I am fond of wacky game themes.

Every once in a while I notice that someone went to great trouble to design and publish a game about an odd subject. With the advent of Z-Man’s hit game PANDEMIC– a very enjoyable cooperative game of fighting a worldwide disease outbreak, I got to thinking that maybe, perhaps, I’d seen this before somewhere before, or a game like it. Sure enough there are a few games with disease as the featured theme out there, and all of them are quite different from each other.  Publisher Descriptions are all copyright BoardGameGeek.

GAMES ABOUT PLAGUES AND DISEASES

Pandemic

By Matt Leacock
Publishers: Various (2008)

Pandemic Box Cover

Publisher’s Description: “You are specialists at the CDC/Atlanta where you watch several virulent diseases break out simultaneously all over the world. The team mission is to prevent a world-wide pandemic outbreak, treating hotspots while researching cures for each of the four plagues before they get out of hand.

Players must plan their strategy to mesh their specialist’s strengths before the diseases overwhelm the world. For example, the Operations Specialist can build research stations, which are needed to find cures for the diseases. The Scientist needs only 4 cards of a particular disease to cure it instead of the normal 5. But the diseases are breaking out fast and time is running out: the team must try to stem the tide of infection in diseased areas while developing cures. If disease spreads uncontrolled, the players all lose. If they can cure all four diseases, they win”.

I have played PANDEMIC just recently for the first time.  The cooperative mechanic, which my competitive brain was ready to dislike, was actually a nice surprise.  The mechanics really establish a sense of urgency.  My first game was a very, very narrow victory– we had one turn left to eliminate the last outbreak from the globe.  Quite enjoyable.  The basic game is expanded by an expansion pack called On the Brink.

Black Death

by Greg Porter
Publisher: Blacksburg Tactical Research (1993)
Print and play from Wargame Downloads (2008)

Black Death Cover

Publisher’s Description: Black Death is the game of plagues for 2 to 6 players. Each player is a different strain of disease in 14th century Europe, and whoever racks up the highest body count wins. The map is based on the trade routes and major population centers of Europe at the time, the events are based on historical events, and the rules are interspersed with grim quotes from the survivors. It is a game of conquest and strategy, just a different sort of conquest than your average wargame.

The stage is slightly smaller than the Pandemic game, mostly just medieval era Europe this time.  The time period is earlier– and the focus of the game entirely different.  This time you are playing competitive diseases trying to compete for large population centers to “score” on.

The sense of humor here is evident.  Black Death is a game of black humor and funny premises.  It can be quite competitive.  I have played Black Death quite a few times and even built a Cyberboard game module to play it via email, but never got permission from Mr. Porter to post it online on the PBeM Emporium.  I believe the game is out of print  from BTRC but it does appear to be a print and play PDF from Wargame Downloads.

Plague & Pestilience

by Dawn Payne and Tray Green
publisher: Chessex/Hilary’s Toy Box (1993)

Plague & Pestilence box cover

Publisher’s Description: “A light card game involving the build-up and destruction of medieval towns. In the Prosperity phase players attempt to build up their populations via stealing from other players or via improvements. Then the Death Ship arrives bearing the plague! In the Plague phase players attempt to kill off other players by playing war, pestilence or other deadly attacks. The cards contain illustrations reminiscent of medieval woodcuts featuring the Grim Reaper.”

This is an older game published by in 1993.   Plague and Pestilence is a card game I own and have played in the past.  In the Prosperity phase, it reminds me more of a Build and Explore game than a game about plagues.  Once the Plague Ships show up, the game changes focus fast.  At that point the effort shifts from the building up your medieval city into a powerhouse to just holding on to what you have built (and screwing over other cities).  P&P is a little gem of a game, pretty much forgotten these days.

Plague!

by Steve Barsky
Publisher: B&B Productions (1991)

Plague! Box Cover

Publisher’s Description: “The Black Death was no Weekend Special. A lot of people became poorly, very poorly indeed. In fact, so poorly they had to be taken away because their Immortality was wearing rather thin. And… as Fate would have it they died right on time, left, right and center. The best place for these unfortunate victims was somewhere deep, dark and damp. Not too much unlike a pit (and people were dying to get there). Plague! Is a germ-free board game, we hope, for those of you who dare to transport wagon loads of infected victims to their final resting place, a deep pit at Clarks Hill.

Object: Inspired by the yodel ‘Bring out your Dead’ the object of the game, for those who wish to play, is for each player to control a wagon which is used to visit the houses. Plague victims are ‘claimed’ and taken away to a burial site. All this whilst avoiding rats and fleas. The first to ‘bury’ 99 victims wins (remember, you’re only doing your job). The winner must now go off and infect the rest of England.”

Plague! is a very old game that was put out in a very limited distribution.  As far as I know, it was published once by a small company in 1991, and has never been reprinted.  I have never played it but have sought it ought for years.  The premise sounds very intriguing and darkly hilarious.

Graphique tiré du site www.gamasutra.com

Rob Bridgett, Directeur Sonore chez Radical Entertainment, a écrit récemment un article sur l’importance du Sound Design dans la structure narrative d’un jeu vidéo (vous trouverez cet article sur le site www.gamasutra.com). Il me semble important de vous faire part de ce que dit Rob Bridgett, d’autant plus que cela fait suite à l’article que j’ai publié hier sur l’intensité scénaristique.

L‘environnement sonore d’un jeu vidéo doit être cohérent à l’univers créé par le Game designer. “The sound designer needs to sit down, over the course of many planning meetings, with game designers and plot out and map the intended experience from start to finish” explique Rob Bridgett avant de poursuivre, “it will dictate where music, fx and dialogue all need to work together with the game flow“. Encore une fois, nous retrouvons les principes de Flow, de narration et d’immersion. L’environnement sonore améliore grandement l’immersion d’un joueur au sein d’un jeu ou même d’une action et c’est pourquoi, le Sound Design doit être parti intégrante de la conception d’un jeu.

Selon Rob Bridgett, les designers sonore peuvent s’inspirer des films d’horreurs des années 80. Les mécanismes utilisés dans ce genre de film montrent bien les possibilités offertes afin d’immerger le joueur (ou le spectateur) dans une ambiance particulière. “A lone teenager creeps through a creaky house at night, high pitched strings in the musical score build, a creaky sound is heard, phew it was only a cat, the strings stop and for a brief moment there is the silence of relief, then, in that moment where the audience is catching it’s breath with relief, then the enemy strikes.” donne-t-il comme exemple.

Enfin, le sound designer doit jouer entre les moments de silence (qui doivent faire partie du sound design) et les moments de forte intensité sonore afin de créer une dynamique. “Something with no dynamic range cannot be experienced for very long before the viewer, or listener, becomes fatigued and reaches for the off-switch” explique Rob Bridgett.

Just about all developers work by iterating in one way or another.

The biggest problem isn’t that you have to change things that are already done, or even throw it away. The biggest issue is that it takes time, and time is pretty much always more precious than money. That’s why the designer can save a lot of time by iterating in the pre-development phase, so he doesn’t waste the whole team’s time.

Iteration means the act of repeating and it’s what we do to make really good games. We make something, look at it and then we notice what we can change to make it better, or maybe even something that doesn’t work as intended at all and “must” be fixed.

Doing this late in the development cycle can be tricky, hard and expensive, as it might require effort from very many team members from different disciplines. Of course, it depends on what you’re about to change. Some minor tweaking might not be a big deal.

Sure, people in the team might whine a bit when changes are to be made because they think that it’s either good enough as it is, the designer should have “known” about the result in advance or just because they don’t want to throw away work that’s already done, but leaving that aside, the biggest issue is time. You’re always working towards deadlines and time equals money.

That’s why it’s important for designers to iterate when only being in the pre-development and theoretical design. Write the design and then make sure that all design-ish people analyze it with a microscope and iterate, iterate and iterate!

That’s a great thing about prototypes as well. They’re built for you to be able to try out things in and make rapid changes. Use them! Unfortunately, not all projects use prototyping, which I think is a real shame. It doesn’t have to be a massive fully playable game.

Heck, it doesn’t even have to be digital.

A prototype can be anything that let you test anything, like a small, small element of a game mechanic, interaction design, or whatever. I think it’s worth dedicating and spending time on prototypes even if it “steals” time from the actual development, because in the end, you’ll save time and turn up with a better product.

Also, try and keep alert so you can make changes in good time, instead of waiting untill the last minute. The less work done to be changed/discarded, the better. And as a designer, dare to say that something doesn’t work right, instead of waiting for someone else to notice it. It doesn’t matter if you become the bitchy one because you’re always the one to point out the “bad” stuff.

Making games is just like making anything else. Let’s say you’re gonna draw a panda. If you draw a panda and you’ve never done that before, you’ll get a result. Now, afterwards, draw another one. Odds are that the second one will look better.

But in the end, you’ll run out of time and can’t iterate anymore. Except if you’re Blizzard, then you can iterative untill you’re satisfied and release globally loved games.

Because the time is limited, it’s important to make sure that iteration cost as little time as possible. That’s why it’s a good idea to start iterating from day one as a designer.

If I were to save this post as a draft, read it a couple of times and then re-write it, I’m 100% sure I would end up with a much better text.

It is interesting to note that while MMOGs, time management games and real time strategy games have made the jump to social games, First person shooters have not. Why not?  I find the current generation of FPS very hard to pick up, and that may be part of the problem.

The Cheaptalk blog has an interesting post on an economists view about why pinball peaked and died out. He blames it on the transferability of skill from one pinball machine to another, combined with adaptive technology. This caused the market for pinball machines to bifurcate to experts and newbies, with most effort going towards building games for experts.

Pinball attracted a different crowd than video games like Defender (my new pal designed Defender and Stargate too,) and this is the fundamental theorem of pinball economics.  Pinball skill is transferrable.  If you can pass, stall, nudge, and aim on one machine you can do it on any machine.  This is both a blessing and a curse for pinball developers.  The blessing is that pinball players were a captive market. The curse was that to keep the pinball players interested the games had to get more and more intricate and challenging.

Pinball developers struggled with this problem as pinball was slowly losing to video games.  Video games competed by adding levels of play with increasing difficulty.  Any new player could quickly get chops on a new game because the low levels were easy.  This ensured that new players were drawn in easily, but still they were continually challenged because the higher levels got harder and harder.  By contrast, the physical nature of pinball, its main attraction to hardcore players, meant that there was no way to have it both ways.

Eventually, to keep the pinballers playing, the games became so advanced that entry-level players faced an impossible barrier.  High-schoolers in 1986 were either dropouts or professionals in 1992 and without inflow of new players that year essentially marked the end of pinball.

What game genres have similar characteristics? First Person Shooters come to mind. This challenge is magnified in a mutliplayer environment – it’s not fun to get fragged within seconds of starting a game. It’s the same experience that a new paintball player gets if they wander onto an average paintball course today – most players are now experts.

I highly recommend reading the article if you’re involved in the games and social games industry. I suspect that there is a risk that the competition for players in some popular social games genres may take us in a similar direction if we are not careful.

What other genres of games do readers think may be at risk in the same way?

What’s the best way to avoid too much setting?

The bare minimum

Stephen King is a writer that likes the idea of giving the reader the bare minimum in terms of description.

He feels that too much and you force the reader to see your characters and settings in your way.

He wants the reader to own the description – thus making the story specific to them.

The key here is, ‘the bare minimum.’  Stephen King is a master at knowing what is too much and what is too little. If you are not as blessed as Mr. King, what do you do?

Trial and error

Until you become an expert, you will have to follow the trusted steps of trial and error.

The rule mentioned before of one line per new scene is a good starting point.

The more important a place is, the more you describe – but remember, you don’t have to reveal it all at once. Revisits can be used to flesh out more and more.

More than a few lines to describe the setting and you’d better have a good reason for it.

Know your players. Different players will have different tastes – if they love long descriptions, give it to them.

Using the right words

If you have a habit of overstating the scenery, work on the words you use. The later reference to senses is particularly useful here.

Use language that doesn’t just describe in a flat way. Use alliteration and very specific descriptors to sharpen your description.

A word like ‘gloomy’ suggests both the state of the weather and of the mood. The better your vocabulary, the better your settings will work.

How do you ensure you engage your player’s senses?

The basic five

The five senses are not anything mystical. They are on the other hand, extremely powerful when it comes to creating a setting.

Little else sparks the imagination like an appropriately used sense.

There is, as ever, a balancing act.  If the sense used is too obscure, you won’t engage the players – and they’ll spend so much time trying to work out what you meant that they’d miss the next few words.

On the other hand, making it too hackneyed doesn’t really add any value. Try to avoid the tried and tested if you can. Be original without being alien.

The final point is to ensure you use all of the senses.

GMs will typically spend 99% of the time talking about what characters can see and only use the other 1% when the input is exceptional – a loud noise or a pungent smell.

In real life the mix of sensory perception is never this heavily weighted in favour of sight. Why should your adventure be any different?

The emotions

Emotions aren’t senses of course, but they are a powerful link to getting a player to understand the setting very quickly. If you can combine senses and emotion you will really hook the player quickly – and that’s why I have linked them here.

Describing an inanimate object by using an emotion on the face of it seems odd, but it can convey in a couple of words what could take a five minutes to explain.

If your characters come to a ‘lonely house’ or enter a ‘confused room’ then you have started to evoke multiple images in the players’ mind – and only a small amount more description will enable the players to fully understand what you mean.

Understanding the levels of setting

Metaphors etc.

The subtlest way to describe is to say how the setting resembles something the players know well (or the other way around).  Each serves it’s own purpose but writers regularly confuse their uses.

a. Metaphors

This is an implication. There is no statement that there is a link; we simply use the resemblance.

‘She walked catlike across the roof of the villa.’

Nobody expects the character to have fur and a tail. If ‘she’ were a cat, we would say she simply walked – cats, by definition, walk catlike.

This one word suggests she walks assuredly, softly, secretively and no doubt evokes the image of a cat burglar. The players will probably already suspect that she is up to no good.

b. Similes

Here we add the prefix ‘like’ or ‘as’ and therefore by definition create more of a signpost to the link.

‘She walked across the villa’s roof like a cat.’

The same result but a different and less subtle route.

c. Analogies

This is the least subtle option as we tell the player that something was like something else and include a comparison.

‘Her journey across the roof of the villa was like a cat stalking its next meal as she made every effort to make no sound and reacted instinctively to every small movement around her.’

d. Allusions

Here you make reference to someone or something famous.

‘Felicity the burglar. The wonderful, wonderful burglar.’

I chose this on purpose – and if you didn’t understand it, I’ve proved my point.

If you’ve never seen or heard of Felix the Cat, the allusion is wasted. Worse still, the players would wonder what on earth the words mean. If they do get it, they feel pleased with themselves.

(If you still don’t get it, ask someone older than you to sing the ‘Felix the Cat’ song (or YouTube it).  Then you’ll get it).

Allusions are dangerous ground.

e. Personification

This is a variation, where an inanimate object (or sometimes flora or fauna) is given a human trait.

‘The fog hugged her body as she sat on the villa’s roof.’

Next time out I’ll talk about using nature in setting.

Hoje vamos abordar sobre o GDD (Game Design Document). Sendo o principal trabalho de um Game Designer, ele é o principal orientador de qualquer projeto de jogo. Dependendo de como será o seu jogo, o tamanho varia chegando a mais de 100 páginas.  O jogo deve ser escrito com o máximo de detalhes para que sua equipe saiba o que fazer e como fazer acontecer. A primeira parte que devemos definir é o gênero (plataforma, esporte, etc.), visão (FPS, TPS, etc.), público-alvo (hardcore ou casual) e por último uma história. A história foi colocada por ultimo, pois muitos casuais nem tem uma história para contar.

O inicio do GDD é o resumo do que haverá no jogo, muitos concursos como BRgames ou qualquer publisher olham para o resumo para aprovação ou não do projeto para financiar. É nele que colocamos, além das informações que disse anteriormente, um resumo da história, sobre o que o jogador irá fazer, o objetivo do jogo, o porquê o jogo é divertido e outras informações sobre o jogo, nada específico.

Para sua equipe, nem todos irão ler o GDD (acontece na maioria das vezes). O Programador olharará a parte de como o personagem se comporta, o sistema de navegação, exploração, etc. O artista gráfico olhará como será o personagem, cenário, armas, veículos, etc. Assim como outros membros da equipe.

Não há uma regra ou receita de bolo de como fazer um jogo ou um GDD, varia de pessoa para cada pessoa. O importante é que o seu documento seja simples, detalhando e cheio de informações essenciais para não haver impasse sobre o que a equipe deve fazer segundo o designer pensou.

One thing that most writers (adventure or otherwise) find challenging about setting is understanding how it gives the story context

Overlooking the setting

Too many GMs spend a lot of time on plot and ensure they have great characters and expect to produce a fantastic adventure.  Setting is the most often overlooked aspect of adventure writing that is relatively easily teachable.

Certain parts of writing are difficult to impart – style and pace are the two that immediately spring to mind – but like plotting or creating believable characters, crafting great settings is something that can be learned.

Having said all of that, good setting does not mean a good adventure but it’s fair to say that bad setting can equal a bad adventure.

Stories in a vacuum

The adventure doesn’t just need things to happen – it needs somewhere for them to happen. Setting doesn’t just give the players a place to see things unfold, great setting adds to the experience.

It creates the mood and can draw the player into the story in a way that no other facet can.

Setting isn’t world building, but it’s a small step towards creating a believable world in which your characters and plot live.

Setting is not, however, just the broad brush-strokes of the world – it’s not just the background.

The link to great characters

We are all influenced by where we grew up, where we went to school, where we live.

The creation of accurate settings reflects who your characters are, where they came from and sometimes even where they are going.

Your characters may be a reflection of their environment. Or the setting may give the players an insight as to why their characters are developing the way they are.

Do your characters conform to their setting, or are they rebelling?

What are the aspects of setting?

Do you need to include scenery?

Scenery is a challenge for the fledgling adventure writer. Too much scenery and the players will feel like they’ve stumbled into a book of photographs.

Very pretty but it doesn’t go anywhere.

Yet too little and there is no context for the story.

Scenery has its place. If the scene opens with a man bursting into the room with a gun, the players don’t want ten minutes of the GM describing how beautiful the room is – they want to know what’s going to happen.

As a GM, you have to know the appropriate point to describe the scene.

You either have to delay the entrance with the pistol, or find another way of working it in.

Each scene deserves at least a few words of setting – even if it’s a familiar place. You can always reveal details bit by bit if it’s a setting frequented often.  Players probably won’t take in all of the details in one sitting anyway.

Because that’s exactly how it works in real life. You typically notice the big things first and then upon revisiting, you start to notice more and more of the details.

Eventually you would notice if something was moved or missing.

A good rule (to be stretched and bent as you see fit) is to give the description as early in the scene as possible, without it getting in the way of the story or encounter.

The second suggestion is to invest more time on scenery the first time you visit – and the more important the setting is throughout the adventure.

Place as a character

Sometimes the scenery or setting plays as big a part in the adventure as any character. In a whodunit, the murder scene is often integral to the plot.

On these occasions, as much effort should be lavished on the creation of the setting as that important NPC.

And like characterisation, you may not use all of the detail – but you had better be prepared. Hogwarts in the Harry Potter novels is a prime example.  So if you have a dungeon, what was it before it was a dungeon.  People just don’t build them.  They are typically functional building that fall into disrepair and then they become dungeons over many, many years.  The dungeon should have a flavour that reflects its original (or most recent) use. 

If you only reveal the salient points in a mystery story, you have telegraphed the plot to the player. Similarly, if you over elaborate, the player will lose interest.

Sometimes the place has an importance because of its effect on the characters – and on these occasions, it merits a greater description.

It’s a classic show and tell scenario.

You can tell the player about the character or you can show the interaction with the setting – which is always far more effective.

Your own backyard

There is a real tendency for adventure writers to fall into two opposite traps when describing a place that is familiar to them – either from real life or a fantasy setting they’ve used over and over again.

The first option is to explain every detail. Often the GM is proud of what they know or remember and they want to share this in every minute detail.

The second mistake is to assume that every player knows about New York, the Manhattan skyline or the Statue of Liberty – and so no description is given.  Or for that matter the Jedi academy on Coruscant.

In the first scenario, the player will think they’ve stumbled upon a game about writing a guidebook, not an adventure.

In the second, anyone who hasn’t visited these places (or watched the film) will feel left out.

It’s like a recipe book without a picture of what the end product is supposed to look like – you feel cheated in some way.

Include the detail that sets the scene and is relevant. Add nothing more but don’t scrimp on the ingredients either.

Change of scene

The greater the alteration of scene, the more important the description becomes – and the earlier the GM needs to reflect the change.

As an adventure writer, you know when you change scene where the action is taking place – it’s your story. But do the players?

To use a literary example, too many books transfer the action from a quiet room in the centre of Chicago to the wastes of Alaska and don’t let the player know until the second page of writing. As a reader this is most disconcerting (and the example I use is from a real novel).

If your characters experience a change of setting, you need to describe that change – even if it means holding up the plot for a minute or two.

Players that teleport, travel to another plane, enter a dark cave or simply visit a village with differing customs – they all need to be aware of what’s changed.  It sets them mentally to be prepared for other changes e.g. the NPCs may react differently to them.

As I write this I am watching the second episode of Dollhouse (I watched the first earlier). Seems good so far (some guy just started hunting her!) but I haven’t really seen enough to form an educated opinion. Every time the guy from Journeyman shows up I expect him to angrily talk about his brother.

At the moment (though not right at this moment, of course), I am in the middle of going through PSYC3311 readings to work out what to replace for 3310 next semester. Somehow I haven’t actually read some of these myself (and I suspect they are mostly the same readings as when I did the unit(s) two years ago), so doubly productive!

While I was reading about graphical representations (more specifically how the things we consider “better” – 3D over 2D, animated over static – are not necessarily so) I had some ideas for an adventure game that has been in the works for a few years (one of them anyway). It has been in very early production stages since forever, but I had some ideas yesterday that changed the nature of it slightly and inspired a few puzzle and plot ideas.

Also, I finished World of Goo demo. Not sure at this stage if I want to buy it.

NaNoWriMo fail! I must be ~18 000 words behind by now. I updated my Ravelry page with photos for everything.

We keep getting Yellow Pages delivered (I swear this is the third time this year) and instead of just letting them sit there this time, I stuck them under my monitor to raise it up to a better height. I noticed yesterday that some were delivered to the Sanders Building (is that supposed to happen?) and I thought about taking them to stick under the monitor in my office, which is lower than this one was and won’t even tilt up very high. Maybe they’ll still be there tomorrow…

Just to start, I’m aware that right now the whole blog looks rather…amateurish. I am planning to make several changes to it but this sort of thing takes some time to iron out, not to mention I need to make sure Greasy is happy with it too. So just bear with us, changes are coming, but we’re working it slowly

That out of the way, I myself have also been fully enthralled in Dragon Age: Origins, having recently completed the personal quest of the rock golem Shale in the depths of the Deep Roads and am now working to gain the favor of the Dalish Elves in my struggle against the Blight. I’ve been taking my time through the game and so far it’s been able to tickle me in all the right spots. Definitely going to be a contender for me for game of the year.

One of the best things about the game for me has been the colorful cast of party NPC’s which you can recruit. This isn’t anything new for long-time Bioware fans, harkening back to the Baldur’s Gate series. But given my work, it did occur to me that this is a part of single player games that will NEVER be able to be captured properly by any MMORPG.

To put it into perspective, it’s been about 10 years since Baldur’s Gate 2 was released, and I would bet that everyone who has played the game still remembers who Minsc and Boo are.

Go for the eyes!

I’m guessing no, you probably wouldn’t – and if you did it’s not going to be because of that person’s personality, but rather the situation that you find yourself in with them. I recall the exact spot in Cazic-Thule where I dinged 65 in Everquest (back when 65 was still the level cap) but I couldn’t tell you the name of the group tank apart from that it was a dwarf paladin.

Perhaps thats just me, I don’t know. But thats how I see things. Real people living in our mundane world just aren’t as interesting as a well thought out, fictional character. Thats why we like to read about them, to watch them, and to play as them. And even if per chance we do have some exotic life story to tell, there’s rarely any incentive within an online environment for any meaningful desire to share it.

But we can ourselves become interesting characters, can’t we? There is a potential to do so. After all, these interesting, fictional characters in our games were created from the mind of a real person, someone grounded and living in our mundane world. So why don’t I see this happening more often in an MMO environment? Barring well thought out role-play, why do I get Bob the rogue looking for XP rather than Iandak the silver tongued Half-Elf rogue with a dark secret from his past? Mainly because there is hardly any incentive in today’s MMORPG design for the player to really put out.

The problem in my opinion is one of scale. Current MMO design gives no incentive for players to flesh out an alternate persona that could then be shaped by their adventures in game. While I am only barely touching the surface of this issue, one reason is that pretty much everyone’s story is the same. There is a SINGULAR end goal that everyone strives towards, and despite the differences in leveling paths one might take across different zones or different methods, you all arrive at the same place.

The game simply isn’t big enough, nor encompassing enough, to be able to capture individually unique and distinct stories or to even have multiple end goals. Perhaps they do not necessarily need to be “end goals” per se either.  The scale needed for such a world would be absolutely enormous, but it’s one way I can think of where suddenly you actually have a large enough world that each player’s story suddenly becomes more unique. The game needs to be designed more as a living breathing world first before it is a game.

It begs the question then, will the Old Republic still have that Bioware feel? Partially yes, I think it will. From the previews I have seen, they’ve done a lot in adding plenty of what makes their games great into it (branching dialogue trees, some sort of moral system, relatively interesting NPC’s, etc.) but will it be like a multiplayer version of Dragon Age? I doubt it, and I doubt we’ll see anything like that for a long, long time.

-Seb

Steve Egan in the comments yesterday brought up such a good, common point that it deserved it’s own post:

I don’t see how replayability could even be considered part of the definition of a game. I say this as somebody who has to wait years before rereading a book, or games that rely on the static elements for a significant part of the experience, as I remember what’s about to happen as I’m experiencing the media.

Recently I took a look at what a game is and from my definition at least, Train is most definitely a game. That’s because my definition is, “A game is an activity with an agreed upon set of rules, that participating individuals act in accordance to, while in a state of play.”

This definition is pretty broad – activities in a “state of play” is hard to defined, and some would say cyclical.  Going for a walk, listening to a teacher in a classroom, perusing a forum, or attending a slumber party could all fit this definition.  Reading this post probably fits the definition!  If the number of participating individuals were 1, all that’s require here is the individual act within rules (they could have created) while in this nebulous state of “play”.

Defining a game is hard, and ultimately, it’s just language.  It only matters in how it helps us design.

The best definition I’ve seen is Chris Crawford’s: an interactive, goal-oriented activity, active agents to play against, in which active agents can interfere with each other. Or, in a series of dichotomies:

1. Creative expression is art if made for its own beauty, and entertainment if made for money. (This is the least rigid of his definitions. Crawford acknowledges that he often chooses a creative path over conventional business wisdom, which is why only one of his 13 games is a sequel.)

2. A piece of entertainment is a plaything if it is interactive. Movies and books are cited as examples of non-interactive entertainment.

3. If no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy. (Crawford notes that by his definition, (a) a toy can become a game element if the player makes up rules, and (b) The Sims and SimCity are toys, not games.) If it has goals, a plaything is a challenge.

4. If a challenge has no “active agent against whom you compete,” it is a puzzle; if there is one, it is a conflict. (Crawford admits that this is a subjective test. Video games with noticeably algorithmic artificial intelligence can be played as puzzles; these include the patterns used to evade ghosts in Pac-Man.)

5. Finally, if the player can only outperform the opponent, but not attack them to interfere with their performance, the conflict is a competition. (Competitions include racing and figure skating.) However, if attacks are allowed, then the conflict qualifies as a game.

But this doesn’t mention replayability!

I was actually surprised. Why do Sirlin and I consider replayability a core part of a game? I can think of 2 reasons off the top of my head. First, all the prominent games of history are replayable. Sports, chess, board games, children’s games, are all at their core replayable concepts. Second, rulesets that create interesting choices (another frequent game definition) seems to require replayability.

This is an interesting point.  Replayability is the fallout of interesting choices.  If the choices aren’t replayable, then they, by definition, weren’t interesting enough to explore.  If you can predict the outcome of all possible rule permutations, then you aren’t playing a game. The rules are trivial.

Without replayability, your game is boring.

Consider Tic-tac-toe.   Most would say it’s a boring game, but it’s still a game because it barely crosses the threshold of interesting choices.  You aren’t 100% sure the opponent isn’t going to make a mistake.  Most people can’t immediately see all permutations.  It’s the minimal threshold of competitive activity.

And yet it’s still replayable.

Steve, in his comment here, puts forward he doesn’t replay because he “has to wait years before rereading a book, or games that rely on the static elements for a significant part of the experience, as I remember what’s about to happen as I’m experiencing the media.”  He’s focusing on the experience – but as the quote itself suggests, the experience is medium-agnostic.  The experience could be a book, a movie, or a game.  In fact, the parts of the games he is interested in are the “static elements”, the things that by definition wouldn’t fall under the interactive ruleset activity at the heart of a game.  You wouldn’t say this sort of thing about Chess or Poker, for example.

If you aren’t interested in replaying the game, it’s likely you’ve completely mastered the key elements through repeated, skilled play.  Or, in the case of something like Train, the (still undescribed) game is serving to give you the experience the designer wanted, and is not as something to be mastered.

Put another way, Train, as a game, is replayable.  It’s just designed so no one would want to.

So, if the experience is the common criteria, why does this matter?  Because, unlike Train, the vast majority of games derive their experience from reinforcement of their choices.  From a design point of view, finding ways to make your game more interesting to replay means the player’s interactions with these choices are deeper, and thus more interesting.  If so, Sirlin and so many systems designers find replayability so important because it is a basic reflection of the quality of their designs.

So a thread started on Praxis, the game design brother to Story Games, about being accountable to work on your game designs.  This is a good thing.  I’m not very good about doing anything with my games very often.  I need some push and incentive to get going.  Some inertia so to speak.  So I joined up.  And I’m going to report here also.

Here are the game in progress:

Comatose – an rpg about people in comas and what happens when something is trying to kill them in their dreams.  This one is pretty well along except it seems empty of story.  Like a lot of mechanics strung together.  I need some more eyes on this for some feedback I think.

The Accused – a murder mystery rpg driven by a puzzle mechanic.  This one is pretty well along.  I had a revelation on this one about a month back that broke a block I was having.  This one needs testing.

The Interman Game – a board game based on my good friend Jeff Parker’s extremely excellent graphic novel, The Interman.  The book is about a genetically altered guy who is being hunted by assassins.  It’s Jonny Quest meets James Bond.  I cannot say enough good things about this book.  You should check out all of Jeff’s work at Parkerspace.com.  He’s currently writing for Marvel – Agents of Atlas in particular is super awesome.  Back to the game.  It’s 90% done.  I need to tweak some of the graphic and do not have the computer power at the moment.

Restless Spirits – an rpg about ghosts and the people they haunt using a unique graphic mechanic for the spirits.  Infant stage.

Becky Sharp card game – based on another good friend Micah Harris’s book, The Eldritch New Adventures of Becky Sharp.  Micah, Jeff, and I used to do comics for The East Carolinian back in college.  I’ll post some of those some day.  Anyway, Micah is a fantastic writer.  He’s eloquent yet down to earth and has an excellent command of language.  His novels and stories are very heavily researched and he truly loves to write.  Infant stage.

That’s it for right now.  I have a whole lot more ideas that I may discuss here at some point.

tomg

I used to share idle thoughts on Facebook.  I’ve moved away from that lately, and I’ve moved to Twitter for my status updates.  Strangely, the more it becomes Twitteresque, the more I use Facebook for its other features.  But sometimes I have fears of spamming the Twitter, and I can’t always compress things to 140 characters.  So here, have some thoughts that aren’t well-formed or interesting enough for their own blog-posts or tweets.

I really hate the D terminal of the Cleveland Hopkins International (really?  where to?  Canada?) Airport.  It’s always under renovation, it’s a mile away from the rest of the airport, and it means I’m flying Continental, “The Official Airline of People who Failed to Book a Flight on Southwest.”

So tired.  I got five hours on Monday night, so I decided to go to sleep really early last night.  As I got into bed, the fire alarm went off.  I put on a robe and flip-flops, assuming it would be over within ten minutes.

A half-hour later, I was pissed off and went next door to Noah to heat up.  It didn’t help my mood that a pair of complete strangers had pointed and laughed at me.  Fuck them.  Anyway, I ended up in Nathan and Monica’s room, watched a little Mythbusters, threatened to flash them, and went back to bed, finally.

If I learn nothing else from Systems Programming, at least I can revel in the fact that I came up with a great C++ pun today (department t-shirt worthy?).

const int & opole(){ return istanbul; }

Actually, though I usually won’t admit it, I have learned a few things from Sys Prog.  Last night I finished my first C++ program, an implementation of a “Huffman Map.”  I don’t completely understand how it works (apparently I need to take Information Theory), but the point is that it does work!

My program can compress and restore files, all without losing any of the information contained within.  For instance, I got a 2.7 KB text file to compress all the way down to…2.5 KB!  I saved ~200 bytes of space!  (Supposedly, the effect is more dramatic on larger files).

Lingering shingles pain: not so much fun.  Every day I think, “Today is the day my leg won’t hurt, and I’ll get through the whole day without Tylenol.”  Every day, I am wrong.

Speaking of recovery, my leg looks a lot better now.  You know how when you skin your knee or something, you get a big scab which you aren’t supposed to pick at?  Imagine two dozen tiny scabs that you aren’t supposed to pick at.

I make it sound like I didn’t pick them all off.  I…did.

Drivel’s really late in publishing, but it’s because we’re considering an increase in the number of color pages and a decrease in the number of planned issues.  At least, that’s the story that doesn’t make us sound like a bunch of fuck-ups.

My computer’s broken, but the folks who built it think that a few tweaks and a BIOS update are all it needs.  I’ll be getting it back next week.  That’s something to be thankful for.  I’d be more frustrated with the computer, but Assassin’s Creed II for PC was delayed, so at least I’m not missing out on that.

More in part two.

I have my problems with iterative design. Personally, iterative design is the way to go for me. Professionally it’s my biggest enemy.

When designing games, I find it impossible to think of every (and I mean EVERY) little aspect of the game. I just can’t. Even harder is that I cannot always guarantee that my design is fun or that it “feels right” when played. Making a game feel right  is the hardest process, because it involves a lot of fiddeling around with animation, response times, feedback and so on. To really get those things nailed, iteration is the way to go – although time and budget restrains often keep me from iterating until I feel the game is good to go.

Now, those budget restrains are not what makes iteration my biggest enemy. It’s my co-workers. Don’t get me wrong here, they are great guys but every time I ask for iteration, it weakens my position as a Game Designer. It almost feels like I’m saying: “I’m a bad designer. I have no clue about what I’m doing. I can’t design on paper.” I had people come up to me and ask me, why I did not know this or that button had to be there 6 months ago. All I could answer was “I simply didn’t know back then!”. Well, that must mean I am a bad designer  - at least to the person asking it does.

Iteration feels like admitting that you don’t have a clue. If you’d have a clue, you could’ve designed everything in pre-production. At least that’s what a lot of people expect of me.

But I am content with this. Iteration IS the way to go. At least for me.

I’ve discussed Train by Brenda Brathwaite before.  After MIGS 2009, David Sirlin gives Train high praise, but asks “Is Train a game?”  It’s not replayable, and it puts a focus on presentation that is more associated with art then games.  I had the same initial thoughts, but I came to different conclusions.

First, while we don’t often have control over it in video games, presentation and the medium of play are very much a part of games.  David Sirlin’s own talk at MIGS on “Every Click Counts” tsks designers for creating unnecessary affordances.  We take controls and thus the controller into high consideration while designing.  Does thinking about the Wii controller make New Super Mario Bros less of a Super Mario Bros game?  Or Rock Band, which got to design their physical presentation in the guitar controller and clearly made a meaningful, accessible impact?  Other games show this too – professional sports has to be played in front of a crowd, for example, and special rules (the 7th inning stretch, say, or commercial breaks) are incorporated for audiences or television.  Are these less of a “game” for these things?  They are just different.

In particular, varying the presentation invites broader communities as well as broader meta-gaming to occur around the game.  Meta-gaming allows audiences to “play” mentally even if they can’t be competitive.  Meta-gaming allows people to learn from the game by watching and talking and exploring, not just playing in one defined way.  Checkers is a stronger game because it can be played online as well as physically, yet that’s a feature, not a required part of being a game.  Checker’s presentation is a design choice.  While usually it is common sense to go for the expansion of the presentation, restricting it has design value too,  and shouldn’t affect it’s “gamey-ness”.  For the people who can play, it is still a game and a meta-game.  With Train, there is just a much larger meta-game then is typical.

Replayability, Sirlin’s second question, is a trickier fish.  Most games today are hardly replayable, and I’ve argued in the past that this lessens them.  Historically, replayability is a core, undeniable aspect of a game.

I see too flaws here though.   One, many of these games are very replayable, if you consider the games to be shorter pieces of the overall experience.  A combo exchange in Street Fighter, a fight in Dragon Age: Origins, a traversal section in Uncharted 2.  If these pieces were just presented alone, we would consider them games – encapsulated mechanics, goals, replayable.  So why would the larger experience containing many such games not be a game?

Because they seem to have a different objective.

Consider puzzle games.  They contain these micro-games, usually in levels.  The play of these micro-games can be somewhat similar to, we’ll call them gamey-games.  But the goal is different.  Or RPGs.  A game like Android is an RPG and a board game at the same time.  It contains many aspects of the most classic euro-games: bluffing, strategic planning, action-value calculations.  Yet its core is in service of its theme, making the player forget they aren’t in a film noir Blade Runner.  And let’s not forget the host of games that use these micro games for story, the proud dukes of the video game market – platformers, adventure games, action games, single-player shooters.  All of these are focused more on narrative then on repeated gameplay.  At least until you look at their micro-games.

Should we throw all of these games out because they don’t elevate their microgames as their ultimate representation?  I don’t know.  I find it hard to believe that something that contains a game isn’t still a game, just as a game that contains art is art, from a base perspective.  It seems to come down to a big tent or small tent debate.

And rather, maybe it comes down to what meaning you’re willing to accept with your gameplay.  Sirlin calls the games he admires teachers of meritocracies built around skill.  Maybe that is their goal, their meaning, what they bring to the world.  But couldn’t other meanings from other games be valid, even desirable?  Why would we expect them to also teach meritocracy?  Couldn’t they teach perseverance or economics or logic?  Games seem stronger for having more possible meanings, not less, just as movies can and comic books have never managed to achieve in the public eye.

While not all these different types of games do honor to the medium they pull from, some, like Train, do.  Maybe that is enough to put down the debater’s cap and say “Welcome, what do we have in common?”

Initial idea on paper. This posts also doubles as a test of the iPhone wordpress app. I seem to drift toward this project when procrastinating so developing the ideas on my iPhone seems quite appealing.

So the first ideas seemed to revolve around the concept of multiple endings. The player is rewarded to each ending which will be dependant on the extent to extent to which they investigate the world.

Quality, free Unity tutorials.  part 1 below – the rest are on YouTube via TornadoTwins.

Wotcha everyone,

There’s been a lot of discussion recently on the proposed classes for Star Wars: The Old Republic.  I’ve been checking out Darth Hater and Bio Break, but your browsing may have been elsewhere.

As Syp posited, it seems that out of 8 classes, a nice round half of them are light-pipe wielding force-monkeys.  That means Jedi or Sith.  Now, because I’m a bit lazy, I’m going to refer to both Sith and Jedi under the term “Jedi” for the rest of this article.  I’m fully aware of their differing beliefs and philosophies, but quite frankly I think typing “or Sith” a few hundred times for the sake of the pedantic will destroy my soul.  There’s not much of it left, and I’d like to keep what I have.

One of the fun things about life is that we don’t get to decide who we are.  We are born into our station in life.  Boy, girl, rich, poor, it’s all random.  In a game, we create our characters, as if we’re Professor Membrane with our own little “Clone your own You!” kit.

At that point, birth is not random.  It’s not an accident.  It’s a fully perpetrated act of creation.

Let us, for the sake of argument, pretend for a few moments that the events within Star Wars really did occur a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

Those born with the requisite genetic bits to become Jedi are rare.  Then they also need to be discovered by the Jedi Order, and taken off to become Jedi Knights.  There is a huge, teeming galaxy full of people, with only a small percentage able to use the force effectively enough.  So Jedi are a very small part of the population; you definately have to win the genetic lottery, then the lucky break lottery.

In a game, all the rules of random birth are thrown out of the window.  It’s so un-random that we’re even assigned a limited choice of character types; no brewers of blue milk here, thank-you!

And out of that limited selection, half of the choices are Jedi.

Tangent time:  Let’s imagine the situation.  Some characters are in a room:

• I’m a Jedi me.  I get to shout Wom! whilst carving stuff up with my uber lightsaber, and with my leet mental acuity I get to levitate stuff, and throw stuff about.  And I’m dead good at acrobatics and leaping about.  What do you do?

• I’m a Smuggler.  I get to…  smuggle stuff.

• Oh, so you hide stuff?  Isn’t that like tidying?  Because tidying is hiding stuff, isn’t it?  Tell you what, you tidy up the ship, and I’ll go off and adventure?  Can I borrow your Wookie?

• Hey, don’t mind me, I’ll just brew up some blue milk…

In the films, Jedi are all-powerful.  It takes another Jedi to take one down effectively.  That, or a heavily armed squad of clones who get the jump on a Jedi, on account of the Jedi thinking they’re on the same side.

Even in the Original Trilogy, the signs are there.  It’s Obi-Wan and Vader fighting each other in A New Hope.  In Empire Strikes Back, Vader makes Solo look like a chump as he casually “Talk to the hand”s Solo’s best quick-draw.  Cool.  As.  Fuck.  And in Return of the Jedi, it’s three Jedi in a room, bitching each other up, whilst everyone else is off picking on each other.

Jedi fight Jedi.  Norms fight Norms.  It’s a two-tier galaxy, kids.

And here we are, looking at a game that seeks to emulate those films, and we’re surprised that half of the classes are Jedi?  In a way, I’m surprised they’re not all Jedi.  Because given that Jedi are far more powerful than everyone else, who would want to intentionally gimp themselves?

Jedi fly better than everyone else.  They shoot better.  They hit people with wom-sticks better.  They ride anything.  They drive really, really well.  They take pain better.  They are neither clumsy nor random.  They do, or do not.  They never try.  Anyone else might be a specialist, but Jedi are just plain all-round fantastic.

So how do you create non-Jedi classes in a Star Wars world, without:

• Rendering them pointless, because they’re so underpowered in comparison, or
• Rendering the Jedi farcically weak?

Game balance is one of those fantastic things that really, really eats the soul out of an Intellectual Property.  It’s rare you find an author that thinks of game balance whilst writing.  And any one that does is probably not putting a good story forward; would Dune work if Paul Atreides was balanced to the same power level as Duncan Idaho, or maybe Gurney Halleck.  How about Stilgar?

Same for Star Wars.  So to be honest, I would perfectly understand if only Jedi classes were available, or if no Jedi classes were available.  Because I’d prefer that to Jedi being intentionally gimped so that there were less complaints that Jedi were too powerful.

Of course they’re powerful.  That’s the point.

I don’t envy Bioware.  They get to try and create a game with a horde of angry Star Wars fans dissecting every decision.  The Lore-Monkeys will scream at them for every game-balance choice.  Theory-crafters will shout at every lore-based choice.  And the Original Trilogy fans will shout because it’s set in some weird non-movie-canon period of time, instead of a perfectly serviceable Galactic Civil War.

From a personal point of view, I really couldn’t give a flying slice-hound for what BioWare do, as long as the game is good.  I’ve grown up with the Star Wars films, and they have made me the geek I am today.  They are now, and will always be, my favourite films.  Everything that uses the Intellectual Property, such as books, merchandising, and games, is based on the films. 

They are not the films.  They never will be.

If I want the experience of the films, I’ll get them and watch them.  I don’t read a book or play a game.

Good luck, Bioware.  May the Force be with you.

Cheers,
Hawley.

I would like to thank everyone that took part in the beta, you really helped out. I didn’t expect there to be quite as much to fix / change / touch-up as there was, shows you how important these tests are.

Based on feedback I’ve just wrapped up rc1 and let it hit the servers, you can download it from the (spruced up) product page. Please note that the game still cannot be bought, and it will not be available until january. The youtube promo / manual video is also locked pending a licensing issue that is taking longer than I expected (my own fault). It will go live shortly.

Time to thank people? Indeed it is. I would like to thank Lars Wikman for his extremely detailed feedback concerning almost every aspect of the game’s graphics and interface. Many thanks mate.

Hong Li and Bruce Downey were outright packrats when it came to tracking down obscure bugs (at least now I know the game will run decently in *some* versions of wine). Thanks guys.

Anders Carling gave me a fair share of tactile feedback of how the game felt, several changes were implemented due to it. Cheers mate.

Finally I would like to thank Lars-Eric Tonfeldt, Monica Tonfeldt, and the always lovely Rebecca Olsson, for helping me test the… somewhat lackluster alpha versions of the game (random blobs of color and a tad of gameplay interspersed between the bugs).

Phew. Tough part is over. Now, it’s quite possible that there are still bugs in the game, and I would appreciate some more feedback on the puzzle levels. Nobody has really commented on them, if this means the levels are fine as they are or if they’re so difficult that nobody has beat a single one is left to see. I’ll continue to tweak them until the launch officially hits in January so if you have any ideas, do send them in.

Thank you everyone.