Learning from Everywhere

I just returned from vacation in Orlando. My family and I visited Universal Studios, Universal Islands of Adventure, and Disney’s Magic Kingdom. As we walked throughout the parks and waited in line for rides, I couldn’t help but notice that theme parks have a lot of lessons that game designers can learn.

Both Disney and Universal spend considerable effort to ensure that every part of a ride works toward the overall experience. Placed throughout the queue area are television screens, posters, and animatronics to set up the story of the ride. Waiting in line for Universal Studios’ Jaws ride, you watch television interviews with the survivors of Amity, discussing the way they’ve coped with the trauma of a shark attack. Outside the ride, the park is set up to mimic Amity, complete with tacky shark souvenirs. At Disney, the path to the Haunted Mansion is littered with tombstones inscribed with cheesy jokes. The ride operators wear funeral attire and make terrible puns in somber tones. Once you get off Space Mountain, you take a walkway back to the entrance. The ceiling is covered in stars, there are alien landscapes built around the conveyor; the ride is over, but the experience isn’t.

Game designers need to remember that every part of a game should work towards enhancing the experience. The opening menu, the pause interface, everything needs to contribute towards the atmosphere the game is trying to achieve. I’ve played a number of games that shattered my immersion because the interface wasn’t as streamlined as the rest of the game, throwing the fantastic pacing down the toilet.

There’s more to establishing tone for a game than just the gameplay and the visuals. Game designers need to remember that they have lots of tools at their disposal, and they need to use all of them.

Pacing in Alan Wake

Lately, I've been replaying Alan Wake. It's a survival horror game heavily based around contrasting light and dark. Enemies are surrounded by darkness, which needs to be burned away with the beam of a flashlight before they can be hurt. I could talk for days about all the things Alan Wake does right, but I'm going to focus on one thing: pacing.

In order for a survival horror game to work, it needs to be scary. And in order for the player to feel scared, they have to feel threatened. Previous survival horror games, like the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill, did this by crippling the player's supplies. The player never really had the tools to fight back, so the best course of action was always to run. More modern games, like Dead Space, have tighter controls, but they still rely on giving the player too little ammo to properly protect themselves.

Alan Wake - I assume through incredibly strenuous playtesting - manages to give exactly enough for the player to fight their foes while still feeling as though they're lacking. Every time I run out of ammo, I turn the corner to find a checkpoint with an ammo cache. And while it was predictable, it didn't lessen the tension. I still felt like I could run empty and be left helpless.

Part of this is due to brilliant level design. Enemies generally require a very specific amount of ammo to dispatch; standard foes take three pistol shots, more difficult foes can take a whole clip. So when the designers build an encounter, they can know exactly how much ammo a player will need to face it. By stringing these encounters together cleverly, they can ensure that the player has just enough ammo to deal with the dangers they'll face. There's still enough wiggle room that the player doesn't feel that they have more ammo than necessary, but they never feel that they need to run rather than fight (unless the encounter is specifically designed that way).

Proper pacing makes or breaks a game. I wish more developers would play Alan Wake and see that.

Games I Love: Team Fortress 2

With Battlefield 3 just released and Modern Warfare 3 on the horizon, I'm often asked which I prefer. And my answer surprises more often than not: neither.

My favorite shooter - and the only one I'll play - is Team Fortress 2.

I don't like military style shooters. I find that battles between two players end in a second or two at most; either someone catches the other by surprise and kills them instantly, or the player with the better aim gets a headshot and kills the other instantly. The guns in military shooters all tend to blur together; there are the assault rifles with slightly different stats, the shotguns with slightly different stats, and the sniper rifles with slightly different stats.

Listening to the developer commentary in TF2 (Valve commentary is ALWAYS worth listening to) reveals a set of brilliant mantras.

At a glance, a player should be able to tell a.) what team someone is on, b.) what class they are, and c.) what weapon they are using. In military shooters, everyone is the same "soldier in camo", and I can never tell if someone is on my team or if I should be shooting them.

Only two classes have the ability to kill in one shot: the Sniper and the Spy. The Sniper has to get a headshot (no other class has that ability), and his laser sight will alert his prey that they need to beware. The Spy has to get a backstab with his knife, which requires him to be in melee range and sneak up on his target. Both classes have the least health in the game, so they pay for their power with fragility.

Balance between classes is, while not perfect, incredibly well done. All classes fit into a rock-paper-scissors configuration, but skill can trump class counters. Nearly all unlocked weapons are sidegrades, gaining strength in one area at the cost of a weakness elsewhere. One of my biggest complaints with military shooters is that they all have weapon unlocks that are clear upgrades to the defaults, making the barrier to entry incredibly high.

Most of all, Team Fortress 2 gets the pacing of combat perfectly. When combat starts, I have long enough to decide if I should engage or if the fight is a guaranteed loss. Once I start fighting, I know it's going to take more than one shot to kill either of us, so there can actually be a fight. And if it's clear I'm losing, I have the ability to escape while simultaneously allowing my opponent the chance to finish me off. Fights are (almost) never over too quickly or too slowly.

I've come to expect a lot from my shooters. I want fights that last, balanced weapons, and game modes that reward teamwork rather than mere deathmatching. And nothing has offered what I want like Team Fortress 2.

Devil's Advocate

Our group at Great Forge Studios is four people. When we need to make a decision - for instance, lately we've been discussing how to handle Endurance costs - the four of us sit down and debate until we find a solution that makes us all happy. As a result of over half a year of this, we've begun thinking alike. The proper psychological term is "groupthink".

Every Sunday night I go to a bar with my good friend Scott for karaoke. One night, I decided to bring some of my work with me. He was intrigued, and I showed him what I was trying to accomplish. At the time, it was mostly creative work - coming up with new powers to fill out powersets. He began tossing out ideas, and we debated them. Eventually, we had enough powers that I could bring them before the rest of the team for serious discussion.

One of the first powers he suggested was an attack for Fiery Aura. It was a toggle that hurt enemies and allies alike. When I brought it before my team, it was immediately shot down; they didn't want friendly fire. I asked for a reason, and they couldn't immediately give one. For the rest of the evening, we debated the merits of allowing or disallowing powers that could injure teammates. Eventually, we decided against friendly fire, but it showed me something important: we would never have had that discussion if Scott hadn't tossed out the idea. We thought so alike that the idea of friendly fire never occurred to us.

Every design team needs someone to question every decision made. Far too often, teams who work closely together fall into groupthink, and they take the group's assumptions as fact. Someone has to shake up that mentality and question the status quo.

In discussing Powerpoint presentations, Kathy Sierra said that every slide should to have to fight for its life. I use that mentality in game design - every idea should have explain why it has to be added in. If there isn't a compelling argument that the idea both provides something the game needs and provides something that no other idea can provide better, that idea gets scrapped. Similarly, if the team immediately shoots down an idea, I jump in and start arguing why we have to include it.

Without debate, there is no game design. A devil's advocate is the most important thing a team could have, and I'm glad I found one.

L.A. Noire and the Use of Graphics

On Tuesday, Rockstar Games (developers of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption) released their latest game, L.A. Noire. The game is a crime thriller set in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. The player controls a newly-promoted detective as he investigates crimes in one of the city's most decadent periods. Most of the gameplay consists of investigating crime scenes and interrogating witnesses.

Rockstar's biggest success in L.A. Noire is their new MotionScan technology for capturing an actor's expressions. They use 32 cameras positioned around the actor to capture his face as he emotes, and they convert that into CG to use in the game. It allows for a depth of facial expression never before seen in the gaming industry. L.A. Noire was the first game to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it received near-unanimous praise. It's absolutely breathtaking.

It's also one of the few examples of using better graphics to enhance gameplay rather than for the sake of having better graphics.

The power of modern gaming consoles and PCs means that games can achieve hyper-realistic graphical quality. Franchises like Uncharted have created experiences that could easily pass for Hollywood blockbusters. Unfortunately, this level of visual excellence is incredibly expensive. Games cost upwards of $50 million to make, and much of that goes to the art teams.

The problem with this is that generally the hyper-realistic graphics don't accomplish anything. Games have whiz-bang graphics purely for the sake of whiz-bang graphics. Most games that strive for realism would be equally enjoyable with half the graphical quality. Good gameplay can make up for weak graphics, but good graphics can't make up for weak gameplay.

That's why L.A Noire is so groundbreaking. The technology used to better display facial expressions is vital to the game; players need to watch characters for eye contact and facial ticks to know if the witness is lying or witholding information. I'm glad to see someone finally using their incredible graphics to improve the experience. And thinking back, it should have been obvious that if anyone would do this, it would be Rockstar.

Portal 2 and DLC

The talk of the week is Portal 2. It launched on Tuesday, and it's fantastic. Just like its predecessor, it is filled to the brim with brilliant dialogue, clever puzzles, and some of the best sound design in the industry. It's only April, and it is already a contender for Game of the Year.

It also launched with an in-game store, and the internet is ablaze with rage. User reviews on Metacritic are decrying Valve as the worst developers ever, and upset gamers are swearing that they'll never buy a Valve game again.

It's easy to see why the Portal 2 store is divisive. Everything on it is horribly overpriced - skins and animations for the co-op characters are several dollars apiece. The bundle containing everything costs 60-70% of the price of the game itself. Even the most devout of Valve fanatics (myself included) have to admit that it's a shameless cash-grab.

But it's not the worst thing ever created. It's not even the worst DLC (downloadable content) ever created.
Nothing on the store affects gameplay; it's either quirky gestures to amuse your co-op partner, or skins to make your robot look slightly different. If you ignore the store entirely, you don't miss a thing. The game doesn't stop having great writing or enjoyable puzzles just because you didn't buy the ability to make your robot dance.

"Day One DLC" comes much worse than this. EA loves to charge you extra for content that's already on the disc you bought. Activision has no qualms about charging $15 for five maps, three of which were on the previous game which you still own.

Yes, the Portal 2 store is dumb. But it's inoffensive, inconsequential, and insignificant. And really, as far as DLC that isn't story-related goes, that's all I can ask for.

Complexity vs Depth

One of the biggest confusions in game design is the difference between complexity and depth. If a game has depth, it allows for many different playstyles, strategies, and possibilities. A game with depth will always have something else to discover. Complexity, on the other hand, merely throws extra layers between the player and progress, and it doesn’t add anything.

As an example, chess is not particularly complex, but it has incredible depth. Anyone can pick up the basics of chess in an hour, but experts can practice for lifetimes and still find new strategies and avenues to explore.

Strategy games thrive on a balance between complexity and depth. The interactions between various unit types lays out the general strategy the player will follow, but there are enough variables that no two games will go exactly the same way.

Kingdom Hearts makes a good example of both complexity and depth. The combat system has a considerable amount of depth. While it’s possible to simply button-mash your way through, you miss out on a great deal of the intricacies of the system. Some enemies are weak to certain types of spells. Enemies telegraph their attacks, allowing for effective use of the dodge and guard abilities to prevent taking damage. Combining abilities with your party members allows for team-up attacks. It’s possible to play through the entire game multiple times and learn something new.

The Gummi Ship is nothing but complexity. In order to obtain parts for the ship, you need to collect crafting components and convert them into ship pieces. These components do nothing otherwise and there’s no other cost to crafting them, so they could just as easily have been replaced with the final pieces. Once you have the pieces, you have to fight with a clunky interface to assemble the ship. And at the end, it doesn’t matter, because the base ship model is competent enough to clear all the Gummi Ship sections anyway. The entire system adds nothing of value to the game.

My favorite rant subject on this topic is Baten Kaitos, a neglected RPG for the Gamecube. Baten Kaitos used a card battle system (which already adds a considerable amount of complexity). Every card had an element, and opposing elements canceled each other out. This meant that playing a fire card and then a water card would completely nullify everything the fire card accomplished. Because the cards you drew were picked randomly, this meant that pure chance could destroy any attempt at strategy you made. All it added to the game was frustration.

Properly executed depth allows the player to experiment with the game’s systems and rewards the player for that experimentation. When done right, depth adds considerably to a game’s lifespan, turning a good game to be played once into a game that lasts for ages.

Games I Love: Skies of Arcadia

I think it’s time for what will be a recurring feature here on Ask Me About Grim Fandango: I’m going to gush about games I love and why I love them.

 

My absolute favorite game of all time, bar none, is Skies of Arcadia. Originally released for the Dreamcast and later re-released for the Gamecube, Skies of Arcadia was an oddity. Final Fantasy VII arrived 3 years ago and brought about an era of darker, moodier RPGs. At the time, developers were trying to capitalize on the trend by making characters with tragic pasts and enough angst to choke an elephant.

Skies of Arcadia balked at that. The world of Arcadia is bright and cheery. The protagonists are unflinchingly optimistic. The music is upbeat, and even the poverty-stricken sections of the Evil Empire’s capital have life to them. Skies of Arcadia remembers something that far too many games forget – you’re supposed to be having fun, and it wants to have fun with you.

It’s certainly not perfect. Random battles happen far too often, even in the fixed remake. The combat isn’t as deep as it could be. The story is incredibly predictable, and some of the characters are horribly 2-dimensional.

But the game has its tone down perfectly. Like its hero, Skies of Arcadia understands that moping for more than a minute or two is obnoxious. It decides that rather than dwelling on the negative, it’s going to accentuate the positive. And its charm is infectious. It’s impossible to listen to the music swelling and see the protagonists grinning and not feel better yourself. And that’s why I love Skies of Arcadia.

A Case for Linearity

A growing trend I keep finding as I converse with other gamers is a belief that linearity in games is inherently bad – that being linear is automatically worse than being nonlinear. It’s particularly frustrating, particularly because I can’t have a reasonable argument about it. Whenever someone begins talking about linearity, they immediately jump to the conclusion that the developers are trying to dictate the way they play.

I’ve never been a big fan of nonlinear games; whenever a new sandbox game launches, I think that I haven’t given them a fair shake, I try it, and I end up disappointed. I can’t help but feel that I’m missing something, as the rest of the world goes absolutely nuts over the latest Grand Theft Auto, or Red Dead Redemption, or whatever it is this month. I really want to enjoy them as much as everyone else seems to, but I just don’t get the appeal. After some thought, I managed to pull together exactly why I dislike them.

When someone praises a game for being “nonlinear”, they mean that the game is a wide-open world that lets the player do anything they could possibly want! Huzzah! No restrictions, no obnoxious rules getting in the way. Just run around, shoot people, run them over, and go wild! Unfortunately, that seems to be the entire appeal. And while I can get behind that for a short time, it gets dull after about an hour. At that point, I start asking, “Okay, so now what?” And there usually isn’t a very good answer.

Nonlinearity also cripples the ability to tell a good story. When the player can decide to drop the plot to screw around for a few hours, the pacing gets thrown out the window. Giving the player so much control over the protagonist’s actions creates a massive mood dissonance. Niko Bellic of GTA IV talks in almost every cutscene about how he hates being forced to kill, and how the war was a terrible slaughterhouse, and then as soon as the player gets control, they can kick a guy out of his car and run over pedestrians like bowling pins.

Admittedly, part of my complaint comes from my emphasis on story and characterization. I adore games as a storytelling medium, so giving the player the ability to destroy the story being told rubs me the wrong way. But I’d rather the developers take away some of my options in order to tell a good story than give me complete freedom and nothing to do with it.

Illusion of Choice

One of the biggest issues I run into with far too many games is what I call the Illusion of Choice. When a game offers you the choice between two options that are terribly unequal, the choice might as well not exist. If I offer you the choice between 100 dollars and 100 yen, I haven't really given you a choice at all.

Lately, I've been making my way through Dragon Age: Origins, and I've been meeting this problem in spades. Your party in DA consists of four characters, each of which is one of three classes. Theoretically, you can choose any of the eight (nine, if you include the DLC) main characters to make up this party. In reality, you're going to need a Warrior who can take hits, and Alistair tends to be better than the other two; a Mage to do magic damage, and only Morrigan fits that bill; a Mage to heal and buff, and only Wynne can do that; and someone to do physical damage, which means the rest of the cast. The player character can be built to fill any of those slots, but it only frees you to take one other person. The game gives you the choice of eight, but at least two of those are all but required.

Bioshock suffers from a similar problem. While you have the choice of filling your slots with any plasmids you wish, one of them had better be Electro Bolt. It stuns enemies, it electrocutes anyone standing in water (and in Rapture, there are a lot of puddles), it opens doors, and it drops security drones better than anything else. On the other hand, slotting Cyclone Trap is a waste of a slot. It doesn't do enough damage or provide enough control to warrant filling one of your few plasmid slots with it. If you need to lay traps, you can draw enemies into puddles for Electro Bolt, or draw them into an oil slick and use Incinerate, or fire trap bolts from the crossbow.

Generally, Illusion of Choice tends to appear because the developers misjudged the usefulness of certain tactics or abilities. In Dragon Age, because mages can provide damage, control, and healing in ways that no other class can replicate, they become the best choice for party members. In Bioshock, Cyclone Trap doesn't provide anything that other plasmids or weapons can't do better.

The answer to avoiding the Illusion of Choice is to ensure that all options are equally useful. This tends to require a lot of analysis, as the more choices you have, the greater the chance that one will be more valuable than the others.

The alternative is to not allow choices at all. Please don't do that.

Criteria

For the past few months, my comrades and I have been working to remake the City of Heroes pen-and-paper RPG. It was originally started by Eden Studios, but something fell through (I don't know the specifics; the license, maybe?), and the project was scrapped. They did release the quick play kit they had demoed at Origins; we downloaded it and were disappointed at how clunky it felt. We decided to salvage Eden's good ideas and convert their foundation into a game that better matched the feel of the MMO.


As I've been working on this, I've started to get a feel for some of the necessary qualities a game designer needs. I'll admit that this list is skewed towards pen-and-paper design, as my mind is still in that frame, but I think it works for all mediums well enough.

1. A game designer needs to be creative.
This one is a little obvious. To be a game designer, you have to have a idea to design around. Where I see a lot of other hopeful designers trip up is in only being creative in the big picture. It's not enough to have a pitch for the broad strokes; you have to be able to fill in the cracks, especially because you need to be making those cracks. As soon as you have an idea, you need to shoot as many holes into it as possible, and then you need to fill in those holes.

2. A game designer needs to be analytical.
The greatest tool a game designer has is the rest of the medium. Hundreds of games have come before you, and they all had strengths and faults. In any genre there are fantastic games and terrible games, and a game designer needs to be able to tell the difference between them. Once you know what makes games in a particular genre good, you need to be able to find a way to adapt them into your work.

3. A game designer needs to be able to argue.
Whenever my team comes up with an idea, the first thing we do is try to break it. When we received suggestions we didn't like, I immediately asked, "What does this do for us that we don't have? Why do we want that? Why don't we?" Every idea should have to fight for its life, and a game designer needs to be able to both support and attack it. Nothing should be added to a game that hasn't be viciously debated and torn to shreds.

4. A game designer needs to be able to do math.
Game mechanics can be broken down into systems of equations and mathematical models. A game designer needs to be able to model a potential change and fully understand the consequences. For a while, my team tried to fake this by playtesting extensively to get a handle on the effects of every change we wanted to make. Eventually, I realized that we'd either have to spend every waking minute testing every possible situation to make sure we hadn't broken anything, or I'd have to run the numbers.

5. A game designer needs to be able to work in a team.
Game design isn't a solo job. No one can properly debate with themselves, and no one will be able to see every potential situation. Working in a group means that every member can provide something different, and more eyes and minds on a project will catch problems and find solutions that one man can't.

So there you have it.

Ask Away

Hello. My name is Brandon, and I'm an armchair game designer.

In modern nerd society, everyone wants to be a game designer. Everyone has a pitch, everyone has a dream, and everyone knows that they're going to explain their brilliant game to Nintendo or Bioware or Infinity Ward and the listener is going to place their hand against their forehead and say, "Oh deary me! You, sir, are a genius. Our studio has been searching for someone like you! Please, come to our offices and think up more earth-shattering ideas."


I'm not going to say that I don't have one of those pitches. But, I'm not here to talk about that. I want to talk about game design in general. Issues that many games run into, terrible decisions that too many games make, and games that I think do things right. I'll run over games I love, games I hate, and the reasons behind my feelings. I'll talk about what I think a game designer should be, and what I think games to aspire to be.

So go ahead. Ask me about Grim Fandango.