Frayed Knights: Resting, Sleeping, Fatigue, and Exhaustion
It's time for another of those updates on Frayed Knights, the upcoming indie role-playing game that refuses to take itself too seriously. This week we're gonna talk nuts & bolts of the game some more. If the topic sounds tiring, it's because that's what it's about --- getting tired.

Adventurers lead strenuous lives. When they are slinging spells and swinging swords in life-or-death conflicts, or traversing treacherous trap-filled, uh, territories.... they are traveling great distances, hunting quest threads, and performing conversational acrobatics. All while lugging around more equipment and loot than any human could really be expected to carry. It's an exhausting career choice!

So unlike certain other, newer RPGs, the heroes of Frayed Knights are not going to be able to go all day without taking a breather or getting some well-deserved shut-eye. Well, probably not. Unless you blow all your silver on Liquid Nap potions. But that's another story.


So here we have a screenshot of a situation you'll find yourself in frequently in Frayed Knights - turning in for the evening. In this instance, it's at an inn, and you'll have to pay to rent the bed for the night. Or day. Or ... well, generic sleep-period. Whatever.

Those who have played the pilot episode (man, is that thing still around?) will note that there's a little campfire icon in both the standard and combat control amulet in the lower right. That's to "Rest" ("R") - which is something pretty different. Ah, now I should probably explain the difference. I'll have Chloe demonstrate.

Here's Chloe. Above her icon, she's got two colored bars. The top, red bar is her health. Running out of health is bad. It doesn't kill the character in Frayed Knights (or we'd run into all kinds of problems with characters having conversations with dead people). But it does incapacitate them. Which means they can still talk, but are not really good for anything else until they are restored. That takes a good night's sleep. So there's one reason for spending your hard-earned silver in the local inn.

But wait, that's not all!

The blue bar below that is the character's endurance bar. Endurance is what allows the character to act. There's no "mana" or other spell-casting limits in Frayed Knights... it's all endurance. It's used to swing swords, cast spells, whatever. When the endurance drops to zero, a lot of things happen, depending upon whether or not the party is in combat. But the basic problem is that the character immediately gets a penalty to pretty much anything he is doing that caused endurance to drop to nothing. On top of that, any roll the character is forced to make - like defending against an attack - is going to be made at a fairly steep penalty. While not exactly a sitting duck, a fatigued character just lacks the energy to dodge well. Finally, if the party is in combat, the fatigued character automatically takes a "rest" action as their next move, to get the endurance bar back into positive territory. This means a character running on low endurance is going to be a lot slower on all of their actions - because they will have to waste precious combat cycles resting.

What exactly does resting do? In combat, rest restores a certain number of points of endurance - reducing temporary fatigue. And it takes up time - time where the monsters may use to do horrible things to your health bar. But it should really be thought of as "taking a breather" or pausing to catch one's breath. The player may voluntarily choose to have the character rest at any time as the character's action - mainly to avoid having endurance drop to zero and taking those penalties.

Outside of combat, resting is always voluntary and effects the entire party at once. The entire party rests however long it takes for everyone's temporary fatigue to be eliminated. Probably. It's almost instantaneous for the player, but time passes in the game exactly as if it were combat - a number of turns pass for everyone to rest up to maximum endurance. This means spell effects can expire, and there are multiple chances for monsters to show up and ruin everyone's break-time.

So that's how resting works.

While catching quick breathers and short rests may be enough to take you over the next hump, there's only so far it can sustain you. A marathon runner is going to need more than a five minute break after one race to be ready to run competitively in another. Sooner or later, characters will become exhausted and a quick breather won't carry them very far anymore.

You'll note that Chloe has a little gold marker - a ring - around her endurance bar. This represents long-term exhaustion. As the character builds up temporary fatigue, they also build up long-term exhaustion (at a much slower rate). Exhaustion acts to limit the character's maximum stamina. The little gold ring starts all the way to the right - the character can tap their entire reservoir of endurance - and then very slowly slides over to the left.

It eventually stops, so the maximum endurance will never be completely reduced to nothing. But at max exhaustion, characters only have about a third of their maximum stamina to work with. That means that "zero stamina" danger level comes much, much faster.

Exhaustion can only be cured by sleeping. That means finding a place to sleep. Or, alternately, pumping down a potion of Liquid Nap, which isn't quite as good (and won't restore an incapacitated character), but works better than Red Bull.

So the overall gameplay effect is that there is some level of long-term resource management that you will need to pay attention to in Frayed Knights, but you never have to worry about completely "running out" of spells or whatnot.

A side-effect of the way I did this - with endurance being the limiting factor to spell-casting - is that I must be very careful about providing any spells that restore endurance. If that's even possible (and I'm still uncommitted either way), I have to make certain that the laws of thermodynamics apply to magic. Specifically, entropy must rule - casting a spell to restore endurance must always cost more than restores.

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:06 AM (Permalink) 11 comments links to this post

 
Game Design: Emulating the Table?
The appearance of Dungeons & Dragons coincided with the appearance of commercial videogames. And no, I don't remember the actual appearance of either. I wasn't even in school yet! I was apparently playing cowboys and indians or something at the time, tying up my cousin to a tree (true story, according to her mother, though neither of us remember it!).

Since the early videogames of that era were not exactly stellar fantasy simulations, D&D was really where it was at for us geeky young fantasy & SF fans. Except for joining the SCA or something, D&D was as close as one could get to being able to participate in a medieval fantasy like Tolkien's books. That was still the case when I started playing, in 1981. A friend of mine, Boris, once exclaimed his professions of faith prior to a session, "It's the best game there is, and the best game that ever was!"

Arguable, definitely. But I wasn't about to.

And our games were filled with arguments over the rules, silly behavior, party infighting, out-of-character tangents, downright asinine antics, and probably some revelations about the darker side of our souls and fantasies than we'd ever want anybody to analyze. But we kept coming back, because we were having a blast. I'm still playing (albeit with a different rule system) every weekends, nearly thirty years later. That says something. I'm not sure I want anybody to analyze what that it actually says, but hey... there ya go.

So it's no surprise that the early computer RPGs (back then neither D&D or the games referred to themselves as "role-playing games" - the games came first, the inadequate name came a couple of years later) sought to emulate the tabletop experience. Minus the rules arguments, I guess, though often keeping some of the other elements. Even the party infighting, in some games. The rules were remarkably similar. A player familiar with D&D would have no problem "rolling up a character" and playing the computer games without looking at the manual. Maybe "Constitution" was renamed "Health" and "Wisdom" was renamed "Willpower," but the players already knew the basics of games before they opened the box. All they needed to know was the keyboard commands.

So here we are, thirty-ish years later. The tabletop experience has changed a bit - we're on a 4th major revision of the D&D rules (well, 5th to 7th if you include the ol' "Basic D&D" editions 'n stuff), and there is a plethora of games that explore different aspects of the social RPG experience. I played one indie dice-and-paper game called "Inspectres" a couple of years ago that used a reality TV-style "confessional" to influence the direction of the storytelling. Weird, but cool. On the flip side, you have D&D 4th edition, which more closely resembles a board-game or MMO than it's immediate predecessor (though in some ways it's probably moved a little closer to its original incarnation in function, if not form). Some other games, even back in the day, embraced a deeper simulationist approach, with detailed charts and dense rules for everything. For some folks, that was the improvement. For others, it was exactly that kind of thing their games "evolved" away from.

And the computer games! Computer games have leapfrogged their tabletop cousins in potential for living out fantasy. I mean, with a Wii controller you can literally swing an air-sword in the air to slay stunningly rendered 3D monsters now... who needs to be rolling dice? There's no need to call out, "I waste him with my crossbow!" and then determine what happened - you just aim and pull the trigger - or press the button. And your average gamer has quite possibly never rolled a twenty-sided die in an honest-to-goodness table-top game of D&D in their life.

So is it finally time for computer RPGs to bid their ancestral home goodbye, to quit trying to be a copy-of-a-poor-copy, let the niche hobby tabletop RPGs do what they do best, and evolve into something greater and different and more *cough*mainstream*cough*? A lot of noted game designers believe so. I probably shouldn't blame them if they do.

Clark Peterson, co-founder of Necromancer Games, once shared a story from GenCon when he and a bunch of friends from the industry were playing D&D. Some obvious fans of the World of Darkness series (by White Wolf) walked by his table, and began making loud, disparaging comments about the kinds of unenlightened, unsophisticated gamers would actually derive entertainment from such a poor, hack-and-slash game like D&D.

Little did these folks realize that the people at Clark's table were some of the very designers of the game system they held as superior. They just chuckled to themselves, kept right on playing, and had a blast.

I think that story may be analogous to how computer RPGs may be "evolving" away from their tabletop roots. Sure, hiding the stats, focusing on the immersiveness (back in the 90's it was referred to by the overly-grandiose term "virtual reality") and action may be a great way to go for many games, and may take good advantage of the strengths of the platform, as well as the experience and preferences of the development team. But is there really nothing left of the tabletop experience worthy of emulating in a computer RPG? Is there nothing else the dice-and-paper RPGs and cRPGs have to teach each other?

I don't think so.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:30 AM (Permalink) 7 comments links to this post

 
Game Design: Suspended in Groundhog Day!
I watched the movie Groundhog Day again... on, surprisingly, Groundhog Day. One of the Best Movies Ever, IMO.

I always thought the last line of the movie, "Let's live here! We'll rent to start." was kind of a weak punchline. But this time I got the "oh, DUH!" revelation. This guy has been living in this town for years. Possibly decades, by some of the implications in the film. Director Harold Ramis posits the opinion in the commentary that it was ten years, and later suggested it was probably more like 30 or 40 years. So how could he possibly go back to his old life?

Yeah, sometimes I'm kinda slow that way.

But anyway - I really brought it up to talk about time loops in games. It's apparently been used in games quite a bit. Some examples include the Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and of course indie game Braid, where manipulating the flow of time is really what the game was about (it was billed at one point as "Groundhog Day" meets "Memento"). There's the Persona 3: FES expansion episode The Answer which takes place inside a one-day time loop. I was kind of disappointed that the time loop didn't play a larger role in the story and gameplay than it did. But it did end up being the big Maguffin plot device that brought the characters into battle against each other, as they took sides over an opportunity to rewrite history - to bring back their fallen friend but risk losing what he sacrificed himself to obtain.

But the game I really think of when I think of the time loops in Groundhog Day was a science fiction text adventure by Michael Berlyn, published by Infocom, called Suspended. It was supremely difficult, IMO. Which is probably why I never beat it. In Suspended, you are a character in cryogenic suspension who's brain has been used as a "living computer" for a central system that keeps a terraformed planet running smoothly and safely. An earthquake has caused a catastrophic failure at the facility, and you awake to full consciousness in communication with several robots who you need to use to repair the facility before too many turns (and too many people die).

If you fail, the population assumes you have gone crazy and are deliberately destroying the world (as, apparently, your predecessor did). They come to the facility and remove you from your suspension - killing you in the process.

Now, the major trick to the game was that each robot was very quirky, having major limitations and a unique ability. One robot always communicated via bizarre poetry about the flow of the electrical systems. Only one robot had visual sensors. Only one had audio sensors. The time limit meant you could not simply move the robots around in one group to get all the information at once to get a clear picture of what was going on and to do everything that needed to be done.

In many ways, the game required you to play it through to failure, many times, to get a better understanding of what was happening and what had to be done. Eventually - well, in theory, as I never got that far - the game would come down to careful management of your robots in some optimal fashion to fix the facility before the angry mob came to kill you. And you could then optimize further to get a better score, or to play at a higher difficulty.

It was a novel concept, and not one often repeated - at least to my knowledge. Maybe because it was so friggin' hard that people got frustrated just getting a handle on what they were supposed to do that they quit. But I think there are ideas there - from the early days of the hobby - which have merit and should be re-explored in modern (indie?) games.

First off - the time loop. Suspended didn't really have one, but as a player you felt like you were in one. The game was very short - it was supposed to be played over and over again until you got it right. What about incorporating that concept right into the game, so that you didn't exactly "lose" the game so much as progress to the next restart.

The other idea was that - in repeating the same scenario - you didn't really control just one character. You controlled several completely independent characters --- the robot. The "you" in Suspended was really a non-entity. You really played the robots - up until the point your frozen meat-suit got sacked. So what about a game of time-loops where you play not just one character trying to "get it right," but several characters, with their interactions compounding on each other. This could be done simultaneously across blocks of turns (which might be confusing), or switched between by player control (as in Suspended), or could be done sequentially - with the formerly player-controlled character becoming an AI-controlled NPC attempting to mimic the player's sequence of actions.

I say attempting to mimic, because the player's currently controlled character could totally change things up - like killing the former player-controlled character and changing that whole timeline.

From a story perspective, this could be a very fun place to explore, too. Do any of the characters have in-game memories of the previous "run?" Do all of them remember the previous runs? Do they know that each other remembers?

And - like my little "duh" moment above - what happens the Next Day? How are they changed? And what happens if there are no "do overs" the next day, but the consequences are almost as dire?

The possibilities seem to be delicious. AND - extra-special bonus - because the game would only simulate one event (say, one day) and a limited number of locations - it could very easily be done by an indie.

Labels: Adventure Games, Game Design, Movies

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:10 AM (Permalink) 10 comments links to this post

 
Game Design - Pulp Fiction - and Games, Part 2
Let's continue on with Lester Dent's pulp fiction formula and gaming. I want to make a few notes before moving forward:

a) I'm not advocating adherence to formula, ESPECIALLY not a formula created for a completely different medium. I'm more interested in understanding why the formula worked, and how some elements might be applied to help make more interesting stories in video games.

b) Dent's formula is intended for pulp-action thrillers, which share many similarities to most game stories, but definitely not all. It's an even looser fit for a comedic game like The Secret of Monkey Island (or Frayed Knights) - but the comparisons are probably still appropriate.

c) A great game and a great story are two different things - and often the goals of story and gameplay are at odds with each other. IMO, the best we can do is find a nice sweet spot somewhere in the vast field between them. But Dent's little formula is far from the only way to tell a good story, and it's certainly not a limiting factor in making a great game. We're digging for ideas here, not criticisms.

What Should Happen First

Dent next talks about what should happen in the first 1500 words. That's about... uh, six pages of text, and about nine minutes of reading time. We'll say ten minutes. The first ten minutes of a game are pretty critical, too. While I give RPGs and adventure games a little more leeway than I do, say, a FPS, the fact remains that if a game hasn't hooked me in within the first ten to twenty minutes, I probably won't play it long enough to enjoy the other 1490 minutes of fabulous story and gameplay it promises.

This also represented the first quarter of a 6,000 word pulp adventure story. So some of these ideas might be more appropriate for something to happen in the first, say, quarter of a game than in the first ten or twenty minutes.

But regardless, there are some valuable nuggets of advice to be mined here. So what advice does Lester Dent give to writers for the first ten minutes of his pulp action story? And do they apply to game stories, especially adventures and RPGs?

Introduce the Hero and Swat Him with Trouble

"First line, or as near thereto as possible, introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble. Hint at a mystery, a menace or a problem to be solved--something the hero has to cope with."

I don't know if there's a more appropriate tidbit of advice for games to steal. Nevermind that Dent ends sentences with a preposition (I do, too).

While some modern games (I'm looking at YOU, Final Fantasy XII!) might get a little too excited to show off their cool CGI opening sequences to get around to introducing the hero, that's not usually much of a problem.

The part about the menace is a bit more interesting. I don't know if this is usually done in the name of a gentle introduction or what, but too often the real trouble or menace or some other form of compelling need is doled out a little slowly, especially in RPGs. Instead, you find out about rats in Matilda's basement that need to get cleared out if you find the time...

The interesting thing here is that Dent seems to suggest that the hero and the conflict / menace / whatever be introduced almost simultaneously. This may not be the true menace of the overall storyline, but it should be a hint of it. In a variation I've found in some stories (and games), the hero may be completely unaware of the menace - but the audience (reader / player) is not. It's been made clear in an intro sequence or prologue or some sort of foreshadowing that Something Bad is on a collision course with the hero.

I think there are more good examples, at least among commercial CRPGs of the last decade or so, than bad ones. While the use of an amnesiac hero is unfortunately a bit trite on its own, Eschalon: Book 1 opens with a nice personal mystery of his own identity. In Fallout, the Vault Dweller is introduced pretty much simultaneously with the need to locate a replacement water chip. Aveyond starts with a battle between a demon warrior and a priestess, embroiling young Rhen in a rescue and world-shaking matters before she's even old enough to do much about it. Ultima VI starts with the protagonist - the Avatar - kidnapped by gargoyles and about to be made a sacrifice upon an altar before being rescued by old friends - pursued by gargoyles the whole time.

Jumping Into the Fray

"The hero pitches in to cope with his fistful of trouble. (He tries to fathom the mystery, defeat the menace, or solve the problem.)"

It SHOULD go without saying here, but the player (or at least the character) should have a chance to deal directly (but perhaps unknowingly) with the Looming Threat as quickly as possible.

Instead of, say, grinding for XP to take out rats first.

Of course, the player character at this point is probably not quite ready to impact the forces of unpleasantness in any noticeable fashion, but that's besides the point. A token victory, or simply obtaining a clue that can set the player character(s) on the path may be all that is needed.

Character introductions

"Introduce ALL the other characters as soon as possible. Bring them on in action."

Okay. I agree with the actual suggestion here, but not necessarily the timing. A long story deals in the characters over time, but having most of the principles introduced in the first quarter of the story is important. This includes the Big Bad - the "Foozle" as Scorpia used to call him. While he may not necessarily need a full-on on-screen introduction, but his presence should be noted.

Persona 3 (which unfortunately overdid the non-interactive or limited interaction sequences at the beginning of the game) handled this pretty well. By the time you get into your first fight, the player has been introduced to the protagonist; future team-mates Yukari Takeba (who appears ready to pull a gun on the protagonist when they first meet - though appearances can be deceiving), Mitsuru Kurijo, and Akihiko Sanada; the "chairman" Shuji Ikutsuki; and the mysterious boy with the annoying voice Pharos - who has two other incarnations throughout the game.


Physical Conflict

"Hero's endeavors land him in an actual physical conflict near the end of the first 1500 words."

Time for some combat. Or not. The point here is physical conflict... some action. It could be a chase scene, too. Or something action-y, even for a non-action medium like most adventure games. Something exciting.

In my opinion, the take-away here for computer games would be to kill the exposition early on and get to some good interactive action! Especially with fantasy and science-fiction RPGs, there's a tendency to ramble on and on with exposition in the early stages of the game. This comes with attempting to introduce the hero and plot in an unfamiliar world.

But while the exposition is necessary, it doesn't need to be in the form of a front-loaded data-dump. Star Wars opened with a battle with no explanation of who the good guys or bad guys were - the audience picked it up as they went along. Ditto with The Matrix - I had no clue what was going on in that opening Trinity sequence, but I loved what I saw and I was ready to learn more when Trinity made her escape through the telephone. Likewise, I was happy to run along battling guards and robots in Final Fantasy VII and only learn between quick fights who I was and why I was doing it.

A Plot Twist or Reversal

"Near the end of first 1500 words, there is a complete surprise twist in the plot development."

Should a 20+ hour story in a videogame have a plot twist this early into things?

I don't know. I will say that as a player, little surprises throughout the game that shake my expectations can help me retain interest. It doesn't always need to be some big M. Night Shyamalan shock like discovering what really happened to Darth Revan. But Dent provides a great example about the hero trying to rescue somebody named Eloise who can explain the secret behind the sinister events... only to find out that Eloise is a ring-tailed monkey.

This sounds much more satisfying and interesting twist than, "But our princess is in another castle!"

So - a twist in the first ten minutes? It might be early, but it may not always be too early... I'd suggest some good surprise or twist before the first hour mark is highly recommended. Hey - I was totally not expecting what happened to Rhen in Aveyond right after she rescued the princess... but that surprise was probably what hooked me on the game.

The First Few Minutes Checklist

"SO FAR: Does it have SUSPENSE?
Is there a MENACE to the hero?
Does everything happen logically?"

I think Dent's questions here are appropriate as-is in any game story in the first ten (or at least twenty) minutes. Interestingly, the first question applies to the player - is there a mystery to intrigue or at least interest him or her? The second question applies to the player's character - are they in some kind of personal danger - from a life-threatening pursuit to the danger of being sent to military school? And the third question is simply checking the integrity of the plot.

So what's your take so far? Can you think of other examples or applications? Is this even an interesting exercise? Does it make you look at any of your favorite games differently?

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:10 AM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
Game Design: Pulp Fiction - And Games, Part 1
A few weeks ago, I came across an old article by Lester Dent (aka "Kenneth Robeson"), creator of the pulp action hero Doc Savage. His article was about how to write a 6000 word pulp story that will sell. Or would sell, if the era of the pulp magazine wasn't a half-century dead-and-buried.

Dent made no bones about calling his method a formula. Maybe we can simply call it "highly structured." But within this tight structure, there is not only plenty of room for creativity and craftsmanship... it is absolutely required. If anything, Dent's formula was simply a pattern to present novelty in a gripping but standardized manner.

As I was mulling over some of my favorite RPGs and adventure games, and distinguishing what made them become my favorites while others never quite pulled me in, I realized that they often shared a few traits in common with Dent's formulaic yarns. I doubt any game designer ever used Dent's formula and tried to adapt it to their games, but I think they had a similar handle on what makes a gripping story, and how to present it to the player quickly so that they are sucked into the game world quickly and feel compelled to see it through to the conclusion.

I wonder how one might apply something like Dent's pulp story formula to stories in computer games. Specifically RPGs and adventure games, as those are kinda house specialties here at Tales of the Rampant Coyote. Not that I'm advocating any kind of assembly-line approach to story-making for games. But - frankly - a lot of games (including many, many indie games) are weak in the story department. Or, rather, they may have good stories, but their presentation is weak. Speaking for myself here - I know I can use any crutch or cheat-sheet that I can find, so I'm really just thinking aloud here.

There's no good way to map a linear storytelling methodology to what should be a non-linear medium, but maybe some cool ideas could be borrowed here and applied to make a better game. Or at least a better game story. I'm going to break this out into a multi-part series simply because there's a lot to chew on.

On Making an Interesting Premise

I think that one of the cardinal sins of an RPG is to be generic. Once upon a time, the scarcity of similar games let them get away with it. But so many games - including indie games - serve up a big ol' rambling dish of backstory without anything to really set them apart. You are introduced as generic hero (or heroes) to play - perhaps of your own making - and then face some simple, generic quests to start out your experience and familiarize yourself with the game.

And all this time I, as a player, wonder why I should care. Why is this? Why can't games kick us in the pants right off the bat? It's not like it hasn't been done several times before in RPGs.

First of all - a good story needs an interesting foundation. The basic plot and setting on which everything else hangs.

Dent suggests four unique elements to form the foundation of the story. I doubt he intended these to be the only four, but they were what he worked with. Dent suggests 1) A unique murder method for the villain, 2) A unique item the villain is seeking, 3) A unique locale, and 4) Some kind of menace to hang over the hero like a cloud. Dent says having one of these elements is nice, two is better, and having three would be "swell."

Okay - so it's gimmicky. So what?

A Different Locale

In fantasy games and space opera, coming up with something truly 'different' can be challenging. Different is sort of the standard in this genre. And so we end up with a lot of games in meaningless variants of some fantasy world, with some war going on in the background between good and evil. Ho-hum.

But there are some good examples out there. In Knights of the Old Republic,you wake up in a space ship in the middle of a battle, set in the Star Wars universe in an era long before the movies! And how about Planescape: Torment? You don't get much more unique than that. Sure, it was a licensed setting (like Star Wars), but it wasn't something the average computer RPG player had experienced before. And in a genre where high fantasy and incredible magic is the rule, going more down-to-earth and realistic may actually be unique. I actually really enjoyed the medieval towns of Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption because of their verisimilitude. I've never studied what medieval Prague was like, but the heavy Catholic influence and realistic, historical touches made the fantastic elements really pop.

And I guess it should be mentioned that with RPGs in particular (Adventure Games typically don't seem to have this problem), simply breaking from a Tolkienesque fantasy world can be pretty unique in its own right. A game set in Tsarist Russia or steampunk Victorian England or some other alternate-historical location might not need much more to make it feel unique. Making it marketable is another question.

A Different Murder Method or Different Villain Objective

How about the murder thing, or the villain's sought-after item? This is surprisingly more challenging in a fantasy or SF world where anything is possible with little explanation. A wizard did it. Wizards can do anything! Well, a wizard, or an engineer remodulating the phase-coupling on the sensor dish array and routing it through the phaser banks. But if a game story writer resists the urge to hand-wave it away, it's still possible.

Take Ultima VII - The Black Gate. You start out with a strange, ritualistic killing to solve. The murder isn't really the focus of the story, but it (and murders like it) help drive the hunt for the killers, and the larger plot surrounding them. Adventure games, again, tend to do better here, as the solving of mysteries (in the form of puzzles) forms a stronger basis for the genre. And they aren't afraid to get a little more silly.

In fantastic or high-SF environments, the theft or pursuit of something moderately mundane can be exceptional. The gold, jewels, and magical Sword of Universal Annihilation get left behind, but poor Simple Simon was turned into a duck and his apple pie was stolen. The first of a rash of pie-thefts. That's interesting! Weird, but interesting.

A Menace Which is to Hang Over the Hero Like a Cloud

Dent doesn't elaborate on this, but I take this to mean some kind of looming, direct and personal threat to the hero. Not just a generic threat to the kingdom or world at large, but a personal danger to the hero himself or those with whom he (or she) is closest. Something that compels action.

There are plenty of decent examples of this. The Vault needs a replacement water chip in 150 days or it will fail. Sephiroth slays Aeris. Bastila is kidnapped and tortured to serve the Sith. Gabriel Knight suspects the recent apparently voodoo-related murders are linked to the nightmares that have plagued him all his life. The Avatar is used by the Guardian to find (and destroy) a threat to his evil plan. The Dark Savant personally begins hunting down the party. LeChuck is going to marry Elaine unless Guybrush does something!

This is so much more satisfying to me than a story with a threat that might as well be addressed, "to whom it may concern." If my custom party of adventurers don't make it to the end, anybody else could come in behind me and finish the job.

So there are some concrete examples of how a game's story might be made to help it stand out among the competition. And believe me, with so many indie RPGs coming out these days, there's plenty of competition. Next time I will talk a little more about Dent's story structure, and how more pieces of his "formula" might be applied by designers and story writers.

Labels: Adventure Games, Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:07 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
Game Design: Books to Games...
Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series would make some awesome movies. Just sayin'. I don't know who they'd get to play Miles - though if Peter Jackson can pull off ordinary people playing hobbits, I guess they could get someone semi-normal (in real life) to play hyperactive, genius, dwarf Miles Vorkosigan.

I brought three of Bujold's books to read while I'm in Puerto Rico. Two are finished now. I was gratified to learn that a new book in the series is scheduled to be released this year. I'm growing perilously close to the end. That happened last year with the Harry Dresden novels (which would also make great movies).

While Miles Vorkosigan's adventures would make great movies, they really make me wonder how they'd possibly translate to video games. To be honest, I really don't know. Some parts of the novels could be easily adapted to make vapid, straightforward action games (Space fleet maneuvers! Rescue actions with powered battle-armored Dendarii Mercenaries!) An adventure game might (barely) fit, as Miles is constantly solving puzzles. But it wouldn't do justice to the action of the series. Nor the amount of social interaction (and manipulation) in the books.

It's kind of an interesting thing to mentally gnaw at though. We always talk about adapting movies from books, or games from movies - but what about games from books? We don't see many direct adaptations of games from books - I remember the Shannara computer game and I still have the video game based on the Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (both games came from long-gone Legend Entertainment). Never played the first one, but the second was actually pretty cool (I especially liked the trap-creation system). There have been a few others, particularly in the Infocom era (Shogun & Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy come to mind), though not so many in the last decade or so. Comic books, sure, but novels?

So - let's say you had a license to make an (indie) game of your favorite novel or series of books. How'd you do it? What would be the core gameplay? What would be your model?

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:07 AM (Permalink) 8 comments links to this post

 
Seven Things That Annoy Me About Modern CRPGs... Sometimes
So yesterday I tackled some old-school computer / console role-playing game features (I won't call them conventions... some were merely experiments that were seldom repeated) that bug me, but suggested games and situations where these otherwise annoying elements could actually be fun and interesting.

Sascha challenged me to do the same for modern "features" or trends in top-shelf RPGs that annoy me as well. This is a little bit more of a challenge, because modern RPGs typically have had the worst of the rough edges polished off. For me, the problem is more that they have some of the coolest, most innovative features polished off as well, so we end up with a product which, for me, is very nice and mildly enjoyable throughout, but really fails to inspire me.

A perfect case-in-point for me was Final Fantasy XII. The game was brilliantly executed in almost every category. With the exception of the confusing and extremely long intro / tutorial, I found very little to dislike about the game. But... I didn't find anything to like, either. I gave up about nine hours in out of sheer boredom. Like many modern RPGs, the game played it too safe, and thus became unremarkable.

In spite of this, I've come up with some modern trends / features / problems in certain styles of modern RPGs that definitely make me want to smack some designers around with a controller. Oh, I mean keyboard. Because I'm playing this game with a keyboard and mouse, when it was obviously written with a console game controller in mind... (but that's another rant...)

1. Leading me by the nose.
I hate getting lost and confused in games. And it's easy to do in these big 3D games. But is making me feel like I'm playing connect-the-dots on my ever-present automap really the answer? RPGs (even the eastern 'jRPGs') used to be more about exploration and... yeah, searching. But now we get more linear plotlines (but with well-defined scripted branches that can be completed in any order!) and step-by-step instructions.

Solutions / Exceptions: Yeah, sometimes I find myself getting frustrated looking for somebody in THE WRONG TOWN because I had a massive brain-fart. There are times like these that I really would like some explicit instructions to make up for my cerebral malfunction. But let me work it out a little on my own before solving the puzzle for me, please!

2. Stupid Choices
Ooh, hey, a dialog option or moral quandary! I have three choices: The goody two-shoes decision that is asking to be taken advantage of, the despicable jerkwad response, or the I-can't-be-bothered-to-give-a-crap option. All three suck. For bonus annoyance points, have the game judge me based on my initial response, not how I eventually resolve the problem.

Solutions / Exceptions: The idea here is a good one. But heavily scripted decision points or dialog options are only part of the answer. First of all Let's get away from the whole "good / neutral / evil" idea and look at some really new, experimental, and avant garde ideas like... I dunno... like stuff Lord British was doing TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO? And instead of relying almost exclusively on scripted, carefully contrived decisions, let the player "choose by doing" in a more dynamic, interactive world. Let them choose their own balance of self-interest, charity, and honor by their actions.

3. The Magical Mind-Controlling Monologue: Getting Suckered Into Boss Fights
Okay, I know I'm walking into a big boss fight. I used stealth to peek through the door, dang it. So I prepare my party. I buff up. I position my party carefully in formation. And then... I get a big ol' cut scene that I can't skip through fast enough, and by the time it's done my buffs have almost worn off. Oh, and to top it off, my entire party has now walked into the CENTER of the big bad boss's lair, allowing themselves to be flanked and surrounded. Apparently the villain's monologue had mind-controlling powers that made my whole party turn stupid.

Solutions / Exceptions: Okay, high drama and storytelling aren't well-served when the protagonists do the SMART thing and nuke the villain's lair from orbit (it's the only way to be sure...). But games should try to avoid nullifying all of the player's preparations for the sake of drama. Or at the very least, provide a rational explanation for why the player character allowed herself to be pulled from an excellent sniper position to the center of the evil overlord's throne room, surrounded by guards.

4. Butt-view and Retardo-Cam
So I guess at one point, designers decided that first-person shooters on the consoles sucked because players couldn't figure out where "their guy" was, so they invented the "third-person shooter." Probably inspired by Laura Croft. So you get this great view from behind your character's head by default, so that you can see the beautiful animation of your character's backside. Cool, except when you can see your own butt, but not an attacking enemy!

The awful camera controls make this problem even worse. The "smart" camera tries very hard to keep as much of your own character's anatomy in the picture as it slowly thinks about wheeling around to look at something that you might consider interesting, like the narrow bridge you want to walk across or that guy who has shot you three while you tried to convince the camera to look at him.

And somehow, this seemed like a good idea for RPGs, as well.

Solutions / Exceptions: Okay. I don't hate this viewpoint. And on a game controller, with an entire thumbstick devoted entirely to panning the camera around, it almost works. Kinda. Sometimes. Good thing nobody plays games on the PC anymore, or they'd really be screwed! Anyway - while developers tend to optimize the game for this viewpoint, most games provide options to allow you different camera views that are designed to actually play the game instead of admiring the artists' work on your avatar. So this is ultimately a very minor gripe.

5. Buy the Rest of This Game With DLC!
This one's just starting to rear it's ugly head. I have nothing against capitalism or premium DLC in principle. And I've enjoyed expansions for RPGs for decades, now. The advent of digitally distributed add-on content is certainly an awesome thing for gamers and game-makers. But there have been some suspicious hints of a trend towards cutting back on the core experience and then selling it back to players via premium DLC.

Solutions / Exceptions: Avoid the appearance of evil, publishers! Trust built up over years and many titles can be destroyed with a poor decision, here. Yeah, it's a double-edged sword... making the game feel "complete" without the DLC makes it harder to sell the DLC - but fighting the perception that you are only selling the players two-thirds of a game in hopes of making an extra buck or two on DLC could be far worse.

6. Level Scaling
No matter how much you progress, the bad guys seem to level up right with you. It pretty much invalidates the whole leveling up / character progression mechanic.

Solutions / Exceptions: This is a good idea with often poor implementation. This deserves three or four articles of its own.

7. Kill Ten Rats and Come Back For Your Reward!
Somehow, the awful, creatively bankrupt MMORPG "quest" that were nothing more than structured grinding made their way into single-player RPGs this last decade. And so we get these quests that encourage us to go out and battle randomly spawning monsters in hopes of collecting X trophies for some kind of quest-based reward.

Solutions / Exceptions: Okay, while I'm not personally opposed to a little bit of optional grinding, a game should never encourage the player to engage in a fundamentally repetitive, meaningless, un-fun activity. Now, if you happen to be out killing them anyway and the game offers a reward for the activity anyway - like paying you individually for collected kobold ears that you are acquiring ANYWAY - that's a little different story. It's a fine line.


I have probably missed some big ones here. What are some modern trends in RPGs that annoy you? How can they be fixed?

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:23 AM (Permalink) 11 comments links to this post

 
Genre-Blending - Good or Bad?
Mixing and matching game categories is something I'm generally in favor of attempting, but I'm not always the biggest fan.

Since adventure games and RPGs were once almost synonymous (a very, very long time ago), I really don't have a big problem with games that mix elements of both. In fact, RPG elements in any game seem to mix pretty well.

But other game elements - especially action sequences - in an RPG (or adventure game) often piss me off. I mean, I like action games. I earned my stripes in the arcades. I've recently come to discover the joy that is Left 4 Dead. And I can put up with some arcade elements in an action-RPG. I gave up on Chrono Trigger when I had to chase the rat on the pipes. I nearly gave up on a couple of old Sierra adventure games when it came to arcade sequences. While I wasn't one of them, I know several people who gave up on Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines because of the heavy FPS sequences. I wasn't particularly fond of the boss-battles (especially against the Chinatown boss) or the zombies-in-the-graveyard segment, myself.

I generally love playing a mix of strategy and action, but only if it's executed well. This is a weird exception for me, as it would seem that the more cerebral strategy aspect would clash with the more action segments. But somehow, those get a pass by my brain, and the two generally compliment each other - particularly if its possible to dial down the difficulty separately in a single-player game.

As to genres in the conventional sense - setting / style genre for other media - I'm more open to it now than I used to be. Science fiction and fantasy? Sure. Fantasy and western? Go for it. Horror and cutesy anime? I'm there! I don't know if there's a really bad mix anymore. But for a few years, I was very much opposed to mixing powered battle-armor and laser swords in my fantasy. Heresy! But while I'm more relaxed and inclusive now, that doesn't mean I do not want some unsullied straight-up traditional settings.

So I ask you: What genre / category mixes don't work for you? What do? When is it appropriate for a game to break the boundaries of "category?" Is it always appropriate, and have games just been placed in arbitrary boxes now by marketing? What do you think?

You can answer here, or in the forum thread.

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:20 AM (Permalink) 5 comments links to this post

 
Joy of Games: Going Beyond the Screen
Once upon a time, I often didn't just read game documentation. I studied it. I'm still very fond of Larry Holland's manual for Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain. Only about 10% of the spiral-bound book was devoted to playing the game. The rest was devoted to stories of the Battle of Britain, descriptions of the aircraft, and a primer on aviation and air combat. It's a fun read (if you are a military aviation buff) even if you've never played the game.

I remember studying to blueprints and documentation for the first Wing Commander. I think they were thrown in there principally as copy protection checks, but I took them literally and actually had memorized things like shield and armor strength in various ship quadrants, damage-dealing potential and ranges of various missiles, etc.

And pity the poor RPG player in the 80's and early 90's who didn't RTFM! Not only that, but it was a two-way street for RPGers and Adventure Gamers - they had to write some of the documentation themselves. Because unless you had an incredible memory, you absolutely had to make maps and take copious notes. The game as it appeared on screen was only half of the story - the rest resided on paper, some written by the player himself.

I believe that there is more to the joy of the map-making, manual-studying, note-taking aspects of old-school adventure & role-playing gaming than simple nostalgia at work. Those of us who could be bothered to employ such work-like efforts into our gaming were often rewarded with some really great gaming experiences that in many ways still surpass our much more beautifully rendered and professionally voice-acted games of today.

I think it simply came down to personal investment. We get out what we put in. A very simple game (board, card, you name it) - can be awesome when played by good friends. But it's a reflection of the friendship, not of the rules. Likewise, I believe a minimalist single-player game can be an amazing if the player find it worthy of investing their own imagination and logic into the experience.

The simple act of going beyond the screen, of taking notes and maps and referring to books in the real world, encouraged this. It helped make the experience more real to us. Other people might look at the dozens of loose papers on the computer desk filled with scrawls and line-drawings and wonder why in the world we were devoting ourselves to meaningless fiction. But, dang it, we understood. In a sense, we shared in the creation of the world, if only our own mental model of it. Our imaginations were engaged, and our efforts and studies were part of a positive feedback loop of commitment to an experience that we expected to enjoy for weeks at a time, if not months. Not discarded with the next new release in two weeks, as we expect today.

And when the final puzzle was solved, the wizard was slain, and the world saved, those papers remained as a testament of our achievements even when the computer was turned off. They helped make it real. Even years later, coming across those old scrawls and manuals can take us back to that time, and it can be hard to resist cracking into a smile at the memories. "Oh, yeah," we think. "I was there."

The article I referenced last week has kept me thinking about this. While I certainly do not want to return to the bad ol' days of purely do-it-yourself mapping and note-taking and lack of in-game documentation or tutorials, I do feel we've lost something since then. Something I'd like to see us recover, if we can somehow manage to keep the good aspects and ditch the more painful bits. I think we're seeing some of this happening in the MMO space, but it's been slow to filter to (or just not applicable for) single-player games.

How can single-player games encourage that personal investment without demanding it? How can the experience of the game grow beyond the screen (or at least beyond the borders of its window)? How can games better engage our imagination? Our participation?

Labels: Game Design, Game Moments

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:51 AM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
Jordan ("Prince of Persia") Mechner's Tips for Game Designers
Jordan Mechner re-published his Tips for Game Designers, plus his older list of tips for Designing Story-Based Games.

I'm not an expert game designer. Mechner has probably forgotten more about game design than I have ever known. So I don't really feel qualified to comment on his tips beyond offering a hearty "Amen!" and noting that they jibe pretty well with my relatively limited experience.

Mechner indicates with several suggestions here that game design documents should be small, and that gameplay is more something that evolves from early prototypes and ruthless editing and iteration. I can't tell you how critical this advice should be towards indies (though it applies equally well to big-budget mainstream developers).

Interestingly, I feel his tips on "story-based" games are in many cases applicable to other kinds of games as well (where story is incidental, or even non-existent). Setting clear goals, a clear interface, and recognizing the difference between context ("The player sneaks into a castle, clobbers a guard, and puts on the guard's uniform") and the actual action ("The player watched a cut scene... of all that happening") - that is a valuable perspective for a game designer to have for any game.

Yeah, in some cases these tips are basic, but considering how often I botch the basics, I still need 'em.

And a tip o' the beanie to John Romero for the link.

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:11 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
Lessons Learned From Bejeweled Blitz
I thought it was strange that I own a copy of Bejeweled 2, yet I find myself more often playing the free Bejeweled Blitz (as have a lot of people). Apparently, there are some real gamer-psychology lessons to be pulled out from this game:

Veteran Game Designer Jamie Fristrom Talks About What Makes Bejeweled Blitz Work

Enjoy!

Labels: casual games, Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:48 AM (Permalink) 1 comments links to this post

 
Frayed Knights - How I Build A Dungeon
It's been a little while since I have posted an honest-to-goodness update on Frayed Knights - the comedy-based indie RPG from Rampant Games. So I guess we're due.

Today, I'm going to talk about how I build a dungeon. I do not pretend that this is the correct - or even a competent - way to do it. It's just how I do it. Members of the development team who are also working on dungeons for the game (Kevin and Brian) may do stuff differently - and much better than me, I should add.

But it's still me who ends up populating and scripting them.

First of all - my design document (when I update it) doesn't have much by way of specific information about each dungeon (or "adventuring area", if it's an outdoor location). Really, I don't have much more than some basic themes and objectives for the location. Maybe some specific events that need to happen here (like, "a prisoner has a hint as to the identity of Moonshadow.") And then some key "signature" locations that serve those encounters.

For the guys working on levels for me, I have to provide a bit more up-front work. Or a lot more. But for myself, I start out without much more than just that. From there, I sketch up a very rough map. And start planning encounters / events. More on planning encounters later.

From there, I build a walkable floor plan. I've recently gotten to the point where I just build the floor plan first and export the entire area to the game engine - floating in the air in a test area. And I use it for a walk-through as the level evolves. This helps me get a sense of scale, what's working, and what doesn't. I like to use vertical elements in my levels, and helps to find out early that I don't have enough headroom in one part of the dungeon and I need to kick things out a bit. These days, I'm doing all my interior-building with Torque Constructor. It's ugly and old-school, but it works well for this engine.

After I'm satisfied with the floor plan, I build the rest of the location around it. This can be pretty time consuming, especially with making sure textures line up correctly, adding some detailing (I'm saving the really careful detailing and "prettyfication" for the end). Changes do take place at this stage (really, at any changes), and large swaths of my construction may be changed, deleted, or expanded. The floors may get shifted and broken into smaller pieces as I try to vary the geometry to make things look more interesting, etc. In fact, the whole process is very iterative - at any stage I may get new ideas that I want to try, I may go back and change something to make an encounter work better, or I may get a new idea for an encounter / event by working on a particular spot. It's not exactly free-form, but it's not a strict assembly line (or "waterfall model," for programmers) either.

Now, the big trick here is planning encounters / events. This is also very iterative. Some get planned out (in rough detail) before anything else starts. The dungeon design may center around them. Others don't get planned out until the very end. I find myself with a relatively boring area without anything else happening, and I think, "What would be cool to have happen here?"

I thought this would be a lot easier to create these encounters than it is, given the amount of time I've spent planning pen & paper adventures or making Neverwinter Nights modules, scripting MUDs, and so forth. But it gets very, very easy to run into a game designer's version of "writer's block." Maybe it's all the pressure of making something intended for a much wider audience than my usual circle of friends. I don't know.

What I do know is that I don't just want endless encounters of monsters that just hang out in their rooms waiting to fight adventurers who happen to kick the door open in a straightforward brute-force slugfest. Sure, we've got that too - but I don't want that to be the meat of the game. I want puzzles. Tactical challenges. Memorable encounters. Unfortunately, that requires me to "be creative" - not to mention spending a lot of time scripting / programming.

What I recently discovered was that one of the things causing the block was that I kept thinking in terms of the existing code and capabilities, and what I could do with it. My real breakthroughs came when I just thought through the dungeons in a lot more free-form fashion, and then later started figuring out how I might implement it with existing (or new) code. Sometimes, by attempting to frame the idea in terms of existing limitations, I find myself with an even better idea.

The problem is that these "out-of-the-box" ideas often require a lot more scripting, code, and / or content support. But I think the final results will be worthwhile.

Now, to answer a couple of questions I've been been asked. Answers subject to change without notice.

#1 - When's the next "alpha test" of Frayed Knights?
The pilot was an early experiment to help gauge where we were going with the game early on and make course corrections where things just weren't working out. Right now, we're going full-out to make the game fully playable, but not necessarily pretty or ready for human consumption. I don't want to take the time out (yet) to make a new playable demo. So probably not until we're literally alpha and switching gears from pure building.

The next one may not be quite as "open" the first one was. But I will desperately need testers.

#2 - When do you expect the game to ship?
I'm hoping 2010. But I was originally hoping 2009, so apparently my ability to estimate this project is for crap. I keep expecting to hit this magical zone where development accelerates speed because it all becomes "old hat" to us, but that's not happened.

#3 - How Big Is This Game?
Too Big.

In an interview at RPGWatch, I said I expected the full game to be "six to ten times larger than the pilot." As it turns out, that's just the first act. Of three. Feature Creep Strikes Again.

But dang it, I do love this game. Warts and all.

#4 - Have you considered breaking the full game into three parts and selling them individually?
Um... Considered, yeah. Made a decision? No, not yet. It wasn't in the original plan, so I haven't worked out how I'd try to break it up that way yet. But if we do go that route, I'd want to be a lot closer to completion, so there wouldn't be a long wait between installments.

If you have particular opinions on that subject, let me know.

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:00 AM (Permalink) 4 comments links to this post

 
Are Class-Based CRPGs are Better Than Skill-Based?
In a class-based RPG, your character's abilities as they progress through the game follow a defined progression path. This contrasts with skill-based RPGs, where player has more direct control over the progression (or lack thereof) of their character's abilities. Then you have some hybrid systems, which try to merge the flexibility of the skill-based system with the structure of class-based.

Class-based examples would include Baldur's Gate, NetHack, Knights of the Chalice, and most jRPG-style games (Aveyond, Deadly Sin, Final Fantasy VI, etc). Hybrid games abound in modern RPGs, including the D20-based RPGs Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights (heavily class-based but incorporating the flexibility of skill-based options), the Elder Scrolls games (leaning very skill-based, incorporating the structure and ease-of-use of class & level system), Eschalon: Book 1, and many others.

Purely skill-based RPGs are a bit more of a rarity. The Elder Scrolls games really border on this realm. Ultima Online. Some pretty ancient cRPGs, Twilight: 2000 and the two MegaTraveller games from Paragon Software, were based on skill-based pen-and-paper systems. And then we had two games based on the Vampire: the Masquerade dice-and-paper system, Redemption and Bloodlines. (You could argue that one's clan in Bloodlines was analogous to a class, and it certainly altered the game experience - especially for Malkavians and Nosferatu. But clan choice imposed relatively few restrictions on character progression - really just the cost of vampiric disciplines). And then there's Cute Knight Kingdom - which does a lot of things very differently.

When I "graduated" from Dungeons & Dragons to other dice-and-paper RPGs back in my teens, I became a big fan of skill-based systems. It was The One True Way of RPGs. I dismissed class-based, level-based games as merely quaint but entertaining relics of a bygone era to me. It took a few years before I came back around in my thinking and learned to re-appreciate the strengths of class-based games. I like both styles pretty equally nowadays.

But with computer RPGs, I lean towards class-based systems. This isn't a matter of preference, but practicality. I would love to play some more, well-done skill-based CRPGs, and my hat is off to those developers bold enough to build them. But it's tough to do well. Very tough.

Here's why:

The problem is one of the design. In a class-based game, a designer can make some reasonable assumptions. If every character has some minimal fighting ability, and can be classified as a tinkerer, a talker, a sneaker, a fighter, or a hybrid of any two of those, and their ability in any of those specializations can be safely assumed to be within a particular range, then there's a well-defined space of challenges and choices that a designer needs to build to.

But in a skill-based game with some thirty skills, with a character who can be maxed out in one skill while having next to no ability in anything else, there really aren't many constraints to design around. This makes the task daunting, if not impossible for practical purposes. Instead, the burden is shifted to the player to not only create a balanced character, but also to play "guess the mind of the game designer in advance" to determine which abilities are going to be useful in the game.

Yeah. I've played those games where I loaded up on some cool-sounding skills that sounded really useful but almost never came into play. I guess I shoulda stuck with "longsword proficiency" or something...

In pen-and-paper games, this isn't such a big problem. The game master can design on-the-fly for known characters. And it's theoretically possible that programmers and designers might come up with some AI "Designer's Helper" that will customize a game on-the-fly around a player's choices and playstyle. In fact, that's such a cool idea that I might try to tackle it myself someday.

If I ever get these current projects finished... :)

Until then, the closest we get is automatically scaling difficulty for combat, which to me is translated, "However powerful you are, it won't make a lick of difference." Can't say I'm a big fan of that mechanic, either. Or you have Cute Knight Kingdom's approach, which has several storylines based on combinations of skills, but otherwise leaves the world pretty open-ended and sandbox-y. It's not so great for epic, traditional RPG quests, but it solves the problem.

So in general, for traditional RPGs, the problems involved in skill-based systems are the reason I think class-based or hybrid systems are preferable as both a designer and a player. (Given a choice, well, give me the hybrid!)

But I'd love to see more stabs at resolving these problems to make skill-based systems more practical in cRPGs.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:11 AM (Permalink) 19 comments links to this post

 
Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie Part X
The tenth installment of Ernest Adams' annual column on poor game design decisions:

Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie - Tenth Anniversary Edition

This years' hit list: Psychic AI, Bizarre morality in merchants, NPCs in two places at once when the player deviates from the script, Overuse (and under-use) of a game feature or player ability in level design, lazy design documents, failure to understand technical limitations, mocking the player, having essential items become unobtainable, grinding (I actually kinda disagree with this one, unless grinding is *mandatory*), and perfect cover.

Adams acknowledges that the newest Twinkie Denial Conditions aren't as funny as past installments. But I suppose that means all the low-hanging fruit has already been harvested.

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:38 AM (Permalink) 4 comments links to this post

 
Game Design: Seven Ways to Make Mazes Suck Less
Maze (n): A confusing intricate network of passages.

The maze is a popular old-school gaming standard. It's a gameplay device that sounds awesome on paper, especially for adventures and RPGs. It's a navigational challenge, requiring problem-solving and memory skills. It's alternative gameplay to supplement existing mechanics, and most importantly it is EASY to implement! What's not to like?

The first maze appearance in a video game that I'm familiar with was in the original Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods. There were two mazes: the little twisty maze of passages all alike were created by Crowther, and Woods created the maze where all the passages were different. It was then, in the 1970s, that players first began experiencing the joy of mazes in computer games. And I believe it was then, in the 1970s, that players discovered the truth about mazes in computer games:

Mazes suck.

I don't know if I ever actually recall anybody talking about how FUN the maze was in a video game. On the other hand, I have heard several people trash mazes as their least favorite element of some games. Sure, they sound good on paper. But I think the key word in the definition above is "confusing." Being confused isn't all that fun, in general. Mazes - especially with a mouse-eye, first-person view - are confusing by nature and pretty dang un-fun.

However, emerging from temporary confusion is a lot of fun. Actually solving the maze, like solving any challenging puzzle, feels terrific. The threat of getting lost and confused is kinda fun too. Just as the threat of permadeath in many roguelikes is part of what makes them fun. But in both cases, it is a Sword of Damocles situation. It's the threat, not the event, that's fun. The tease of danger of becoming hopelessly lost adds a certain intellectual thrill. We're going in, and don't know how we're going to escape. That's fun.

But when the threat is fulfilled, and the player really does feel lost? Not so much fun.

Is it possible to capture the two "fun" aspects of mazes - the thrill of the risk of becoming lost, and the satisfaction of solving the intellectual puzzle offered by mazes - while mitigating the actual problems of becoming lost? And when you do that, does the maze lose it's "maze-ness?" Does it at that point become just a... map?

I've been pondering this working on Frayed Knights, as I was working on on the minotaur's lair a couple of weeks ago. Minotaurs, based on tradition as old as ancient Greece (back when there was just ONE Minotaur!), lair inside of mazes. But mazes... uh, suck. So what is a poor game designer to do?

While some of these ideas came too late for me to feed into my minotaur maze design, I had a few thoughts on how to at least improve things. If a game, for whatever reason, must include a maze-like sequence, here are some basic rules-of-thumb to make mazes and maze-like areas suck less:

1. The idea is to tease the player with the possibility of getting lost. Something that looks like a maze, acts like a maze, and threatens to be a maze will function just as well.

2. Mazes should be small. A big maze could be made up of some easy-to-recognize landmark areas connecting smaller mazes and still feel like a big maze.

3. The maze itself - traveling from point A to point B - should almost never be used as the principle gameplay element in any part of the game. Trying to challenge the player by a maze alone leads to hopelessly convoluted mazes. Instead, designers should use simpler mazes to supplement some other game mechanic.

4. If possible, it should be easier to escape the maze than to solve it. Having an easy exit / reset button is a Good Thing (found in a Tales of Monkey Island episode).

5. Adding a vertical element to a maze can make it feel FAR more confusing and complex than it really is. If used carefully, it can add to the fun and challenging puzzle-solving aspect without adding to the bad "I'm totally lost, this game sucks!" aspect very much.

6. A first-person perspective makes any maze ten harder (statistic pulled out of thin air). Any other form of limited visibility preventing the player from seeing the entire maze at once will also make it more difficult.

7. Once the player has solved the maze, avoid requiring her to "re-solve" or backtrack through the maze again. Have shortcuts or bypasses unlock for key locations once they have been discovered.

And here's a bonus eighth tip:

* Any map can become a "maze" in the worst way very easily if not carefully designed. A good map should contain plenty of landmarks, avoid excessive repetition of similar geometry, and never let the player stray too far from "focal points" to guide progress. In other words, they should be kept tight, clear, and distinctive. (RPG Maker users, take note!)

And yes, I keep learning that last one the hard way. But I keep finding other indie game designers doing the same thing.

Bottom Line: Mazes, in general, still suck. But I believe that, used carefully, maze-like game mechanics can still be salvaged to make fun games.

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:22 AM (Permalink) 15 comments links to this post

 
Making Culturally Meaningful Games
DanC writes about three false constraints which are holding the industry back from making "culturally meaningful games."

Lost Garden: Three False Constraints

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:49 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
On Difficulty Levels
Player-selectable difficulty levels in games, in general, suck.

I do not have a fundamental problem with the idea. My time is at such a premium that I'm really not one who wants a full-on ultra-hardcore emit-blood-sweat-and-tears-for-every-checkpoint-achieved type of player. I played Bioshock on easy (I think) because it was a rental and I just wanted to get through it to the end. Conceptually, difficulty levels are a Good Thing.

But in practice, they suck.

When designers are trying to balance the overall challenge of a game, there are a lot of really clean, easy-to-change, easy-to-program, almost invisible parameters that can be modified to make things work. Like how much damage the player can take before dying. Or how much damage the player does, on the average - which means the enemies fall faster. Some are a little more complicated, like the placement of health or ammo pick-ups.

The problem arises when "difficulty level" uses these same parameters. After all, it's the same one the designers use! But really, all I'm choosing as a player is my level of handicap. Gee, do I want trivial and boring, or do I want punishing and headache-inducing? Neither? Okay, let's choose "Normal" difficulty.

There are two things that bug me about this.

First, but least importantly, is the gamer mindset. As a gamer, I'm always calculating risk (or cost) vs. reward ratios when I'm playing a game, and that includes the difficulty options screen. I'm immediately thinking, "So what do I get if I choose the punishingly hard road?" In general, nuthin'. There's no benefit at all for choosing the hardest difficulty level unless I am such an expert player that anything less challenging makes me fall asleep.

Give me something different. Bonus content. An extra level. Even more enemies ( or earlier appearances of tougher enemies) beats "nothing. " Maybe I'm hung up on replayability, but I'd like to have a slightly different experience playing through on hard than on medium rather than just dying more frequently.

And I don't want what feels like an artificial or arbitrary increase in my challenge. Simply making it easier to die is... lame. Again, more enemies is something. Less frequent pick-ups can work, though that also gets frustrating in a hurry.

Better AI is awesome. In an RTS, if changing difficulty only allows the AI to cheat or gives them bonus resources, I'm not a fan. But give me a smarter opponent that will surprise me and give me a more interesting challenge? I'm all over that. This isn't hard to implement in an RPG, either, where enemies might "forget" to use their most effective abilities as often as they should, or pick their targets unwisely ("Let's cast silence on the fighter!").

The problem is that this takes more work. A lot more work. I've never seen a game budget where any consideration at all was placed on difficulty levels, and as a result they were always implemented as an afterthought to fulfill some nebulous bullet-point in the design doc. And so difficulty levels will continue to be implemented in as lame a manner as possible for 99% of games.

And so difficulty levels will continue to suck.

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:50 AM (Permalink) 16 comments links to this post

 
RPG Design: Experimenting With Initiative
This weekend I concluded long-running D&D campaign. We've been playing it for about three-and-a-half years. 3.5 edition of D&D, naturally. We normally alternate games so we only end up playing a little over twice a month, and then only for about three hours per session. It's tough having longer games when the majority of our group have children to take care of. So while not quite as impressive as it sounds, it was still a Big Game.

And we have a very big gaming group - ten players if everybody showed up, and that was only because we had to turn down a couple of friends who wanted to join the game later (which feels really, really sucky to do, I should add). Handling initiative for a large number of players is horrible. Third edition tried to streamline matters by removing the die roll every round. Taking the time to roll dice wasn't the killer - it was everything else associated with tracking who goes when.

With such a big group, players would end up chatting and spacing what was going on while waiting for their turn, and then find out that by the time their turn came around, the combat situation had changed and they'd have to re-figure everything out. Which made their turns take even longer. Which encouraged other players to chat and mentally check out while taking their turns. After all - with ten players, if each player takes only three minutes per turn, that's a half-hour waiting to get to do something. And that is not including the wait for the DM to resolve his side of things.

Jockeying for who would go next, with changing initiatives, also took place. You generally wanted the casters with the big area affect spells to go first, along with those casting "buffs," followed by the melee characters rushing in to mix it up. Even without the dice-rolling, initiative order would change in mid-combat, complicating things and sometimes confusing people. Including me!

Then there were all the times we'd lose track of who's turn it was. And as a DM - not being the most organized person in the world - I'd get distracted and forget to keep things moving along swiftly. It was a mess. Combats took forever.

I made an effort to streamline the initiative system, which was met with very reserved tolerance at first. I don't roll for each monster's initiative separately --- to save my own sanity, I have monsters with the same (or very similar) initiative modifier all go as a group. At most, the monsters end up broken up into three initiative groups.

What I gradually came to realize is that what order you went within your party was largely cooperative and unimportant. What was important was whether or not you got to go before your enemies.

So I decided to put players into initiative "groups" as well. Against one unified group of monsters, the party would be divided into "group one" and "group two." Then, within the players' initiative groups, I let them decide among themselves who is going first. At first, we worried that this would slow things down, as deciding order could turn into a lengthy debate.

In practice, this was not the case at all. I estimate that this sped up combat by about 20% or so. While not a complete revolution, it's a substantial improvement. The increased speed seemed consistent across all character levels. I wouldn't have believed that the transition of turns was actually taking that long - but in our group, it was.

Secondly - and perhaps most importantly - it helped keep the entire group engaged in what was happening in the game. Since it's possible to go at any time during your group's initiative, players stay more involved and attentive to what's going on in the combat. Actions get taken as players are ready to go. They discuss their battle plans as they go with each other a lot more. They get to work tactically much better together. Without increasing the difficulty at all, it increased the number of interesting decisions players could make.

Effectively, this system made combats much more fun. And that is always a big win. I don't know if it would work as well for significantly smaller groups. But for a large group, it was a game saver.

So would this work in computer RPGs? Well, the group-based, single-player RPG is something of a vanishing breed, though the indies and some companies like Atlus have really been bringing it back lately. Traditionally, these games still tend to go by the old "roll dice to determine your order" system. Would something like this be advantageous?

Probably not in the same way. After all, we're talking about only one player, and the computer can automate the turn transition extremely well (better than us poor humans). But - borrowing once again from wargames - would having initiative be more at a "group" level rather than individual level make combat more interesting?

Maybe the party pools together its initiative bonus (plus random dice rolls) to allow the player to select who in what order - when you absolutely, positively need to get protection from vampires up as fast as possible. In the D&D Miniatures game, the player winning initiative could move two characters - any two - first, with each player alternating movement. Deciding who moves when was not a complicated decision, but it was an interesting one. The order in which units are able to move is often just as important as what they do. It often dictates what they can do.

In the real world, in time-critical situations, the coordination and timing of individual actions is often critical to success. But due to the limitations of the user interface, you don't see much of that in single-player action-RPGs (or RTS games). While the reaction speed of the player, not the character, is usually the issue in these games, could something be done here as well?

Stuff to think about.

Have fun.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:10 AM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
Games Should Be Easy?
Jeff Vogel has come to the realization that old-school difficulty is not necessarily a good thing:

Make Your Game Easy. Then Make It Easier.

I have a rant brewing about difficulty levels. It's a simple one. Suffice to say that I don't think throwing multiple difficulty levels into the game is, by itself, a miracle cure to appeal to all players. Not even close.

But in general, I agree with his new philosophy which replaced his old, 100% wrong one:

"People will happily forgive a game for being too easy, because it makes them feel badass. If a game is too hard, they will get angry, ragequit, hold a grudge, and never buy your games again."

Sounds about right. Although I think ragequit isn't necessarily the case. People will just give up and not come back, anticipation the frustration they last felt when playing the game. It won't be a vindictive thing. It's just that an occasional butt-kicking might be good for the soul, but only a handful of people will actively seek out the constant experience of a whuppin'. I hear there are special clubs for people like that, but they play different kinds of role-playing games.

Speaking personally - I like to be challenged. But if I'm feeling fully challenged every single minute, I'm gonna get tired of a game quickly. It becomes a source of stress.

But I also get bored if a game is too easy. If I don't find myself forced to actually puzzle my way through some situation at some low level of frequency, I may not come back to the game for a next session. The challenge doesn't have to be excessive and force me to reload. But it should make me exercise some brain cells (even in an action game).

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:08 AM (Permalink) 14 comments links to this post

 
Give Innovation a Chance!
So Jeff Vogel sez: "People say they want innovation. But actually give them something different that they have to adjust to and they get all angry and full of nerdrage."

I haven't played Brütal Legend yet (maybe it will arrive under the Christmas Tree for me a few weeks). So I can't speak to the review. But I can definitely speak to the frustration.

There's a quote I love by Howard Aiken: “Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.” I like to tell this one to indies who get all caught up in secrecy and NDAs around their "game idea."

And truth be told, most innovative / original ideas really ain't all that awesome. The path of innovation is the path of failure. That's the whole point. When you abandon the tried-and-true, you are exploring the space of the untried-and-possibly-untrue. You are entering the realm of the experimental. And if every experiment succeeded, it wouldn't be very experimental now, would it?

But as much as we rip on designers for staying in the safety of their comfort zone, the average player is even worse. Heaven help the poor designer that messes with the "standard" interface for games of a particular type, even with a damned good reason! For people who really enjoy such cutting edge entertainment, we can be real sticks-in-the-mud when it comes to innovation.

I'm no different. I find myself complaining sometimes too, asking, "Why did they do this? Why didn't they just let me do what I've always done in previous games? Why'd they try to 'fix' what wasn't broken?" I guess my knee jerks as quickly as anybody else's. But I believe that I'm at least slightly more generous than the average gamer these days. After all, my love of the hobby was born in the extreme Darwinian Deathmatch days of the arcades, when there were no rules to be broken and every week offered something new, original, and sometimes downright stupid. We played them all.

All I'm saying is that if we gamers claim we want innovation to break us from some of the ruts we find gaming in, we need to put our money where our mouths are. Be willing to try out something different that changes the status quo. And accept the fact that not every innovation is going to come bathed in angelic light - sometimes they'll really stink. But we need to give them the chance.

Labels: Game Design, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:46 AM (Permalink) 8 comments links to this post

 
Game Design: Quest For the SideQuest
Hmmm - so does Frayed Knights get a free pass or not?

In general, I think the question game designers should ask themselves is: Is the thing you're asking the player character to do the most obvious, straightforward, or fastest way to solve the given problem? Asking the player to go downstairs and get a key for a shoddy wooden door is not unreasonable. I certainly wouldn't smash a door if the key was just downstairs. Asking the player to climb to the top of Mt. Evil and fight the Soul-Devouring Dragon-Wraith of Pestilence to get the same key is completely ridiculous, because at that point it's less trouble to just kick the door down or call a locksmith or something. (Exception: All comedy games get a free pass for plot doors because the stupidity of the side-quest is part of the joke.)

Shamus Young addresses the issue of ridiculous side-quests and "find the key" type puzzles / plot progressions in games. A great rant:

The Escapist Magazine: Quest for the Side Quest!

Okay, I worry about my own guilt with some of these things - but at least on a theoretical level, Shamus is my kind of gamer. I often feel myself wanting to shout "Amen!" with his rants. This is no exception.

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:46 PM (Permalink) 4 comments links to this post

 
Game Design: Overwhelmed By Choice?
As a player, I'm a guy who loves open-endedness in my games. In role-playing games, I may as much of a goal-oriented player (the "Dungeon Upwardly Mobile Professional," as author / designer Tracy Hickman once called it) as any hardcore gamer, but I love to approach a goal my own way.

In dice-and-paper RPGs, I can be every game master's worst nightmare as I deviate from the script and start asking questions and manipulating parts of the GM's world that were never fleshed out beyond being the flat cardboard background setting. Consequently, my efforts frequently come to naught, as the players who take the conventional, predictable, and prepared-in-advance approach get rewarded.

I really loved the magic system in White Wolf's Mage: The Ascension. Apparently, we're a weird, strange animal. The magic system in that game was apparently incomprehensible and subjective for many players. While there were "rotes" - predefined spells - for the most part magic was something you created on-the-fly within broad guidelines. It was a very goal-oriented, open-ended kind of thing. Instead of looking over a menu of options and picking the one that might be most effective in this situation, you really had to think outside of the box, come up with a plan of action based upon some very broad powers, and then custom-build a spell that would both meet your objective and (preferably) appear to be nothing but a coincidence to any observer. It was very fun for those who got into it. Practically impossible for anybody else. It has little to to do with intelligence, and a lot to do with preference for style.

Not everybody likes to play that way. And frankly, a "sky is the limit" approach can be frustrating to players regardless of style. Especially without being provided concrete sub-goals, as I learned to my detriment running a recent pen & paper campaign. An infinite number of choices often results in no choice, and players will simply drift, feeling rudderless, overwhelmed, confused, and frustrated.

I wouldn't exactly call that "fun."

In general, I've always been of the opinion that more choices means more fun. But even for me, I do have my limits. The Elder Scrolls series is perhaps the best known for being open-ended games. While I am apparently one of the few players to ever actually complete the storyline in the second game, Daggerfall, I admit I got lost in the open-ended world of the follow-up, Morrowind. The open world led me further and further from anything resembling the games' goal (and I never really understood what that was), and so I just played until I got bored.

How could I possibly get bored? There was so much game left for me - so many more choices and opportunities! But I did. I, too, found myself rudderless and confused, and not entirely certain what my end-goal was for the entire game. At least Oblivion solved this last problem, making the end-goal almost TOO obvious throughout the game.

I'm a fan of open-endedness and having plenty of choices, but it seems there's a limit. In my pen-and-paper games, it seems that - as a group - more than two or three major options to select from causes the group to get bogged down with indecision. I think with individuals, the number might go up a bit more, depending on style. But there seems to be a "magic number" after which the number of options becomes a detriment, not a benefit. Or players adapt by ignoring many options.

Hmmm - maybe that's why I keep ordering the same thing when I go out to favorite restaurants.

There is a tendency - especially by less experienced game sesigners, to try to include everything (even the kitchen sink) - in their game. While the increased breadth sounds cool and fun and all, it's important to note that besides the obvious difficulties of increased development and balancing work, the end result may actually be less than the sum of the parts for many players.

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:10 AM (Permalink) 7 comments links to this post