What ranking did you get last time you parallel parked?
This past weekend, Rachel and I went to the Exploratorium together. It's a hands-on science museum featuring interactive exhibits that demonstrate how the human senses and other natural phenomena work. It makes apparent many things in your everyday life that you take for granted or wouldn't otherwise be able to detect, such as exactly which points you look at when observing a photograph.
We went out to dinner afterwards. As I washed my hands in the bathroom, I imagined an exhibit that might observe you while you washed your hands, and give you a readout of how "well" or completely you had washed them, giving you a "Percentage Clean" rating, or a graphical representation of the spots you had cleaned or missed.
Though something like this would be complex to accomplish in real life, it would be par for the course in a video game. You have your avatar wash its hands, perform whatever inputs are required, and the game rates you on how well you did. Supplying control input to, and receiving tangible feedback from, "the computer" is part and parcel of the gaming experience. Tailoring your input to attain a specific numerical rating (the "perfect game" or "S Rank") is the central mechanic of many games-- Dance Dance Revolution, one-on-one fighters, shmups, and so forth.
Everything that happens in a game can easily be tracked internally (see the stats screens for Rockstar's GTA3 series and Bully); the question to the designer is: which information is revealed to the player, and which remains hidden? It's an interesting aspect of design, since any statistical information that the game reveals which the player cannot visually observe himself exposes the "third man" in every scene-- the Omnicient Eye of "the computer," which doesn't otherwise exist as an entity in the diegesis of the gameworld. In a game, you could be supplied with a numerical ranking upon completing the hand-washing action, but if you somehow received this data when washing your hands in real life, what would the implication be? That you were being surveilled by some unseen force.
In a game with a realistic setting, I think designer-dictated information control is important as a means of maintaining the game's artifice. If my character is in a gritty, real-world locale, performing down-to-earth, human-scale actions, numerical stats and ratings are going to break the suspension of disbelief-- how is my Strength rating of 8 derived? Did I get that from my yearly physical exam? Does my avatar "feel" objectively like he has about an 8 in strength relative to other people? How do I know the Armor Rating of a leather jacket? I've never seen it sewn onto the tag of any article of clothing I've ever bought. Anything in life is only knowable through direct observation-- as I practice something, there's no meter for me to fill or any objective scale for "leveling up"; I can only determine my own improvement through direct observation of the results of my practice.
Hereby, in a game where my character increases in skill over the course of the game, I would much rather have all the numbers hidden from my view as a player. If I practice shooting, I would love for the only feedback I get about skill improvement to be my character's shots becoming observably more accurate; I'd love not to have a weapon's effectiveness determined by its having an "Attack Rating of 10," but by my observing that, yes, a claw hammer is a fairly deadly bludgeoning weapon, and I know my character to be fairly strong, and when I try out swinging the weapon at a piece of plywood, observing that the wood is cracked in half.
The other side of this would be intentionally designing the game to provide the player with excessive amounts of tracking information that they would never be able to observe on their own, very overtly throughout normal play. This approach could effectively reinforce the futuristic Police State as a setting. Consider playing a character in a setting like that of 1984 or Minority Report; each action you performed, even when your character was completely alone, could present the player with a numerical score onscreen, implying their actions being constantly watched and recorded through some sort of active surveillance, acknowledging the computer's Omniscient Eye as an active entity in the gameworld.
Just another instance of the possibilities of a designer intentionally uses a game's "gaminess" to aesthetic ends.
2.26.2007
Eye
2.21.2007
Pro
Official announcement:
I will begin work as a level designer at TimeGate Studios on March 12th!
TimeGate's most recent release was Extraction Point, the official expansion pack for F.E.A.R. Considering my work with WorldEdit and the F.E.A.R. maps I've released, I would say that TimeGate and I are a pretty good match :-)
TimeGate has been on the scene since the late 90's, gaining prominence with the Kohan series of RTS games before switching gears with the release of Extraction Point. I was very impressed with my playthrough of the expansion, which recently won PC Gamer Magazine's Expansion of the Year 2006 award. It's a great team of guys there and I'm excited about the project.
I'll be moving to Texas immediately after GDC. I'll miss being in the Bay Area with Rachel and everyone else I know here, but I feel like taking on this new role will be worth it.
I hope to find the time to release BENEATH pt. 2, which is not so far from completion at this point. I'd like to make it a priority, as I'd hate to see this go unfinished, since I'm excited about how I plan to finish up the story.
In any case, with this move I'll be a professional designer, which just makes me happy beyond words. I'll keep this blog up to date with how it all works out. Thanks to everyone who's provided me with the encouragement and support to do this thing. Lone star state, here I come :-)
2.19.2007
Subvert
As any dilligent nerd should, I've familiarized myself with the ouevre of Osamu "God of Manga" Tezuka. His storytelling is masterful, and some of it is simply mind-blowing in scope. Over the decades that he produced material, he created an incredible range of properties, from Kimba the White Lion, to Black Jack the outlaw surgeon, to the millenia-spanning Phoenix series, to an eight-volume retelling of the life of Buddha, and of course his trademark character, Astro Boy.
Until recently, the original, Tezuka-directed Astro Boy animated series from the 60's wasn't available domestically. Now it's been released in two excellent box sets, the first of which I picked up and have been watching an episode or two of per night.
The thing that stands out about Tezuka is that he is first and foremost an entertainer, regardless of his subject matter. His stories are all peppered with flashy fights and plenty of quick little jokes and sight gags. Thereby, even a story with a deep theme and complex plot can entertain a viewer who's simply interested in a few laughs.
For instance: Astro Boy is a children's show, but the most recent episode we watched operated on a few assumptions that would most likely go over the intended audience's head, and featured a few quick twists that led to a significantly complicated plot. To synopsize:
Some 50 years ago, a prominent scientist, "Dr. I.C. Frost," hypothesized that if astronauts could freeze themselves during an extremely long space flight, they would be able to defrost upon arrival to explore faraway planets otherwise unreachable by humans. So, to prove that his theory is right, he established a secret lab in a hidden facility in the deserts of Egypt, built a robotic sphinx and an army of robotic crabs for protection, constructed his cryogenic chamber, and froze himself, to be defrosted in 100 years. Present day (50 years on): a nefarious character has set his sights on Dr. Frost's well-guarded technology, and employs a covert agent to kidnap Astro Boy, drain him of all but the last reserves of his power, and strand him in the desert. Having no memory of how he got there, Astro calls out for help, lost in the wastes. The nefarious character "rescues" him, restoring his power on the condition that Astro will help him in his "expedtion" to an "ancient tomb." Astro proceeds to do battle with the guardian crabs and the Sphinx, gaining entry to the secret lab. However, upon her defeat, the Sphinx reveals the nature of the tomb/lab, Dr. Frost's wishes, and her purpose. Astro then realizes he's been had, drives away the nefarious man and his crew, and agrees to keep Dr. Frost's resting place a secret between himself and the Sphinx, until Dr. Frost awakens once again. Astro flies off to another adventure, ending the episode.
Note that the above is stated in chronological order, whereas the TV episode starts at present day, and reveals the backstory later on.
The point of typing all that out was to illustrate that 1) the show's premise was based upon an understanding of the speed of spaceflight to other star systems and the concept of cyrogenics, and 2) the plot itself is fairly complex and relies on a dialogue between two different time periods and a third-act "reveal" of the nefarious character's true nature. Regardless of how far some or all of this might fly over the heads of an audience of children, the show succeeds in engaging and entertaining any viewer by featuring frequent robot combat (between Astro and the crab robots, and Astro and the Sphinx,) and a constant stream of very clever little sight gags, inserted during otherwise mundane sequences. So, a viewer that doesn't understand or care about the plot can nonetheless enjoy the show entirely for the frequent robot fighting and simple jokes, and maybe absorb the themes of the story along with the core entertainment factor.
I think that video games are ideally suited to be message delivery systems (MDS) following just the same formula. The main draw, the core experience, of a video game is the gameplay itself, which in many cases is buffered by narrative elements. The gameplay is wholly separate from the narrative; one can easily exist independent of the other. However, in most narrative games, the story elements support the gameplay and vice versa, or the two elements at least run alongside one another. Much like the viewer of an Astro Boy cartoon can enjoy the jokes and action without appreciating the overall plot and themes, the player of a game can enjoy jumping and fighting and leveling up without investing himself in the story. It's the idea of the short positive feedback loop, laid out by a colleague of mine and expanded upon further in this Gamasutra article-- the player (or viewer) is driven forward by constant small rewards to complete a larger task. The classic Lucasarts adventures are successful for the exact same reason the classic Astro Boy is: there's a joke at every turn (every click,) giving the player constant tidbits of entertainment regardless of their overall investment or progress through the total work. Overserious adventures fall flat, since when the player is stuck, they have no levity to tide them over until they figure out that frustrating puzzle. Genuinely funny adventures that keep the player stuck for too long also fail, since hearing the same jokes repeatedly stops being funny.
The possibilities for subversion in games are endless, and some games have begun to mine those possibilities. Grand Theft Auto 3 comes to mind, as does the more recent Dead Rising. GTA3's draw was the open-world action gameplay: ramping cars over buildings, blowing up crowds of onlookers, leading the cops on wild chases through the city. And yet, even if the player completely ignored the core storyline to freeform, every radio station that played in every vehicle was densely packed with ruthless satire of American culture in the form of Laszlow's bewildered talk show hosting, and the variety of consumer-lampooning advertisements that played between songs. The gameplay itself was the draw and the experience that sustained the title, but it also acted as a message delivery system, inundating the player with Rockstar's very specific point of view.
Dead Rising is the more recent, and more overt, but relatively less successful example, as its message is largely delivered during skippable cutscenes, as opposed to alongside the gameplay itself. It's great nonetheless-- it's a Japanese game, clearly made for the American market (released exclusively on the 360,) starring American characters and taking place in America, but the story itself is explicitly anti-American, anti-consumerism, anti-Western-culture. The draw of the gameplay is smashing thousands of zombies, and smash zombies you do, but at each plot point the thrust of the narrative rails on the Western way of life, targetting American gluttony, virulent consumerism, and government corruption. The idea of consumer as zombie, admittedly lifted from Dawn of the Dead, and the rampant destruction of all the products and shops in the mall as an anti-consumerist fantasy do underpin the gameplay itself, but the real, outright message delivery occurs during the discrete, skippable cutscenes, and fails to some degree through lack of integration with the core experience.
In the past, I've seen the disconnect between gameplay and narrative to be a failing of games; ideally, I believe that the player's actions should BE the narrative of the game, the events themselves perpetrated by the player dictating entirely "what happens," as opposed to the separate gameplay simply propelling the player to the next pre-scripted sequence. But I think there's a huge amount of value in intentionally exploiting that disconnect in the current generation of games to subversive ends. Since the gameplay lacks bearing on the narrative, the narrative can be whatever the designer wants. Players will consume enjoyable gameplay first and foremost, and swallow whatever rides sidecar to that experience. This is true of any game, even those with the highest production values, extending this concept to the widest possible audience. What's most exciting to me about this concept is that it's a chance for games to have tangible social impact-- something that, as a medium with an extemely large and impressionable audience, it's high time they achieved.SUBVERT! SUBVERT
2.04.2007
Theatre
This Friday we went to one night of the Noir City film series at the Castro Theatre in town. I love old film, especially stuff immediately pre- or post-war, including pre-code American pictures, Alfred Hitchcock, and pulp noirs. Friday was definitely about pulp, but it was also a tribute to cinematographer John Alton, so it was all beautifully shot and the imagery was just stunning.
The movies were definitely grade B as far as their star power and scriptwriting went, which is the draw of half the films shown at the Castro. It's also part of what made the evening interesting to me, as a viewer. The audience was definitely not taking the films overly seriously, and there ended up being a lot of "laugh lines" throughout both films that I wondered if I would've noticed or enjoyed if I'd been watching them at home on DVD. Seeing film in a theatre, especially with a big crowd of fellow movie lovers, is a truly communal experience.
It's something that, I guess, video games will never have, which may be to their benefit or detriment as a cultural medium. Games are integrally focused on the individual, the player, even when that player is participating in a multiplayer game; the player's experience is entirely self-centered, whereas the moveigoer's experience is entirely... hmm, the opposite of that. "Self-sublimating"? Maybe "introverted" versus "extroverted?" The film experience is entirely focused on the actions of others onscreen and in the movie theatre, is what I mean to say. In other words, much of the enjoyment of these films came from vicariously sharing the exact same experience with hundreds of others simultaneously, and my reactions to the events onscreen resonating through them.
I'm not sure what the implication is. I feel that games have a harder road to hoe than movies since, at their inception as a mass medium, anyone with a nickel could walk into a theatre and see a movie, enjoy it with others, discuss it with others, share it with others, and walk out with no baggage. All games (except arcade games, which were simple and have fallen out of favor) require a significant hardware buy-in, and can only be shared with a limited audience (usually at most the players involved in the game and a few onlookers, barring public tournament situations.) Games as an experience are more intimate-- based on the player's actions themselves and limited in being shared with a living room of others-- which is powerful, but also precludes the accessibility and appeal to the collective unconcscious that moviegoing provides.
Something like World of Warcraft probably appeals better to the strengths of both games and movies (a player-driven experience that is nonethless unchanging in its nature and shared simultaneously by tens of thousands of others on your server, as well as requiring only the bare minimum computer that most people already have for e-mail.) I hope someday this genre of game will be able to develop more engaging and meaningful play to go along with its appealing base architecture.
1.30.2007
Christmas
Last year was my first GDC. The conference comes again in March, and I couldn't be more excited about it, honestly. The sessions, keynotes, and Game Developer's Choice Awards were all outstanding and tend to make one terribly excited to be working in games. As I was telling a colleague, GDC has given me that sense of anticipation I used to get as a kid waiting for Christmas. It's the most wonderful time of the year.
It goes without saying that I'll be there for Miyamoto's Keynote, and the GDC Awards. Phil Harrison's thing, I dunno, probably not. I got my fill of his shitty infomercial company line at last year's Keynote. Why does this guy get to Keynote two years in a row?
I'm also planning to take the whole week off and attend...
| (305) Game Design Workshop | Marc LeBlanc | Monday, 10:00am - 6:00pm — Tuesday, 10:00am - 6:00pm | Game Design/ Two-Day Tutorial |
| Overview: This intensive 2-day workshop will explore the day-to-day craft of game design through hands-on activities, group discussion, analysis and critique. Attendees will immerse themselves the iterative process of refining a game design, and discover formal abstract design tools that will help them think more clearly about their designs and make better games. | |||
I've heard from a number of people that the workshop can be really fun, not to mention enriching in how one thinks about game design. LeBlanc has pioneered some of the biggest "Big Ideas" in design philosophy since his stint at Looking Glass, and I think it'd be fascinating to have two full days of intensive work study with him and my fellow attendees.
Let's take a look at some of the other sessions that have grabbed my attention:
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I think that fully-realized, engaging NPC crowds are going to be one of the big leaps from this to the next evolution of games, not to mention that I'm psyched for anything related to Assassin's Creed.
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I love studios that bank on their own original IP, and the Lith maybe most of all. Sign me up.
| Designing GEARS OF WAR: Iteration Wins | Cliff Bleszinski | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: Cliff Bleszinski, designer of GEARS OF WAR, outlines the design processes that yielded GEARS OF WAR. He takes the various features that worked in the product and breaks them down, step by step, describing how the collaborative and iterative process made them shine. | |||
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These both sound like excellent design overviews/postmortems from a couple of wildly divergent but highly successful developers. One is a breakdown of how the most successful recent "core gamer's" game was designed, and the other how the breakthrough mass-appeal title Guitar Hero came to be. Tell me all about it.
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This is a big one-- a showcase for recent, usually small-scale experimental game design hosted by Jonathan Blow, whose time-bending Braid brought the house down last year.
| Exploration: From Systems to Spaces to Self | Clint Hocking | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: Whether we are exploring a system-space or a simulated two or three dimensional space, every game is in some way an exploration game. This presentation examines exploration in games, and how designers can better utilize our human compulsions to explore in order to offer players a more meaningful experience. | |||
Clint Hocking is always a fascinating thinker and speaker. He's heavily into the MDA thing and the whole emergent/Looking Glass philosophy, which should come into full practice now that he's broken the bonds of Splinter Cell. I wish his talks could go on for longer than an hour.
| Game Design in Agile Development | Rory McGuire | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: In the leap to next-generation, traditional development methods are starting to show their seams. Larger technical complexities are giving designers shorter periods to find the fun and polish game play. This session covers Agile and Scrum methods, focusing on how their fundamentals benefit designers in the next generation development environment. | |||
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Two sessions addressing two cutting edge approaches to design, iteration, and production flow. Maybe they'll be a little dry or over my head, but I'd love to be up on the newest approaches to next-gen studio game making.
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Molyneux is generally full of shit and ditched out on his session last year, so hitting up this presentation should be good for gossip-making at least.
| Interactive Cinematography | Thiery Adam | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: Film has developed a set of camera rules and influences that have become the language of cinematography. For some reason, its wealth is largely unapplied to the camera in video games. This lecture is about learning from other mediums and figuring out how to go beyond with interactivity's possibilities. | |||
Active camera control is so much more important to the player's perception of a game than most people give it credit for. The incredibly dynamic camera in God of War, Gears of War or Resident Evil 4 are great examples of an effective, active in-game camera. I'd like to see what this guy has to say.
| Narrative Landscapes: Shaping Player Experience through World Geometry | Brian Upton | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: When a player moves through a game world the physical geometry of the virtual space imposes an implicit structure on the play experience. This session explores practical level design techniques for shaping that experience, drawing on examples from real games and theme parks as well as academic research in virtual environments and city planning. | |||
Directly tailoring the player's experience through space design? Yes please.
| Reflections of Zelda | Eiji Aonuma | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: Aonuma explains the development team's formidable task of progressing the epic franchise across multiple generations of Nintendo systems. This is a rare opportunity to learn behind-the-scenes development challenges and triumphs from Link's latest installments. | |||
Zelda... Seeee-crets! Sounds like fun if there's nothing else going on in this slot.
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I love, love, love Suda51's crazy ass. If you think I'm missing him in person you've got another thing coming.
| SPORE's Magic Crayons | Chaim Gingold | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: This lecture discusses the appeal, challenges, and techniques used in the design of games with a strong player creativity component. Many programs will be compared and analyzed, but specific emphasis is placed on the design and methodology used in the development of SPORE's editors. | |||
Spore session. Pretty much a given.
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Warren Spector musing about the state of the art in game-driven narrative? I'm not missing this one.
| The Imago Effect: Avatar Psychology | Harvey Smith | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: The Imago Effect: Avatar Psychology Creating an in-game representation often holds a strange fascination for players; for some games, we spend more time crafting our avatars than we do playing. On the surface, character creation seems simple. This session explores the notion that there's much more going on in the player's mind, taking a look into the ways we let our audience engage in self-express through avatar. | |||
Avatar creation and customization is one of my favorite feature of any given game in practically any genre. Being able to fully customize my own avatar in the upcoming Mass Effect sold me on that game about twice as hard as I would've been otherwise. I don't know if I can ever forgive Harvey Smith for Deus Ex 2, but I'm into this subject and he seems like a smart guy.
| The Game Design Challenge: The Needle and Thread Interface | Eric Zimmerman | TBD | Game Design/ 60-minute Panel |
| Overview: The Game Design Challenge is back for another year, with three talented designers tackling a very unusual design problem. Their assignment? Design a game with a highly unorthodox input device: a square of fabric, a needle, and some thread. At the session, each panelist will present a unique solution to this game design enigma, and the audience plays an important role as well � by voting in the winner of the Game Design Challenge 2006. | |||
| The Metagame: A Battle of Videogame Smarts | Frank Lantz Eric Zimmerman Warren Spector Marc LeBlanc Jesper Juul Clint Hocking Jonathan Blow Tracy Fullerton | TBD | Vision/ 60-minute Panel |
| Overview: The Metagame combines a gameshow format with strategic competition and lively debate. Inspired by Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, in the Metagame six videogame sages compete in a battle of aesthetic analysis and critical connections. | |||
Here are a couple of frivolous, fun sessions run by the insufferable Eric Zimmerman. But everybody likes seeing design superstars playing little games. I'll be there.
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Sounds useful.
| Censorship of Video Game Content: Time to Fight Back | Lawrence G. Walters | TBD | IGDA/ 60-minute Lecture |
| Overview: The intent of this lecture is to educate the attendees regarding the current legal climate associated with video game content laws, and evaluate some potential future trends. | |||
| Who's the Real Bully?: Rights and Responsibilities in the Anti-Game Debate | Daniel Greenberg | TBD | IGDA/ 60-minute Roundtable |
| Overview: Beating up on the games industry is easy and grandstanding carries little political price. Defending any new media is very difficult. What can developers do? What are our rights, what are our responsibilities, and what are our choices in defending ourselves and protecting our work? | |||
A couple of sessions about the current state of games, regulation, censorship, and freedom of speech. Zeitgeisty!
| Preserving Games: Saving the Past and Setting Safeguards for Today | Henry Lowood | TBD | IGDA/ 60-minute Roundtable |
| Overview: This roundtable meets twice. The first meeting emphasizes preserving digital games of the past, many of which are rapidly becoming endangered. The second shades towards organizing an archiving strategy for games produced today. | |||
I've started to think about historical game archiving and game culture heritage preservation. I'd hate to see so many games of today and yesterday go the way of the thousands of films that have been lost to history through neglect. Games have the advantage in that they're non-physical in their essence so there's no flimsy film to dry out or burn up. This seems like an interesting topic to explore.
| Game Criticism: Opportunities and Approaches (Day One) | Ian Bogost | TBD | IGDA/ 60-minute Roundtable |
| Overview: What contributions can criticism offer to the medium of videogames? What unique opportunities exist in different critical media, for example, blogs, traditional journalism, and academic criticism? What techniques are most useful for such critics? What are the good and bad examples of game criticism that already exist, and how can we learn from them? | |||
Games are just now developing their own critical approaches and language. As representative of an arm of critical thought still in its gestation period, I'd look forward to what these guys have to say.
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Game design icons discussing what they'd term as the most significant games of all time. Sounds like fun.
Looks like the space under my Christmas tree is overflowing! Hope to see you there.
1.29.2007
Stress
I've been thinking about my own self-induced stress lately. Here are the factors:
- I work in QA
- I am eager to begin working in a design role
Am I too impatient? Am I too hard on myself? Or am I too lazy? I feel like I don't spend enough time at home working on my mapping. But I don't have a good metric for that. How many hours per day did other level designers put into their maps and mods before they went pro? How many months or years? Do I spend too much time reading and posting about games online, or playing games? Or do I not spend enough time with my girlfriend, or reading, or traveling? I'm trying to find a balance, but I admit that I'm impatient regardless. I want to be where I want to be and I want it now. I don't know if I should expect myself to be making quicker progress on my work, but I do. So I'm sort of stressing myself out. I'll be happy when my night job turns into my day job, and I can actually enjoy myself when I'm not working. I'm looking forward to it.
Another short-term factor I've noticed in my own dissatisfaction is when I reach a point in the mapmaking where I'm not sure exactly how to proceed. I think part of learning level design is figuring out an effective workflow, recognizing exactly which aspects of the map need to be completed in what order, and being prepared to tackle them when the time comes. I'm facing some aspects of this map that I haven't had to deal with yet-- specifically, meeting a friendly NPC in person for an expository scene-- which I still need to figure out how to set up and script, not to mention writing the actual dialogue to be spoken, and recording it, and putting it into the game. I've gotten to the point though that I know my next step is to write the dialiogue, at which point I can lay out the sequence of the NPC delivering it, script it in, and then move onto the next scene. In general, I'm much more comfortable when I know exactly what work I need to do, and just have yet to do it, than when I'm uncertain about how to proceed. I think that's really true of myself in any regard; I thrive on certainty, knowing what goals I have to complete, and completing them. This probably figures heavily into why I'm drawn to games, and specifically the ones I am.
Here are some progress shots of the living quarters where you meet the aforementioned NPC:
"Sup bro"
A comfortable seating area, with dining table in the background (the two of each seat will become significant.)
Another outstanding bathroom set that I'm slowly becoming famous for.1.24.2007
More
Welcome to the first scripted sequences of BENEATH pt. 2!
Some dastardly ghosts swarm you:
But that's just a trick.
Then, a Heavy and his cronies burst through this door! The Heavy easily tosses over this huge reception desk, scattering junk everywhere:
Then you fight the dudes!
Next I'll either be scripting the NPC conversation sequence, or the next fight sequence... I also need to convert that overhead bridge seen in the last shot into a working retractable walkway.
More to come!
1.20.2007
Shell
So far, I've built the entire shell of BENEATH pt. 2, and laid in the gameplay-relevant set decoration objects. Here's a general overview:
From a viewability standpoint things are still pretty dicey what with the fullbright and the stock texture, but the player's path is something like this:
Green star being the start point. I've learned a lot from making BENEATH pt. 1 and observing how levels are designed in retail games, and I'm happier with the layout and flow of Pt. 2. I was pretty happy with the beginning and end of pt. 1, in that they were pretty open and non-linear, but the central section-- the meat of the fighting-- was really cramped, and basically sent the player in a more-or-less straight line through a bunch of little rooms and little hallways. Also the fights often "felt like [the player] was fighting from a doorway," in that you were confronted with enemies as you set foot in a room, and basically had to stick to the front door for cover until they were dead. So, even though I personally really enjoy close-quarters tunnel fights, I think that more open environments with more cover and flanking opportunities play to F.E.A.R.'s strengths, so I've tried to give the fights as much room to breathe as possible.
For the bigger picture, I'm trying to unify the map as a whole by sending the player through various parts of it in multiple ways and making later parts of the space visible from the very beginning. Also building out ancillary areas along hallways and side rooms that aren't actually playable, to give the player a sense that the space is more of a "real place" that expands beyond the playable path, and exists as a complete entity (labs you can see through windows but can't enter, doors blocked off by debris, etc.) So that's the basis of my layout philosophy this time.
Here's the first arena you'll meet hostiles in:
It's a barracks area, with dividers between individual bunks (more playable space to the left and right, not pictured) and a split-level ceiling. There are no dead ends, giving both the player and enemies plenty of chances to hit cover and flank. It's a straight shot from one end to the other without stopping, except a heavy is going to burst those double doors and block the way until he's killed off.
One section of the map is a non-combat living quarters area where you speak with an NPC. This is the panoramic overlook from the quarters, where the player can look back down to the starting spawn, further down to the lowest level, or up to the roofs, to reorient themselves. Makes for good scenery for a semi-interactive sequence.
Stairs leading down from the "rooftops" (indoor rooftops) to an interior area, that the player must pass through to proceed. Alice is there for scale reference.
My first vent-crawling sequence! I think it'll be a pretty nice one, not stupid and drawn out. There's going to a scripted Alma appearance in here too, but not the scary stuff. Alma in BENEATH isn't a malevolent force.. hopefully her role will be clear by the end of pt. 2.
The server core-- the heart of the facility. It holds all the answers to what lies beneath.
Weirdly I already don't feel like I have THAT much more to do on the map. Logically, I know I do: triggered event scripting (which there's more of this time,) set dec, detailing the geometry, texturing, and enemy encounters. But somehow it doesn't seem especially daunting. I think I just have a better foundation this time.
More to come soon!
Comments
Blog comments: ENABLE!
If you're reading this, feel free to drop a comment. I've only been taking e-mail feedback up til now, and I've gotten some good ones.. but I figure no reason to keep he comment system turned off. If I don't like it, I can always go back to the old way.
I'm also going to put up the first development shots of BENEATH pt. 2 today. Figure I've been working on it for a little while now, I ought to start documenting it.
1.03.2007
Personification
The holiday break is over, and I'm back from visiting my family and old friends in Florida.
When we were over at a friend's apartment, Zuma was up on the 360. I'd never played it before, and most everyone gave it a try. It's a PopCap game in strict puzzler mode: a line of multi-colored balls is rolling down a winding ravine, and the player must shoot more balls into the line to make like-colored connect-threes, destroying the group. The goal is time-based, to slow the approach of the line of balls, thus preventing them from reaching the endpoint of the ravine which results in a game over. Eventually the player destroys all the balls on the screen, passing the level and moving on to the next. As a newbie just getting into the mechanics, I had fun, but clearly didn't grasp the more nuanced strategies that drive the game.
My friend Lara, on the other hand, is an expert at the game. She owns the registered version on her home computer, and has put dozens of hours into the 360 version. What interested me wasn't necessarily her ability to breeze through the early levels of the game, but the way she addressed the elements of the onscreen conflict. She'd adopted a set of terminology that personified the groups of balls, and inserted herself into the equation as the opposing force in the conflict between "her" and the "guys" (like-colored groups) onscreen. When she was trying to destroy a certain set of like-colored ball, she would address it in a combative fashion ("I'm going to kill that guy," "Fuck you/fuck that guy,") and when she would destroy a set of like-colored balls, she would say she'd "killed that guy." When she missed a shot, causing her to lose ground in the conflict, she'd make pained sounds ("ow," "ouch!") or say that the "guy" in question was "hurting" or "killing" her.
I found it funny, but also really fascinating. Here is a puzzle game, the most abstract, non-representational genre of video game. The only actors onscreen are generic colored balls, and a stone frog that dispenses more balls onto the field.* But my friend had, presumably unconsciously, found a way to personify and insert herself into the events depicted, despite the lack of evidence for the designers having any intention of implying a human conflict through the content of the game. I assume that Lara's interpretation built naturally over the dozens of hours she's put into the game, as a function of "seeing through" the game-- not having to concentrate on learning and tracking the game's mechanics, allowing one's unconscious to occupy itself with constructing unique strategies, or re-interpreting the events onscreen in new ways.
I also assume that, in such an abstract game with such a simple goalset, this reinterpretation is a necessary motivating factor to keep the player going past the point where the experience plateaus, and they've absorbed all the depth that the game has to offer. Lara reconfigured the events onscreen into something more visceral and immediate than "balls rolling down a ramp," mentally placing herself as an actor in a physical conflict against these hostile "guys," allowing her to extend the period in which she could remain engaged with the game.
"Seeing through the game" is something that occurs in high-level, usually competitive play, such as with one-on-one fighting games. One of the things I found interesting about Lara's interpretation of Zuma is how, in seeing through, she constructed an interpretation with no basis in the designer's demonstrable authorial intent. Authorial intent is a concept central to some arms of narrative criticism in the film and literature worlds, but not one I'd ever considered in relation to games. The player has free reign to mentally build his own interpretation of a game's theme, as Lara did, or to tangibly circumvent the designer's intent through play, by devising and executing his own objectives within the gameworld's mechanical constraints, but outside its designed progression behaviors.
Most games that I play are difficult to thematically reinterpret as they're generally quite complex, specific and concrete ("Sam Fisher is an NSA agent who must prevent terrorists from carrying out their plans by using covert actions.") But PopCap style games, highly abstracted and simple in concept, are a fascinating platform for player reinterpretation, an aspect of the genre I'd never considered until I went home to Florida for Christmas.
*the holes that the balls advance towards also feature skull-emblazoned hatches, but I wouldn't classify them as "actors."