Happion Labs GameDevBlog

Notes on Psychonauts

More proof that everything Tim Schafer touches is gold.  My expectations were very, very high, so I was a little nervous at first, playing the first couple of hours...the mechanics were a bit too derivative of Jak & Ratchet, and it was maybe not quite as funny as I remembered Tim Schafer being.  But then I got to the lungfish brain and I was sold.  Even funnier than I remembered Tim Schafer being.  It's genius.  A hot genius injection.  There's a thing about Tim Schafer games - they're not just funny, they're clever, they all have original puzzles, and you feel clever when you solve them.  Much like the time travel setup in Day of the Tentacle created the opportunity for a slew of time travel related puzzles, the psychic powers of Psychonauts lends itself to psychic puzzles.

[Sign you've been blogging too long?  I know I wrote a Notes on Grim Fandango once, talking about "functional fixedness", but it seems like Google never indexed it...?]

I look at this game, and I know it's been in development for a good long time, but it's still unbelievable they pulled it off.  There are a lot of levels and they all have their own look and feel and they're all highly polished...I play it and I think, "This must have been really expensive."

I wonder why Microsoft bailed out on it?  It's the best Jak & Daxter-like game I've ever seen...so I'd expect a high quality Xbox version of one of those games to do about half what they do on the PS2, if Microsoft put marketing muscle behind it.  Maybe half of Jak & Daxter just isn't enough to be profitable?

Now that Double Fine is with Majesco, they can hit the PS2 also, and make more money, but then they lose out on the Microsoft marketing muscle.  (I assume there are no TV ads for Psychonauts, and I haven't been to a videogame retailer lately but I imagine they don't have pride of place.)  Still, I expect Majesco will be profitable, Double Fine will be profitable, and the only losers are Microsoft.

Notes on Ancient Domains of Mystery

ADOM is my favorite roguelike game.  It's one of the few roguelikes that has an overworld, and for some reason that makes it especially pleasing to me.  I'd had my hankering to play a roguelike rekindled by this article, but Angband doesn't have that overworld and for some reason that kills it for me.

Playing a roguelike requires  participation on the part of the gamer.  You have to have an imagination.  There is very little difference, game-mechanics-wise, between a Giant Bat and an Orc Scorcher.  The only difference is in the text.  So if your brain ain't providing the images for you, you're going to want to play the game with graphics and sound.  Who cares that there's however many different kinds of monsters in a roguelike if they all look like a single ascii character on the screen?  Those with the imaginations.

Reading fiction requires a similar investment.

I just cancelled my World of Warcraft account today.  There was a little exit poll and I asked myself, why is it that I'm not willing to play WoW but I'm willing to play ADOM?  Well, I probably put in four-six hours at ADOM today, and I got to play eleven different characters including troll paladins, elvish necromancers, and halfling bards.  I explored dozens of dungeon levels and killed dozens of different kinds of monsters;  I raised undead followers and soothed rabid animals with my music;  I cooked and ate orc flesh (the meal made me ill and later killed me);  I prayed to my deity and received supplication;  I fought with two weapons, no weapons, magic weapons, big heavy clubs, arrows, spells.  I was executed for shoplifting.  I blew myself up with an alchemical experiment.  I was killed by an invisible Ogre Magi.  I died of starvation in the wilderness.  (Hunger and food, normally a gameplay element I find completely tedious, is somehow tolerable in this game, a ticking time bomb of suspense.)  Some of my characters were killed at first level, most of them made it to around five, my record was eight.  I'm guessing I made about forty levels in total.  All in the space of four to six hours.

And it occurred to me that not even Diablo II or Neverwinter Nights packs this much experiential density (there's my kneejerk pretentious designer vocab again...shall we call it 'stuff'?) into an hour of play.  Neverwinter Nights comes close, but it is bounded by something that doesn't hold back ADOM:  because the animations are realistic, and that means the walk cycles are realistic, and that means travel times are realistic.  What can take a second in ADOM can end up taking half a minute in NWN, and even though they pack their dungeons and cities as densely as possible, they simply can't compete on that score.

Can a modern day videogame find ways to match a roguelike in content density?  Discuss.

Below Average

Just got the survey results back from our lecture at GDC.  Apparently we're below average.  Hmph.  I wonder if they'll let me back in next year?

The best comment:  "It was slightly frightening - the similarity between the speaker and Ed Norton in American History X."

Notes on Republic Commando

For me, Republic Commando is the pleasant surprise of 2005.  Not a fan of Star Wars since George Lucas butchered it, the only reason I played this game was because my friend Brett Douville worked on it.  But damn if it didn't turn out to be very cool!

I'm getting exhausted with first person shooters.  The hit games at the end of 2004 didn't bring much new to the table.  Republic Commando gives us a new game mechanic, the ability to easily and intuitively control your elite squad.  It's a completely different approach than Full Spectrum Warrior:  FSW's interface was complicated and highly strategic - you needed to plow through a long tutorial before you could even function.  Republic Commando takes a page from the PC version of Harry Potter, and builds your squad's actions right into the environment in the same way that which spell Harry Potter would cast was built into its environment. 

Context.

You press the same button every time, and your squad mate always does the right thing.  It makes a whole palette of actions available to the player.  The only downside is:  the player usually doesn't get to choose.  This crate is a crate to snipe from;  this crate is a crate to throw grenades from;  etcetera.  Sid Meier would not approve - although there are choices (you can hack the door or breach it with explosives;  you can snipe from this crate or throw grenades from the crate right next to it;  you can order your team to attack or you can go in yourself, guns blazing), for the most part, the game is a linear thrill ride.

I love linear thrill rides, and think that Sid Meier is off the mark in placing so much imporance on meaningful choices.  (Especially since if you look at top games you see a lot of linear thrill rides.)  Republic Commando has a very high density of spectacle in its level design;  it constantly treats you to views of red-shirts getting gruesomely killed, allies executing vicious combat moves on assailants, explosive environments that fall apart around you.

Given that the game is unabashedly a linear thrill ride, there's no reason to complicate the interface FSW style.  The interface is so simple, almost no tutorial is necessary.  Whoever designed it should get a medal.  It obeys all the principles of good interface design:

* Information exists in the world.  You know exactly what pressing the button is going to do when you press it, because it tells you on the screen.

* It doesn't violate prior conventions.  For the most part, Republic Commando plays like Halo, on the sticks and triggers.  The only differences:  they move the jump to the Y button (this actually is an example of a good affordance, IMO, and I agree with the decision, since the A button is now the command-squad button, which means the most important button in the game is right where it wants to be, under your thumb), and put weapon selection on the D-Pad.  Since millions of people have played Halo, Republic Commando is going to be a snap for most of its players.

It taps perfectly into the fantasy of leading an elite squad of soldiers.  These guys are incredibly badass, and you're the most badass one of them.  A side note:  another difference between this game and FSW is this game has the mass-market kill count.  In FSW, you'd be up against two or three enemies at a time.  It's hard to feel badass when your elite team of four is being challenged by just two assailants.

In a nod to Gauntlet, the game tends to hit its fever pitch when you're faced with droid generators:  you need to demo the generator that's constantly cranking out a stream of droids, making it damn hard.

What I'd love to see is this game mechanic take off, and not be another innovation dead-end like Die By The Sword, Galleon, or Homeworld.

Unfortunately, LucasArts pulled the ripcord on itself right as Republic Commando was coming to the finish-line.  They previously had a history of failures, and started spreading the mantra of fewer, better games.  As have all publishers;  but at Lucas, they eventually panicked and took it one step further than everyone else.  They laid off most of the staff and decided to concentrate their efforts on One Awesome Game, currently in development.

This may have been a premature decision.  Republic Commando has done a quarter million units on the Xbox in its first month, which may not be Halo numbers but it isn't shabby at all.  And Star Wars: Battlegrounds hasn't been doing too bad either, as I understand it.  LucasArts may now be regretting the dismantling of some excellent teams.

So there is no Republic Commando sequel scheduled for the foreseeable future.  So maybe it's the end of this mechanic.

But maybe not.  There's no reason a Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, or other game couldn't steal it.  That might actually be the hook I need to play another WWII shooter.  (But I'm not most people, and if I was developing a Call of Duty sequel I wouldn't want to mess with the formula until sales started lagging.)

Republic Commando isn't doing as well as I think it should on gamerankings.  So let's look at some of the complaints.  One guy's saying it's Halo for 12-year olds.  Um, Halo's already for 12-year olds.  In fact, I know a couple of 6-year olds who love it.  A lot of Rainbow Six comparisons.  It's been a while since I've played a Rainbow Six, but as I recall, controlling your teammates was FSW-level complicated.  Excuse LucasArts for making a game actually accessible.  Let's see:  one guy hates Star Wars products on general principle.  I can understand that. 

One interesting thing about Gamerankings is that Republic Commando and Devil May Cry 3 are the only two games I've found where the user reviews are higher than the critics reviews.  Could this mean that Republic Commando is one of those few games that are actually designed for players rather than reviewers?

I believe it could.

Finish

We were going over market research on Spider-Man 2 last week:  one of the questions I wanted to know the answer to was, "Did you finish the main storyline portion of the game?"  Only 55% of our players said, "Yes."  (Side note:  it's not entirely clear how much of our survey is grognard capture.  The marketing research team is doing everything in their power to get a representative sample of our players, but it's still a web-based survey, so you've got to wonder.)

So, well, that's depressing to me.  That's a little like hearing that half of my readers put down my novel halfway through.  Or that half of my audience walked out of my movie halfway through.  (Not that I've ever made a movie.  I'm just trying to make a point.)

Of course, not finishing games is epidemic.  They're long and hard and people get frustrated and bored and move on to the next game.  The list of games I haven't finished is long, and includes some impressive titles that I still consider "good games."

So I asked:  how do our figures compare to other games?

It turns out this question has not been asked by our marketing research department before.  I've got to say, it drives me crazy that we do all this research asking things like, "Do you ever consider buying products because you've seen them in a videogame?" and not these more fundamental questions, like, "Did you *finish* the damn thing?"

I'm fairly sure that more than 55% of players completed Max Payne 2 and Halo - those games were designed to be finished, and I'd hold them up as an example to follow.  If your game is going to have a decent story, your players should be able to get to the end of it.

How can we expect people to buy the sequel if they didn't even finish the first one?

Weekend Gaming Binge

So the 28 days is up and I plunged back into gaming again.  I played a bunch of different games and didn't get far in any of them before sampling something else.

Notes on Oddworld Stranger:  There is a constant tension in the game designer.  On the one hand, you want to make your character badass, so that your players feel heroic.  On the other hand, if you make them *too* badass, nothing challenges them and it stops being a game.  So on the Hulk and Superman side you're sitting there going "I sure am badass" but you get bored quickly because nothing challenges.  (Or the game is heavily contrived so there actually is a challenge--Hulk can only smash through doors;  all the badguys are armed with Kryptonite rays--and then you stop feeling like the Hulk or Superman.)  And on the other side, you have Abe's Oddessey, where the main character is...well...a loser, and each screen is fraught with peril.  Ever since I was a kid I preferred the games where you play losers.  It wasn't interesting to me to just be able to shoot at something and blow it up.  I preferred the games where you had to trap the badguy in the pit, or whatever.  (Lode Runner, for example.)  And Oddworld has always provided in that respect.  But now, in a concession to the mainstream, they bring us a badass character.  But they still keep that indirectness to killing.  Yes, you can kill badguys, but the game is designed so it's more rewarding to actually lure them away from their friends, paralyze them, and suck them into your ghostbusters-like bounty collection vacuum cleaner.  I love this. I read on David Jaffe's blog that he thought it was a cool game and lamented that it wouldn't sell;  I agree, but have to point out that this is actually the most mass-market thing that Oddworld has done yet.

Notes on Dragon's Lair and Space Ace:  I actually bought the PC versions of these, mostly because when I was a kid I wasn't about to drop that many quarters into the arcade machines, and I wanted to find out what I was missing.  Turns out not much.  Surprise:  Space Ace actually does have some nonlinear choices.  But I didn't care, and didn't get very far before I lost interest.

Notes on Achaea:  Over on Terra Nova someone pointed out that the indy game scene is alive, well, and profitable, and Achaea is an example of that.  So I gave this text-based-MMORPG a shot.  It's supposed to have the most interesting politcal system in an MMO.  But, it turns out, first you should kill a lot of rats.  Click.  You know, I'm sure it's a good game, but I'm just not an MMO sort of guy.

Notes on Halo 2:  Halo is delicious to play.  One adjustment to the core mechanics, here:  no hit points anymore.  No health packs.  You've got the famous Master Chief shield and that's it.  It's a good call, because now you can't get stuck at a checkpoint with insufficient health.  And Halo and Halo 2 are beautiful worlds to be immersed in.  You want to play because you're happy to be there.  "You always take me to the nicest places," Cortana says when you emerge from a narrow gulch into an establishing shot of a beautiful canyon with waterfalls and rainbows.  And I really dig the writing.  Not only is the dialog punchy, the writing is pulling me along.  I want to know what happens.  Oh, and:  you don't notice load times.  You die, there's no "Quit / Retry", "Loading..." - it almost immediately drops you right back into the action.  Makes it very hard to pull yourself away from.

On the moderation-management front, I'm more convinced than ever that videogames are truly addictive.  Going without for 28 days was not enough to get over the cravings.  They belong somewhere between caffeine and nicotine in the dangerous substances list.

So...

Does anybody know how to turn one of these new, tiny, svelte Playstation 2's off?

It's kind of dark in the living room right now but I swear to you I can't find a power switch on that thing.

I'd leave it on, but isn't that how I destroyed my last PS2?

New Blog

My friend Brett Douville has lately repurposed his blog to be predominantly about videogames, and he's got a unique hook:  taking the books he's read and movies he's seen and asking how one can inform the other.

New Game Journalism

So in my blog-crawling this morning I discover there's a thing called "New Game Journalism."  Supposedly, it does for game journalism what Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe did for music journalism in the seventies.  Here are a couple examples.  I particularly like that last one, even if Tom Chick is reviled by my friends for dissing on Deus Ex.  In fact, if it wasn't for the treacly ending, that last one could stand out as an example of the kind of modern day literature I love, a Microserfs for game geeks.  (And I'm not saying that because he mentions Spider-Man 2, I'd decided that before I even got to that part.  I swear.)

I try to tell Mark about it.

"I still don't understand what it is," he says.

"They have a manifesto," I say.

"Oh my god.  That tells volumes," he says.

Ignore Mark's cynicism. This stuff excites me for a couple of reasons.  One:  I've read four pieces so far, and three out of the four have been quite entertaining.  Two:  this kind of journalism only works on nondisposable games.  To be able to tell a story about your experience in a game, your experience has to be different from other people's.  It won't work for the linear thrill-ride sort of console game that is the bulk of the industry.

For example, a review of Prince of Persia that says, "And then I ran along the wall and jumped and just barely grabbed the ledge!" is not interesting.  As interesting as it might have been to experience at the time, it's not a story worth retelling, because everyone who played Prince of Persia ran along the wall and jumped and just barely grabbed the ledge.

On the other hand, Deus Ex is a fine target for New Games Journalism.  To wit.  It's second person instead of first, but I think it should be considered a good example of the style.  None of the "best of New Game Journalism" articles I've seen so far actually mention this one, and that is an oversight.

So:  if this kind of writing starts to take off, it might encourage the making of more games that allow the possibility for emergent stories, emergent gameplay, and custom content.  And I think that's a good thing.

But don't get me wrong.  I actually love games that are linear thrill-rides.  I'd just like to see more balance between them and the others.

We're Hiring, By The Way

We're staffing up on the Spider-Man team.   We need...just about everything.  More specifically:

Senior Designer:  We're looking for someone with level and mission design experience and a programming/scripting background to lead our future mission/level design efforts.  MAX experience would be a bonus.

Gameplay/AI Programmers:  People with experience who will program enemy, civilian, and traffic behavior and add gameplay features, sometimes in C++, sometimes in our C++-like scripting language.

Animators.  Preferably with MAX experience.

Concept artists.  Particularly character and guys who can do color.

Why work for us?

It's an opportunity to work with talented peers!

It's an opportunity to work on a game that's virtually guaranteed to be a hit!

You'll work fewer hours per week than most studios!  (40/week for 3/4 of the project.  Historically, we've gone up to 60 for 1/4 of the project, but we're trying desperately to fix that.  We have a good plan in place for being less crunchy this time.)

If you're into Spider-Man, it's great fun creating his world!

You'll get cross-platform console experience, both current and next-gen!

Feel some ownership of your work!  You're not just galley slaves cranking out someone else's spec!

Have I convinced you?

 

Send me an e-mail and resume if you're interested (fristrom@treyarch.com), and I'll fast-track it to our HR rep.  (And maybe pick up a sweet referral bonus for myself!)