Posted on November 27, 2016
anecdote: learning the rules
I’m beginning to experiment with game design via anecdote. The idea is to tell a quick story told from the point of view of the player that helps to describe the features that might exist in a game.
You approach a sports bar. The bouncer takes note of your total lack of team colors, home or away, and nods you through. The game is already on. You order a beer at the bar and stand in the back of the crowded room.
“Joe Baller passes the billet… and… it’s a superhit!”
How do you react?
–> Cheer loudly.
x Boo loudly.
x Sip your beer.
The crowd turns and looks a you, wondering what kind of asshole would cheer a superhit. Clearly you haven’t yet learned the rules of blernsball. You put down your beer and slink out of the bar.
Posted on November 26, 2016
write what you know
I am writer of code. I am not a writer of literature. Once I wrote and illustrated a piece of underwater adventure fiction — I was in 2nd grade and my teacher pinned it to the hallway wall outside the classroom. In the many games I’ve developed I have written tutorials, tooltips, item descriptions, even some character dialogue. I’ve read a lot of books, but couldn’t tell you anything useful about writing one.
How, then, am I supposed to create my own world, with its own characters and its own stories to tell? I’ve heard this axiom before, “Write what you know.” I came across it recently in an interview with Ubisoft’s Tommy Francois. “It’s not a cliche, it is the meaning of life,” Francois says.
“The guy who writes a book should be able to inspire himself, and he is alone with no tech. Anyone who writes and has not lived, I would probably not want to read his book.” –Tommy Francois
How am I supposed to write what I know, when I don’t even know how to write? I’m starting to realize that maybe this is the wrong question to ask. As a game developer and a programmer I write in the language of game design and game mechanics, not in dialogue and story arcs. Maybe a better question would be: Can “write what you know” help to inform game design and mechanics?
Thinking in this context immediately brought me down the road of the evolution of game mechanics. When designing a platformer you should probably be fluent in the mechanics of Super Mario Bros. When designing an open world adventure you should probably be fluent in the language of The Legend of Zelda. Certainly you can innovate and have a total departure from the play styles established in these games, but you should learn the rules of the game before you decide that you can break them in coherent and interesting ways.
So the first milestone I established for my procedurally generated game was to essentially create an experience with the look and feel of The Legend of Zelda, but deeply infused with procgen. Maps and dungeons are randomized, enemies start out dumb but can learn from their mistakes. This sounded great, and right away I started thinking about the details of my combat system.
And I was stuck. I lost my inspiration. After working on my game or my blog for at least a few hours a day, every day, for a few months, I had hit a wall. But this wasn’t some sort of writer’s block. I knew exactly what I wanted to do and I knew exactly how to proceed. But game development, especially indie development, means sacrifice. What other parts of my life am I willing to exchange for time to work on my game?
Was I going to spend less time playing with my kid so that I could work on a Zelda clone? Was I going to miss what would turn out to be some of the most epic baseball games ever played on the Chicago Cubs’ run to the world championship while I tried to figure out what was the best input control scheme for murdering monsters? The answer, at least for a few weeks, was no.
During this time I started to notice a trend on game news sites and blogs (see grep –week 47). There’s a growing movement of developers with a desire to move away from everything we think we know about video games. The subtext seems to be that if we don’t figure out how to expand our range as designers to be more inclusive of the majority of humans who find nothing of value in our craft, we risk becoming obsolete. There’s plenty of rhetoric that games are capable of being just as powerful and important as books or tv or film as an agent of change or as vehicles of empathy and emotional introspection, but anyone who follows the industry should know that the evolution of our medium is slow, and possibly stalled altogether.
Tommy Francois proclaims, “I am sure that someday someone will create a GTA with no guns.” The interviewer deftly responds, “If we can make these sumptuous, realistic, open worlds with a range of inventive ways of murdering people, why haven’t we done one without the violence?” To which Francois replies, “The easy answer is that the original games were made by testicles for testicles.” — And the industry has been stuck in that rut ever since.
There’s a clear pattern emerging here. Game developers are all very similar people — having worked at eight different game studios I can verify this. We have similar backgrounds, similar tastes, and we grew up playing the same games, so naturally we tend to make those same types of games for ourselves. There’s enough of us out there as consumers that the problem isn’t apparent to most developers or publishers.
If and when consoles finally fall off a cliff under the weight of their murder simulators, what comes next? Mobile games have been devoured by free-to-play, reaching the end of the genre life cycle in record time. There’s a push by Apple to resurrect premium games, and maybe with the entry of Nintendo into this space there’s hope for that yet, but the form factor of mobile devices generally doesn’t allow for immersive experiences with deep storytelling — not to mention Apple’s extreme wariness of any software that promotes contemplative or progressive thought among its players. Like all big publishers today, they want to play it safe as long as the money keeps rolling in.
So what’s a developer to do? For me the answer is to pivot hard. I’ve given myself a new challenge: design a game with the look and feel of The Legend of Zelda, but without violence. Can such a game have as much of an impact on its players as the original Zelda did for me when I first played it? I am certain that it can, but now I have to prove it.
Posted on November 23, 2016
grep ‐‐week 47
I’ve been noticing a trend on game news sites and blogs in the last few months. There is a growing movement of vocal critics of the state of the industry, which is very encouraging. From AAA to indie to classic developers of all genres, it seems people are finally coming around to what Dan Cook (“Why video games are pointless”) and Raph Koster (“We make bad movies”) warned us about 10 years ago. All of the articles below were published in just the last two months.
On the pointlessness of the debate of ‘walking sims’
@pcgamesnews
There’s Dan Pinchbeck (Dear Esther) talking about defending himself from critics claiming a walking simulator is not a game, because you don’t kill things or solve puzzles. When he was growing up games could be anything and weren’t pigeonholed into genres.
“It felt like games were always about questioning what they could be.” –Dan Pinchbeck
We’re definitely at the point where something’s gotta give
@IdleThumbs
Then Amy Hennig reflected on her work on the Uncharted series, questioning the morality and logic of hundreds of game developers ruining their health and their personal lives just because that’s what they are expected to do, because that’s what AAA developers have always done. And the big driving force behind that is publishers trying to give the increasingly hardcore players of a shrinking design space exactly what they expect for $60 at retail.
“I mean, Uncharted 1; a ten-hour game, no other modes… you can’t make a game like that any more.” –Amy Hennig
What counts as a game?
@GameON
John Romero reflects on the cyclical nature of the debate.
“Computer games weren’t games according to people who played board games back in the ’70s. While console games were not games according to computer game players in the ’80s… As we expand the boundary of games, people question whether it’s a game at all.” –John Romero
Games should be about what players feel, not what they do
@gamesindustry
David Cage of Heavy Rain thinks that “there’s a tradition in video games that they should be separate from the real world and not talk about real issues, our society and so on. I don’t know where that comes from.” He wants his games to “stay with you for years. Just like the books or films you love, they become a part of you.” As a writer he can literally write what he knows and put it in the game.
“For me, working in video games is about personal experiences: having a life, loving your children, loving your wife, going out to the park, and being inspired by all these things. Then you try and reinject that into your games and share those feelings with everyone that plays them.” –David Cage
We shy away from life and death and love and sex
@gamesindustry
Monument Valley creator Ken Wong thinks there’s not enough “life and death and love and sex” in games.
“[We all have] interests outside of games, and that really helps us remember that we are part of the story telling tradition, and the artistic tradition. We should be aiming to be as relevant as literature and film and all those other art forms.” –Ken Wong
We make boring games
@gamesindustry
Brie Code, lead programmer for Child of Light, comes right out and says it: “We make boring things.” If you aren’t a white male geek gamer, then the vast majority of video games aren’t made for you. She quotes a fashion designer upset that his peers are no longer capable of designing clothes for most women, because they think those women are shaped wrong rather than realize that their own skill at designing is flawed — “this is a design failure and not a customer issue.” Our potential audience of video game players isn’t broken, rather our ability to design to the expectations and life experiences of the general public is lacking.
“I want to make games that help other people understand life.” –Brie Code
There’s a desire to go back to a simpler time
@gamesindustry
Ron Gilbert of Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island thinks the time is right to resurrect old genres that have been neglected by big publishers for the last two decades — “Back then games were a little bit simpler and seeping with charm.” I see a parallel with point-and-click adventure games from the 90s and console games today, both of which closely follow Dan Cook’s genre life cycle: “I do feel that somewhere around the mid-90s, point-and-click adventures sort of ran off the rails. A lot of really – for want of a better word – stupid puzzles were being made.”
“There are just so many more people playing games these days, and with adventure games being very story and character focused, they are able to attract that broader audience.” –Ron Gilbert
I’ll be following this up shortly with a post on how these musings have led to a substantial pivot in the direction of my core design.
Posted on November 16, 2016
grep ‐‐week 46
The theme of this week’s grep is: catching up.
Procedural Generation, and the problem of Player Perception
@gamasutra
This is really more about UX than procgen, but he’s trying to get players to explore his procedurally generated spaces in a roguelike way (trial an error, experimentation) and it’s not working. The author’s conclusion is a bit sad, in the he thinks he can no longer put trust in his players and should instead cater to a lower common denominator, but it seems to me like he should just focus on improving his UX design.
Making randomness transparent in Tharsis
@gamasutra
Following up on player perception of randomness, this is a repost of an article from earlier in the year about the excellent RNG game Tharsis. The developers discover that by showing their random number generator as dice literally being thrown and physically simulated (as opposed to a hidden black box) players have an easier time accepting the results.
Dissection of Randomness in Games
@gamasutra
A nice overview of the various ways that RNG can be incorporated into game design.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead: A roguelike you could play for the rest of your life
@rockpapershotgun
How have I never heard of this game?
Procedural island generator
@gamedev.net
Pretty floating islands.
Posted on October 26, 2016
grep ‐‐week 43
The theme of this week’s grep is: phoning it in.
Sid Meier’s Psychology of Game Design
@GDCvault
Lots of great stuff in this video, but most relevant here is the part about the psychology of random number generators:
- If a player has 2:1 odds of winning, and they lose, that’s ok.
- If a player has 2:1 odds of winning, and they lose twice in a row, the game is cheating.
- If a player has 20:10 odds odds of winning, and they lose, the game is cheating.
- If a player has 5:1 odds of winning, and they lose, the game is cheating.
Bending Unity to Carry Spherical Voxel Planets in Planet Nomads
@gamasutra
A technical deep dive into some very interesting procgen techniques implemented in Unity.
The code of No Man’s Sky
@3dgamedevblog
An article about No Man’s Sky that is actually positive and interesting, rather than trying to hold it up as an example of everything that’s wrong with indie games. Huzzah.
Fun with naming roguelikes
@rockpapershotgun
“Your game is a Roguelikelikelike.”
Fun with procedural tree generation
@rockpapershotgun
Pretty trees.
