GameDevBlog

Making the Game

My mom just asked me why I wasn't in the "Making the videogame" Spidey 2 show on MTV. As is usual for shows about videogames, programmers are not represented. I'm almost used to this, but it's especially irksome that Blur, the prerender house we used, got as much airtime as Treyarch did, and a localization tester got more screen time than anybody else who worked on the game. All I can do is speculate...maybe the MTV audience likes seeing testers because then they think, "I too could get a job in the game industry!" And maybe the reason programmers are shunned is because they tend to be fashion unconscious, or because there are no visual opportunities: interview an artist and you can show some nice graphics in MAX or MAYA. What do you show if you interview a programmer? Some C++ code? Stepping through instructions in a debugger? Actually...why not show that? For just a few seconds? It might look techy and cool and Matrix-like. Or maybe it would alienate the typical MTV audience: "That looks scary. I'll never be smart enough to work in videogames."
It reminds me of this Neal Stephenson article where he talks about H. G. Wells' morlocks and eloi. Coders are the ugly morlocks, hidden underground, running the machinery, making life happy for the pretty eloi.
I could argue that programmers are the most essential force in game development; that you can have a game with bad art or bad design, but a game with bad code won't even run.
But I can't be too bitter; according to the GD salary survey, programmers do make more money than their eloi counterparts. So we've got that going for us, which is nice.

Notes on Siren and Fatal Frame 2

Gameplay Mechanic -> Emotion

Siren and Fatal Frame 2 both try to do the same thing: scare you. People talk about how we need to put emotion in games but Will Wright points out it's already there - for example, some games make him feel guilt. Other obvious emotions would be frustration and, thanks to survival horror, fright. A thing unique about these two games is that the core gameplay mechanic itself serves to heigten that emotion. With Siren, they do it by letting you see through the eyes of the creatures that are hunting and killing you; with Fatal Frame they do it with a "combat" system that gives you a first person view and rewards you for waiting until the last possible moment before you're hit before you "attack". (Thus the monster in question fills your screen and looks as scary as possible.) These aren't the only things the games do; this stuff alone wouldn't work by itself, but it helps. So, question: can gameplay mechanics be designed that heighten other emotions? Maybe "nice" games like Zelda are designed with that in mind? (Joy of discovery?)

Arrrgh!

I so wanted to like Siren, but it was pure torture. With both Siren and Mask of Majora game ideas that sounded good on paper turned out to be quite frustrating to actually play. I wonder if those ideas were born sucky, or if additional work could have solved those problems...Siren is the worst kind of stealth game, the kind where your only option is to wait for monsters to finish tediously long patrol paths. Add to that: failure is often punished with death. Add to that: very few checkpoints. Add to that: the frustration is exacerbated by another innovation: you have to do the same level multiple times, and once you've done certain tertiary goals in the level -- (and they don't even tell you what those tertiary goals are) -- later levels become unlocked. Which means you're playing the same waiting game over and over, even once you've mastered it. I think the sightjacking mode is salvageable: allow your character to move while sightjacking, make the patrol paths shorter and quicker, add another gameplay element so that sightjacking isn't the only tool in your toolkit, add more checkpoints, and you've got something. But the idea of doing a level over and over again until you get it perfect, or else you can't advance? Kill that puppy in its sleep. Are there really any gamers out there who like doing the same tasks over and over, and feel alienated by today's crop of "easy" games that have plenty of checkpoints or *gasp* - save anywhere?
Mask is salvageable also - making it so time doesn't run out while you're in a dungeon would probably have made it much more pleasant.

Fatal Frame 2

Fatal Frame 2, by the way, was very cool. Sick story, poignant ending - possibly the scariest survival horror game I've played. Steals overly heavily from The Ring - are wells, crawling women, and film scratches really that scary or did The Ring condition me? A problem for me was that it was actually too gamey - ordinarily I would have been stoked to kill monsters well, earning more points to upgrade my weapon with various special abilities, but that particular gameplay got in the way of the scare and atmosphere. Maybe Ico had the right idea when they made their combat system so rudimentary - it doesn't detract from the experience the way Fatal Frame (and some people say Prince of Persia) does.

Ah, Gannt Charts

We're having some work done on our condominium complex and a month ago the construction company posted the first draft of the schedule, a nice little Gannt chart that says the first thing they'll do is have external catwalks installed by June 7. And here it is, June 19, and...no catwalks. It reminds me of the very first time I tried to use scheduling software, Symantec Schedule 1.0 I think it was. I made a nice little Gannt chart for *Gryphon Masters* and then watched in horror as the days went by and that very first bar got longer and longer. As always, it's good to know that construction companies have just as much scheduling difficulty as software companies.
Now, when I saw that Gannt chart the first time I was really excited. Things are finally moving, I thought. We'll have these sagging walkways with their dryrot replaced in no time. I mean, there's a Gannt chart! Which is the nice thing about Gannt charts. They make everybody feel really good for about a week.
And then you hit that first milestone (or inchpebble) and the task isn't complete and you wait and you wait and you realize the Gannt chart is just words, words, words. Even if you update the Gannt chart every day it's depressing: the day before yesterday we realized we'd actually be done September 19th. Yesterday we realized we'd actually be done September 20th. Today we realized we'll actually be done September 21st. Wait a minute...if this keeps up we'll never finish!
Which is about the time I throw out the Gannt chart, which is too bad, because in theory, in a couple of months, things will actually settle down, and the Gannt chart will start looking like an approximation of reality. I just have to learn to get over that hump.

Notes on Full Spectrum Warrior

Something New, Done Almost Perfectly

Way back when we thought Next Generation had their head up for giving Die By The Sword a five-star review, as the game was flawed in a variety of ways. I'm now of the feeling that when a game does something totally groundbreaking, they deserve that extra star. FSW has a few problems, but to focus on those problems would be immature. I'm going to anyway, just to make some points about interface and tutorial, but FSW is the best game design I've seen this year. Maybe last year too.

More Crisp Gameplay

Two nights ago, I was talking to Ed Del Castillo of Red Alert and Battle Realms fame. (He also happened to be best man at my wedding.) He said that most problems with videogames aren't problems with the game design but problems with the interface; the game fails to communicate what the rules of the game are to the player. Take Thief: you have to learn through trial & error (or reading the hints it gives you during load times) that an arrow will kill an unaware opponent but only damage an aware opponent. If the game had shown aware opponents dodging, or lifting a wooden shield to block the incoming arrow, the rule would have been more clear. Second best, you could have an icon floating over the victim's head, indicating its status - this isn't quite as good because it breaks immersion a little. (I personally have no problem with a screen full of icons; if my avatar doesn't see 'em, I don't see 'em. Or something. But others do.) This is the route FSW took. A fairly simple, abstract game at its core: when you're in cover, you can't be hit. The various states a unit can be in (cover, engaged, pinned) are represented by icons. You can engage someone with point fire from cover, allowing your other squad limited movement. Fire and motion: one unit fires while the other moves, and you can leapfrog your way through most situations. Add grenades and supression fire and you've got a simple but engaging game of puzzles and resource management.

Time To Think

I was focus-testing War of the Ring for Ed a while ago and he said that I was a weird player - most of the RTS players he watched frantically click on things while I sat there, I guess looking like a deer in headlights, paralyzed with indecision. Although a lot of people really like the fast decision making of your typical RTS, I prefer to be given more time to analyze. (I also prefer hour long chess games to ten minute ones, and when playing Freedom Force I kept a hand over the pause button at all times.) FSW gives me that, because I can hunker a squad down behind permanent cover and they will never get hit, which means I have all the time in the world to come up with a plan. This is a design decision they made on purpose for the retail market: in the original Army training program there is no permanent cover. After a while I felt a bit like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now; even though there's a hail of bullets flying and my squad is yelling in terror, I'm sipping a latte and idly wondering whether I should use a grenade launcher or try to flank. The downside, of course, is that I'm not as engaged as I could be; shouldn't being in a warzone be keeping me constantly on the edge of my seat? Until I come up against an enemy with an RPG, anyhow.
As always, any design decision is going to endear you to one group and alienate another group. You can try to get both groups by including some kind of flag in your options. (Pandemic has a cheat code which lets you play with no permanent cover, but very few people are actually going to discover that, in particular reviewers. All the reviewer knows is, "I'm not on the edge of my seat," and that's what you get in your review.) Still, it is good to make these decisions, to try not to please everybody. The goal, when making a groundbreaking game, is to please a group that the current crop of games does not please, and they got me, for example.

Tutorial Problems

FSW has a long tutorial, separate from the single player campaign, and it shows all the problems that having a separate tutorial brings:

- people forget. I did the tutorial, played the whoe thing on the easier difficulty setting, and then did the tutorial again. I had forgotten a bunch of things from the tutorial: how to make my squad face a certain direction, how to break formation and go for the nearest cover when under unexpected fire, and I was never totally clear on the difference between being engaged and being pinned. They fire a *lot* of information at you in the tutorial and expecting you to remember it all is foolish.

- some people skip the tutorial altogether. I looked through some of the online reviews for FSW and it seems to me that some of them skipped the tutorial. Especially for a game like this, you don't want to let people go in untrained.

I, personally, would have done the Peter Molyneux thing, and introduced elements as part of the single player campaign as you go. But it doesn't make a lot of sense for untrained soldiers to be wondering around in a war zone, so the story would have needed some tweaking. There would still be a nonskippable, slimmed down, training portion, that teaches fire and motion with just one squad. Then the story starts, and
you're ambushed, and somehow you end up on your own with no grenadier and no hand grenades. You have some easy gameplay (none of the badguys take cover), and then you rendezvous, and then you get grenades. Now the enemies take cover. Then you get your second squad, and learn fire-and-motion and supression fire. It would take longer than the current tutorial, but not feel like a tutorial.

Interface

Pandemic thought it would be good to have tapping a button do one thing and holding it down do another. It's not; it's one of the first things Donald Norman says not to do in Design of Everyday Things. I realize there aren't a lot of buttons on the xbox controller. (Oh boy do I realize.) Still, there had to be a better way to do this. I was continually doing the wrong thing all the way through the game; it wasn't the end of the world because usually you have to confirm an action after you input it, so if you input the wrong thing you can backtrack. I would have cut the radio (which could have been automatic) and the ability to select individual team members (a feature I never used), and used the buttons that freed up so functions wouldn't have had to be doubled on single buttons. And, if there still wasn't enough buttons, I wouldn't have been opposed to having menus pop-up a la Splinter Cell. In the lower-left I would have had icons representing what the buttons did instead of the team roster.

Side note: it's tempting to load functionality on your gamepad with chords, modes, double-taps, combos, and what-not - it makes your game look less complicated than if you put the extra functions on the D-Pad or in menus, for example, and in theory will scare less people away. I'm not sure people get that scared - I mean, look at your typical remote control, a monster that's bristling with buttons, most of which never get used. Aren't people used to a shitload of buttons by now? Hey, if anybody at Microsoft is listening: the next Xbox needs *more* buttons on the controller, not less. I heard a rumor that you're thinking of cutting the black and white buttons (because they get used the least) - don't do it. Don't be retarded. And if you want to give us another set of triggers I'd sure appreciate it.

Notes on Thief: Deadly Shadows

Slow Learner

You know, when Thief first came out I wasn't into it. I thought it was too much waiting, and too punishing when you got caught. I didn't give it enough of a chance. But enough people raved about it, so later I played Thief 2 and realized that the game wasn't so much about hiding in the shadows, but about sneaking up behind people and knocking them out. That knowledge, and an increased reliance on quicksave, made it one of my favorite games ever.
The Thief 3 tutorial makes sure you know the bread-and-butter gameplay of Thief before it turns you loose, including a demonstration of how to use flash bombs, which I never used that much in Thief 2 but now realize are very useful.
Something game designers hear a lot: "I didn't like your game because such-and-such was too hard." At which point the designer says, "Oh, but you can just such-and-such to get past that point." We can't ship the game designer with the box, so we make these tutorials, hoping and praying they'll teach the player everything they need to know to have fun, but all too often don't.

That's What I Would Have Done

If you'd handed me the Thief license and said, "Where can we go from here?" I would have said, "Let's put it in a continuous world. The city can be an overworld and then you can go inside basements and houses - they'll be your dungeons." Which is just what they did. "Ideally, it would be seamless, but we're stuck with the Unreal engine and not made out of money, so people will just have to deal with the load times as you go from district to district." Check. (We were going to do the same thing with Spider-Man 2, but then we decided that we are made out of money, so we went for seamless.) "And we could gradually expand the area of the city that you can get to as you progress." Check. "And the outfitting you used to do between missions can be done in some kind of black-market shops." Check. "And we can have side quests." Check. (Although I didn't actually do any.) "And hidden areas with extra loot." Check. The end result: it's more than a game, it's a world.
Thief 3 has small levels that are exquisitely detailed. To my untrained eye it's as close to photorealistic as action-adventure has gotten. The framerate suffered for it on my poor PC. Still, it's as if they decided to do the opposite of GTA; instead of a large, empty city it's small and jam-packed with interest, and I think that's what allowed them to make the levels look so nice. I think it was a good choice.

Crisp Gameplay

Simulation vs. Game - as graphics get more realistic, one might think it's a good idea for the simulation to keep pace. There are all kinds of places in Thief where the simulation isn't convincing: when you drag a dead body away, you leave his sword there, and nobody seems to notice; bad guys searching for you in the shadows walk right up next to you and don't notice you; the bad guys keep a run of banter going as they search...as if you're telepathically listening to them. (Maybe you are, I'm not clear on whether Garret's keeper training included telepathy or not.) When they find a dead body, they search for you a little while, and then resume their normal patrol. (Shouldn't you guys be calling for backup or the coroner or something?) BUT 'fixing' these flaws would probably ruin the game, making it too punishing.
Underneath all the pretty graphics there is a rule system. Blackjack or shoot an unaware opponent and they die; once they're aware, the blackjack does nothing, and the arrows hurt but do not kill. Not a very good simulation (surely a well placed blackjack or arrow would kill them whether they were aware or not, eh?) but a good game, one that encourages stealth above all. Once you've used your flashbomb, you can run, but not fight - hitting or shooting your opponent magically restores their sight. Again, not a good simulation, but a good game. Your opponents hear you if you run, but they don't hear the sound of their friend's body slumping to the floor after you've sapped him. Learning the rules takes time, but once you've learned them, you start feeling the sensation of mastery; you can play this game perfectly. (And when you do slip up, there's always the flash bomb.)
I imagine the split between the quality of the visual simulation and the abstraction of the gameplay bothers some people. I can imagine people saying, "Why didn't that kill him?" and "Why was I caught just now?" It doesn't bother me. (Who was it who said, "I don't see Mario; I see a cursor"? I can't find the reference.) For me, good graphics on an abstract game is like having a high quality chess set.

This Industry Chews Up Directors

So Randy Smith quit after Thief 3; Harvey Smith quit after Deus Ex 2; Chris Soares stepped down after Spider-Man; it's looking like Tomo may step down after Spider-Man 2...he certainly seems battered by the experience...; am I just focusing on anecdotes or is directing really rough? It seems like they're flogged for every imperfection, and they get it from both ends: people in upper management want to make sure their thumbprint mars the director's vision, and people on the team get pissed off because they think the director is working them too hard, or is focusing on the wrong things, or whatever.
(I just looked for that bit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest about how the bird at the head of the V can't hold that position forever and needs to take turns but couldn't find it.)
We have an idea for making the job easier next project; I'll tell you how it worked out in three years.

I'm going to be a dad!

Cathy just rounded the corner between trimester one and trimester two, so now that the likelihood of a miscarriage is close to nothing, we can go public: she's pregnant. The baby's due November 30, give or take. We don't know the sex yet, we don't know what we're going to name it, we don't know how to baby-proof the condo, we don't know how to raise a healthy, happy child...there's oceans of ignorance, here, really. The thing that scares me the most right now is the whole never-getting-to-sleep-again thing. I like to sleep.
Cathy just read the last paragraph and asked, "What if it has two heads?" That scares me too, a little, although it only had one head in the last ultrasound.

Notes on Dreamcatcher

More is more?

I've moved on from Shadowlords to Dreamcatcher, and it's pretty impressive. I had no idea the NWN engine could do stuff like this - there's a minigame where you ride a dragon while people shoot at you from islands below; there's a whole sequence where you command a troop of elves to scout and fight; there are pirate battles; there are cutscenes. You can tell that Adam Miller had to hack and hack to make NWN do it, and the result isn't terribly polished (die and respawn in the dragon mission and you're running around in the air, sans dragon) but you gotta admire the guy for the sheer ambition.
Normally I'm a *less is more* sort of guy - but there is something to be said for sacrificing polish for lofty ambitions. For one thing, it's hard to market a game that's highly polished - what do you say? "Highly polished experience!" But it's easy to market something new, even if that something didn't work as well as you hoped. Die By The Sword had a "move editor", for example. It performed as advertised - you could record macros in a special tool and play them back in-game. Was it actually useful? No. Did it make the game more fun? Not really, although some people might have had a little fun experimenting with it. Did it sell more copies? Probably. There are better examples...like GTA. Breaks a lot of ground but not terribly polished. Sometimes more *is* more, and I'd rather play a game that does something new poorly than something old well. (Let's all shoot for doing something new well, though.)
NWN itself is surprisingly polished for a creation that is so mind-numbingly huge.

Chaotic Neutral?

One little thing about Dreamcatcher that you have to be a total D&D dork to appreciate - it makes distinctions between law & chaos vs. good & evil, giving us a sort of moral palette I haven't seen since Ultima 4. I had to break a couple of vows to do the rght thing, and my character shifted towards chaotic good.

Shelf Level Event

I almost shelved it at a particularly hard boss midway through the game. After giving up for the night, I went back the next day, read the cheat sheet, and have to admit that it was my issue that I couldn't get past the boss, not the game's. Somewhere somebody has a game design rule that goes something like: "It should never feel like the game's fault if the player loses." I. E. when a player dies, he should say, "Oh, I know what I did wong. My bad." Nice in theory but I've found, in practice, people tend to be either self-blamers or game-blamers. I guess I'm a game blamer.

Sigh

Like Shadowlords, I'm a little depressed now that it's over. Story-driven videogames are weird in that I'm usually in a big hurry to get to the end and then when it's over I get depressed. I get this emotion more with videogames than most other media - I think that's because I get more involved with games, and the experience lasts longer, although I also felt it when I finished reading Lord of The Rings the first time...and when The Sandman series ended...

Here's an incomplete list of games that made me sad when I finished them:

Beyond Good & Evil
Dreamcatcher
Freedom Force
Grim Fandango
Ico
Max Payne 2
Monkey Island
Out of this World
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
Shadowlords
Tron 2.0
Ultima 2 (probably the first game I ever had that feeling with)
Zelda: Link to The Past
Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Here's an incomplete list of games that I finished but was not sad at the end - these are all good games, but they didn't give me that 'pang' at the end, for whatever reason

Everything or Nothing
Unreal
Zelda: Wind Waker
Jak & Daxter
Metroid Prime
Viewtiful Joe
Deus Ex: Invisible War
System Shock 2
Diablo 2
Mario Sunshine
Blade Runner
Thief 2

Here's an incomplete list of games I might have been sad to finish, but the final boss was too hard, so now we'll never know:

Chrono Trigger

The question is: is there a magic ingredient the games from the first list have that we can steal and inject into our own games?

Sorry if there are typos I didn't catch - I decided to switch back to qwerty after all.