Happion Labs GameDevBlog

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.)

 

That's Drama Design Notes - "Try A Different Way"?

My daughter is only six, and is still a sore loser. I've given up trying to play Sorry! with her ... taking one of her pawns in chess can incite her to sweep all the pieces off the board ... etcetera.

Role-playing games can really bring out the sore loser in people. You spend a lot of time crafting a character, and then that character gets killed. Maybe it's by the rules, maybe you think the GM didn't give you a fair chance. Computer RPG's have savegames - you die, you go back, you pretend it didn't happen. With tabletop RPGs I've seen teenaged boys throw temper tantrums, and I've seen grown men turn to whiny bitches after a stray fireball takes their character out.

So you'd think role-playing with my daughter would be out of the question, but we can play Archipelago and it's fine. Why? Because of "Try A Different Way." Anything happens she doesn't like, she can just veto it. I have to come up with something else.

If you're a gamer, you're probably thinking: but that's cheating! 

And if you're an improv actor, you're probably thinking: that's shooting down someone else's contribution. That's not cool.

I know, right? That's why we have rules. So we can agree ahead of time on what we're okay with. If we discover we're not okay as we thought we'd be, well, that's interesting. Better luck next time.

Here's the thing, though: role-playing games really are separate beasts from board games. They're stories and they can go places that we don't want them to go. In rare cases we need some kind of safety to protect us. Ron Edwards called them "lines and veils" - sometimes you need to draw a line, say, "I don't want to go there." Sometimes you need to "pull a veil over it" - do it off-camera.

Games need these safety valves whether they're written explicitly into the rules or not. (If they're not, and you don't want to allow a safety valve, your safety valve will probably be somebody quitting.) 

So as long as we have this valve, why not put it explicitly into the rules? A protocol for drawing a line or veil, that tries to be fair.

And then why not let people use it for everything, so they can make the game into the kind of game they want it to be, on the fly?

Traditional role-players don't like it when someone else controls their character. But role-playing rookies new to GM-less games don't see the divide and have no problem with it. With TADW, the traditional role-player can say, "Hey, hands off my character," while everyone else enjoys what comes naturally to them.

But isn't there potential for it to be abused? You're supposed to use it when it would muck up the game for you.  If you use it too often, it'll kill the momentum. If somebody's a jerk, or if they're playing to win, they could use it to deadlock the game. Well, so far in my playtests - blind or not - that hasn't happened.

BUT it's very complicated to explain. Sometimes you can push back against another player's contribution 'in-game':  "I cut your hand off" "No, I pull my hand out of the way!" - and sometimes 'out-of-game':  "I kill you dead" "Try a different way! I don't want my character to die just yet." Trying to explain the difference and keep the rules light is a serious challenge.

I think the answer I'm going to go with is to borrow from In a Wicked Age. With IAWA, you can say, "Wait, no, that doesn't happen" - but then you roll some dice. And you can lose. But then you can choose - do I give in and let the other player have what they want, or do I exhaust a limited resource which will result in me having less narrative authority and possibly my character's death?

In other words - although your character could always die with In a Wicked Age, nothing else will happen unless you're okay with it:  "The soldier rapes you." "No he doesn't." (Dice roll - the king's player wins, but the loser narrates.) "He threatens me with his sword - I run - he slashes at me and I get hurt - but I'm not raped."

There's one kind of line/veil that, at first, this doesn't seem to cover: what if something you can't stand happens to someone else's character? You have recourse there as well.  "The soldier rapes him." "No he doesn't - I rush to his aid and stop the soldier."

So ... that's where I'm going with the next draft of That's Drama. You have a hand of cards and you can trump to get your way - but you can also expend a card permanently if you really don't like where the story is going. The worst that'll happen is you use up all your cards, and your character will have to exit the story. (I'm softening In a Wicked Age still more by saying they 'exit the story' rather than 'they die' - maybe they leave town or something.)

Woah, I Won A Contest

After getting my ass kicked in this year's Game Chef I figured maybe I wasn't cut out for this RPG-story-game design thing, but I just won "Overall Favorite" for a "solitaire RPG." 

I was up against some hot designers from the story games community ... people whose work I really respect ... so I'm a little in shock.

The game is called Storyleaves. I was looking for a way to make writing fiction as compelling as playing an RPG, and in the process it became less about the fiction and more about just having fun. 

"Solo RPG" is almost an oxymoron - you might almost call it daydreaming. But when I think about it, I have to ask - why is the lonely fun we might have daydreaming a story any less worthwhile than the lonely fun we have playing a videogame?

There's another problem with Solo RPG's, and that's what the story games community calls the "Czege Principle" - if you create and then solve your own adversity, that's boring. This is something videogames fix - they provide the adversity for us to solve. If we try to take the computer out of the mix, and empower the player to create the story, how do we solve the Czege Principle?

By building the adversity into the game rules, which is what I tried to do with Storyleaves. Unfortunately, I have to admit it's broken - half the time the adversity is strong and tough to beat, the other half the time the protagonist sails through - imagine a TV show where the hero beats the antagonist in the third scene. So I'm still working on it.

The latest draft of the game is here. I welcome your comments.

Here's the contest link:

http://rpgsolitairechallenge.blogspot.com/p/awards.html

Story Games - My New Obsession

I've been playing role-playing games like D&D and its ilk since I was a wee lad, often with pathetic heartbreak, as I'd invite friends over and they'd get bored by the complicated rules or subvert the activity into silliness . . . this was often the fault of these games, supposedly about creating epic stories, but which actually are about killing & looting, or which create stories that are not so much "epic" but ... "lame."

Or I'd spend enormous amounts of time creating worlds and scenarios and rules which would never get played at all.  So after I turned 16 and learned to drive and to pursue women I all but gave up on role-playing, except for maybe the odd memorable one-shot of Paranoia or Cyberpunk or The Fantasy Trip.  (Or a session of D&D where I played a Celt and tried to speak with an outrageous irish accent - and somehow didn't realize until later that I was the only one doing a funny voice.)

And this is despite the fact that I even had a job working on computer RPG's - the Magic Candle series!  I came to hate computer RPG's - I hadn't enjoyed one since Ultima 4.  I wanted to like them, but they never lived up to the promise - "Be in this world, tell an epic story."  

I realized that games and storytelling just don't mix.  I, at least once, said as much on this blog.  So when we moved up to Washington, a mecca for role-playing, and a friend was playing a regular, ongoing D&D campaign - just like I wished I was in when I was a kid - I got in on it.  And, of course, it wasn't about the storytelling, or the acting, it was about killing monsters.  And that was usually fun, often the highlight of my week, but...

Just recently, a few months ago, I started hearing about some new games - and unable to restrain my curiosity (could this really work?) - I talked some friends into playing a few of them.  

And they were *awesome*.  They were everything I used to think role-playing was supposed to be.  We "acted"; we created epic stories; we spent our time actually playing instead of looking up rules.

So what was it about these new games?  Ever since Paranoia and Call of Cthulhu and Vampire there have been efforts to increase the amount of "story" in our games...and in 2002 there was Sorcerer and Universalis...the new new effort to get more story in games.  I've never played Sorcerer but I've played games that subscribed to its creator's philosophy, and I've dabbled a few times with Universalis and although it's always been very memorable it didn't quite hit the *awesome* level that these recent games have hit, didn't put me in this frothing anticipation for another session.  Somehow they missed the mark.

Here's one thing this latest crop of games have in common:

First, it's not just the GM telling the story - in fact, the GM has been neutered or is gone completely.  The players not only get to say "I do such-and-such" but also invent other characters, setting elements, obstacles and complications.  The result?  It's better for the GM (if there is one) because they don't have to prepare much (or at all);  and it's better for the players because they're invested.  It's their story too.

But Universalis had that, and Sorcerer to a lesser extent.  (Vampire did not - they even call the GM the "storyteller", for Christ's sake, how disenfranchising is that for the rest of the players?)  So what else?

Flow.  These games that have worked so well for me are exceedingly light on rules - sometimes the rules fit on just a page or two.  So there's no flipping open the book to page 321 to figure out if you can cast Dispel Magic on a Purge Invisibility field. But 3rd edition D&D is an extreme case - most RPG's aren't that complicated.  What I didn't realize is just how simple rules have to be before you're playing fluently.  Universalis is a pretty simple game;  I've taught it to several people, including my 5-year old daughter.  But I've never gotten to the point with it where I don't have to think about the rules anymore.

A side effect to playing these games is that, for now, I've lost interest in video games.  With the exception of Limbo there hasn't been a video game that's captured my interest since I discovered "story gaming".  This is partly due to being completely jaded with video games after making them for a living for so long, but story games were the last nail in the coffin, seems like.

Raph Koster once said he became disillusioned with games because, after working to come up with a method to universally describe them, he realized that they're all basically math.  And that's yet another reason why story games are so freaking cool - they aren't.  (Well, technically they are, because the universe is math, but you know what I mean.)  With D&D it's pretty easy to see through the story through to the underlying math.  But with some of these story games, it's the story that matters - the math just pops up on occasion in service to the story, to resolve disagreements or escalate.  

So, you're probably wondering, "What are these games that have Jamie in such a lather?"

I'll tell you:

Lady Blackbird (possibly the best RPG session I've ever run)

Geiger Counter (there was one moment in our GC play that didn't flow, btw, due to me missing a key rule, but other than that...)

Fiasco

In a Wicked Age (though this went terribly when I ran it, it was awesome when someone else who had played it before ran it for me...)

A couple of homebrew games created by old friend Mark Nau (who played in those aforementioned TFT & D&D games and has really been the one to turn me on to this kind of gaming)...one of which he hasn't even written up the rules for, so I guess you're not going to get to play those.  Maybe he'll post a link to New Hope in the comments, though.

And just last night I playtested Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple and while it's not exactly an RPG it is a neat way to collaboratively tell stories.

Despite my inexperience I've tried my hand at making them myself, and this one we've had some good fun with:  Nowhere Road

There's also a good book on how to approach this kind of gaming:  Play Unsafe, by Graham Walmsley.

And a community of people who are into it at story-games.com.  I've been posting there a lot lately myself.

There, go play, share my joy.

Brett Douville has created an art-game answer to Rod Humble's *The Marriage* - it is called *My Divorce*, and it is available here:

http://www.brettdouville.com/MyDivorce.html

Brett has done something important here. I could go on about it, but it's something you should experience for yourself.

So I was going to show my solidarity with the "game length" bloggers today by re-posting an old post that I thought was entitled "Shorter Games Please!" but...I can't find it.

I suck.

I found this instead - http://www.gamedevblog.com/2005/04/finish.html - an article that mentions only 54% of players surveyed actually finished Spider-Man 2.

Honestly, 54% is huge for games - although at the time I was bummed in my own casual conversations with people, I've never met anybody who's finished the game. That 54% must be a survey of hardcore gamers, the sorts of people who actually sign up to be surveyed by Activision.

So - yeah - that's like hearing nobody finished reading your novel. And Spider-Man 2 isn't the only one, it's common for games.

Schizoid has the same problem - after we shipped, we looked at the leaderboards to see how far people got. We didn't expect a lot of people to finish - Schizoid has no story, and we expected people to play until they hit their plateau and stop. What we didn't expect was how quickly so many of them stopped - maybe half of them stopped 10% through the game.

Why'd we make a game so hard, that stiff-armed our players so early on?

We were afraid.

We were afraid they'd play through the game too quickly and be disappointed by the length.

We were wrong!

Don't be afraid to make a short game! Make games like Limbo and Portal that give people one of those brief but transcendent moments that makes our lives worthwhile!

And here's the other game length "size doesn't matter" bloggers:

Jonathan Blow of Number None

http://the-witness.net/news

Ron Carmel of 2DBoy

http://2dboy.com/2010/08/12/too-short/

Chris DeLeon

http://www.hobbygamedev.com/spx/short-videogame-design/

Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games

http://nygamedev.blogspot.com/2010/08/coming-up-short.html

Mike Gilgenbach of 24 Caret Games

http://24caretgames.com/2010/08/16/does-game-length-matter/

Eitan Glinert of Fire Hose Games

http://www.firehosegames.com/2010/08/how-much-is-enough/

Cliff Harris of Positech Games

www.cliffski.com

Chris Hecker of Spy Party

http://spyparty.com/2010/08/16/size-doesnt-matter-day/

Scott Macmillan of Macguffin Games

http://macguffingames.com/2010/if-size-doesnt-matter-where-do-you-get-the-virtual-goods

Noel Llopis

http://gamesfromwithin.com/size-matters

Peter Jones of Retro Affect

http://retroaffect.com/blog/160/Size_Doesn_t_Matter_Day/

Lau Korsgaard

http://www.copenhagengamecollective.org/2010/08/17/size-does-matter/

Martin Pichlmair of Broken Rules

http://brokenrul.es/blog

Greg Wohlwend of Intution Games

http://mile222.com/2010/08/a-haiku-about-game-length/

Jeffrey Rosen of Wolfire

http://blog.wolfire.com/

Too Much Randomness?

I should have mentioned that the Bejeweled Blitz leaderboards are reset weekly;  so the fact that PopCap guys are at the top of my list is not because they played a lot back in the day and once got a really good score - it's because they get really good scores every week.  So while they may play more each week than you or me (hey, it's their job, after all) it's still pretty impressive.  (Others think they must be cheating - to which I say, "Think that if you want.  Whatever helps you sleep at night.")

Still, Jeremy argues that they're too random, and the very fact that he perceives the randomness to outweigh his skill, that he doesn't think it's worth investing his time, may go to show that they overdid it...or maybe it just goes to show that you can't please everybody...

Permanent leaderboards, by the way, are not a good thing.  Not for the longevity of a game, anyway - right away, some awesome player will stake out some awesome score and 99.9% of other players will decide it's not even worth competing.  Even if it's just a friends list competition - the deltas between friends are high enough to drive people away.

Notes on Bejeweled Blitz

I'm not the biggest fan of plain old ordinary Bejeweled, but if you take Bejeweled and:

- shorten the session length to 1 minute

- add friends leaderboards

- add a somewhat random incidence of score multipliers

then you've found my digital crack.

Friends' leaderboards are obviously compelling - but what about those other two things?  Are they obvious?

First - session length.  If you like a game, wouldn't a longer session be better?  Nope.  All other things being equal, a shorter session length is better than a longer one.  If you like the game, you can always play it again, and the lower your time commitment, the more likely you're going to re-up.  So go ahead, take your game, make it shorter, see what happens.  You'll probably find that you have balance issues - those 'guns vs. butter' decisions you were making early on thrown out of whack.  But that can be fixed, and the tighter game loop is probably worth it.

So why did it need random multiplier gems?  I've heard hardcore guys say it takes the skill out of the game, if a n00b can rack up a 150000 point score just from a lucky draw - and people who invest more time are more likely to get the big payouts, so don't multiplier gems wreck the game?  Nope.  I'm more or less quoting Richard Garfield here:  "Everyone says they want their games to be less random, but nobody really does."  Paraphrasing, rookies want to be able to win occasionally, otherwise they won't play, and the skilled players will have nobody to play against.  (Also, a lot of players who think they're skilled aren't as good as they think - a highly variant game lets those players feel like a badass when a less variant game like chess might throw their actual lack of skill into stark relief.)

And there's another thing going on with the multiplier gems and that's a slot-machine schedule of reinforcement.  For a tiny investment (one minute of your time) you might get that big payout.  Behaviors that are reinforced intermittently are resistant to being extinguished - check that out, I did learn something with my psych major.

When I find myself drawn back to Blitz, I feel about like those wirehead laboratory rats of legend, the ones who would continually pull the lever to get the electrical stimulus until they starved.  It makes one ask if maybe Blitz is a bit unethical - are we being manipulated by PopCap?  All I can say is that since guys who work at Popcap are continually at the top of my leaderboards, at least they're drinking the kool aid too.

And the fact that the PopCap guys are always at the top shows that there is still skill involved, despite the variance.  It's hard to put that skill into words - the ability to see the matches is paramount, and that seems to be something you can only learn by practice.  There are also strategies, to be sure, but most of the strategies seem to be less important than just being able to make a lot of fast matches.