Blog - Theme in Artificial Evolution
Wednesday, April 1, 2009I've written before on how developing a game based around a theme is very similar to the concept of building a game around a core mechanic.
One of my past projects, Artificial Evolution, benefited from being developed around a theme, and memories of this floated around my head at one point today and I feel they should be shared. After all, part of the function of this blog is to give people a look inside my design process.
When the project fell into my hands, it had already been determined that the setting for the game was a world where robots had already long since killed off all living things.
It may seem strange then that we chose the theme we did, which was evolution, with a particular emphasis on Darwinian survival of the fittest. A process that is entirely natural and biological.
Yet the game's core mechanics involved defeating other robots and stealing their parts to make your robot ever more powerful. The survival-of-the-fittest theme made at least some degree of sense given those mechanics. Why it stuck then, I'm not sure, but it did and we ran with it. Over time the game's back story and plot and even combat mechanics and aesthetics were all being influenced by the decision.
For example, we had been debating for a while how to do ranged combat. Nobody could agree on anything we came up with and it just never felt quite right for our game. We started to question why these robots would use guns or lasers at all. Wouldn't the player just be damaging the parts he was trying to harvest? How much would such weapons really damage a robot anyway? If there's no people or animals left, would guns become obsolete?
So, it dawned on us that the theme of the harsh animal-like conflict of a Darwinian world should be reflected in the combat system. Even though our robots are not animals, and for the most part don't even resemble animals, our combat began to be inspired by nature. Our robots wouldn't use weapons, they'd use their claws and go savagely for the (metaphorical) jugular. Combat became fierce, personal, and brutal.
And as your player's robot was attempting to harvest new appendages and components for itself, this form of combat made sense. You want that arm that robot has? Tear it off. I found I really liked this system as it avoided a lot of what you think of as 'typical' robot combat... there's no laser beams or buzz-saws or anything stupid like that.
And so we developed a really clever little control scheme for how to pounce onto your enemy, grappling the part you want, and tear it off their struggling, fighting body. It was pretty simple and fit perfectly.
The story that developed out of the theme was also an interesting and very atypical of robot uprising stories. Once evolution became the dominant theme, as on the one level the player is literally 'evolving' their single robot, the story actually tackled evolution in a more proper form. If robots became a species, how WOULD they evolve?
We already had established that you play a robot who goes rogue to explain the fact why you're killing all other robots, trying to take out the master computer that controls them all (the game needed some sort of end goal, a 'master computer system' seemed like an obvious choice). Just going rogue, however, wasn't a very good solution. First of all, there's too many damn robot stories out there where a robot goes rogue. And playing a rogue robot is just kind of weird when you start to think about it... players are generally too logical to be playing something that is essentially a force of pure unpredictable chaos.
So eventually the story developed where every now and then the robot species creates random variations of itself, and allow for a Darwinian run to see if any of these new robots can defeat the stagnating old robot species. The player therefore is playing one of these random variations. It made a lot of sense for explaining how the robot species works, fits the theory of evolution better than anything else, and explains the players actions and goals. The player is behaving unlike the rest of the robots but still more logically than if it was just malfunctioning because it's not malfunctioning - just a special robot designed to attempt to overthrow the rest of it's species as part of the evolutionary process. The machines created a system to improve themselves by imitating life, but yet, put in this context points out how very mechanical the process of natural evolution really is, which is a dark irony I always did love about the project.
So, the game really benefited from having a theme. And note that picking a theme that seemed initially counter-intuitive with our characters and setting caused us to create something that, even though it uses a somewhat cliche game topic of robot uprisings, caused lots of new developments that defied the typical trappings and made things fresher. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:51 PM
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