GameDevBlog

Notes On ... Videogames I Played Last Year.

Or, part of last year, because my memory doesn't go back that far.

Enslaved - Great character animation, particularly in the faces. May be the first time I've seen exasperation in a video game. 

Mass Effect 2 - I felt manipulated into doing these character missions, to get the bennies and because the main story arc hadn't advanced yet, but then found myself sucked in despite myself and making hard choices along with the characters. I was sorry when it was over. 

Inside a Star-Filled Sky - I'd been meaning to play this ever since I saw it at GDC, but didn't get around to it until December. Does things to your mind.

Desktop Dungeons - This exercises a part of my brain that I love to exercise. Flow. Happiness.

Deus Ex 3 -  By combining Gears-of-Warish cover mechanics with stealth, it brings a new clarity to the stealth game that I haven't seen before.

Blueberry Garden - A very pleasant way to while away part of an afternoon.

Fruit Ninja Kinect - Pretty much the killer app for the kinect, IMO.

Little Alchemy - I mentioned that one in a previous post - my daughter and I kept coming back to it and have gotten close to finishing, although seems like they keep adding more stuff. (And they're fond of sixty second shooter, too - somebody over there topped our leaderboards.)

What about you? What were your highlights of last year?

sixty second shooter update

Ok, as promised, I've tuned up sixty second shooter a bit. The main goal is to make grabbing power-ups less frustrating - Tomo's biggest issue with the game as it stands.

I also discovered an exploit: one could play in a long, flat window and see the whole board and know where all the power-ups spawned. I don't know if anybody was actually using that exploit but I fixed it anyhow - part of the game is supposed to be exploring the unknown, so if one can see the whole board, that's not the experience I had in mind.

It raised a problem though - no matter what I did, I was going to make some window aspect ratio optimum. At first I said, "Okay, let's just use the longest dimension as the cap." But that would incent people to play in a square window, to see as much as possible in each direction. I want to incent full-screen play. But monitors are different sizes. I ended up with a compromise: about a third of the visitors to the site are 1.8; about a third are 1.6; and about a third are 1.4. So, 1.6 it is. Not optimum for my display (16:9) but close enough that I'd still rather play full-screen (and not misclick off screen.)

Anyhow, Tomo, what do you think?

 

Neat toys

Checking out the other highly rated games in the Chrome web store I came across a couple cool things to play with.

Sand - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdknckljjbdpkhgmcokoahffbdinafbo/reviews - I can't describe it. It's pure play, mixing sand and water and oil particles and setting them on fire and stuff.

Even better, though, was Little Alchemy - http://littlealchemy.com/ - you start with air, earth, fire, and water - and mix them - and see what you can come up with. Combine them in the right ways and you can make snowmen and zombies. Who knew? Although part of me says, "This is just a sparse matrix of combinations that I'm filling in," another part of me says, "When am I going to stop? This gets harder and harder as I go along," I still sat there and tried to come up with new combinations for hours. My daughter loved it too: 'the best game ever,' she said. Hey, what am I, chopped liver?

Notes on *Impro* by Keith Johnstone

Graham Walmsley's Play Unsafe (which I highly recommend if you play TTRPG's) took a lot of its ideas from this book Impro . I just read it recently and it was pretty mind-blowing.

• Status

First - the idea that all human conversation can be considered a status transaction. Once you start looking at the conversations you have this way you'll be both alarmed and maybe even a bit depressed, but it will also give you new insight and understanding. Just as an example, the thrust-parry-riposte -- "I'm reading War & Peace" "That's my favorite book!" -- has the first speaker trying to elevate their own status by showing how smart they are, reading such a big novel; and the second speaker trumping by saying not only have they already read it, they have a deep appreciation for it. (And it sounded so innocent at first!)

So, yeah, after reading that, I can't make a blog post or write an e-mail without being aware of how I'm trying to elevate my own status, bragging, etc. (Look at this book I just read! Look at this thing I just coded!) 

But also there's insight into other people: if somebody else says something that seems arrogant, it's usually because I've played high-status first and they're just trying to keep up.

Playing high-status can often get you what you want but it also can make you look like a jerk; it can lead to success but nobody likes you. Elevating someone else's status starts to look like a magic weapon, a way to create enough space for you to play high-status without coming off as a jerk.

• Creativity

Notice how almost all the media we consume is retread - or, at best, remix and mash-up? (sixty second shooter's a good example of mash-up.) Nothing unethical about that (though it does get tired) but what if you want to do something truly creative? Johstone has some neat tricks for getting right at your subconscious that can even be done by just one person. I played around with his 'automatic writing' trick (you imagine you're opening a book in a library and reading the text there) and came up with this weird thing. Another trick is to write a list of unassociated words. Combine that with reincorporation and boom - instant story.

What I'm wondering now is how to apply that to video game mechanic ideas ... using this technique, it would be easy to create a truly creative game story, but what about its mechanics ...?  Any ideas?

• Hypnosis and Trance

At the end of the book, he starts talking about 'mask work' and here he starts to sound batshit crazy. Apparently in his workshops when people wear masks they get 'possessed' and truly become different people. But it's actually not that far-fetched: no, I don't think that his students were suddenly taken over by gods, but there are lots of studies that show being cast in certain roles or being 'hypnotized' can make people do some surprising things. 

I'm not sure how to apply this to videogames but some of the best roleplaying experiences I've had were when the game rules encouraged or allowed me to play characters or act in a way that was totally out of my comfort zone. When I used to play 3rd edition D&D I tried to 'stay cool' - rarely talking in character, not getting too excited, usually keeping things to the math of the tactical situation (skip the role-playing, GM, we want to kill something!)

The other end of the spectrum is playing Munchausen - a party game where you play someone else telling stories. Maybe it was the booze (the game, I think, requires or at least strongly recommends that you drink) but the last time I played this I acted in a way that I never would have done if I didn't have an excuse. ("It wasn't me! It was the Munchausen!") Apocalypse World, Fiasco, and Kagematsu have all had similar effects on me - have me playing gay characters and love relationships like it's the most natural thing in the world. In a way, these games have hypnotized me - given me permission to act in ways I normally never would.

Is there a way to apply that to computer games?

Notes on sixty second shooter - why?

So, the first of some designer notes.

When I heard about Chrome's native client, my first thought was to take the game we had been working on with Richard Garfield and port it to the new "platform" ourselves, self-funded, and see what would happen. Nobody was as excited about that idea as I was - and for good reason, I suppose, since native client isn't a new platform per se. Chrome Web Store is the platform - and it's too late to be a launch title for that platform. In a way, it's a repeat of what we did with Schizoid, the first XNA game studio game for XBLA. The platform was already crowded, and using new tech made for a nice PR story which did drive a lot of attention to the game but the XBLA gold rush was over by the time we'd shipped.

But, to me, there's a huge difference: because, with Chrome and native client, you can do things in the browser that you couldn't do before (which was not the case with XNA Game Studio and XBLA - although XNAGS made things easier, it didn't necessarily enable new or better games) it's an ecological niche waiting for the right game to evolve there. 

So I thought to myself, what is that game? 

• It can't be a "big game", a Halo or Unreal, because nobody will want to sit through the load times. Even a "medium-sized game" is iffy.
• But it still has to distinguish itself from the sea of flash and javascript games out there. So it should be a game where native client and gl matters.
• Mouselock wasn't available yet, so first-person and Shadowgrounds sorts of control systems wouldn't work.
• I had to be able to do it in a short time with little-to-no help.

So an arcadey shooter started to look like the obvious choice. I was a little leery about mouse+keyboard: most browser games seem to avoid that, probably because it alienates the casual. I believe that's 'casual games conventional wisdom sacred cow #1': only use the mouse. (Looking around on Kongregate, WASD + mouse shooters are pretty rare.) But Realm of the Mad God demonstrated that you could get a decent sized fan base with a WASD shooter, so I went for it.

Why, what sort of game do you think is perfect for native client?

3rd edition D&D considered as an illustration of the dangers of free-to-play

Lots of people have blogged about how your business model affects your game design. Here's yet another way of looking at it. This may sound like a slam on 3rd Ed but it's not - all I'm doing is pointing out that the nature of D&D fundamentally changed with the release of 3rd Ed, and the business model made that happen.

3rd edition D&D was almost completely open source - so much so that Paizo has been able to effectively re-release it as Pathfinder. Of course, the people at Wizards of the Coast said, "If we make this free, so that everyone can download most of it off the internet, how are we going to make money?" Every way they could think of: selling books (effectively merchandise at this point, something you buy because it's more convenient than looking up the rules on the internet, or because you're in a store and it's there and tempting, or because it looks good on your coffee table) and add-ons (splats, modules) and miniatures.

And, of course, they wanted to encourage their players to buy these things. The problem, as I see it, lies with the modules and miniatures. Moldvay's edition of Basic D&D - I believe the most popular D&D product in terms of units sold - said, on the back of the box: "This is a game that helps you imagine." Miniatures weren't required. Even modules weren't required - you could get a whole evening of play by rolling up some encounters on random tables.

But now they want to sell pregenerated modules and miniatures - so they design a game that's heavily about tactical combat, about moving your playing pieces around on a board, so you'll be encouraged to buy miniatures. And they design a game that's complex enough, that takes enough time to block out encounters, that it's almost foolish to design your own adventures, or make up what happens on the basis of encounter tables, so you're encouraged to buy modules. In comes the railroad. Out goes the imagination - instead of imagining whatever we want, we're constrained by the minis and modules.

Obviously, a lot of people - probably even most people - like their D&D that way. The minis and modules bring a huge amount of clarity and rigor to the game, and make it a more consistent product. And while the old Red Box Basic D&D may have been the single most succesful D&D product, certainly much, much more money was made off of 3rd edition in all.

But it had now become a different game. A game I enjoyed some for what it was, but never got the same sort of awesome out of as I did with Basic D&D or Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu or Space Opera or the new school of indie rpgs like Apocalypse World - games where it's all about the imagination.

So - am I suggesting we avoid free-to-play? No, of course not, I'm planning on making sixty second shooter free-to-play. I'm just saying I'm going to tread carefully on the path and try not to lose my way.

Murderous Ghosts

D&D players get a little freaked out by the idea of playing an RPG with just 1 GM and 2 players. Partly it's social proof ("Well, if we couldn't find anyone else who wanted to play, this activity must suck") but a big part of it is that D&D has the whole 'you need a whole party of adventurers to survive' thing.

Unfortunately, the attitude rubs off on other RPG's - I know at least a couple guys who like RPG's but refuse to do it with only two other people at the table. "Well, maybe if they're GM-less," one of them said - but that attitude doesn't make sense to me - in fact, the way I see it, the more players you have, the more of a burden the GM becomes.  Because games with GMs typically take the form of the player telling the GM what they do, and the GM responding, in any game with a GM the GM is going to spend about 50% of the time talking. In a three player game, the players still get to participate 25% of the time - but in a five player game it drops to 12.5%. 

But I digress. My point being: if a three-player game is to be avoided, what must these guys think of a two-player game?  That must be completely nuts!

And - usually - I'd agree. For the most part when I've done two-player role-playing, there's been a noticeable lack of momentum. You're both straining to come up with ideas. When it's your turn, you're put on the spot - you can't just sit back and let one of the other players fill the void. And that pressure makes it even harder to contribute.

Which is why the new Murderous Ghosts is such a pleasure. When playing it, I never felt like momentum was lacking; I never felt stuck. 

I'm not sure how it achieves this. It's sort of like a two-player Choose Your Own Adventure, where you each have a book to consult to tell you what to do next, but, completely unlike one of those books, it leaves the actual description for you to invent. It's the structure of a story without the details - bones without skin. And ... maybe because it tells the GM how to prepare for a minute before play starts ... or maybe because it holds your hand so carefully as you go ... or maybe because it gives you a solid foundation to build off of ... like I said, I never feel stuck.

Not to mention, it takes under an hour to play, and the subject matter - intense horror - is just cool.

So it's easily my new favorite two-player RPG.

You can buy it here.

Hmm. How punishing should death be?

I was pretty sure death was too punishing so far in sixty second shooter.  That was one of Tomo's pieces of feedback - it breaks up the action for three seconds, lowers your multiplier, and eliminates all the enemies (giving you no points for it) meaning you respawn into a target-poor environment in which it's hard to build chains.

Probably people will just restart the game at that point, I thought.

On the other hand, if death isn't punishing enough, going through the 'next level' portals becomes an easy choice.  Always go - ideally, I'd like players to judge their own skill level and hang out on the level they feel they can handle.

And I've been recording the number of deaths in the high score database, and turns out the top scores often have one or two deaths.

So - seems okay for now.  I am going to shorten the time of the death cycle, because it does break up the action, but keep the multipler change and enemy evacuation as is...

 

Features vs Framerate

Something I've been deliberating lately - I've done console development for so long I've never had to worry about different performance characteristics on different machines.

One nice thing about web development is I can keep track of statistics about the games that are being played and what framerate they're seeing.  Good news - seems like most people so far are playing with better machines than my laptop. (Though that may be an early adopter thing.)

So, for them, I'd like to turn on some of the cooler features I've worked on - in particular post-process glow and blur. On my machine, it makes things run just a little too slow - when most of your frames are <33ms but once or twice a second you get a 66ms zinger it's worse than running at a consistent 50ms.

So...assuming I don't come up with any genius optimizations...people with machines like mine should have post-processing turned off.  Or play in a smaller window.  It would be really nice if the game could detect that and adapt appropriately - "Am I running below 30?  Turn these features off!" - but what would that look like to the player?  Some players would be playing along with the effects on, and then they'd get a bad frame or series of frames in some gnarly stretch of game, and then suddenly the effects would turn off.  It would look like it broke, like a bug...

Games back in the early days of hardware acceleration used to do things like that, but I think these days PC games have mostly moved away from that - these days they make a best guess and stick with it and let you adjust settings if you want.

So, for now, I guess that's what I'm going to do - I'll run with the full suite of effects and let the players turn them off if they want better framerate. But that's putting a lot of responsibility in the hands of the player - they'll probably have a better time if they turn off the glow and play at 60, but will they realize that?

So, I don't know. What do you guys think?

More notes on *Apocalypse World*

The more I engage with this game, and compare it to other games, the more I appreciate its genius.

The Core Mechanic

The core mechanic should seem familiar to people who have played D&D - it's a little less granular - instead of saying "I shoot him" you say things like "I point my gun at him and make him back down" ("going aggro") - but the idea is the same: you want to try something in the game, you usually have to roll for it.  A lot of the modern collaborative-story-heavy rpg's have moved away from this traditional approach, but AW makes it sing. How?

Any move you do, you roll two dice, and add them together, and maybe add some modifiers if your character is good at that thing or whatever. And you try to get a 7+. Still, standard roleplaying, right? Roll dice, add modifiers, try to beat a target number.

Not quite: if you fail a roll in AW (6 or less), something bad happens. Where it just would have been a 'whiff' in D&D, here additional trouble is piled on. And if you ONLY get 7+ - if you don't get 10 or higher - you get a mixed result. Something good, something bad. Or something mediocre.

Bottom line: whenever you roll the dice, something happens. You don't get that feeling of "I might as well have just skipped my turn."

Historical note: this is a bit like Otherkind Dice and Ghost/Echo. There, you rolled multiple d6's, and some would be whether the good result happened or not, and some would be whether a bad result happened or not, so it was very possible to get mixed results. It was still possible to whiff, though - nothing good, nothing bad. AW fixes that and streamlines things.

Game Moderating As Maintaining A Collection of Threats or Dangers

There's a line in the AW book that says it calls for one method of GMing - that the entire game is built upon it. I didn't understand what this really meant until recently, when I was looking at another game: Danger Patrol. (A free game you can play right now, google it.)

A quick naive non-exhaustive taxonomy of roleplaying methods, divided by the kinds of prep you do:

* The sandbox: a map with hidden stuff in it. Could be a dungeon, could be a wilderness, could be whatever. Older D&D modules were like this: a big map. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do?

* The railroad: a series of encounters that the players will meet in order, providing they play nice and don't say anything like, "What? Save the world? I didn't sign up for that." This was how I used to GM, because I wanted to tell a story in a fairly linear order. Modern D&D modules are more like this - because you can only fit a couple encounters in in a session and they take a lot of planning, they may have maps but the maps are linear.

* The relationship map: instead of it being about the terrain, it's about the people and what they want from each other and who the players know. GMing this requires some creativity. "Okay, the players are doing this. How do my characters feel about that? What are my characters going to do now?" To make this work, the characters have to have incompatible wants, so that a story will happen. In a Wicked Age and Smallville are modern examples of games that rock this method. 

* Threats or dangers. There's just a list of bad stuff that could happen or is happening. Could be a character wants something from someone and that's going to lead to problems - a bit like a link on the relationship map. Could be a bomb in the building. Could be a stormfront. In Danger Patrol, Ghost/Echo, and Poison'd - these troubles are written down on cards or post-its for all the players to see. When a player tries to fix one of the troubles, and gets a 'Yes, but...' on the dice - the trouble might go away or be mitigated, sure, but another trouble is plopped down, on another card. The whole thing organically grows and shrinks. The players have the freedom to do whatever they want and the game responds appropriately. And with DP, GE, and Poison'd, it would never occur to you to remove the index-card-danger mechanic. It's just part of the game.

With Apocalypse World, however, the dangers and troubles (called "threats" in AW) are (sort of) secret. The moderator keeps track of them on their own sheet of paper and doesn't show the players. So a GM might approach the AW rules and say, "Well, I'm going to skip that part." But that would be like removing the board from a board game.

So that's why the rules say the game calls for one kind of GMing.

And, just as a side note, this method of GMing? One could make a computer game out of it. The creator of the game would need to prepare ahead of time the things that ordinarily are made up in play - which is a lot of prep: most people would only see a fraction of the content unless they played multiple times. But there'd be a lot less prep than, say, trying to make one of those choose-your-own-story books. (And it's much more promising than my experiments in having intelligent agents with wants that are supposed to come into conflict - which is the relationship-map method - that was one I banged my head against for years with almost nothing to show for it.)