Happion Labs GameDevBlog

Notes on Doom 3

One of the few GDC's I went to I saw Michael Abrash's lecture on the Quake engine and its potentially visible sets.  One thing that struck me the most about that lecture was how much he talked about lighting and how important it was at Id to have dramatic lighting.

Doom 3 shows just how seriously they take lighting.  Flickering lights, moving lights, colored lights, all casting dark, high contrast shadows all over the place.  And, of course, your flashlight.  This time, they made the lighting a part of gameplay.  You can have your flashlight out - you can have your gun out - you can't have both at the same time.  Some people have been saying that Doom 3 isn't that innovative;  well, this is an innovation.  A small innovation, perhaps, but an innovation nonetheless.  And a risky one!  With so many wankers out there saying "I just want to frag shit", telling them that they're going to have to do their fragging in the dark might not go over well.  (And with some people it didn't - as I understand it, the "duct tape" mod - where your flashlight was attached to your gun - hit the streets within days after the release of the game.)  It's the sort of innovation that your publisher will quash right away.  You see, if you're going to have some areas of your game require a flashlight, you have to make those areas dark.  So dark that no matter how much the player turns up the brightness on the monitor, they still can't see anything.  And if you make your areas that dark, your publisher is going to say to you, "What's the point of your state-of-the-art renderer if you're just rendering a black screen?"

But it works.  For me, anyway.  The truth is most of the game is lit enough that you can shoot just fine - those few areas which are pitch dark and you have to switch between flashlight and gun are rare, but those areas are scary and intense and interesting.  After playing long enough I become confident enough in my abilities that I was willing to have the flashlight up all the time;  if a monster showed up I knew I'd have enough time to drop the flashlight and still get enough rounds in it to kill it before it hit me.  (And if I didn't, well, there's always quicksave.)

Doom had a few scary moments:  some atmospheric lighting, something jumping out at you.  But Doom 3 is all scary all the time, this constant tension.  If that's what you're in the mood for, nobody does it better.

Side note:  at first, I was scared to go in elevators.  If I was designing this game, I thought, I'd put something scary in here.  The monster would come through the door right as it was sliding shut, a la Aliens.  After a while I realized I never got attacked in elevators - they became my safe haven to reload all my weapons while I changed floors.  Which again brought to mind Aliens, the scene where Ripley is arming herself as she goes into the nest.  Dramatic either way, really, eh?

It seems Id has learned some lessons from Valve.  One of the lessons:  create the illusion of a continuous world.  As you go from level to level in Doom 3 you can imagine how they're connected.  Once you even revisit the same level.  Another lesson: immerse the player in the story.  On the face of it, Half-Life didn't tell a story much different from Doom's;  in both games, science has unlocked a gate to evil and you're the guy who has to go in and deal with it.  One of the things that makes Half-Life great is the way the story is told:  in the quality of the scripted events, the interactions with people, the convincing details, all without a single cutscene.  Doom 3 has caught up to Half-Life in this regard:  it tells the same story as Doom, but tells it the Half-Life way - although there are a few cutscenes, to introduce bosses, most of the story develops while you're playing.

Rookie game designers think that the more types of enemies a game has, the better.  Doom proves this isn't true:  what Doom and Doom 3 gives you is a small number (I haven't counted, but it's probably around a dozen) of enemies, but they are highly differentiated.  I had a different favorite tactic with each.  Dodge imps fireballs while hitting them with the shotgun;  use the machine gun on the tiny spiders;  plasma gun for the skeletal things that shoot the missiles;  rocket launcher on the giant floating head things;  etcetera.  If a game has too many different opponent types, they're going to start feeling all the same, except possibly with more hitpoints.  This is a place where Doom shows its ancestry to classic videogames;  more and more games these days have lots of enemies with only cosmetic differentiation.  A step away from gamism towards simulationism, I suppose, so not necessarily a bad thing, but you do lose that pure-game pleasure.

And those are my notes.  It's midnight on Thanksgiving Day and I'm going to try Half-Life 2 now.

Notes on Lucky Wander Boy

When I read on Jurie Horneman's blog that there was a novel about videogames I had to buy it immediately, of course. I didn't expect to like it; Jurie made it sound overly pretentious, and…hey…how good can a novel about videogames be?

I freakin' loved it.

Now, I'm a pretty weird guy. Philip K. Dick's Valis is one of my favorite novels ever. And whenever I've recommended Valis to someone, and they've read it, they've been like,"uh . . . okay . . .whatever." For some reason, when I read Valis for the first time, (I was sixteen) it really got its hooks into me. Valis is the story of a guy who thinks he's seen God, and for the duration of the book you're not sure if he's crazy or he really has seen God or both. It's only barely science fiction.

I also enjoyed Haruki Murakami's The Wild Sheep Chase and Dance, Dance, Dance and Kobo Abe's Kangaroo Notebook. These are very surreal Japanese novels about ordinary guys getting sucked into pure weirdness.

Once, my thumb on the pulse of American culture, I set down to write a novel that combined elements from Valis and The Wild Sheep Chase. I wrote two hundred pages before giving up on it. (But I did transplant the main character into my other novel.) I finally decided that I was the only one in the world who would want to read such a book.

Well, D. B. Weiss wrote a book that combines elements from Valis and The Wild Sheep Chase. And it's about videogames. It's almost as if he sat down and said, "I think I'll write a book for Jamie Fristrom. That way I can guarantee to sell at least one copy. Money in the bank!"

The protagonist of Lucky Wander Boy is heavily, heavily into videogames. His obsession is so strong I imagine it alienates ordinary readers. I bet most people, upon reading that Pac-Man is the first metaphysical videogame or that Donkey Kong is the Gnostic demiurge would say, "This guy's full of shit." And he is, sure, if you're one of those people who can't enjoy critical theory for what it is, a form of play in itself, using the works of others as a springboard for your own ideas. I found myself recognizing that the protagonist was obsessed to the point of psychosis but was sucked right into his psychosis with him.

(Or was he psychotic? Perhaps his delusions about videogames were real; the same sort of ambiguity I enjoyed in Valis.)

A couple parts of the book I enjoyed: at one point the geek-hero goes to a classic videogames convention and discovers that he is the alpha male, the least geeky guy there. There have been times I've had a similar feeling within a crowd of fellow geeks. The illusion is shattered, though, when he plays some basketball and fumbles it horribly -- raising the question, does every geek in the crowd think they're the alpha male, that they're just slumming when they hang out with their fellow geeks?

Now, I've never played the actual game Lucky Wander Boy after which this novel is named. (I'm pretty sure it doesn't actually exist.) It does not sound like the kind of game I would enjoy. As Weiss describes it: "The moment Lucky Wander Boy grabbed his first pencil, however, a new species of Sebiro appeared less than a body’s length from him to the left, one twice his size with a bird’s beak on his human head. This Mega-Sebiro was faster than Lucky Wander Boy, and whether or not he immediately caught the hero depended entirely on whether the Mega-Sebiro first turned left or right. In the coming weeks, I would hear of numerous ‘tricks’ or ‘cheats’ to make the Mega-Sebiro turn left every time, away from the Lucky Wander Boy, but none of them worked. The Mega-Sebiro’s behavior was entirely random, beyond the sphere of human influence." Thus violating one of our cardinal guidelines of game design, that the game not be capricious. The protagonist, truly hardcore, takes this as a challenge, and suffers at the hands of Lucky Wander Boy, never making it to the third stage.

Spoiler warning:

Near the end of the book we discover that the designer of Lucky Wander Boy now operates a spanking-fetish parlor. She's a mistress of punishment. Is D. B. Weiss saying that the reason some of us respond to videogames is because they are fundamentally punishing in nature? It's not so much for the challenge but pure masochism? Is the success of games like Viewtiful Joe, Ninja Gaiden, and Splinter Cell partly due to this fetishistic desire of ours? Maybe playing videogames is a punishment we mete out on ourselves because we feel guilt for transgressions real or imagined.

Ugh, I better leave the critical theory to the experts.

Anyway, even if you're not into critical theory, Lucky Wander Boy is a delightful surreal trip through geek culture.

Notes on Heart of Darkness

The game Heart of Darkness, that is. Nothing to do with the Conrad novel. Eric Chahi of Out of this World and Frederic Savoir of Flashback pooled their talents and did something awesome: Heart of Darkness is possibly the best 2D action-adventure I've ever played. (Possibly except for Viewtiful Joe: VJ has it beat as far the core combat and art direction goes--Heart of Darkness is a little too wannabe-Spielberg--but in every other respect I think Heart of Darkness is superior.)
But I'm looking at old reviews right now, and reviewers were underwhelmed. Some theories as to why: there was a fair amount of hype. According to Bill Dugan, who worked at Interplay when Heart of Darkness was launched, it showed very well at E3. Then years went by. 3D happened. Finally Heart of Darkness ships, but nobody wants to play these 2D games anymore. It didn't sell well, as I understand it.
Or maybe it's because the ending is a little flat. The last level isn't terribly climactic and doesn't feel like anybody could have possibly designed it with the intent that it really be the last level of the game: it feels more like whatever last level they truly did have in mind got cut, and they managed to stitch the ending together and finally ship something not quite satisfactory. The second-to-last level is quite climactic--and incredibly difficult: after playing all the way through the game in two sittings, for the last level I'd play it a dozen times, get frustrated and leave, come back to it a few hours later, play it a dozen times, etcetera, until I finally managed to win--and it seems to me that if they'd been willing to throw out that last level they would have had a better result.
Still, I gotta say, it worries me that reviewers are so fallible. I loved Galleon, I loved Heart of Darkness, but reviewers consider these games to be C+'s pr B-'s. How many cool games am I missing out on right now because I rely so heavily on gamerankings as a filter? I wish there was a movielens.org for games...hey, if any of you know of great games that got mediocre reviews that you think I would like, let me know.
Heart of Darkness has the same sort of cinematic aesthetic as Out of this World, but takes a somewhat more systemic approach to delivering it: it's like the authors of the set-piece heavy Out of this World and the highly systemic Flashback, together, managed to deliver the best of both worlds: a game the length of Flashback that is still full of highly memorable set pieces.
Examples of what makes it cinematic would be: you start the game standing in the wreck of your spaceship - you jump out, and immediately afterwards it explodes. Guess what? You can stand in that spaceship as long as you want; it only explodes when you leave. This parallels one of the moments in Out of this World when a platform shoots up on a jet of water right when you stand on it - you feel like you just made it in time. But it's all magicianship. And although most of the game is more standard do-the-wrong-thing or don't-react-quick-enough and you're dead, there are other moments of this fake drama: you swim across a lake or crawl through passages with monsters on your tail - as long as you don't do anything stupid (like stop) you'll barely make it. (Much like running down the corridor with lasers blasting away the sliding doors behind you in Out of this World.)
On another note, although a lot of the game is stock--the timing puzzles, for example--and some of it we've seen before in Out of this World, some of it is just so damn inventive that I want to find these guys, shake them, and say "Why do you make such great games!" and then I'd jump up and down on them, yelling, "Why do you make such great games!" I'm not going to spoil these inventive bits for you. Buy your own copy and find out. You can supposedly get ones in good condition for $3. (I tried that, and the disk was scratched to hell. So I bought it from somewhere else for $10. A bargain!) It runs fine on a PS2.
Although let me get to the difficulty. It's much less frustrating than Out of this World. A lot of it obeys Scott Miller's "God Concept": after playing it through once, I started again and made it pretty far without dying. Contrast with Out of this World, where it requires just sheer luck for me to make it past the first set of screens. But there are some random effects (despite what the review on IGN says) that make parts of the game a crapshoot: there are these armored guards near the end of the game that randomly shoot missiles at different levels - if you're too close to them, you've got to just guess what's coming and hit the right button. Then, when they die, they drop two eggs, which will grow into mature guards in a moment - you can drop and shoot the eggs, but the lightning out of your gun wavers randomly, and may or may not destroy them in time. I don't think even God could do anything when the dice roll wrong and you end up with a horde of these guys shooting random projectiles at you.
Little did I know there was an Easy setting! It never occurred to me to go to the options page, which you can only access from the shell menu. Save yourselves: buy the game, but play it on Easy.
One last thing: people frequently bitch about games that take away powers from you. They were upset about the ending of Prince of Persia where you lose your time dagger; they were upset by your ships getting weaker in Wing Commander; they would have been upset by this, as you lose your gun fairly early in the game, and have to play for a while unarmed before you get a replacement. I tell you, I want to throttle those people. (My apologies if you are one of those people.) As a game designer, looking for ways to milk a game for level ideas, this is such an obvious move, and these complainers want to take it away from me! It's more game I'm giving you, man! Enjoy it!
That said, I suppose taking the gun away and fundamentally changing the game mechanic is a different kettle of fish than taking the dagger away in Prince of Persia, which feels a little like taking away your save-game option in the last level. It's a fine line between clever and...stupid.