to the total number of older ones. Instead, I went with the system that was easiest to program: interstellar travel is instantaneous and only takes place when ships are built. If I needed to, I could justify this with in-game fiction, but Meridian is not much story-based, so I didn't bother.

It wasn't until a few hours ago that I realized that with this simpler system in place, there was no longer any reason to maintain the changing accuracy ratings. Their main influence on the game was to clog up the UI with hard-to-understand percentages. If I just keep accuracy ratings static, the only important information to show in the UI is fleet size. I should be able to really clean things up.

There were a lot of other design changes during development, of course, but these were the most drastic and/or instructive.

Meridian: Coming Soon!

Ambition

2008-12-17T14:48:00.002-05:00

Another Game Design Challenge that I really enjoyed. The requirements stated that it had to be an online game, but I think I might want to build this in board game form.
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Ambition is an online game for 4 players. It mimics the conventions of a physical board game, with a virtual game board, game pieces representing the players, and cards that players can pick up and use.

All players start at the beginning of a path that has 100 steps. The players play in real time, with all players participating in each turn simultaneously. Players may take a maximum of one minute per turn. Gameplay centers around virtual cards. Players start with 3 cards. Each turn consists of choosing a card to play and choosing how to play it, and at the end of each turn, players get a new card at random.

There are three types of cards, each of which can be played one of two ways: either for the Greater Good ("played GG"), or All For Me ("played A4M"). The cards types:

1. Quandary Cards
Players have a 50% chance to pick up this type of card.
- If you play this card GG and ALL other Quandary cards in play this turn are also played GG, then you move forward 5 steps.
- If you play this card GG and ANY other Quandary card is played A4M this turn, then you move backward 2 steps.
- If you play this card A4M and ALL other Quandary cards in play this turn are played GG, then you move forward 10 steps.
- If you play this card A4M and ANY other Quandary card is played A4M this turn, then you move forward 1 step.

2. Help Cards
Players have a 25% chance to pick up this type of card.
- If you play this card GG, then you must choose one OTHER player who then moves forward 10 steps.
- If you play this card A4M, then you move forward 1 step.

3. Hurt Cards
Players have a 25% chance to pick up this type of card.
- If you play this card GG, then you move backward 1 step.
- If you play this card A4M, then you must choose one OTHER player who then moves backward 5 steps.

These cards essentially encode the Prisoner's Dilemma. Rational self-interest always demands that the cards be played A4M, but the best outcome for all is that everyone play them all GG.

In other words, Ambition is about selfishness and sacrifice. It is designed to teach a moral lesson through its game mechanics.

Two more rules enhance this lesson:
- If a player finishes a turn on spaces 1-29, they are automatically moved forward 1 space at the end of the turn. If a player finishes on spaces 60-99, they are automatically moved backward 1 space.
- Lastly, the game supports multiple winners. Any player who finishes within a 75-turn time limit wins the game.

These final rules amplify the fact that winning is nigh impossible through selfishness alone. Also, the open winning condition prevents the game from becoming totally cutthroat at the end.

Critically, Ambition must support an online chat channel during the game. Players must be allowed to discuss and negotiate as they navigate a complex social dilemma.

The numbers used in this design may be changed after playtesting, and the game may be colored and themed in order to make it more appealing.

Some lessons are best imparted through gameplay, and I believe that the lesson presented here (the basis for my personal understanding of morality) is one of them.

Fragility

2008-12-15T22:56:00.003-05:00

Most interesting systems are fragile. I always knew this, but trying to create one has forced me to really learn it.

I'm trying to craft a set of rules for a fairly simple turn-based hex grid game. Each piece can move once a turn. Moving onto another piece (attacking) generates a battle, and one side may retreat from the battle. Pretty easy to follow.

Except that it turns out that I need to get everything juuuust right for it to work strategically. Does an attack count as a move? Once a battle is won, should the winner move onto the space? Should the retreat move backwards or should the retreat movement be at the player's discretion? Further, when attacking confers an advantage, when is it ever advantageous for a player to move a piece to a space adjacent to an enemy piece? Wouldn't both players then just dance around each other?

I've tried to solve this last problem by adding a "boost" mechanic, in which each piece can move twice after a 5-turn cool-down. There are all sorts of other little fixes that I've found necessary. Retreating pieces can retreat into any space surrounding the one right behind them except the one in which the battle took place. Pieces that win a battle can move afterwards, but losing pieces can not. Et cetera.

And while my tone might suggest that I'm frustrated or upset with all this, the truth is that I revel in this sort of puzzle-solving. This is game design, and it suits me.

I'm hoping to have Meridian feature-complete within a week.

Design Notes

2008-11-26T16:38:00.003-05:00

I just posted the "completed" versions of Worrywart and Stressor, and I thought it might be fun to give a look at the brainstorming that produced them. Below are the notes I took as I thought them out. Normally, my notes aren't nearly so coherent, but for whatever reason I was grammaring as best I could when I wrote these.

I should note that these notes lead to incomplete designs. I took these notes while waiting for a delayed flight, and after I thought for a while and came up with the designs that I eventually submitted, I stopped revising the notes and started writing up the actual submission. So if these notes seem to lead somewhere other than where I went, that's expected.

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Insomnia:

- Not dependent on what others do, so this should either be solitaire (i.e. with a finite ending) or a race
- The less sleep you get one night, the more you should get the next (round-to-round beneficial negative feedback loop)
- Insomnia: The longer it takes to go to sleep the harder it is to go to sleep (turn-to-turn harmful positive feedback loop)

Represent "subjects of thought" as cards. You need to replace the bad thoughts (worries) with good thoughts, but the mind tends to wander.

So maybe give cards their value, make certain suits good and certain suits bad. Each turn you trade in a card for a random one. If the total bad-good is lower than a certain threshold (which changes based on last night's sleep), you go to sleep.

Where's the choice? As is, you always trade in your worst card. Obvious Optimal strategy ftl.

How to use the Insomnia aspect of this? It would seem to suggest that the easiest time to go to sleep is the very start, but that's no fun.

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Is there a way to design this more dangerously? Yes. Now find it.

Is there a way we can work with cards as a series of rectangular planes? 4 groups of 13 or 13 groups of 4?

Would need to relate Insomnia to pattern-building or find some spacial aspect. That might be difficult.

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Possibly work with a series of acceptable thoughts that can be ruined by a bad one? Try it:

Red cards are good thoughts, black cards are bad ones. Need to pick up a certain number of consecutive cards that are acceptable. For a black card to be acceptable, you must get rid of a red card of equal or greater value to nullify it (distract yourself).

Maybe you start out with black cards to represent the insomnia, and you pick up random cards as the hours roll by. Gives a good chance to never sleep.

The goal is to play a certain number of rounds without ever having to play a black card.

Again, there's no choice here. Goddamnit.

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Think systems.

We've got a harmful feedback loop already in the form of insomnia. That's the villain.
Now add a beneficial feedback loop to act as the hero's weapon. And then a themed justification.
It would be nice to just include "tiredness" as the opposing force of insomnia, but that really defeats the point.
What about a positive beneficial feedback loop? The shorter the time til sleep, the more likely you are to sleep? That's just inverse effect of insomnia.

Accelerating chaos is a good way of defeating a harmful positive feedback loop. See DotA.
So take more cards each turn? Give lower chances at success, but more opportunities and/or they count for more benefit.

Maybe allow player to pair good cards with bad ones of the same number (new perspective), allowing them to be played as good.
Increases the importance of random cards.

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F**k convention. Let's make it a social storytelling game.

4 players take turns being the protagonist. He's trying to go to sleep, and they narrate his stream of consciousness in turns.
The protagonist is trying to reach a happy plausible conclusion to each line of thought.

The antagonists start the game by taking one turn each to establish a "worry", and give some initial detail to the essence of that worry. Each worry is permanently associated with a certain suit, with the remaining suit being designated the "happy suit" (I suggest hearts).

After the initial worries are set out, the deck is shuffled and cards are flipped from the top one at a time. If the suit of the card corresponds to that of a worry, then the least-recently-speaking antagonist takes a turn addressing that worry. If the suit of the card is the happy suit, then the protagonist takes a turn trying to resolve as many of these worries as is possible.

Each turn consists of adding a thought to the protagonist's stream of consciousness. Each thought may reference one new detail of the protagonist's life. All details immediately become canon. If a player violates the game's canon, the other players should point this out and give a chance for revision.

The protagonist wins when he has brought all worries to some happy conclusion, almost certainly because the right cards came up in the right order. But competition isn't the point here.

Sample playthrough excerpt:

Clubs: Gosh, I don't think I can pay the rent this week. I've only got $404 in the bank!
Diamonds: And without a home or a job I certainly won't be able to impress the girls. Sarah hasn't even looked at me all day!
Spades: And then my only comfort will be the heroin that I've just gotten addicted to!

Club: I shouldn't have bet all my remaining money on McCain winning. The loan sharks will probably be after me soon.

Heart: The heroin probably isn't that much of an issue. It's a fun problem to have, so far,
and there's always the methadone clinic that just opened up down the street in case things get bad.

Club: Then again, the clinic isn't free, and I don't have the $50,000 it takes to get admitted.

Diamond: If only I had a girlfriend to comfort me. I haven't had a chance ever since my friends told all the girls in town that I'm impotent.

Heart: I know! I'll solve my money troubles and my romance issues at once by becoming a male prostitute! This plan is flawless.

Spade: Of course, prostitutes don't have a good record with getting off heroin.

Club: And I need a lot of money up front to pay off those bad McCain bets.

Diamond: And business will be slow until I prove that dastardly rumor wrong.

Heart: At least I have $404 to spend on heroin in the meantime. That should last me for a month thanks to the new discounts.

Worrywart and Stressor

2008-11-26T16:32:00.002-05:00

This week's Game Design Challenge (from GameCareerGuide.com) was to design a card game around the theme of "insomnia". This was tricky. Insomnia generally isn't a choice, so figuring out how to model it while including an interesting choice was difficult. I ended up with two very different designs, both of which are complete games that I'm somewhat proud of, so I figured that I'd show them here as I submitted them. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present Worrywart and Stressor!

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Worrywart

The topic of insomnia is serious, weighty, and grim. This game isn't.

Worrywart is a wacky social game of collaborative storytelling, which employs a deck cards for pacing and structure.

There are four players. Each player is assigned a suit at random. The player who gets Hearts is designated the Protagonist, and the other suits are assigned amongst the Villains.

The worrywart is trying to go to sleep by putting his worries to rest, but his insomnia keeps them in the fore of his mind. Each turn consists of one of the players narrating the worrywart's stream of consciousness, keeping in mind the details of the past. The Villains try to amplify the worrywart's worries, while the Protagonist tries to bring all of these worries to a happy conclusion.

The game starts with each of the Villains introducing some independent Worry that strikes the worrywart while he lies in bed. Each Worry can be as ludicrous or as plebeian as the players like. For example:
"Gosh, I wonder if Sarah from work likes me; we had a bit of an argument today."
"I must've been in the wrong frame of mind thanks to the heroin addiction that I just picked up."
"But not even heroin can comfort me after today's hostile encounter with alien invaders. How am I ever going to convince them not to blow up the planet?"

The deck is then shuffled and placed between the players. The game then proceeds in a series of turns. During each turn, a card is flipped from the top of the deck and discarded. The suit of this flipped card indicates which player is active this turn.

The active player gets to add one small bit of narration to the stream of consciousness. There are three rules that must be followed here:
1) Each turn may only add *one* new factual detail about the worrywart's life.
2) The new narration must be based on the original three Worries introduced at the start of the game.
3) Previous narration is canon, i.e. all details introduced by previous players must be regarded as true.

This creates an interesting dynamic in which the players must combine good facts with bad. A possible scenario, alternating Villain and Protagonist turns:
"Gosh, I wonder if Sarah at work likes me; we had a bit of an argument at work."
"Well, we've always been pretty friendly in the past. It's probably nothing."
"Although I probably shouldn't have made that sexist joke so loudly."
"I guess the joke didn't really matter in the long run, since we've got a hot date set up for tomorrow."
"A pity that I'm gay. I always get the wrong hot dates."
"Wait, silly me! Sarah is a guy! What an unfortunate name he has; I always get confused."

The story will rapidly get crazy as the players try to one-up each other. This is OK.

The game ends when the Protagonist brings all Worries to a happy close, as judged by consensus (it's not really a competitive game), or when the players agree to stop playing or start over.

The use of card suits ensures that the Villains will have three times as many turns as the Protagonist, so winning will be a difficult matter, but insomnia isn't supposed to be easy to beat. The Protagonist's strategy is generally to try to combine the Worries in creative ways so that he or she can deal with them all in one fell swoop. For instance, the Protagonist might try to put his Worries to rest by deciding to take Sarah on a date to an alien methadone clinic. Or something.

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Stressor

This game attempts to abstractly model the individual experience of insomnia. The design is based on three premises:

1) An individual's insomnia is not correlated to any other person's, so the game should be solitaire-type or based on a mutually independent "race" structure of competition. (Stressor uses the latter.)
2) Although sleep should always be difficult, the less sleep a player gets in one night, the easier it should be to get to sleep on the next night, as the insomniac is more tired (a long-term beneficial negative feedback loop).
3) The longer it takes a player to go to sleep on any given night, the harder it becomes to fall asleep, as the insomniac becomes stressed about sleep itself (a short-term harmful positive feedback loop).

The game is played over a series of seven rounds, each consisting of four turns. Each round represents a full night and each turn represents two hours of intended sleep time, from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM.

For 2-6 players.

How to play:

1) Round begins. Shuffle the cards and deal two to each player. Cards represent "subjects of thought" which can either calm your mind or stress you out even further. Hearts card are "good thoughts" and all other suits are worries. The magnitude of effect of each card corresponds to the card's number. Face cards act as tens, and aces count as ones.

2) Turn begins. The first player in the rotation is dealt a new card.

3) The first player chooses whether or not to attempt to go to sleep. To sleep, the player must choose a good thought (a Heart card) to focus on. This card is placed down in front of the player, and another card is dealt to replace it in the player's hand. The player must then play a total number of cards equal to however many cards are in his or her hand at this point, picking up a new replacement card after each one is played.

If, after the requisite number of cards has been played, the sum of the values of the worries is less than or equal to DOUBLE the value of the Heart card that is being focused on, then the player successfully falls asleep. Heart cards that are played after the focused card have a value of zero. The player may abort the sleep attempt after picking up a replacement card. Should the sleep attempt fail or be aborted, the player discards all of the played cards and keeps whatever cards are now in his or her hand.

If the attempt is successful, the player turns in all cards and waits for the next round to begin. The player receives a number of points equal to four minus the number of turns that have been completed. For example, falling asleep on the first turn yields 4 points, falling asleep on the third turn yields 2 points, and players that do not fall asleep during a round receive no points.

4) Repeat steps 2-3 for all other players.

5) Repeat steps 2-4 three more times for a total of four turns per round.

6) Repeat steps 1-5 six times for a total of seven rounds. There is one change to step 1: players that did not fall asleep during the previous round may keep one card of their choice from that previous round in their hand and are only dealt one new card at the start of the new round.

7) The player who has accumulated the most points wins.

Later sleep attempts require more cards to be played, so it will become harder to fall asleep as the hours roll by. Also, players who get no sleep will have an easier time falling sleep on the next night since they can carry a card over. This satisfies the original premises.

The key moment of gameplay takes place in step 3. If the player chooses to attempt to fall asleep, he or she only has complete information about the Heart card that forms the foundation of the attempt. Since cards get replaced as they are played, fully half of the "worry" cards that will be available are not known when the choice is made. And although it is generally easier to fall asleep earlier, there is always a chance that a better Heart card will be dealt to the player later on, and a failure is generally devastating, so waiting until a later turn may be the best option. These dynamics should provide a satisfying, interesting choice as the core mechanic.

E's First Biped

2008-11-21T15:20:00.006-05:00

Below are some renders of the nearly-finished cyberninja character I mentioned in the previous post. I'm pretty satisfied with how he looks, but I'm currently discovering that getting the animations to look right is more difficult than the modeling ever was.

If this turns out well and I can get it imported and working inside a 3D game, I might finally build a game that I've been kicking around inside my brain for a while. It's essentially Armored Core (though this idea came to me before I'd played AC) but with more regular PC FPS controls instead of the slower, heavier mecha feel that AC uses. I had envisioned it allowing the player to base their character on a light, medium, or heavy frame; the biped I'm making now was my conception of the light and agile fighter.

This guy is meant to be speeding around the arena and jumping off walls. The medium fighter would be a more classic FPS feel, more Master Chief than ninja. The heavy frame would hearken more towards the mechs that I usually disparage, but would still lack any autotargeting and would move fluidly. I might make the other characters this spring or summer.

Of course, there's a lot that I have to learn before I can make a game that even approaches the concept I'm babbling about. For the time being, I'm just going to focus on finishing the 3D Modeling course strong. After I've rigged my biped, the last step is to produce a short animation. I'll be sure to post that when the time comes.

First Foray Into 3D Art

2008-11-18T17:04:00.007-05:00

One of the classes that have been keeping me so busy this term is CS22: 3D Digital Modeling. It's part of the Digital Arts curriculum at Dartmouth, and it provides just the sort of quick overview of modeling that I could put to good use in my games (once I get serious 3D stuff up and running this winter).

The class covers three assignments. First, we modeled, colored, and rendered a room full of stuff. Second, we modeled and rigged a spider using subdivision surfaces. Currently, we're working on a biped that we'll model, texture, rig, and animate. It's this last project that I'm hoping to use in a game. I've elected to make a lightly armored cyberninja character. If it turns out well, I plan on making a medium armor and heavy armor character to go along with them for inclusion in a game of the Armored Core mold. More info on that later.

So far, I've confirmed that I'm not an artist. I can't visualize my goal and then make it happen. I'm pretty good with software tools, however, so I can produce some pretty nice-looking models if I use tutorials or reference images.

Below are some of the renders from my room. The idea was that it would be the ultimate sunroom, and the curved roof would reflect the sun such that the rest of the room was brightly and naturally lit. Unfortunately, the lighting package mental ray bugged out on me at the last second, so these renders are much less impressive than they could have been. Further, I screwed up the image plane for the outside view, which becomes painfully obvious with the mirror. Lastly, I should note that one entire wall is one big mirror (next to the wine table). You can see where it hits the ground in the lower right corner of the first image.

Angles of Art

2008-10-22T23:27:00.004-04:00

The Games-as-Art question has intrigued me for a while. In fact, the first two posts on this blog deal with the subject. I still think that games can do as much and more than any other medium, but my thoughts on specifically how they can accomplish this has evolved somewhat. While I've always been most enthusiastic about the narrative-driven shared authorship model (see Deus Ex), I think that there are some other, artistically orthogonal ways of getting an artistic impact in games.

The shared authorship model depends on story and player choice. That faced some opposition from Roger Ebert who, among others, claimed that interactivity destroyed authorial control, but as long as the author can control the outcomes of choices, that seems like a weak rebuttal.

But another, wholly different artistic angle is the "model a system" approach. The theory here is that games are great at teaching the intricacies of complex systems, and this can be applied artistically. SimCity imparts understanding about the dynamics of urban development, The Marriage shows the author' conception of how a marriage functions, and Civilization teaches us about abstract things like territory and projection of force and long-term planning.

And games can also take the tack of trying to elicit an emotional state in the player. This is most commonly seen in rhythm games like Rez, DDR, or Everyday Shooter, but also applies to nonmusical games like flOw and Endless Ocean. Each game puts the player in an emotional state of groove, flow, or relaxation. I know that when I get into the Rock Band drums for a while, I tend to zone in and rock out.

Now, whether these last two angles really qualify as art might be a bit harder to defend than the shared authorship approach. When we model other systems, such as modeling the earth's climate for scientific purposes, we never claim that it's art, even though we can fiddle with the variables and see what happens. But as long as the system model is being created with artistic purpose in mind, I think that it wins the definitional battle intuitively. I think it's also fairly clear how something that puts you in an altered emtional state can be art (isn't that what music, graphical art, movies, and all other art at its best attempts to do?), but such an admission also opens the doors to some intriguing arguments that stuff like food or drugs or insults are artistic. After all, they all induce a new emotional state.

Other angles of art could include the interactive storytelling approach championed by Chris Crawford, in which we take the shared authorship model and turn the player control dial up to 11, or the linear storytelling model, in the style of Half Life 2 or Call of Duty 4.

I suspect that most games go for the systems-modeling approach, but they aren't modeling anything that currently exists. A typical RTS, for example, presents a system of rules that can perhaps offer us new experiences and teach us about human behavior, but it isn't attempting to model real things, unless you consider an RTS to be a legitimate simulation of strategic combat. Such a game is about abstract things like resource management and territorial control.

There's no conclusion that I'm working towards here; I'm just trying to clarify the current state of my thoughts on the subject. Hopefully this will inform my next game project after Meridian is finished.

Promoting Asp

2008-10-16T23:06:00.004-04:00

Due to an unusually high courseload, I've been pretty much unable to play, make, or (as is evident) write about games to any respectable degree. I have, however, had the time to pass around the completed version of Asp.

I thought that Asp was pretty fun, a little bit original, and otherwise unfortunately unremarkable. Still, I figured that submitting the game to reddit had no downside, so I sent it in expecting to get a few pageviews and, if I was lucky, some interesting comments.

To my surprise, they loved Asp. That, or they loved the fact that I was debuting it for free on reddit. Either way, the submission got over 360 votes and, even better, over a hundred comments. Some of these were about stuff unrelated to the game or troubleshooting technical problems, but I also got a lot of good constructive and evaluative commentary. It was a moment of triumph.

I also submitted Asp to playthisthing.com, a review-a-day site that focuses on any and all non-mainstream games. It was an offshoot of Greg Costikyan's Manifesto Games, which I had followed briefly after it opened up. The site has a large backlog of suggestions, and I again didn't expect much.

But then Greg Costikyan himself reviewed the game! His opinion seemed to be very similar to mine: the game is obviously a student project that just tries to do one new thing decently. But he didn't hate it, and he even used the phrase "worth playing"! I have low standards. Triumph!

So my thinking on this subject, as I related to my friends afterwards: If I can get this sort of attention for a pretty small and not especially inspiring game, what might I be able to accomplish if I make something I'm truly proud of?

I have the option now of taking the good suggestions I got and making a major revision of Asp, adding content along the way. Asp 1.1 might be an objectively, unambiguously good game, but I doubt I'll take that path. I'd rather keep moving and picking up skills in more varied projects.

Meridian

2008-09-29T19:06:00.004-04:00

It's about time I start writing about my latest project. I had intended to get started with 3D stuff, but the idea behind Meridian came to me just a few days before returning to school, and I was excited enough about it that I couldn't wait.

Meridian is a turn-based strategy game with a space combat theme (obviously, my favorite setting). The majority of the game takes place moving fleets around on a hex grid board. When two fleets meet they trade attacks until one side is destroyed or decides to retreat (which salvages almost all ships). Larger fleets will typically have the offensive advantage, but small fleets can conduct hit-and-run attacks.

Each player also has a set of solar systems. Conquering the other player's is the game's ultimate goal. Each system produces a certain number of ships every 5 turns. However, players may sacrifice 1 ship-per-turn in exchange for a large one-time bonus of ships. Therefore a player can get the advantage in the early game but be repulsed by a swarm of new ships. The natural response might be to create an equal number of ships, but this would cede the hard-earned production advantage.

Meridian is being programmed in C# using XNA. I've found it to be quite clean, and I'm loving Visual Studio. I don't much miss Java. I'm a bit more than halfway done right now. Fleets can move around and attack each other, and most of the graphics stuff is where it needs to be (though some of the art will be getting an update). Interstellar travel and capuring of solar systems has yet to be added, and getting a decent AI running may be a challenge.

Further updates to come...

Doublecross

2008-09-23T17:36:00.004-04:00

I'm pleased to announce my latest game to the throngs that have undoubtedly been waiting for it. Doublecross is a card game that's designed to set up a constantly uneven battlefield between the players. The game rules set up a web of relationships that attempts to keep everyone scheming and negotiating.

Each player starts with all the cards of one suit. Each card is worth a value equal to its number (face cards are 10) that can be played, once a turn, against any one other player. The goal of the game is to have the fewest points played against you after all cards have been played.

It gets interesting with the addition of a card-trading phase between each turn. Players can exchange one card a turn, and playing certain suits against certain players counts double against them. The game is set up such that the one player who has the most valuable cards (to you) can't trade with you; you have to get his cards through the other players. The result is that every player is constantly balancing his relationships with two others.

I only got the chance to playtest Doublecross once, with a group of friends at my summer camp. A single round of the game took the better part of an hour to play, surprisingly. That's mostly because there was plenty of scheming, as I had hoped. After about 8 cards had been played per player, the two sides were mostly set in stone and it was simply a matter of playing the rest of the cards. Reviews from the players were divided. Two of us loved it and two of us were ambivalent. One of them stated that I had obviously designed the game for myself, since I so love deceit in games (see Balderdash and the diplomacy in Risk). It's true, and I take that comment for a good sign.

I'd love to playtest Doublecross some more and continue to iterate, but it's proven difficult to get together three other people to play a card game that none of them know. I'll work on it.

Asp Evaluation

2008-09-13T15:40:00.004-04:00

Asp offers a new type of tactical core gameplay. It's easy to use, well-constructed, and pretty enough. Now for the negatives.

The art is primitive and shows it.

The tutorial is nice, but I'm ashamed that such a small game requires one.

The randomized skirmishes are usually imbalanced, since the initial placement of forces is random and it's difficult to account for RPS-style strengths and weaknesses of each side.

There's no sound.

And worst of all:

The interest curve is messed up. Action is highest on the first turn, then rapidly decreases. By the end, the player might spend half a minute or more watching his ships turn in circles trying to kill that one last enemy ship.

Asp Design Retrospective

2008-09-12T22:00:00.005-04:00

Thanks to a summer spent at a wilderness camp with little access to computers, this post is coming quite late. I'll recall the best I can.

The core gameplay from Asp had previously been tested in the game's older prototype, Squadron. This prototype had been quite popular in the ol' high school computer lab, so I was excited to finally flesh it out.

I knew that it would be important to offer very different types of ships in order to give the game tactical depth. Fighters formed a core of the fleet, a base by which to compare other ships. Bombers were an obvious choice; they would be weak, but extremely powerful. Small, fast ships (which were referred to as "scramblers" inside the code) seemed like a cool idea, and they turned out to be useful in-game for their mobility.

As I played the earliest builds of the game, the general tactical approach that I could offer started to emerge. Distract and attack is the basic formula. The Carapace creatures (internally called "Resilient" ships) were included almost entirely to facilitate this strategy.

I made balancing the game easier for me by making the two sides' ships unequal. Since I didn't have to rely on an AI to be as good as a player, I could set up the enemy to whatever strength or configuration was fun. The human forces are thus more powerful offensively, but the AI dictates that they aggressively pursue closer targets and ignore the ones that might be doing more damage.

Since the AI's behavior is mostly dictated by the initial proximity of the player's ships, I discovered that the layout of the levels (i.e. which squads started where) was exceptionally important. A level could change from trivial to impossible just from the movement of a squad's starting position by a hundred pixels. This turned out to be a blessing; the campaign levels could be adjusted such that a smaller player force could destroy increasingly large enemy fleets.

When setting up the campaign missions, I did a lot of testing on my own. I developed a series of requirements that I employed before I even considered using a level: Could I win without giving any orders? Could I win by ordering all of my units to attack the enemy at one spot? Could I win by having each of my squads attack each of theirs one-on-one? Is it possible to win by using a planned, thoughtful strategy? While these tests ensured that the levels were winnable and not trivial, I worried that they only offered one solution (the one that I tested).

This worry abated when I started playtesting and found players discovering wholly new solutions to the missions I had set out. However, some players had a tendency to create elaborate 40-waypoint formations each turn that inevitably backfired, and all complained of performance and UI issues (e.g. not being able to right click to select a squad).

Aside from the usual minor changes, I made one major revision to the otherwise finished game in which I fixed the performance problems (see the Engineering Overview), added new UI elements, and replaced a terribly cluttered Help screen (see below) with an interactive tutorial that discussed basic tactics. I'm satisfied with the final result, but that's not to say that I don't see any flaws. I'll discuss those next.

Asp Art Retrospective

2008-06-10T03:02:00.005-04:00

Part 1

I fancy myself a programmer and designer; my skills in art are minimal. But it isn't really something that a game developer can ignore, so I'll review the art work I did with Asp as well as the engineering and the design.

All of the graphics in Asp benefited greatly from certain improvements in the code. Since finishing M.E.H., my last project, I've finally put in the work to implement true rotation, anti-aliasing, transparency, and the other basic graphics concepts that are necessary to make any art look decent.

All of the sprites and all of the basic menu screens are the result of me fooling around with the GNU Image Manipulation Program, and it shows. I tried to give all of the sprites some character and texture, but they are ultimately fairly primitive. Also, since I decided to use spherical collision detection (it's easy), I tried to keep all of the sprites to a roughly circular shape. While the resulting graphics are serviceable, I wouldn't mind having a more talented person replace them.

I decided from the start that I wanted to use a basic black-and-purple scheme in all of the menu and "official" art (logo, title, etc.). I've always liked this combination in other contexts, and I think it worked well here. However, I needed a palette of at least three colors for the battle scenes (for friendlies, enemies, and background), so I went with green for human ships and red for the aliens since these colors seemed appropriate and easy to differentiate. The unfortunate result is a revolting red-green-purple-black palette in total. I'd be lucky if people just gloss over this facet of the game. Certainly, however, nobody will find the battle art to be especially appealing.

One part of the game art that I really like so far is the only part that's not yet finished: the story illustrations. And, naturally, this favorite art is the stuff that I didn't make (partially). I asked Olex, the talented artist in my group of friends, to do some sketches that would function as the expository cut-scenes of my game. Luckily for me, he agreed.

After Olex made some concept sketches that I liked, I gave him the descriptions for the action in each scene and then gave him free reign. So, for example, the second scene's notes were "An Asp scouting party (mostly Asp Scouts, some Workers) finds a human scouting party in the distance." Olex took that and drew up this:

My part, then, was to add effects, touch it up, and add some dialogue (radio and hive-mind chatter). This is the final version of that scene:

I'm pretty satisfied with this sort of illustrating, and I'm looking forward to finishing them, plugging them in, and finally calling Asp complete.

Asp Engineering Retrospective

2008-05-31T22:01:00.002-04:00

Asp is mostly finished by now. All that's left is to finish and include the illustrations that form the storyline of the game. Download the current story-less version here.

This game is certainly my most polished and well-built yet, but that isn't to say that I didn't make some big mistakes during the programming process. So here's a retrospective on what went wrong and what went right.

Technical Design

Having already built Squadron, I had a decent idea of how Asp would be structured. One of the first things I did when starting to build the game was draw up a list of all the classes I would need. I tried to make good use of inheritance so that I'd end up with clean and concise code.

I did make a few mistakes in this early process. For example, I hadn't anticipated needing separate classes for player squads and enemy squads; adding these two classes unfortunately involved a lot of copy+pasting. Similarly, I didn't include a PlayerShip or EnemyShip class, so each of the individual ship classes (e.g. pFighterShip) included very similar code. Still, if the only big issue introduced by these mistakes was repetitious code, I can't complain too much.

I also used some tools of Java that I hadn't needed before when I was just slapping code together until something worked. Abstract classes, enums, generics, and other features were extremely useful in architecting the game.

Programming Process

Asp was built in Ubuntu Linux. My tools were gedit and javac. I really should have used a more powerful environment, such as Eclipse, but I was comfortable with formatting my own code, and I generally kept things clean. My only big mistake in writing the code was putting so much in a single main file. The classes were all managable and orderly, but the main loop and initialization code ended up taking almost 2000 lines of code in one file.

I started Asp during a one-week spring break, and I finished the basic systems by the end of that week, i.e. ships were flying around and shooting each other on my commands.

With most games I've stopped there, but I really wanted to make Asp more complete and friendly. In between college classes this past term, I've expanded Asp to include a lot of small polishes (minor ship movements, particle systems, etc.) and a few more important elements (a menu system, a tutorial, a campaign, randomized skirmishes). Adding these elements took a lot of time, to my surprise, but I'm satisfied with the final product.

Hurdles

I occasionally hit a few problems that couldn't be fixed right away. Initial playtesting required that I make some UI changes, and I had some strange issues with loss of color depth in Ubuntu (the latter disappeared with Ubuntu 8.04, after I had given up on it).

By far my most problematic and difficult issue, however, was performance. Even when I commented out all of my main loop code excepting the drawing of my background, the game would crawl at about 20 FPS, barely playable. On my Windows machine, it would sometimes drop to as low as 6 FPS.

I did a lot of research on Java 2D graphics and performance, and I learned quite a lot. I was introduced to VolatileImages, managed images, the limitations and advantages of different Java graphics methods, and more. It's unfortunate, in a way, that I had to learn all of this since Java works so hard to keep the programmer from having to be concerned with it.

After much experimentation and asking for help on the Sun Java forums and Javagaming.org, I was able to get marginally closer to my goal. The problem was certainly that some images weren't being hardware accelerated for some reason. At first I thought that the issue involved some images (like the background) being too large, but other large images, as well as many small images, were still fast.

I continued experimenting until I eventually discovered that, while I had correctly created my images such that they should be accelerated, I had overwritten them when I loaded my images from files. The unaccelerated background images had not been touched since then, so they slowed down the rest of the game. The issue was fixed and the game runs comfortably at over 60 frames per second.

Lessons Learned

Design for your specific game, but also design with flexibility in mind.

Keep code files compartmentalized and of managable size.

Use powerful tools when available and useful.

Fix major issues when they first appear; waiting will just make it harder to deal with them.

Encoding Ideology

2008-05-21T14:24:00.003-04:00

We finally got to talk about games in my Intro to New Media class, and as expected, it turned out to be interesting and enlightening. We began by reading two academic papers on games, both of which used Civilization 2 (a game that's closer to perfect than any other I've encountered) as an example.

One of them ("You Have Unleashed a Horde of Barbarians!" by Christopher Douglas) made the case that games are "existentially soothing", since unlike the real world, the player of a game can be sure that the game world was intelligently designed with a certain purpose and meaning for him. There is order. Douglas then goes on to argue, on a somewhat different tack, that Civ2 supports an ideology of American imperialist expansion, taming the natives of an uninhabited-yet-inhabited land. The "goody huts" in Civ2, he claims, are represented as people who exist only to be exploited or destroyed (as "barbarians").

I have a number of problems with his specific claims here, but the paper got me thinking about the interplay of game mechanics and narrative. It would be wholly possible to replace the goody huts with, say, goody caves, which might have bandits inside (to replace barbarians) or treasure or scrolls of ancient wisdom or whatever, thereby changing the narrative without changing the game mechanics. It would be impossible, however, to claim through narrative that the Sioux civilization in the game is fundamentally different and should be treated as an enemy; since the mechanics treat all civilizations alike and the Sioux are functionally equivalent to the English, this story wouldn't be consistent.

Narrative thus acts as a sort of mask over the game mechanics. You can swap out certain elements of the narrative freely, and these elements can be important in the end product, but they're ultimately limited by the mechanics. The tricky part is maintaining that consistency. I've written before about Jonathan Blow's critique of Bioshock; essentially, the complaint was that Bioshock's gameplay and its story don't match very well. What the mechanics actually "teach" the player is to shoot everything that moves from as far away as possible. On the other hand, I'd argue that Bioshock's climactic cutscene involves a perfectly consistent interplay of mechanics and message.

Blow also made the argument that games provide a world with an explicitly defined meaning of life. The world has a goal, the player has a purpose, and everything in the world is meaningful only with respect to that purpose. It actually sounds quite similar to "encoding ideology" in gameplay.

So while I disagree with Douglas's argument that Civ2's gameplay has encoded the ideology of imperialism, I think that it's fair to say that Civ2 encodes some sort of ideology. Ultimately, it's a game about expansion, growth, and domination of other civilizations. Whether or not that influences the player, displays the ideology in an artistic way, or has no effect whatsoever is a different question.

Thoughts?

Commentary: Shadow of the Colossus

2008-05-13T14:39:00.005-04:00

I picked up SotC after hearing about how it was yet another underappreciated masterpiece. Not quite as underappreciated as Beyond Good & Evil, Ico, or Psychonaughts, but a fantastic game that everyone ought to play. So I played it.

In truth, I was pretty ambivalent at first. I was interested enough to play through the first few colossi, but I didn't have the interest to continue. The battles were well-designed and all, but... maybe action-adventure just isn't my thing.

Then I played it once with my roommate and his friends standing behind me calling out advice, and it was ridiculously fun. They helped with the puzzles, while I did my best to pull off the requisite acrobatics and attacks. The game proceeded more quickly and we burned through another two colossi.

I find that I tend to enjoy more the action side of the game. Swinging around a colossus, jumping from a giant head to a giant shoulder, is thrilling. And the puzzles were well designed. I think that there was a bit of clash when they come together, though.

In Portal, the player generally has infinite time to figure out how to proceed. Experimentation is encouraged, and the player can try out whatever and still feel creative when the puzzle is solved. SotC introduces a major danger factor. You can't sit and try to analyze the colossus for weaknesses because if you stop running, you'll die. This might be solved by adding more "safe spots" (or making dodging easier) and making the camera more friendly (keeping greater distance from the player and controlling the angle to include the player when focusing on the colossus). I doubt that you'd lose the thrill of danger, either; there's still a gigantic furry thing trying to kill you.

The best aspect of the game design was centered on the controller. Clinging to the controller corresponded to clinging to a colossus, pushing and stabbing the attack button corresponded to pulling back your sword and stabbing enemies, etc. Haptic feedback was used for heartbeats, charging your sword, and other subtle but inspiring effects.

I had some trouble with the narrative. Others have commented that the colossi are sympathetic characters much of the time, but nothing was really done with this; it never factored into the story. Jonathan Blow talks about finding elements like this and incorporating it into the story, resulting in masterpieces like the Weighted Companion Cube. SotC left this out. And while the game nailed the feeling and flow of a grand tragedy, it might have overdone the ambiguity. It's a tale that would do well to have morally charged content, but our only clues to what is right or wrong is what looks good or looks evil (and as Ico taught us, horns aren't necessarily a bad thing).

Except Agro. That was done well, and deserves credit for subtlety of execution.

Commentary: Interactive Storytelling by Andrew Glassner

2008-05-08T01:07:00.001-04:00

It turns out that Dartmouth has an Interactive Storytelling course, which is awesome. It also turns out that I'm not allowed to take it. Which is something less than awesome. But the professor is quite nice and allowed me to borrow the class textbooks. I already talked about the first, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, and it's high time I bit into the other, much thicker book.

Andrew Glassner's Interactive Storytelling is straightforward and thorough. The book is meaty and nutritious for game designers, while Crawford served a more exotic dish. Glassner divides the book into the Story section, the Game section, and the Merging section. Each gives an overview of all the fundamentals that Glassner can come up with.

The Story third of the book reviews common plot structures and features of stories (since time immemorial), and it includes some basic helpful hints. Avoid direct on-the-nose dialogue. Villains must feel internally justified. Characters should have interesting internal lives as well as external ones. It's a lot of bread-and-butter advice of the sort that would be most useful to someone coming from a more technical background.

The Game section is easily the weakest. Glassner spends most of it listing the different ways in which games can be classified. While constructing a vocabulary for the medium is important (and even inspired a few earlier blog posts), this sort of listing didn't really build to anything. Glassner never applies his classifications. We're left to wait for Raph Koster's game grammar for that, I suppose. But this section did include a few interesting ideas, such as a few thought experiments borrowed from game theory and an introduction of the Go terms sente and gote.

The section discussing the merging of games and stories is certainly the heart of the book, and most of the interesting analysis shows up here. After a brief comparison of the forms (identifying several polarities), Glassner entertains the idea that perhaps it's impossible to have a game and a story work synergistically. He makes a good case that it can't be done. In fact, he makes such a good case that one starts to reconsider the whole book with skepticism.

But Glassner is willing to offer enough interesting ideas in the rest of the book that the reader's enthusiasm (if not his confidence) is restored. After discussing and identifying several options (multiple-choice dialogue, hypertext fiction) and making some critical observations (loss of control always breaks immersion, "believable" is more important than "realistic"), Glassner concludes by listing a set of hypothetical interactive story "experiments". They're all quite intriguing, and they leave me with some hope that a merger of these media can be accomplished.

My one gripe with Glassner's approach to uniting stories and games is that he seems to require the resulting story to be entertaining to watch. Again and again he makes the (correct) claim that "people are bad actors." But we aren't asking players to act for the benefit of an audience. All we're asking is that they experience the story firsthand.

Call of Duty 4, as the highly-regarded game critic Ben Croshaw pointed out, has a run-of-the-mill, modern conflict grab-bag story. Some Arabs here, some Russians there, throw in a nuke or two and ship the game. But the focus on immersion and the first-person experience made the game ridiculously fun and, more importantly, genuinely moving. It's that sort of focus on the player experience that will establish games as an art.

A Gamer's Duty

2008-04-30T10:26:00.000-04:00

Over the past few weeks, I've primarily been playing Rock Band and SSBB, and I am ashamed. A while ago I drew up a list of all the games that I felt like I ought to play. These are the games that everyone agrees is underrated or overlooked: Psychonaughts, Beyond Good & Evil, and Ico for example. The immediate appeal of another Brawl has kept me from expanding my gaming horizons.

But today I finally got some discipline and loaded up Shadow of the Colossus. I rode out on my horse, took down a giant, and turned off the console. I had fun, but not enough fun to keep me playing. The puzzle design is great, but maybe this game isn't for me?

I had a similar experience with Psychonaughts. I appreciated it, but couldn't play it for long. It never drew me in. I felt like I was a spectator of the game, watching the wonderful levels play out while trying to clear out the boring platforming in my way.

I worry about this; how can I not love the games that everyone agrees are works of genius? I suspect and hope that it's a matter of genre. I've never been a huge fan of platformers or third person action-adventure games. I'm a game design tourist, showing up to appreciate and understand the elements behind the game, even though I don't stay to play 'til the end.

As long as I'm learning, it's worth it, of course, and playing these games is not a significant sacrifice. I just bought Ico and Katamari Damacy. Down the hatch!

Good to Great

2008-04-22T14:44:00.002-04:00

So Asp still isn't complete. I've been working on it pretty regularly, too. I wrote the basic underlying system in one marathon week, so I had assumed that it wouldn't take much longer to finish it. What I'm discovering is that moving from good to great (or in my case, bad to competent) can be a lot more complex.

This stage of "polish" is often cited as the most important part of game development, and there are plenty of examples of the best games taking their time on it. Valve has spoken about how Half Life was started from scratch mid-development (so that Half Life is arguably the real Half Life 2) so that they could get it right. Blizzard is famous for taking as much time as they need to get a game right.

With Asp, I was re-coding an older, flawed game, Valve-style. I was hoping, then, that everything would fall nicely into place. But what was missing in the older version was all of this polish. Re-implementing the basic systems was, as expected, easy. But adding a menu system, improving the GUI, making the different game modes, proper balancing, and a whole load of little features that give the game its color and proper functionality have become the main challenge of making this game.

I'm hoping that if I don't skimp on the polish, I'll end up with a competent game. Maybe even good. And maybe, if I dare suggest, great.

Game Personality

2008-04-15T13:06:00.002-04:00

I was reading through some of Tom Chick's old :60 Reviews, and I came across this one on Supreme Commander. As a previous post has made clear, I adore the game, but one critical line from the review struck me deeply: "Why... is there no personality here? This is as aggressively bland a game as you’ll ever play."

SupCom brought the RTS genre back to strategy for me. After games like C&C and Warcraft 3 that rewarded micromanagement more than anything else, SupCom's emphasis on high-level strategy was a breath of fresh air. Epic battles of high strategy: this was what I had signed up for.

But Chick is right in calling the game out on its lack of personality. As pretty much every review acknowledged, all three factions play almost exactly the same. The powerful "experimental" units differ somewhat, but generally, the only distinguishing factor is the art. It's great art, too, but without corresponding differences in gameplay potential, it almost feels deceptive.

The problems extend beyond just this lack of distinction. The entire game is about fighting robots, in an environment in which resources are as plentiful as you can gather them. The result is that, even in the game world, the battles are just high-tech games. Nothing ever seems to be at stake. Even the original Command and Conquer made an effort to put you in character and give you reason to care about the outcome of the battles. The campaign stories in SupCom try to pull this off, and they give fine justifications for why each side is fighting, but you can never see (or even imagine) the effect of any given battle. Two robots fight until one dies... Why do we care? Where's the ultimate human element?

As I write this, my criticisms seem a little unfair. It's a high burden that I'm demanding. But perhaps that's the difference between a good, well-crafted game and a great masterpiece. Or maybe this aspect of being sucked in to a level of deep involvement in the game world is just another facet of the game to be judged, separate from gameplay or aesthetics. I'm not sure. But Chick hit a nerve; something is missing in SupCom, and I acutely feel its absence.

Taking Immersion All The Way

2008-04-08T18:41:00.004-04:00

When I was in the 8th grade, I had to present an "invention" as part of a BS homework project. Mine, naturally, had to do with games. I drew a sketch of VR goggles, an omnidirectional treadmill, and sensor-laden gloves and called it a next-next-gen console. I was pretty sure that I was pulling it all out of my ass, but it turns out to be surprisingly feasible, if not cost effective or satisfying in implementation.

Are we moving towards this sort of total immersion? Is the Holodeck our ultimate destination? The popularity of the Wii, the availability of affordable VR technology, and the ever-increasing realism of game graphics suggests so. And most gamers can't wait.

But this stuff has a way of being a lot lamer than we imagine it. Personally, the Wii controls were a letdown. I do like the final product, but the sensing would require mind-reading to be accurate enough to satisfy me. And earlier attempts (read: Virtual Boy, every other early VR system) were generally awful.

Plus, I worry that we misunderstand a lot of the fun in games. It's not all about realism. I play Wii Sports sometimes when a tennis court is within a short walk. I play Rock Band even though I have no interest in learning to play drums. And I really don't think that Call of Duty 4 needed to be any more intense than it was (in 20 years this will be embarrassing to read, I'm sure).

Total I/O immersion will probably be a ton of fun, but I find myself doubting that it can make everything better. Maybe the gamepad really is the best way to experience Super Smash Bros., or Halo 3, or Madden, eh?

A Theory of Un-fun

2008-03-27T14:38:00.002-04:00

I might be willing to accept that all good media are entertaining, if we define "entertaining" to mean that the audience stays interested. But games have historically gathered around the more specific feeling of "fun". Fun implies something distinctly flighty and feel-good. And I think that games' focus on fun has become a limitation.

Warren Spector wrote a fantastic Escapist article about moving beyond fun. He gives a few good examples of other media objects that are distinctly not fun. My examples would be the movie American History X and the YTMND presentation "The Unfunny Truth about Scientology". They're tough to watch, but you don't want to look away.

Games are starting to get there. Bioshock's climactic moment, in which the main character finally confronts Andrew Ryan, is entertaining, but not fun. To give a more interactive example, Mass Effect includes some truly wrenching choices. They're no fun to make, but they're moving.

If games are art, they ought to be able to move beyond fun, and while we're starting to get small examples of this, no game has really embraced it. Mass Effect is still primarily an awesome action RPG. Bioshock is a badass shooter first, Objectivist critique second. I'm waiting for a AAA game that will be unabashedly un-fun. Maybe then the medium can grow up.

The Line Between Toy and Game

2008-03-25T14:14:00.002-04:00

I've written before about the difference between games and puzzles, and I'd like to make comments on another of Greg Costikyan's distinctions. A game has a goal, while a toy does not. Toys rapidly get boring until you eventually invent a game. SimCity is a toy, but it's easy to add a goal and make a game of it (e.g. build the biggest metropolis).

Video games justify themselves as games by giving the player an explicit goal. Kill all the bad guys. Capture the flag. Get the most points. Put the ball in the goal.

But it seems to me like there's no way to enforce these goals. "Winning" is ultimately decided by the consensus of the players. If the players all decide that the winner is whoever has the biggest negative score, who's to stop them? When playing Super Smash Bros. on stock mode, the game proclaims that whoever survives to the end is the winner, but my friends and I often decide that the winner is whoever had the most kills.

So are all games toys? If I come up with a definitive answer, I'll post again.

Squadron, Fleet Command, and Asp

2008-03-20T21:20:00.005-04:00

I feel a bit bad about not posting frequently enough, but I figure I can justify it since I've been spending my time making a game. This is my first game project of the year, but it's mostly building on older ideas.

I like "high strategy", whatever that means. Micromanagement is icky. So I found myself fascinated by indirect control. Since I'm a fan of space combat (see my older game, M.E.H.), I experimented with squadrons of spaceships (think "Red 2, reporting in!").

I put together a little demo during summer 2006 in which a somewhat chaotic group of ships would follow the mouse cursor and shoot any targets in their line of sight. You could only control the ships by giving them a direction; they all did their own individual things. I called the demo Squadron, shared it with the TJGames.org community, and forgot about it.

Squadron was still pretty micromanagement-heavy, so when it was reincarnated in 2007. it was paired with an idea for deterministic battles: you'd give the army its orders, then just watch the battle play out. If you lost, you could issue new orders. This concept was named Fleet Command, and I did a lot of ambitious design before I actually started programming.

The realities of programming and playing changed the game a lot. The orders (in the form of waypoints that your squadrons would follow) were open to editing every 10 seconds. This way, you were still architecting neat maneuvers while continuing to interact with the evolving battle.

Fleet Command was pretty good (as judged by the number of people playing it during CS class), but it was extremely ugly under the hood, and finishing it would be a pain. When I finally decided to finish the project about a month ago, I resolved to start over entirely with good design and a totally unrelated but cool new name: Asp.

Asp has already progressed past Fleet Command, and it looks better graphically and in the code. Adding proper menus and structure shouldn't be a problem. I originally envisioned Fleet Command as having a fleet-purchasing customization element, 4 wholly unique factions (each with a full campaign story), and a bunch of other features. That's been reduced to one playable faction, one enemy faction, and one campaign. If I'm sufficiently intrigued, I might go back and add the other features later, but for now I'm just focused on getting a release candidate together.

Expect Asp in the next few weeks.

The Decline of the PC

2008-03-15T14:50:00.002-04:00

I'm a PC gamer. I insist that this is true despite owning and using a Wii, Xbox 360, and Nintendo DS.

I'm mostly a PC gamer because I grew up on PC games. I never owned a NES, my Genesis broke fairly quickly, and I skipped the PS1/N64 generation. Meanwhile, my mom (a teacher) bought me plenty of educational games while my brother smuggled me the good stuff (Command and Conquer, Starcraft, Civilization 2). I was absolutely at home with installing, configuring, tweaking, and playing on the PC.

And for a long time there were legitimately good reasons to focus one's energies on the PC. Multiplayer gaming, modding, better graphics, and mouse control were enough to convince me that the PC was where it was at.

But despite my history with the PC and ensuing fondness for the platform, I've got to acknowledge that consoles have caught up. PCs might offer more customizability, but they break much more often. Mods and multiplayer are available on the console, and in a more centralized and easy-to-use format. PCs can still offer better graphics, but only at an exorbitant price.

Penny Arcade recently wrote about this. It's getting very difficult for us PC gamers to maintain that our platform really is the objective best, and gamers who care about playing good games above all else are going to end up buying and playing consoles.

Aside from the upsetting experience of being on the losing side of a fanboy war, I don't think that the loss of the PC's supremacy is an especially bad thing. The only danger comes from the possibility of losing good games in the transition. RTS games are more suited to a mouse-based control scheme. C&C3 tried to break from this, but could Supreme Commander switch in the same way? And if not, does that mean that nobody will be willing to make games that deviate from established console control schemes? And if future console generations take the Wii route and don't much upgrade the hardware, will game technology stall?

I accept that consoles are going to continue to encroach on the PC's old territory, but as long as it's still financially viable, and as long as developers continue to release AAA games on the PC, I'll stick with the old platform, if only so that I can use a mouse and justify my SLI rig.

Who Is The Player?

2008-02-25T11:54:00.004-05:00

Some meandering speculation:

I've written before about the conflict between "role-playing" and "powergaming", and I cast this tension as one between the demands of the game mechanics (do whatever it takes to win most effectively) and the story (do what is appropriate for the fictional context of the game).

A question raised in Andrew Glassner's Interactive Storytelling, however, makes me think that the dilemma about what actions are appropriate in a game is even more complicated than I thought. Even if we just look within role-playing, it's not at all clear what role is supposed to be played. (I should note here that when I use words like "appropriate" and "supposed", I'm not so much talking about a player's duty as a designer's concerns about what works best to achieve her creative vision.)

Glassner examined this purely in the context of storytelling, and presented the problem as one of identity. Should the player try to act as he thinks the character would act, try to act as he would act in the character's situation, or try to act in whatever way maximized fun?

In practice, it seems obvious that players will try to have fun. In a lot of games, this manifests as the games-based equivalent to making a blooper reel; the player sometimes gives nonsensical dialogue, picks the craziest conversation choices, or runs around throwing bottles at people. As long as games offer a safe experimentation space (read: infinite replays), we can expect this to continue, and it's not much of a problem. Still, the designer surely wants to make the "real" story fun as well, and so it deserves to be looked at too.

So in these "serious" story spaces, who is the player? Himself or the character?

Very few games try to impose a developed character upon the player to match up with, and those that do (see Indigo Prophecy) tend to suffer for it. Carefully architected gaming situations are fine with me, but architected main characters are for movies. At least give the character an ambiguous backstory or one that's player-chosen (see Mass Effect).

Most games encourage the player to "create" a character that may or may not match up to his real self (here I'm thinking of KOTOR, in which I and other gamers played once as pure light side and once as pure dark). Even games that allow total freedom permit players to create characters outside of the self. Again, we can expect this to continue as long as games are a free experimentation space.

But this freedom to create an outside character to play seems like a problem to me. Or, if not a bona fide problem, a loss of potential. Interactivity's contribution to art is that it can allow firsthand experiences of choice. In no other medium can you make someone feel guilt or responsibility or the pain of a difficult choice in a fictional context. But eliciting such emotions require that the player identify with his character. Rather than "playing" an imaginary character, the player would have to inhabit the mind of the character.

Is that even possible in a fictional space? Should the goal of some games, then, be to immerse the player utterly?

Or perhaps there's an easier alternative: just make the player care. If they player enjoys the presence of a character, the death of that character is a negative event, even if the player doesn't actually grieve. Maybe by making the goals of the player's character align with the goals of the player we can achieve the same results.

More on this later...

DotA Game Mechanical Analysis: Part 2

2008-02-21T14:09:00.005-05:00

Part 1

As previously stated, there are three lanes between the two sides' bases. All have an identical three towers and standard creep generation. They are, however, asymmetric. The top and bottom lanes are longer than the middle lane. Either the top or bottom lane (depending on which team) is uniquely far away from an important "secret shop" that is necessary to purchase high-level items; this lane is therefore less convenient. The middle lane can be ambushed from both sides, and is thereby more dangerous than the others.

What if certain lanes had more or fewer creeps or towers, amplifying the asymmetry? What if players received a stat boost in certain lanes based on how long they had spent in that lane?

Let's zoom in to the level of a standard battle involving Heroes and creeps. If a Hero attacks another Hero near creeps, the creeps will all attack the attacking Hero. This serves to dissuade players from targeting enemy Heroes when creeps are nearby, as is usually the case when both characters attack at melee range. When one Hero's attack is ranged and the other's is not, the melee Hero must be very careful to avoid attacks, sometimes disengaging from the battle. When both Heroes have ranged attacks, they can rarely attack each other during a creep battle.

What if players could order nearby creeps to attack nearby enemy Heroes? What if Heroes were strengthened or weakened due to proximity to creeps? What if Heroes gained greater attack range when closer to creeps?

When a Hero kills a creep (i.e. strikes the final blow), it gains gold. Whenever an enemy creep dies near the Hero, the Hero gains experience points. The only exception is when a creep is "denied", i.e. it is killed by a Hero on its own side. By denying nearly-dead creeps, players prevent their opponents from gaining experience.

What if denying actually reduced an opponent's experience? What if it gave the denying Hero a stat boost? What if players could only deny creeps at full health?

When a player kills an enemy Hero, that player gains a large amount of experience and gold, while the killed Hero loses gold. This produces a strong positive feedback loop; early kills tend to make later kills easier.

What if we turned this into negative feedback through, for example, giving an experience bonus to the killed player, giving a passive stat penalty to high-scoring players, or giving a temporary stackable stat penalty to all nearby Heroes allied with the killing player (thereby ensuring that most multi-Hero showdowns would end with a similar number of casualties)?

There's more to say, but I'll stop here for now.

DotA Game-Mechanical Analysis: Part 1

2008-02-16T00:07:00.006-05:00

As previously promised, I'm going to attempt to do a simple analysis of the game mechanics of DotA (Defense of the Ancients, a mod for Warcraft 3). The goal is to get a general sense of the forces at work in a typical game. By modifying just a few rules, we might be able to come up with very interesting modifications to the game. I'll note some of the intriguing possibilities along the way.

In most games, there are five unique Heroes on each side. Each Hero is defined by the primary statistics of Strength, Agility, and Intelligence. These in turn define the lower-level secondary statistics: maximum health, health regeneration rate, maximum mana, mana regeneration rate, armor (damage resistance), attack speed, and damage. A Hero's attack range, movement speed, and main statistic (i.e. the primary statistic that determines damage) are usually static and predetermined for each Hero.

What if players could allocated primary statistics at will upon leveling up? What if players had direct control over secondary statistics?

Heroes also have a certain amount of gold. An initial deposit of gold is given at the start of the game, and a small amount is generated as time passes, but the majority of a Hero's gold comes as a reward for killing enemies. Gold can be used to buy items, of which a Hero may hold up to six at any time. Items can be combined with each other to form better items. Any item can boost primary or secondary stats by a specific amount. Some items confer new active or passive abilities upon the Hero.

Each Hero has four natural abilities that can be learned as it levels up. These include three lower-level abilities and one "ult" ability. Abilities vary immensely in function; much of DotA's variety comes from the different abilities at play. In most cases, an ability costs a certain amount of mana and, in return, either confers a stat bonus on the player or inflicts a stat penalty on the enemy. Some abilities apply passive bonuses, some of which are activated randomly according to a specific probability.

Already we can see how changing small rules produces very different gameplay; DotA excels in this sort of experimentation. What if an ability affected a usually static statistic such as attack range (Dwarven Sniper)? What if an ability used up health instead of mana (Sacred Warrior)? What if one Hero's damage potential was based on the difference between the stats of that Hero and its target (Obsidian Destroyer)?

In order to destroy the enemy Ancient (and thereby win the game), a team must destroy all of the towers that defend any one of the three "lanes" leading to the base. The lanes are asymmetric, with the middle lane being both shorter and less safe. Also, in a full game with five players on each side, one lane for each side will be covered by a single Hero, which is more dangerous but also allows the Hero to grow powerful more quickly.

Each lane is protected by three towers, which increase slightly in strength as they appear closer to the base. Towers heal extremely slowly, so damage to them is mostly permanent. They also do a significantly large amount of damage, and are capable of destroying lower-level Heroes in one-on-one combat.

What if towers grew in strength as they killed creeps, or as the Heroes around them grew. What if a tower could be strengthened through a combined purchase by its allied team?

Periodically, a group of "creeps" (weak monsters allied with one side) are spawned and try to run down their lane, destroying everything in their path. They are usually met by the opposing creeps. One side will win this battle; the winning side, by virtue of its comparatively higher numbers, almost inevitably wins the following confrontation. This produces "creep momentum", in which a group of creeps can grow larger and larger as it moves down the lane. Creep momentum is usually stopped by a tower, but not before the tower sustains damage.

As time passes and more towers are destroyed, the number of creeps spawned each time increases. Occasionally, a "siege engine" is included with the creeps, which is especially effective against towers and other siege engines. This amplifies creep momentum.

What if creeps were made stronger when closer to their own base, thereby destroying creep momentum? What if we did the opposite, making creep momentum a major force in the game? Or what if creeps grew stronger as they dealt more damage?

More to come...

Game-Mechanical Analyses

2008-02-11T22:14:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Andrew Glassner's Interactive Storytelling (good book, more on it later), and he spends a significant portion of it classifying different elements of game mechanics. For instance, he lists all the different types of competition/cooperation dynamics, categorizes the amount of randomness that a game contains, and classifies the different abstract types of goals that a player can be given. I also know that Raph Koster is currently working on a book about "game grammar", in which he attempts to craft a set of language for describing what happens in games.

These sorts of attempts to formally describe games intrigue me. Games are systems, and mastering a game is about understanding these complex systems at deeper and deeper levels (and with some games, it's possible to completely solve the system). I wonder, then, if it's possible to completely describe the system that underlies a game. Extending Game Theory to actual video games, in a sense.

Some games, such as turn-based games or games with a defined, limited set of choices, seem to lend themselves to this sort of game-mechanical analysis. Consider Civilization 2. The game makes its statistics and formulas mostly transparent. For instance, terrain is semirandomly distributed at the start of the game. Different types of terrain produce different amounts of food. You can increase the amount of food produced through irrigation. Irrigation takes 5 consecutive turns by a Settler. Before that, the Settler must move to that location, which takes a certain number of turns. Before that, a settler must be built, which takes a certain number of Shields (units of production). Shields are gathered from a city's surrounding terrain.... It goes on. Each of these steps could be diagrammed and the system as a whole could be analyzed.

If we can understand how these systems function, perhaps we can understand what makes them so engaging. We can prevent games from becoming too chaotic, or too predictable, or too complex. Koster hopes that with game grammar, designers can find and excise the un-fun from their games.

I'd hope for even more. Glassner ends his book with a list of "experiments" to try out. It's essentially a series of "what-if" suggestions. He restricts the scope to stories within games, but what if we took a similar mindset and applied it to mechanics? We can take a system, fiddle with it a little bit, and produce an entirely novel experience.

Let's use DotA as an example. What if players' mana constantly drained rather than constantly recharged? We're really just "flipping a bit" in the system, but it would produce fantastic changes in the gameplay. With more tweaking, we can make it something truly fun. So mana drains, but let's make spells become more powerful as more time is spent in between charging sessions. But let's also let players transfer mana between each other, free of charge. Now there's an incentive to have one player wait for as long as possible while others bring him mana. Suddenly, we've added an entirely new game mechanic, as well as a new social angle to the game. I'd play that!

Expect a more complete game-mechanical analysis of DotA later this week.

All Games Are Puzzles

2008-02-07T00:37:00.000-05:00

A while back I read Greg Costikyan's excellent essay "I Have No Words & I Must Design", which starts out by defining exactly what a game is not. For instance, a game is not a puzzle. Puzzles are static, while games change with the player's actions.
I was later contemplating a player's relationship with a game's rules, and I was struck by the thought that, when both the rules and the actions of an opponent are determined/deterministic, a game is essentially static. Consider a computerized game of Tic-Tac-Toe with a simple AI. Once you figure out what the AI will do, and once you've mastered the rules, winning becomes a routine matter. You've "solved" the game, and it's only a puzzle that's trivial to complete. Extrapolating from this, other games present the same situation with more complex AIs rules. All games, therefore, are puzzles!

I thought I had come upon something profound, but now that I've more thoroughly examined my theory, I have to qualify it. And by "qualify it", I pretty much mean that I was wrong.

Costikyan introduces the first objection by observing that a game like Zork, which allows the player to travel freely through its world but otherwise consists entirely of puzzle-solving, is "90% puzzle and 10% game". The mere fact that you can proceed in an undefined path suggests that there's some adaptation to the player's actions. Still, this isn't entirely convincing; one might liken it to the ability of a player to walk away from a jigsaw puzzle for a while, or even to concentrate on a different piece of it. Just because I can control the presentation of a puzzle doesn't make it any less puzzle-like.

A more intuitive and damning objection to my generality is that the random elements that are sometimes present in games destroy the stasis that is the hallmark of puzzles. In less pretentious terms, puzzles can't be random, while games can. There are a couple of rebuttals to this, aside from a sticky argument involving physical determinism. With each random step in a game, the player is presented with a new situation that uses preset rules. To me, that just sounds like you're dividing the game into further puzzles. The game can still be "solved", but rather than taking a single step to the solution, the player must navigate a new puzzle after each random event. It's possible to have randomized games in which the player is incapable of winning (which would prevent "solving" the game), but as previously discussed, that just makes your game suck all the more.

What randomness is really trying to do, by introducing all of the game's sub-puzzles, is to increase complexity. If you know the rules by which the game operates (including the choices of opponents), then a game has been "solved". If we increase the complexity of the rules enough, then a game becomes impossible for a human mind to solve. Without the possibility of solving the game, players are forced to create their own heuristics and constantly estimate probability; in short, players are forced to make interesting choices. And that's when the fun comes in!

Tic-Tac-Toe isn't fun because it's too easy to solve; generally both players have solved it, too, so you know both your correct move and what your opponent will do. Checkers is a game that is just barely simple enough for AI to solve; human Checkers masters generally are too good to produce surprising games, but novices who haven't yet mastered the game can still have fun. Chess is complex enough that nobody has solved it, and it produces an engaging experience for players of all skill levels.

One simple way to increase the complexity of a game, aside from adding extremely complicated rules, is to support multiplayer. Humans are tough to predict, and so interesting choices abound. AI, in attempting to mimic the complexity of humans, has to resort to randomized elements and/or monstrously complicated algorithms that no human mind could discern. Dice Wars is an example of a game in which the AI is just barely simple enough to solve; the fun and frustration in the game come primarily from managing the various randomized situations that can arise.

So the takeaway for designers is this: don't let your game turn into a puzzle. Whether through multiplayer, randomness, or innate complexity, don't let the gameplay become so simple that it can be solved. The "correct response" should not be obvious at any level of gameplay. To ignore this is to risk losing all interesting choices in the game, which is, in turn, to risk losing all of a game's fun.

The Dimensions of a Flash Game

2008-02-04T14:45:00.000-05:00

Flash games and I have an uneasy relationship. I like them, but I don't like that I like them. All too often, I'm sucked in by a game that I know doesn't have any innovative gameplay (casual games' supposed asset), and I'm ashamed.

A while ago I started to examine what it is that allows these games to so easily demolish my productivity. I concluded that their main advantage is the amorphous quality that has been labeled "color" by more enlightened individuals. To imagine a game without color, replace all sounds with beeps and all graphics with colored squares.

"Cursor*10" has fantastic gameplay and no color. So does "Pong".

"Winterbells" has fantastic color and poor gameplay. It's instant happiness.

But one game seems to lack both color and gameplay. I'm talking about the juvinile favorite "Kitten Cannon", whose repetitious gore provided my high school with endless fun when the teacher wasn't around.

In explaining the appeal of "Kitten Cannon", I had to turn to another facet of the game: story. That doesn't precisely mean narrative, since this game's is actually rather boring. Story represents the context and representation of events in the game. In a spy thriller, the context ("I'm a super-cool spy!") is a lot more important than the actual narrative. In this case, the context is that you're shooting a kitten out of a cannon, and the appeal lies entirely in the irreverence.

"Kitten Cannon" is our poster child for story. "Pong" does, too, as a representation of table tennis, but it's rather weak.

"Red" combines color and gameplay but no story.

So, what game has it all? I might nominate "flOw". Your suggestions?

My Game Doesn't Suck, You're Just Playing It Wrong

2008-02-01T00:01:00.000-05:00

A game comes out after weeks of hype and excited previews. It promises a deeper story, more advanced AI, and greater immersion than ever before. The game is released, and flops. It has its few passionate defenders, but the general consensus is that the game simply, to borrow a colorful phrase, blows chunks out of a monkey's ass. The embittered lead designer lashes out in an interview, "It didn't suck. People were just playing it wrong."

I'm pretty sure that this hypothetical designer would be laughed at. A game designer's job is to make a good game, and if people don't like it, it's hardly fair to blame the audience. And this principle applies to designers of any kind: if I can't figure out how an interface works, axiom states that it's the designer's fault. The player of a game can't be at fault, right?

I'm not so sure. If some people go to a theater and talk throughout the movie, is it really the filmmaker's fault if they don't enjoy themselves? I think that this analogy is (terrifyingly) valid, and it's of major concern for game developers who are looking to do anything different.

Imagine a first-person RPG. The game has extensive and intuitive interfaces for conversation and for interacting with objects in the game world. The player is presented with a series of dramatically significant obstacles to overcome, each of which can be solved in a variety of ways, consistently including conversational means. The game is a spy thriller, and so the player always has a silenced gun hidden on him, designed to be a last resort.

The hypothetical game developers start hypothetical game tests. The testers see a first-person game and a gun in their character's hands. They talk to their first opponent, a clever enemy who is sublty working against the player. After a brief conversation, they shoot the enemy in the head. Guards rush in to stop the player, and the player kills them all.

The designer is infuriated; the player didn't even try to figure out all the wonderful and clever ways to win! Clearly, the game needs to discourage this sort of behavior.

They run another test. This time, the player shoots his enemy and vastly stronger guards rush him and kill him. He reloads, hides behind cover, shoots his enemy, and kills all of the guards. He proceeds to use this strategy on all further levels.

The designer is frustrated. This just won't do. So he limits the player's ammunition and the availability of alternative weapons to the point that it's impossible to use violence to accomplish all the goals.

Yet another test. The player shoots until he runs out of ammo, and dies. He reloads, collects all the ammo and bonuses that he can, and goes on another shooting spree. All of his preparation wasn't enough, though, and he fails again. The player then pronounces that the game sucks. In fact, he was just playing it wrong.

Obviously, this wouldn't happen with all game testers, but it would certainly happen with many hardcore FPS gamers. I've seen this sort of thing happen. I discovered that a friend of a friend had never played Half-Life 2, so I insisted that he play the opening level. It was, I told him, one of the best expository scenes in the history of gaming. He loaded up the level, ran past all the people who were talking, and spent his time throwing bottles at passerby and laughing like a hyena over my weak protests. It still hurts to remember.

There are surely ways that designers can show players how to "properly" play a game, but we players have a responsibility as well. We need to be receptive to entirely new styles of gameplay. We can't just interpret new games based on previous genres.

If we can't bring ourselves to play games with an open mind, the hypothetical game above would probably be transformed into yet another "badass shooter".

Like Bioshock.

Just saying...

Commentary: Indigo Prophecy

2008-01-20T22:57:00.000-05:00

Indigo Prophecy is a strange beast. On one hand, it's story-centric, so I instantly like it. On the other hand, its approach to storytelling in games just feels so... wrong.

Let's get the praise out of the way first. The game kept me playing through the end, the voice acting and motion capture are top-notch, and with the exception of a third-act meltdown as the plot rapidly got ridiculous, the story was excellent.

But as stated in Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, when dealing with interactivity, what matters is what you do. And in Indigo Prophecy's case, what you most often do is play repetitive reaction-based button-matching minigames in order to determine your character's success in action sequences. These action sequences are wicked cool, too. But they're cool to watch, not to play. Since Indigo Prophecy secretly wants to be a film (the opening menu lists "New Movie" instead of "New Game"), that's hardly surprising.

You also get to choose what topics you want to bring up in conversation. A lot of the time, this presents somewhat interesting choices, but you stop caring about them once you figure out that the vast majority have little to no effect on the game. The range of conversation choices is also extremely limited most of the time. Also, the game somtimes decides to artificially limit the number of topics you can bring up. As a police investigator, this gets frustrating when you need to ask someone about four different things but get cut off after two. Why can't you just finish talking?

There are other minigames that are introduced, too, including the obligatory and tedious sneaking mission and a more tense and welcome minigame in which you try to prevent your character from having a panic attack. Several times you're given a strict time limit to complete some simple task, like find an item or hide somewhere, before something catastrophic happens (the building blows up, the police arrive to arrest you).

It seems that the goal of the developer was to elicit in the player whatever feelings the the character was experiencing. The time limits induce increasing anxiety, the threat of a panic attack forces the player to stay calm and control the character's breathing, and the action sequences demand quick reflexes.

To some degree, this works, but it still feels wrong. You're being taken along for the ride, rather than actually controlling the characters. It's participatory, but not interactive. Like in a movie, all the major decisions are made for you by professional storytellers; in effect, the story is being held hostage behind a barrier of minigames. The result is that the action sequences are sweet and the story is good, but I feel no special connection to the characters that might have been garnered through interactivity.

Commentary: Deus Ex: Invisible War

2008-01-18T19:09:00.000-05:00

I've made it clear in the past that Deus Ex is one of my favorite games of all time and conforms most to my own vision for games-as-art. Since the teaser trailer for Deus Ex 3 just came out, I figured that it was high time that I spent some time with the middle child. Besides, it's on GameTap.

I'd heard a lot of bad things about Invisible War, but I knew that these was partially due to everybody's high expectations when it came out. That said, once the game started up and my (male) character started to talk, the voice acting made me cringe. You can't deliver lines like "I just saw a man die" in a deadpan. I restarted with the female main character, who was good enough for me to continue playing.

I soon became upset that there were so few "normal" people in the game. I preferred the early levels of Deus Ex because they were filled with normal people just living their lives. There are only a few in Invisible War, and the majority of the NPCs in some areas are just "Thug".

That's not to say that everything Invisible War did was wrong on the story/environment front. There are a lot of nice additions. The two competing coffee chains, for instance (though they probably shouldn't have acted as reliable sources of optional quests). Or the international pop star, NG Resonance, who shows up primarily as an AI bot with whom you can chat in public places. Plus, as in Deus Ex, there are several early-introduced main characters who each have their own satisfying story arc.

But in comparison to the original, this iteration just doesn't hold its weight in creating a believable world. Maybe it's just that everything's too futuristic to relate to, but I just couldn't get sucked in. In Deus Ex you were surrounded by people who were just getting by, trying to survive in the wake of a devastating plague, while the rich got shipped a secret vaccine. That a terrorist/secessionist group rose up to fight for the people seems almost inevitable in that context. The different factions and their motives feel reasonable.

In Invisible War, the two biggest factions are the WTO, whose big selling point is enforced economic stratification and trade controls, and the Order, which is defined primarily by a bunch of talk about internal balance and such. They make some sense... but it's hard to imagine that the whole world is dividing along these lines.

Luckily, the game's plot proceeds rapidly after a somewhat slow start, so you don't spend much time with the less-than-intriguing initial dynamics. The choices that it presents really are interesting. Personally, I felt beholden to consistently carry out JC Denton's original intentions, but most of the choices are well-balanced.

But where I really appreciated this game was on the gameplay front. The new developers radically simplified the character customization by removing Skills, which previously governed things like weapon accuracy and lockpicking, and scaling down the biomod system, which governs special abilities like cloaking or hacking. The result is that each biomod becomes more potent and creates a new set of strategies.

For example, at one point I had to take down a gigantic military robot reminiscent of an AT-AT from Star Wars. I turned on my speed enhancement biomod and charged it. Because of my increased speed, I could avoid the rockets it sent at me. I got close and used my Bot Domination biomod (which was illegal in the game world and therefore harder to find) and ran away again. After 10 seconds, I gained first-person control of the bot for a minute and used it to wreak havoc on the enemy.

These sorts of interesting strategies weren't limited to creative biomod use. In one mission, I had to assassinate someone, but she was in a secure room with a guard and a security camera. I used a sniper rifle to take out the guard in the hall and an EMP weapon to disable the hallway security camera. I then used a "noisemaker grenade" outside of the door. My target and the guard left the monitored room to investigate and I took them both out with two quick sniper shots from the other side of the hall.

Liberal use of biomods and the sniper rifle made this game pretty easy in most sections, but they also made me feel like a badass covert-ops agent. Which, I should note, I was.

Ultimately, I confess that I had more fun with Invisible War than with Deus Ex, which I was not expecting. That said, Invisible War didn't inspire me like its predecessor did. Deus Ex was a landmark for including subtle interactive exposition and choices that felt important and flowed naturally. Invisible War doesn't deliver as much in that department, but it's still a great game.

Commentary: Rez

2008-01-17T01:12:00.001-05:00

I first heard about Rez from Penny Arcade; Gabe listed it as his favorite game. That got me curious, so I started reading up on it. I read about how it featured procedurally created music, where the player helps create the soundtrack. I read about how it evoked a feeling of synesthesia (the mixing of senses) in the player, where the gameplay and music melded together. I read about how you couldn't be sure whether you were playing the game or whether it was playing you. That pushed me from curious to intrigued, and I hopped on eBay and bought a used copy (the only one available).

My first experience with playing Rez was thrilling. After popping the disc in the PS2 and starting up the first level, I could immediately tell what all the fuss was about. Every time I targeted something, every time I fired, and every time I hit an enemy, I'd hear a different sound; together, they made some pretty sweet trance music.

Unfortunately, things went downhill after that. After the first section of the first level, a more dominating background music starts up. The sounds from your actions in the game are still present, but they eventually start to get washed out. The rest of the first level, and the second, and the third, and the fourth all resulted in disappointment. The levels are rather short, so I kept playing, and I had some fun with it, but I felt let down. This was not "synesthesia". It was cool, but it was not revolutionary. The elements were there, but I just couldn't hear them.

But the fifth level reversed my opinion yet again. First of all, the climactic level features a healthy injection of powerful imagery representing life's evolution from the primitive sea to the modern day. Second, the difficulty is adjusted based on your previous performance to provide a more intense experience. Lastly, and most importantly, the music is great. The overpowering background music of the previous levels is replaced by something more low-key that melds perfectly with the gameplay-generated musical additions. It's truly a novel experience, and it's really in this level that Rez delivers.

I should note that the game is a somewhat standard rail shooter with no especially innovative gameplay. A story is present, but it's present mostly in the manual; it's something about a rogue supercomputer that you have to infiltrate, presumably by shooting everything that moves. The graphics deserve some accolades for succeeding in their highly stylized nature. The inside-a-computer look and the trance music match perfectly.

There's been a lot of talk about how Rez is a prime example of games-as-art, and it's connection to the Russian painter Wassily Kadinsky (see the bottom section of this page) certainly gives that view credence. Normally when I've thought about games-as-art, I've considered the story/narrative elements and the game mechanics; essentially, I've thought that games can be art either through the story that it tells (interactively, of course) or through the systems that it models. Rez adds another perspective: games can be art by providing a unique sensory experience. The combination of stylized graphics, pulsing haptic feedback, and procedural music really makes this game something wholly new, and any hardcore gamer owes it to himself or herself to find a copy of Rez (or buy the upcoming Rez HD on XBox Live Arcade) and play it to completion.

"The Videogame as an Expressive Medium"

2008-01-14T20:21:00.001-05:00

I opened the Dartmouth student daily newspaper today and discovered that there would be a lecture entitled "The Videogame as an Expressive Medium" on campus. One of the benefits to being in college, I suppose.

The lecture was given by Mary Flanagan, PhD, who has an impressive resume, and the audience consisted mainly of professors. She was a game designer, not a Game Designer. Dr. Flanagan presented herself primarily as a scholar and an artist who uses games as her medium. At one point she defined a designer as one who solves problems for an auidence while an artist is one who asks questions or attempts to express something. Game design, it became clear, was only one part of her work.

The lecture itself quickly delved into a vocabulary that I was unfamiliar with. I was able to follow some of the references to "representation" and "relational systems", but a lot of the terms used were abstract, academic, artistic, and ultimately over my head. Chris Crawford dedicated a chapter of his book Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling to the divide between artists and engineers in the gaming world; while Dr. Flanagan had a wide and interdisciplinary set of skills, it seemed to me that she stood distinctly on the artistic side of that line.

Her projects revealed this. Consider [giantJoystick], an installation project that consists of a gigantic Atari Joystick connected to a standard Atari system connected to a gigantic projector screen. The games are only playable if a group of people negotiate how they will work together to move the controls, creating a social gaming experience out of a normally straightforward, solitaire game.

I'm more interested in the software for now, but that's not to say that I couldn't get anything out of a high-level academic lecture. One easy and interesting takeaway was her list of the different ways that games could be expressive: rules (as in The Marriage), style (I've also heard the word "color" used for this quality), characters, agency itself (i.e. the freedom to choose and to do), the way decisions manifest in the game, and the nature of the interaction (i.e. just shooting everything vs. having a song shared with you in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time).

The most interesting bit, though, was her statement that "the mechanic is the message." As Jonathan Blow discussed, game designers have largely ignored the potential effects of game mechanics on the player, which is especially unforunate since "systems are biased towards producing truth". Dr. Flanagan made a similar point. After all, she claimed, you can't say that your game is about world hunger when the only mechanic is collecting or shooting things.

Commentary: M.E.H.

2008-01-12T23:06:00.000-05:00

M.E.H. is my the last game that I made in high school. It's available for download from TJGames.org.

The initials, I should note, don't stand for anything. Or, more accurately, they stand for something different every time you open up the game.

The game is a top-down shoot-em-up. Players choose a set of enemies, who are worth a certain bounty, and then destroy them. The resulting money can be used to upgrade the ship.

I had a number of goals when I made M.E.H., and now that I'm old and wise I think that it's high time I reflect on these. The primary reason I made M.E.H. was to continue practicing programming in Java. I certainly got better and learned a lot, but I can also state fairly conclusively that the programming is extremely sloppy. I promised some friends that I'd have it done by a certain date, so I ended up experiencing my first "crunch time", which lasted for two days. I hope that nobody ever sees the menu code that I made during that time. It's hideous.

But I also wanted to accomplish specific things from the design front as well. I've always loved customization in games, as in the Armored Core series. I wanted people to be able to upgrade along any one of several parallel paths. So for instance, I offered hulls that were slow and powerful as well as hulls that were fast and light as well as hulls that were balanced, and there were two levels (cheap and expensive) of each. I did the same with weapons and generators (whose energy was necessary to power both movement and shooting). The item choice became the game's strength; customizing the ship in different ways was most of the fun for me.

The enemies I created were also varied. There were four types: the weak, dumb, common enemies that would stop in place to shoot you, the fast and agile enemies that would swoop down upon you and then run away, the powerful but weak enemies that would snipe from a distance, and the large and slow enemies that fired a constant spread of shots. I was immensely satisfied with how the AI turned out, especially on the agile enemies. They behaved just like I wanted them to.

Unfortunately, all of this didn't make the game fun. It's pretty good for an amateur attempt, but not objectively good. The problem came with player control. Moving fast was the best way to evade enemy shots, and so the best tactic was to continuously charge forward, occasionally turning. Aiming and energy conservation were a bit too hard, and I found these tough to balance. The best strategy was to get the fastest hull and the spread weapon and just spam all over the map. It was fun to play with the customizations for a short while, but the gameplay wasn't there to back it up.

Perhaps with a bit more perspective and time, I could have fixed the balance issues (the charged shot weapon, for instance, was never a good choice) and made gameplay a bit more strategic or skill-based. Instead, I pushed it out the door.

For a high school game, I'm satisfied with how M.E.H. turned out, but it's not something I plan to hold up as evidence of my skill.

Randomness

2008-01-11T14:03:00.000-05:00

We all know the feeling. You've plotted carefully, planned everything perfectly, executed flawlessly, and then a roll of the dice takes it all away. I've permanently burned into my memory all of the times that I've had the rug swept out from under me in a game of Risk or Dice Wars.

Of course, complaining about the randomness in a game called Dice Wars is like complaining that In-N-Out Burger doesn't provide a slow and relaxing dining experience; it's true, but you're still a dumbass for pointing it out. And I can't deny that the game, which is built around a highly random game mechanic, makes for fantastic fun despite the occasional unfairness. Indeed, chance is one of the fundamental sources of the elusive quality labeled "fun".

This doesn't mean that randomness is fun, though. Rolling a die, hoping to get a six, is not a fun game. The difference between rolling a die and Dice Wars is that, in the latter, the player usually has a significant amount of control over his place in the game. "Significant" in this sense means that your decisions have a high potential to determine whether or not you win the game.

I don't think that the makers of Dice Wars would advertise their game as offering "the possibility of defeat regardless of how skilled you are!" The game plays very well when superior strategy eventually beats through the randomness and wins (as it usually does), but it sucks to have your fortunes reversed when you're rightfully winning.

So what role, then, should randomness play in a game's design?

Most games seem to think that random elements have some place. Some games even include chance when it's totally unnecessary. Take, for example, the standard attacks in games like Heroes of Might and Magic or Warcraft 3, wherein the ranges of randomness are narrow or always balance out. Changing "23-27" to "25" is not going to visibly affect the gameplay. I'm not sure if the randomness is an early feature that was grandfathered into the final design, or if random elements are part of some sort of game design checklist, or if the designers really feel that the minuscule chance of a major change in gameplay adds to the appeal of a strategy game. I really don't know. Of course, I LOVE these games, but I'm much more impressed by something like Diplomacy that actually boasts that it lacks random elements.

My only complaint about randomness is that it leads to arbitrary events in gameplay, and arbitrariness doesn't lend itself to fun. But it's worth noting that the feeling of arbitrariness isn't only created by random number generators. Imagine that you're running along in Battlefield 2. Suddenly, an artillery shell drops out of the sky and blows your character to smithereens. It was not a random event; the enemy commander chose to shell that particular area of ground, but the switch from safe to deadly was sudden; the death feels arbitrary, a nuisance that keeps you from the real action and fun of the game for that much longer.

The same scenario can play out in a lot of deterministic games. What if, in Diplomacy, a bunch of other players gang up on you simultaneously, each action on his own volition (i.e. not in alliance with the others)? Or what if you're playing a non-randomized rock-paper-scissors-style RTS against a friend who just so happens to choose the strategy that always beats yours?

The perception of arbitrariness, then, can be born of player action as well as game-generated randomness. This is an incredibly important point when games are viewed in a holistic perspective. What does the player compete against? Either other players (whose actions are variable), a random element of the game (as in most solitaire games), or against set obstacles. But a game that is played versus set obstacles is more properly a puzzle (which can be included in games but is not itself a game). From this analysis, all games are played against pseudorandom elements.

But playing solitaire and playing against another person still feel very different. The reason is that, while the other player might do anything, his or her decisions will be constrained by his own strategy and skill. If you only build bombers, your opponent won't only build tanks. To continue with the RTS metaphor, the reason that people don't bitch about an enemy's surprising strategy is because they have the ability to scout out the opponent's base and see that strategy firsthand. If you couldn't scout before a battle in an RPS-style RTS, the game would feel arbitrary.

In the Battlefield 2 artillery example, the arbitrary feeling could be fixed if each team had a counter that made visible the time left before the other team's artillery could be fired. You're left with a time-sensitive mission to destroy the artillery before time is too late; if the guns are standing ready, infantry would have to spend time under cover. Because the possibility of an artillery strike is known, it won't feel arbitrary.

So there's a useful takeaway: if a player's actions are obscured from another player, then scouting must be available. Otherwise, just reveal what the other player is doing. Chess and Go do fine without hiding anything from the other player. Even modern RTSs are starting to take the hint by adding visible countdown timers for superweapons or announcing when important units are being built.

But while this solves the perceived randomness of multiplayer games, it doesn't inform us about how (or if) to include genuine random elements in game design. What about Dice Wars?

The best answer I can give right now is that it depends on what type of game you're making. You can either go for the sort of fun that comes with a slot machine, or the sort that comes from a test of skill or strategy. Randomness has a place in a game like Dice Wars or poker primarily as a means of simplifying or abstracting a layer of gameplay. In Dice Wars, it's understood that each attack should have a possibility of winning or losing, with the higher count having a better chance to win. Rather than simulating this with a sub-game, Dice Wars just rolls the dice. Poker offers a test of skill that is entirely based around managing randomness and judging probability, since the player controls the betting. Like Dice Wars, it is a test of skill because the random elements are expected to average out. If they don't, it is accepted that the game is flawed as a test of skill.

Ultimately, games have to be either cheap fun in which randomness dominates or deeper, high-commitment fun that acts as a challenge. Mixing the two necessarily dilutes one or the other. Dice Wars is more accessible than Go, but it won't be a timeless strategic showdown. Slots is extremely accessible, but it won't keep people playing for very long. Unless they're addicted to gambling, but we can't much help that.

SupCom's Best

2008-01-08T21:46:00.000-05:00

After becoming enamored with the robot on the front page of March's PC Gamer, I decided to dip back into RTS territory for Supreme Commander. The game promised to take the genre to a never-before-seen scale, with battles large enough that strategy, rather than micromanagement, is what counts. The huge maps, massive armies, and exceedingly satisfying explosions all made the game feel big. I'll be damned if I didn't feel at the time like the fate of the galaxy rested on my shoulders. This was war. This was epic.

One skirmish match stands out in my memory as my favorite moment in all of my RTS experience. The match was 2v2, with me and an artificial intelligence on one side and two AIs on the other. The map was gigantic. Each group had a continent, ripe with resources, separated from each other by a huge ocean that was broken only by a thin land bridge connecting the two sides. This meant that all land forces were funneled into a small channel of fighting, which made for some prime strategizing.

Upon starting, my immediate focus was, naturally, to secure all the resources I could and to build up defenses on the land bridge. I built walls, shields, turrets, anti-air guns, everything. It was like the Korean DMZ. The pace of construction was frantic. That little strip of land became my only military center. If I could stop all attacks there, I figured, the match would be mine. At first, this was pretty successful. My enemies would send in a few light bombers, some tanks, maybe something heavier now and then, but nothing stood a chance. I had time, money, and security. It was time to begin the only project that mattered: the Mavor.

The Mavor is the name of a huge, game-winning artillery gun that's capable of hitting any stationary target from any range with pinpoint accuracy. It's only disadvantage is its prohibitively long build time. But it's worth it since it's one of those weapons that makes you cackle with glee every time it fires. I started early.

Now, it's worth noting that the Mavor isn't the only major character in this battle. Each side has a few extremely strong, game-defining units that only it can build. My enemy, for example, could build something called the Galactic Colossus. The Galactic Colossus is a gigantic humanoid robot that can crush all smaller units under its feet and destroy almost anything with its huge, sweeping laser beam. I discovered this when one of these charming fellows walked over my extensive, carefully-built defensive network with barely a scratch. I was heartbroken.

So my defensive network was gone, and had proven itself ultimately useless late in the game. I was able to take out the Colossus before it reached my base, and I began to plan a new, better defense. They'll never be able to beat me now!

I was in the midst of this when the narrator helpfully chimed in with "Strategic launch detected." That meant that someone had fired a nuclear missile, and it had not been me. I watched the blinking icon on my little radar screen descend and touch, almost gently, down to land. A flash of light, and then it was gone. So was my base. So was almost all of my army. So was the half-finished Mavor. Curses! Foiled again!

If I had any sense of perspective, I would have exited the game at this point. I had almost entirely lost. But I was too invested in it to stop then. My thought at the time was not "Hmm, maybe I should go outside" but rather "Oh, now it's on." I pulled back all my engineers to my useless computerized ally's base and began a few specific projects: bombers to stop another Colossus, anti-nuclear defenses, my own nuclear missile silo, and a brand new Mavor. I was focused this time. I had learned from my mistakes of the last two hours, and it was time to turn the tide.

They sent a few more Colossi, which I stopped short with a team of high-powered bombers. They fired another few nukes, but could never hit my new base thanks to the new defenses. My own nukes eventually finished building. And after a long period of waiting and managing my defenses, the Mavor was finished. It aimed, it fired, and I cackled with glee.

Each shot punctured whatever shields they had installed and destroyed the structures beneath in huge clumps. I sent in some scout planes and learned all that I needed to know: the locations of their anti-nuke defenses. A few Mavor shells later, and these defenses were gone. You know what had to come next.

Boom.

Payback's a bitch.

Commentary: Façade

2008-01-06T23:29:00.000-05:00

Façade is perhaps the most ambitious independent game project that I've every seen. For those who haven't heard, the game is designed to be an interactive drama. You play as the longtime friend of Grace and Trip, who's marriage is falling apart. Your actions (which are very limited) and words (which aren't so limited) affect how the story plays out.

The game does a lot of things right. The graphics are a bit goofy at first, but you get used to them, and they emphasize the important parts such as facial expressions. The voice acting is superb throughout. When Grace and Trip argue, it's convincing and powerful. And while the game is short (it lasts for about 15 minutes), it can be replayed several times before it loses freshness.

That said, interactive storytelling requires that all of the elements be just right before it works. In this case, the natural language parser that the game uses is obviously flawed. That's not so much a fault of the designers as it is an inevitable outcome for such an ambitious project.

There were several times that I'd suggest something sensible to one of the characters and they would reply "That doesn't even make any sense!" or "You think I'm... not communicative?". The parser is clearly set to pick up on certain words in order to figure out what is being said, and it fails often. Another manifestation of this problem is when you try to get in-depth on a topic; if you try to make another point about, say, the possibility of an affair, the characters are liable to yell at you for bringing up a subject that they've already discussed.

And so while Façade is interesting, and I advise everyone to play it a few times, it ultimately fails. The final product is fun to watch and well-produced in many ways, but the introduction of interactivity, as has happened to most attempts at interactive storytelling, breaks everything down.

Chris Crawford suggested in his latest book that a better solution for dealing with language is to present a set of menus for what words would make sense to the copmuter at that point in the sentence. Word-by-word the player assembles a sentence that the computer is guarenteed to understand. This limits the number of things that a player can say, but it eliminates the frustration of being misunderstood by the technology. Façade with menu-based language might be a fantastic game.

Saved Games and Player Death

2008-01-04T14:25:00.000-05:00

I once read a rant on some game review site that game designers no longer had any excuse for limiting the player's ability to save the game. Technical restrictions weren't a problem anymore, so just let us do as we please!

But that viewpoint, though common among players, ignores the importance of player death in gameplay. Generally, in any game, there is a possibility that you could lose. Saving eliminates that possibility. For a sufficiently devoted player, constant saving means that there's no possibility of failure at any level, and so any sort of tension that the game wants to create evaporates immediately. The worst that could happen is replaying a short bit of the game, so like Office Space's Peter Gibbon's, the only incentive to perform well is to avoid being hassled.

Marty M. O'Hale wrote a great article about this dilemma in The Escapist. As games got harder, players saved more often. Once designers saw this, they could justify adding more difficulties (including arbitrary obstacles such as deathtraps or highly randomized damage). In a sports game or casual game, we'd think it ludicrous to save before every single decision, but in RPGs and FPSs it's taken for granted.

O'Hale suggests that the solution is to replace player death with different types of gameplay-related setbacks. Rather than have the player die and reload, find some way to penalize the player and introduce a new situation. Penalties should never be random, and the player should only have to save upon ending a gaming session.

I can think of one game that already implements this system: Diablo 2. In D2, each death is accompanied by a loss in money and possibly experience. The player must then retrieve his "body" without the use of any of his previous equipment. The player is penalized, death creates temporary new gameplay possibilities, and saving is only available upon exiting the game. There's even a Hardcore mode, in which death is permanent, for the truly skilled and daring.

Prey and Bioshock also both attempted to circumvent the quicksave-die-reload cycle by implementing in-game respawning, though both also allowed saving at any time. These solutions, however, were lambasted for removing any penalty from death. Oddly enough, respawning automatically in-game was considered to be substantially worse than reloading. But if these games had included a more substantial penalty with each death and had removed the ability to save at any time, I suspect that they would both play better.

Games that try to reach this goal of limiting saving while improving gameplay have a whole new set of problems to deal with. Because losing now genuinely matters, the player has to be given several chances to overcome an obstacle. If he's run out of ammo, he has to be able to sneak. If he gets caught sneaking, he should be able to talk. If he's unconvincing, he needs to be able to run for it. If he gets caught, he can eventually escape. Each failure must have a penalty associated with it. Only if the player is wholly inept at all options can he lose the game and, perhaps, be forced to restart the level or even the whole game.

There's another big reason for saving, of course. I played Morrowind cautiously and rarely died, but I saved often because I feared the other great danger to my character: bugs in the software. Crashing is frustrating. One could take the D2 route and just eliminate all bugs, but that's an unrealistic expectation. I suggest, then, that the game implement a hidden autosave. Every time you step through a door, or every 30 seconds or so, the game silently and quickly autosaves. Then, if it closes unexpectedly, the option to restore the previous game becomes available. The designer preserves his saving mechanic, and the player doesn't get as frustrated as he otherwise would be. What's there to lose?

Commentary: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines

2008-01-01T21:04:00.000-05:00

Do I have enough subtitles? Meh.

I picked up Vampire from Steam during the Halloween special. I had previously read about the game's success in offering a powerful role-playing experience. I'd also read about its crippling bugs, but I figured that the most important ones had probably already been fixed.

The format of the game (a real-time, first-person RPG) was my absolute favorite, and I was very pleased with it. Vampire did a great job of using its subject matter in the gameplay; your vampiric abilities, weaknesses, and hungers are all front-and-center. Troika set the game in White Wolf's World of Darkness setting, and exploring this world is great fun.

In many ways, Vampire is like Deus Ex (my constant point of reference), and it earns my respect for that. There are several competing factions, each of which is appealing in its own way. Stealth and fighting are usually both valid options. You always travel to the same locations and accomplish the same major goals, but your actions and conversation choices subtly affect the story. At the end, you choose which faction to finally ally with. It's another implementation of the shared authorship model. It works, too.

I have three complaints, though. First, the game's action sequences are sometimes too long and tedious. I know that the only reason I'm building up my character is to make these sequences easier, but I wish that they could be made more compact. There were also several interesting skills like intimidation, hacking, seduction and others that I would have liked to use more. It would be cool to try to talk my way through an objective; instead, these skills were mostly useful for small bonuses along the way. Still, this isn't a game-breaking flaw (and Deus Ex did much the same).

Second, while the game's fictional world was vastly intriguing, the actual story that I played wasn't half as cool. The game talked a lot about apocalypse, but there was nothing other than talk, so I never was afraid of it. There was also a lot of talk about a great evil power that had crept into the city, but nothing impressive or alarming ever happened. There were some good touches, but the story was ultimately low-impact. It never convinced me.

Third, the game lacks replayability. This isn't a critique of the game, really, as much is it is my personal bitching. It offers some very interesting choices right off the bat though the "clan" that your character belongs to. One clan is insane, and you can argue with stop signs and such. Another clan is the only one that can use magic. Another is hideously ugly, so they must walk through the sewers and never speak to humans. But I found that when I tried to replay the game, I had to sit through the same briefings and accomplish the same missions. A lot of it was different, but over half was the same. It's great the first time through, but I just wish that it could remain fresh for another few plays.

Despite my bitching and moaning, the game is great. It's got plenty of flaws, but it delivers a solid role-playing experience in an interesting world. Vampire is still available on Steam, so pick it up when you've got a lull in your gaming schedule.

Defining "Good" Games

2007-12-30T04:41:00.000-05:00

It's almost four o'clock in the morning, beginning the last third of a noon-to-noon LAN party. Right now I'm surrounded by a bunch of hardcore gamers and geeks playing Team Fortress 2 and a variety of obscure Warcraft 3 maps. I've decided to take this opportunity to poll this sample of the hardcore gaming public about "what objectively makes a good game". After a lot of argument about the proper use of the term "objectively", I got an interesting set of answers.

Seung said that the measure of a game is the quality of its storytelling and pacing.

Jason claimed that pure and simple "fun" was the main criterion, but replayability (offering a different experience with each play) is important.

Tom M. said that a good game includes "original" game mechanics and a strong sense of progress through the game, represented through either new gameplay opportunities or an unfolding story.

Barnett's sole criterion was value; a good game keeps him entertained for a long time.

Tom L. listed gameplay as the most important aspect of a game. His example was the game Tales of Symphonia, which he characterized as having poor storytelling but fantastic cooperative multiplayer battles.

Derek said that replayability was his only measure of a game's value. A good game keeps you coming back. He hasn't played Portal, but he speculates that it's not "worth it" unless he can play through it several times.

David told me that a good game will be either a short and difficult test of skill or a longer, easier, more involving experience.

Jack plainly listed his three criteria: challenge, fun, and creativity.

And Jonathan said that a good game is defined partially by its "polish" (how well-implemented the game is) and mostly by its "concept" (the originality and quality of the ideas underlying the finished game).

So now let's try to draw deep meaning out of a tiny and undoubtedly flawed opinion sample:

I was surprised that so many of my friends emphasized replayability or game length as a measure of how good a game is. I tend to consider replayability a matter of quantity rather than quality. While quantity might influence purchasing decisions, it doesn't affect how "good" I consider a game. I think that the disconnect might represent a basic difference in how we think about games. My vision is often informed by movies, probably because I envy film's combination of popular appeal and artistic reputation as a medium. I tend to think of more narrated games like Deus Ex or Half Life 2 or Portal as the games that are closest to realizing greatness. Some of my friends tend to think more of games like Defense of the Ancients or Starcraft multiplayer or TF2 that can be played over and over again without losing any freshness. This conceptual difference mirrors that between the proponents of art-through-narrative and those of art-through-mechanics.

Several of my friends mentioned creativity and innovation, but in general this was in reference to gameplay and game mechanics. What most struck me was that nobody mentioned anything about the type of emotion or effect on the player that the game engenders, except mentioning "fun". As Warren Spector noted, other media are applauded upon creating experiences that are distinctly not fun but are otherwise enlightening or powerful. It could be that the focus on fun is why games are not widely considered a "serious" medium. Of course, most games are intended to be light entertainment, and few aspire to be high art, but it bothers me that the possibility of artistic potential doesn't even enter so many minds.

Game Length

2007-12-28T12:04:00.000-05:00

Portal was a transformative experience for me. It was undeniably a short game, but it felt like it lasted just the right amount of time. It got all the good puzzles in, never felt repetitious, and it didn't overstay its welcome.

Further, I had a lot of other stuff to play, and it was really, really nice to be able to suck all the enjoyment out of Portal in a few hours. It didn't require a month-long commitment to appreciate. I didn't enjoy Portal "despite" its short length, but because of it.

But, then again, my favorite game of all time is Morrowind, and I often cite the game's depth as its strongest point. I probably spent over 200 hours in the game world, learning all of its secrets and exploring all of its hidden corners, and I really don't think that anyone can truly enjoy the game without spending a lot of quality time with it.

So I'm left with the interesting and important question: how long ought a game to last?

I'm immediately tempted to turn back to my earlier post about playing for the experience of the game versus playing for the joy of exploration versus playing for skill. And, certainly, I'd expect a game that offers a lot of exploration to last a long time (like Morrowind), a game that offers a test of skill to be endlessly replayable (like multiplayer shooters), and a game that offers a tight and powerful experience to be shorter (like Call of Duty 4 single player).

But this system breaks down with some examples. The Final Fantasy series is certainly an experience game (though mostly a passive one), but it relies on its long length for an engaging story and world. Psychonauts is an exploratory "new art"-motivated game, but it's linear and could succeed even if it were much shorter. And you might be able to describe Portal as a skill-test, especially if you include the "challenge" levels.

I think that ultimately a game designer must look at exactly what his game has to offer and then pace the game accordingly. If there's not much variety to offer in the gameplay, then a short and dense experience like CoD4's is a good idea. If the joy of playing is through immersion in an open world, as in Morrowind, then create that open world and don't limit the player's time in it. If you've got a few hours worth of fantastic puzzles and hilarious dialogue, then don't try to extend the game to an unnecessary length; just make Portal!

The important thing to remember is that game length does not determine game content or game value. Let the game decide its own length, and we'll be happy with however many hours result.

EDIT: Coincidentally, Tycho from Penny Arcade also blogged about Portal and game length today.

The Best Moment in Gaming

2007-12-27T20:12:00.000-05:00

At least, my favorite moment. It came from Warren Spector's masterpiece, Deus Ex.

My character, JC Denton, was charged with finding and killing known terrorist leader Juan Lebedev. As I charged into the airplane hanger in which he was hiding, I was intercepted by my trusted brother Paul. He had switched sides and was now working with the terrorists. "Join us, JC. Talk to Lebedev. He can convince you."

When I approached Lebedev, he immediately surrendered. "Easy now, Agent. UNATCO has a policy against killing unarmed prisoners. We have much to learn from each other." He started to tell me that the conspiracy freaks were right; the government and my cohorts, he alleged, were the bad guys.

Just then, my partner Anne Navarre barged in. She had been a little aggressive in the past, demanding that we kill enemy terrorists instead of using non-lethal weapons. And now she was demanding that I complete the mission. "Terminate the prisoner, Agent. If you are too afraid, you are ordered to return to base, on Manderley's authority. There is a helicopter waiting."

I began to ask more questions from Lebedev, and he started to elaborate on the crimes of the UN anti-terrorist coalition that employed me. Navarre interjected, ordering me to kill him. "Leave us, Agent. Now.... You have disobeyed a direct order." She had made clear her intention to kill Lebedev.

The choice was clear: shoot Lebedev and be rewarded for a job well done, or disobey and let Navarre do it for me. Neither choice was satisfying. The man was a terrorist leader, and his people had been trying to kill me throughout the game, but he was convincing, and it was against our policies to kill him.

I got pissed.

So I shot agent Anna Navarre in the head.

It was brash, an act of anger, murder in the second degree. I had not taken any of the choices that had been offered. It seemed inevitable that Lebedev would die, but he did not, so I fully expected the game to break. Instead...

"I guess Paul must have convinced you."

Lebedev lived and kept talking. I learned the big secret and we both got out. I made up a story for my employers about hearing shooting on the plane in which he had been hiding.

It was an incredible feeling. I truly acted spontaneously and out of frustration. For the first time, a game let me take the "third option". I just hope that more games in the future offer the same.

Commentary: Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling

2007-12-26T12:50:00.002-05:00

CCoIS, Chris Crawford's latest book, is partially an examination of the problems of storytelling and interactivity and partially a guide through the technical problems of creating a Storytronics-style interactive storytelling engine. The first part is full of insight and useful lessons for game designers and storytellers. The second provides an interesting glimpse into the technology that Crawford has spent years cooking up.

For those that don't know, Storytronics is Crawford's current approach to implementing true interactive storytelling, and it's what he sees as the first major step of the new medium he is founding. And he really does consider it to be a new medium; his book, along with most of his speeches and writings, drips with contempt for games. Video games, he proclaims, are adolescent nonsense, defined by simple and often violent themes. Interactive storytelling, on the other hand, is about people.

I'm not so sure that IS is so far separated from games, and I'm not convinced that games really are so limited, but I'd love to play what Crawford describes. He rejects branching-tree stories or foldback schemes in favor of a language-based playing experience and personality modeling. Storytronics provides an authored storyworld with characters and situations in place, and the player navigates this storyworld, forging a storyline.

Some parts of Crawford's approach still look like they might present problems. Consider, for example, the problem of interactive tragedy. The most dramatically compelling ending for Romeo and Juliet is the double suicide at the end. But the player is trying to win! Crawford's solution is to change the definition of "winning" to the dramatically compelling ending rather than the character's best interest. He thus proposes that the player be rewarded with "applause" upon completing the tragedy. I'm not sure that players will find that truly rewarding, and I worry that it breaks character identification. You're forcing the player to role-play rather than powergame, and that won't work with everyone.

Crawford also concludes that interactive storytelling cannot support a creative "third option" to problems. His reasoning is that, should he offer the choice to the player, it becomes obvious and no longer is a player-created solution. Within the language-driven context he describes, I understand this limitation, but I know that in Deus Ex my most powerful experience was a third option involving shooting a previously-friendly character. The game did not present the choice to me directly, but it existed in the background. I worry that accepting this large a limitation is cutting off a powerful playing experience.

But despite my few misgivings, the majority of the concept of Storytronics sounds solid, and I'm looking forward to playing it.

The primary reason I read the book, however, was for the insight it gave into the more general fields of storytelling and interactivity. Crawford offers plenty of useful lessons. Stories are about people, not things. Interactivity is a multi-agent cycle of listening, thinking, and speaking. Stories are not based in spectacle. The choices that the player is offered should not be black and white, or even black and white and gray, but ALL grays. Every design decision constrains future design decisions, so do the tough stuff first.

I still feel beholden to games, and I'm not willing to totally abandon them in favor of IS, but this book contains enough insight that I'm happy to have read it.

Role-playing vs. Powergaming

2007-12-23T16:52:00.000-05:00

I've heard a lot of discussion about role-playing versus powergaming. In the context of a tabletop RPG, I understand the dilemma. Gamers are given an explicit goal. But a lot of the fun of the game comes from role-playing. Sometimes, winning the game and role-playing in an interesting way are contrary goals. For instance, finding a stranger in the woods, killing him, and taking all of his stuff is not interesting, but it helps beat the game.

The problem is that what you (the player of a game with an explicit goal) would do is different from what the character (a fictional person in the game world) would do. Role-players tend to enjoy the story that is created in a game, so they make an effort to inhabit the mind of their character. Powergamers are more interested in the competitive and game-mechanical aspects, so they just do what it takes to win.

A lot of games cater directly to the powergaming crowd by dropping most pretenses of a story and offering great mechanics. Team Fortress 2 doesn't explain, for instance, what these two color-coded teams are doing trying to kill each other. A much smaller subset of games cater to the role-playing crowd. Morrowind, for example, isn't a whole lot of fun unless you get into the lore and try to inhabit the game world.

Most games will offer at least a context for the role-player parts of us to enjoy. Counter-Strike, for instance, has the context of a terrorist vs. counter-terrorist battle. That mindset adds to the fun, as we peek around corners and defuse bombs with seconds to spare. But if a game like Counter-Strike encourages behaviors like bunny-hopping through its mechanics, then the role-players are generally forced out by the powergamers.

The ideal games, then, are the ones that have mechanics that encourage the character's intentions directly. Sports are the best example, since the player and the character are the same. Powergaming vs. role-playing even seems like a stupid way of looking at sports since the only story context is the real world.

Other games do a good job of this as well. Uplink, for example, casts the player as a hacker. Winning the game entails hacking systems, making money, upgrading your own computer, etc. There's no motivation to break the story context; you're not doing anything that your character wouldn't do. The party game Mafia is another good example; the mafioso's character has to lie, scheme, and deceive in the same way that the player must lie, scheme, and deceive in order to win.

I think that the issue might ultimately come down to character identification. The best games make us inhabit the character in every way. Our goals and the characters goals are the same, and the game world operates according to the character's world (i.e. if the character is a counter-terrorist agent, then bunny-hopping is simulated as being ineffective). Catering to both powergamers and role-players is just a matter of simulating the fictional world with enough depth that what we must do to win and what the character would do never diverge. Let nothing in the game be unrealistic from the character's point of view, and you've got a winner.

Commentary: Bioshock

2007-12-22T13:00:00.000-05:00

Bioshock was one of the games that the games-are-art crowd got really excited about. Heinous acts like killing innocent girls have been seen in games before, but here, the game actually purported to care! That this was novel might be a sad reflection on the state of the medium, but I admit that I was excited too.

When I first encountered the vaunted moral choice, I was ecstatic. It was real! The game asked me to rescue the Little Sister and give up the extra Adam, and thus the game actually put value in the life of this character!

Except... It was never a difficult choice. I got plenty of Adam anyway, so it didn't feel like a sacrifice. And a few Little Sisters later, Tenenbaum delivered a huge bonus gift. Throw in the fact that I never really needed Adam to succeed and the choice was really just one of "which ending do I want to see".

I enjoyed Bioshock while I played it, and in my hype-haze I named it a masterpiece. I still think that the gameplay and the philosophical content of the game (i.e. the Objectivist society it showcases) is great, but I've since come to the realization that the whole "moral choice" angle is a lot weaker than it should have been.

The killer argument that ultimately changed my mind was in Jonathan Blow's excellent speech about how and what games teach. The lesson we learn in Bioshock, for example, is to kill everything that moves from as far away as possible, unless it's a Little Sister. When we actually have a chance to save them, the music plays and the girls first fight us and then looks at us with big eyes to say thank you and run off. But since there was no major sacrifice, all we can conclude is that the game is trying to clumsily manipulate our emotions.

Blow also makes a fantastic point about the Big Daddies. They're explicitly our enemies, but their whole purpose in life is to protect the defenseless. They make gentle, mournful moans and they are kind to the girls. Most importantly, they never attack anything that isn't hostile. Why do we kill them? Well, there's an obfuscated justification somewhere in the game about just how the Little Sisters are being rescued, but it sure seems like they go right back in the vents, and when we see them later, they're still programmed to harvest Adam. Ultimately, the reason we kill the Big Daddies is because the game expects us to, and because we want the goods they're protecting.

Contrast that with Portal. The Weighted Companion Cube is a box, but I (and others) honestly felt more sympathy for the torched box than for the Little Sisters. Bioshock's girls feel like just pieces of the game mechanics, and the only reason I ever felt bad for them is because I was told to.

The question of sympathy in games is one that we're definitely going to have to figure out. What made the Weighted Companion Cube work when the Little Sisters failed? The Cube protected us from the environment, depended on us to keep it close, and was integral to our success. The Little Sisters were dispensers of Adam.

With interactivity, it's what you do that matters. In order to make us care about a character, we have to interact with it more. I think that Alyx Vance from Half Life 2 is a step in the right direction; I'd mourn her death. But the lesson of Bioshock is clear: game designers can't depend solely on the representation of a character (as a helpless little girl, for instance) to generate sympathy.

Commentary: Call of Duty 4

2007-12-20T12:24:00.001-05:00

I was a huge fan of Call of Duty 2. It was so intense and immersive that I couldn't play it for more than an hour at a time. The method of displaying health with no visible statistics, effects like shell-shock, and the constant yelling and action all served to keep me engaged in the experience of fighting WWII rather than the experience of pushing buttons and manipulating numbers.

For Call of Duty 4, I decided that I wanted the most authentic, immersive experience I could muster. So I closed the blinds, locked the door, turned off the lights, put on my headphones, and jacked into the world of CoD4 for about 6 hours one night and played straight through. It was intense.

CoD4 ups the ante for the series by placing more emphasis on developing characters and cinematic storytelling. What's remarkable is that it does so while enhancing the immersion instead of sacrificing it (as is often done with cut scenes, freezing user controls, etc.). The best trick that CoD4 has up its sleeve is its method of moving the user's camera while leaving limited control to the player. While I was consciously aware the it was the game that was making my character's head turn, it felt like I had control, so I was able to see what I needed to see without breaking immersion.

Four scenes were especially excellent and memorable: the opening pre-credits mission (the team chatter and the leap at the end especially), the sequence as the displaced foreign president (a creative way of delivering necessary exposition, and defying expectations too!), the final sequence as the US soldier (especially the way movement is governed), and the final sequence as the British soldier (best game ending ever). All of them, with the possible exception of the second, used first-person interactivity to improve an architected dramatic scene.

The sequence in which the player acts as a gunner from a circling plane also deserves special mention. It was a ton of fun, but it ruined my treasured immersion by including lots of repetitious dialogue. This could have been easily remedied by just, say, tripling the number of lines recorded.

The gameplay is excellent, but not as pristine as the storytelling, and so it served as the biggest weak spot of the game. Some parts felt frustrating, repetitive, or just odd, but I'm not sure if a Call of Duty game, with its fluid combat and checkpoint-based progression, can ever escape those occasional flaws.

Why We Play

2007-12-18T17:14:00.000-05:00

My friends and I all play a lot of games. But after many an argument between us, we've come to the conclusion that we all play games for very different reasons.

I'm an "experience gamer". I play for the immersion in a fictional game world and the feelings that it produces. I like games that give you a role to play. I preferred Starcraft over Warcraft 3 because the former treated me like a character in the story. I tend to prefer first-person games with interesting settings (Morrowind is my favorite game of all). When I played Call of Duty 4, I turned off all the lights, closed the door, and played straight through from beginning to end. I was so immersed in the game that I nearly came out of it with PTSD.

My friend David (who supplied the name for this blog) is a "skill gamer". He plays through games on the hardest difficulty that he can manage. He preferred Tribes 1 over Tribes 2 because it was harder to play; he wants a game that separates the pro from the noob, not a game that anybody can win. He plays for the satisfaction of doing the best that he can and dominating the competition.

Gabe from Penny Arcade wrote that his reason for playing was to see "new art". "I play to see the next level or cool animation. I don't play games to beat them I play games to see them." The joy of gaming for Gabe, I infer, is in the discovery of new environments. He's an "exploration gamer". I bet he'd like Morrowind as well.

There are probably other styles of play as well; these are just the ones that I've seen so far. From a designer's perspective, this represents a challenging problem. Some people will only enjoy your game if it offers immersion into an interesting role, some will only play if it offers a serious test of skill, and some will only play if your game keeps serving up new and varied material. Satisfying all of these simultaneously is difficult, if not impossible. A constant change of scenery could make a skill gamer lose his edge. A too-difficult game could frustrate an experience gamer. A deep but narrow experience game could bore an exploration gamer. The best games will satisfy all.

How Are Games Art?

2007-12-17T22:04:00.001-05:00

Now that I've conclusively resolved the debate about whether or not games are art, it's time to figure out exactly how.

Clive Barker argued that the nonlinearity of games didn't matter at all. "Let’s invent a world where the player gets to go through every emotional journey available. That is art. Offering that to people is art." But Ebert and I agree that there's more to art, since a sandbox or a Lego set or, more to the point, a personal experience isn't art. I don't quite think that it's authorial intent that matters, but I'm certain that the "art" is the product and not the consumption.

I'm much more sympathetic to Warren Spector's shared authorship model, by which I mean I love it passionately. Essentially, the game finds a way to let players help decide the story, but the designer keeps it within preset bounds. Deus Ex, for example, lets the player make moral decisions through actions and dialogue (should I kill or stun the terrorists? do I switch sides?) and then provides feedback by adjusting future dialogue and game worlds. You feel like your decisions matter.

The big limitation here is that the more freedom you offer the player (i.e. the bigger their share of the authorship), the more work the developer has to put in. If you let the player decide in the opening scene whether he wants to make this a comedy game in New York rather than a Sci-Fi game on the moon, you now have to make two games. Deus Ex solved this problem by crafting a story that forced your player to complete all the levels regardless of his sympathies; it was always rational to complete the objective. That can't be done every time. But this just seems like a creative problem. A good enough designer will figure out a solution.

Chris Crawford, whom Spector names as an inspiration, writes in Interactive Storytelling that any sort of branching story requires too much work for too little freedom. His solution is to create an automated system of storytelling: the Erasmatron. It loads up an authored storyworld and allows the player to navigate the story at will. I'd love to play this. But while Crawford has made it clear that he considers interactive storytelling to be new and separate from games, it really just seems like a better, more efficient implementation of shared authorship, with more authorship reserved for the player.

Jonathan Blow gave a fantastic talk recently that partially argued for the importance of game rules in artistic consideration ("all games actively teach"), and The Escapist had a piece on the subject as well ("game rules are highly compact artistic statements"). Games like The Marriage or Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games take this approach. The idea is that all games can make a point by modeling a system and giving it context. By playing within this system and confronting its rules directly, we gain insight.

This sounds both intriguing and also very difficult. Usually when I've heard ideas about artistic games, the mechanics are already decided (e.g. "It's an FPS...") and a compelling story is glued on top. I think that game rules that compliment the story will become a critical component of artistic games in the future, in the same way that a fantastic artistic movie requires cinematography that compliments the story (and the acting, and the directing, et cetera).

Experimenting with game rules and basic mechanics, however, might require abandoning the safe methods of making a game "fun". Games might have to be compelling in other ways in order to keep players interested. A game without fun seems antithetical, but that might be the inevitable direction of a "serious" medium of art.

Are Games Art?

2007-12-16T22:57:00.001-05:00

It’s been done to death, I know. But I’m new, and “games are art” has been my personal rallying cry, so cut me some slack.

To hardcore gamers, there’s not much to debate. We’ve seen the light already. We’ve actually felt moved by games, or gained new insight, or gained a new perspective. Any decent definition of art has to include games.

I've heard a lot of people complain that the games industry hasn’t yet produced a game that’s recognizable as “fine art.” It’s true; the medium is in its awkward adolescent phase. But the elements of art are showing up more and more, and that’s enough to show that it’s a valid medium.

Some still argue that games are artistically deficient by nature. The intelligent and entertaining Roger Ebert got some press a while ago for claiming outright that games can never be high art (A later commentary, responding to a Clive Barker’s defense of games, clarified his argument somewhat). The idea is that Romeo and Juliet would be ruined if players could have chosen a different outcome. While games can be “elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful,” the addition of player choice negates “authorial control,” which Ebert claims is necessary for serious art.

Half Life 2 is the most direct answer. It’s a linear, authored narrative. While parts of the exploration and dialogue are optional, the conclusion is inevitable, unless you count all the times that the player dies. If Gordon and Alyx are destined for a tragic double suicide, there’s not much that we can do about it.

Of course, limiting art to linear stories destroys a lot of games’ artistic potential. What interactivity offers is an artistic application of choice. Think about it this way: every other artistic medium is limited by passivity. No matter what is depicted in a movie or a book, it can’t make you feel guilt or responsibility, for example.

The key point here is that the unique artistic power of games’ stories is not going to be in the specific events that happen but rather the choices and consequences that are presented. Being forced to make a decision subjectively is a lot more powerful than witnessing another person wrestle with that choice. You’re living, not watching.

So while it’s clear to me that games can offer a deterministic authorial control, I think that we ultimately have to reject that sort of control as a criteria for art. A designer can create a game that presents certain choices in certain ways with certain consequences. There’s no way that we can know what the player will do, but there’s also no way to argue that the designer isn’t controlling the player’s experience, albeit indirectly. That’s enough to make art.