Blog - On Survival
Thursday, July 17, 2008Something I read somewhere was talking about getting more women into games and gaming (a topic I'm interested in, given my full support of WIGI) and it was mentioned how back in its day Frogger was very popular with, well, everyone. Women weren't just interested, it argued, because you were playing a cute little frog rather than some kind of weird male power-fantasy or sex object (thought that probably helped.) They argued its popularity was also based on the game's non-aggressive nature.
(I don't mean to come across as having the prejudice that women don't like violent games, by the way. I've certainly known women who didn't fit that mold. In fact, at the lecture just given last week at the Boston Postmortem there were findings reported that the GTA series were listed as one of the top games among teenage girls.)
Now, you can't quite say there's no violence in Frogger. You can be crushed under a truck, or eaten by alligators. Neither is all that violent, no. I've seen worse in Disney movies. But I'll still count it.
The difference is that the player character, our protagonist, isn't the violent one.
The player is not forced to commit (virtual) acts of violence.
I like that.
I once played through (and beat) Fallout without engaging in a single round of combat, because I argued that most people avoid fights at all cost. I tried to play the game making decisions I would actually make in real life if I were placed in the same situations. If faced with evil forces I would run away, hide, sneak around if I had to. Playing that cunning and adaptable coward character was one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I've ever had.
I also was completely blown away by some of the "chase scenes" in Half-Life 2, where the character is being pursued by some terrifying and at the time unstoppable force. Such situations in games, where fleeing is the only option, are risky as the player must KNOW that making a stand and fighting isn't possible. I think HL2 did a good job at providing such feedback. In the Ant-Lion chase sequence, the fact that for every Ant-Lion you kill, more appear makes it quickly apparent that staying and fighting is a bad, bad plan. When chased by the Helicopter-thing through the waterways on your boat, you don't have a gun that seems powerful enough to put a dent in that thing's armor. After unloading a clip into the machine and the bullets seemed to ping uselessly off it's hide, I got the picture. So, in both cases, I ran. Knowing that these deadly forces that I couldn't possibly stop were just behind me in full pursuit made for an intense emotional experience. It was powerful.
So, I've often had an extreme attraction to game experiences where I'm NOT the hero, where I'm fragile and scared. Why?
Well first of all, relative to video games, because it's DIFFERENT. Not many games give you that feeling. Most games are male power-fantasies after all.
But in real life, I'm no hero, and have no plans to be. So as cool as it would be to be one, I still feel that it doesn't resonate as well with me.
Most people don't have experience with actually firing a gun and killing someone. It's kind of abstract to most people. Survival, however, is something we do every day. Many people HAVE experienced a moment of terror where they thought they might die.
Shouldn't that resonate with more people?
Being a hero is a good fantasy, and my entry from yesterday should demonstrate that I don't mean to knock that fantasy as a great one to base a game around. Hell, it's certainly been a successful formula in the past. That's why when it's reversed on me it totally takes me by surprise and blows me away. It may not be as strong of a fantasy to be fragile, or a coward, but as long as I'm risk-free doing exciting things under heavy fire, there is still a thrill there.
I love post-apocalyptic works because something I take for granted every day, like finding something to eat, becomes a new, compelling emotional experience. I'd like to see more games that let me experience that.
Labels: game design, survival
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 9:27 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Design Via Fantasy, and Player Expectation
Tuesday, July 15, 2008Brenda recently wrote an entry about designing a game based on a player fantasy. In other words, you think "who might a player want to be?" and build a game that lets them be that person. For example, a common fantasy is to be a rock star. Design a game with that fantasy in mind and you have Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Another fantasy is to be a hero, and save the world.
Lots of games fulfill that fantasy for you. Combine the rock star fantasy with the save-the-world fantasy and you have something like Fret Nice. ;)
I have made a few recent observations about the games I've been playing lately and how they relate to player fantasy.
The first observation was that even though it's a somewhat negative fantasy, it's that player-fantasy element that kept me playing the online flash game Motherload.
There's something about that game's player fantasy (you're the last "living" thing left on an abandoned colony on Mars, sent to continue their mining business) that keeps drawing me in. In real life would I like to be that guy (er, robot)? Hell no. But in terms of a game fantasy role, I find it strangely engaging.
We had talked in one of Brenda's classes about making games tie in to elements from your childhood memories. I think the premise of Motherload seems very close to one of those childhood memories of mine, hence why I find it so compelling. When I was younger, on nights where I was too cold to sleep I would make my comforter and blankets into a small igloo shape and hide inside, huddling for warmth, pretending I was an arctic explorer that had been separated from my team during a blizzard. Even though I wasn't actively doing anything but trying to sleep, it was fantasy play, pretending that I was just trying to survive the cold for the night. So, if I "played" with that fantasy, the fantasy of Motherload as the lone mining robot on Mars isn't too far of a stretch from that.
(As I haven't mentioned yet but fully intend to one of these days, mere survival is my favorite motivation in games.)
My other observation on player-fantasy stems from when I was recently playing Evil Genius. Something in me, I think the game designer part actually, loves the fantasy of being an evil madman, devising devious traps for my lair of villainy. I think part of the reason I wanted to become a game designer is because back when I was a kid playing the Megaman series of games I always thought the evil genius villain Dr. Wiley was having all the fun. He was making crazy levels filled with traps and enemies that Megaman had to fight and escape. I would even draw elaborate levels out on paper, pretending I was Dr. Wiley designing a new hideout. It turns out that all those devious traps and enemy placement were actually the work of game designers... ;)
In any case, that player fantasy caused me to pick up Evil Genius. Don't get me wrong, it's a fun game. The problem with it is that it takes way too long to deliver the parts of the game I associate most strongly with that fantasy!
It's a problem of player expectation.
When picking up that game I wanted to make death traps and crazy science laboratories where I'd make man eating plants or new death traps, etc.
The game lets you eventually do both. The key word there was eventually.
The traps they give you at the beginning of the game, however, are fairly boring. You can unlock more by researching with evil laboratories but it takes far, FAR too long into the game to get to the point where you can build evil laboratories!
My (player) expectations were not met until after several DAYS of playing the game.
I wanted evil labs from day one. When I think "Evil Genius" I think of evil laboratories and mad scientists. Thanks for hooking me in the first 5 minutes, game.
So, there's the main observation on designing by player fantasy: you must very carefully think about what the player expectation of that fantasy is before you proceed. Designing by player fantasy means your game hinges on player expectations. You need to deliver that fantasy.
Evil Genius did, but takes hours of frustration to get there.
Motherload, however, sold me the fantasy from the instant the game began.
Evil Genius, however, picked what I can probably safely say is a much more common and popular fantasy.
When working on a recent student game project at SCAD (a tabletop RPG) our team did an early exercise on player expectations before writing any actual rules. We established at least an early framework for our game's world and its inhabitants and then made up characters of our own for it. We then proceeded to play a quick adventure with our characters, making up rules when needed. This exercise was to explore what we as at least a few early playtesters expected to be able to do in this particular game world. If a player wanted to do something that wasn't yet addressed, we could then actually write it into the final game. It was an interesting way to deal with the problem of player expectation.
Labels: design, player expectation, player fantasy
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:14 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - The Return of Fluffy
Monday, July 14, 2008We just started our last and final session of EGD this year, and gave them both of our basic non-digital design exercises earlier this morning.
I happened to snap a photo this time of the "Fluffy: Destroyer of Worlds" image.
Again, we draw the following on the chalkboard and ask our students to pitch a hypothetical game based on this image:
A couple of the ideas it generated actually seemed pretty fun or had some interesting mechanics I think I might try playing around with in Flash/actionscript.
I have, after all, been meaning to try to make some simple flash games this summer to add at least something digital to my game design portfolio.
Also, because it's a topic that interests me, I couldn't help but notice how the classic "box of crap" design exercise encourages play with affordances (again for you non-academics reading the list, affordances are qualities/properties of a object/material that are instantly understood: i.e. glass = transparent and breakable.)
I made the mistake of giving each of my students (among other random bits with which to make a game) a rubber band and a six sided die.
Predictably, nearly every group used the die for its original function as a random number generator. I was glad to see at least a few exceptions there which surprised me. However, every single group used the rubber band in some way to involve projectiles in their game design (sometimes using the die as the projectile...)
I suppose I should have seen that coming, given the nature (affordances, if you will) of a rubber band. Especially those rubber bands placed in the hands of rowdy high school students.
Oh well.
Labels: affordances, EGD, teaching
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:30 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - "There IS no ahead-of-schedule!"
Thursday, July 10, 2008A few days back some of my students claimed to be ahead of schedule because they had completed already by the day before all their milestones we had set for the day.
One of my fellow instructors pointed out to him "In game development, there is no ahead-of-schedule. Go and finish it, or polish the hell out of it if it's content complete."
In any case, it is surprising how well the students are doing this session. There is one exception: a team with multiple producers and leads who fought and argued constantly (they apparently each had their own, different, design documents they had made...) was one we were concerned would not finish. Apparently it's 'nearly complete' according to their team, although I can't imagine it has any kind of polish on it at all as was pretty rough (to put it kindly) when we last saw a build just two days ago.
But other than that, the teams barely had to crunch on their provided "crunch-night" last night. Even with the fact that most of the instructors weren't around (It fell on the same evening as the Boston Postmortem).
One team was (and this is unprecedented) content complete several days ago, and they have just been tweaking and polishing for a while now. That team contained several of those students I mentioned in my last entry: every opportunity for free time available to them, they still worked on their game anyway, rather than LAN gaming with the rest of the kids. Their game was already better by day 2 than the final product of any 1-week session of camp yet.
Even more average teams, however, are surprisingly close. Before crunch officially started, one team only had a few things to add (loading screens, eliminating critical bugs from one of their weapons...) A third team only had a problem with one cutscene not loading correctly. We usually have at least one team working until 5am on crunch night, but last night we packed up and had left by 2am.
Perhaps this batch is just more hard-core about game development. Maybe they were just driven to make better games than those we showed them from the students they came before them. Or maybe we've just gotten better at scaring them into actually finishing their games early so they can work on polish. ;) posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:20 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Designers vs Gamers
Tuesday, July 1, 2008Game designers find making games more enjoyable than playing them.
I'm sure that by this point this is true at least for me. Keeping up on my game playing almost seems like more work to me than my game design projects.
This dynamic of being a game designer first and a gamer second, however, is something I notice is lacking in most of my students in the EGD camp sessions I've taught.
Most of them can't wait for our lectures on how to use the tools to be over so they can have more free time to play games on the LAN with each other. In fact, a few of them are probably playing games during our lectures.
On one hand, this doesn't bother me as much as you might expect. We see our program as a great way for high school students to determine if a career in game development is right for them before they start college.
This is certainly valuable, if true, as I see a lot of people enter the game development major at SCAD who just don't make it once realizing early on that it's not what they expected. Lots of students like games, and think making them would be fun. It is, if you're into it, and don't mind how much work it is. Neither is necessarily true for most people.
So if these kids come to this camp and realize that they'd rather play games than make them, then I suppose we've done our job. The price tag for this camp is rather expensive for a camper to decide they'd rather spend it all playing LAN games, but then again the price their parents are paying is still nothing compared to the cost of finding out the same thing as a University student.
So, it shouldn't bother me. For the most part it does not. Even so, there's a part of me that finds it a little disheartening. For one thing, even if they find out they don't like it, they still are stuck making a game with other students. They all have to work on a game which gets judged by industry folks. That means that when my students put as little work as possible into their game, just so they can get back to playing, I'm pretty embarrassed and angry when it gets presented to game developers I respect and admire.
On top of that though, I just feel a little sad that the kids don't see the same magic I've found, where making games IS more fun than playing them.
So, it makes me happy when a few of them do find that magic.
This session we have one camper who spends all his free lab time just playing with the level design tool we have, once we showed him how to use it. Especially after lectures where I show them more on that tool, a few keep playing around in it, exploring the possibilities. One called me over to test out the level he'd made, using a few of the tricks and techniques I had taught.
I love that. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:17 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - So Long, Atlanta. Hello, Boston.
Friday, June 27, 2008Today we wrap up the EGD camp in Atlanta. The students presented their games to a few local developers, and thanks to making them do practice presentations earlier the student presentations went pretty well.
I'm glad I came down here and did the Atlanta camp this year. I Wish I had found Emagination earlier and did this camp for EGD last year as well. Being in GA already for SCAD means I go to occasional game development events up in Atlanta (SIEGE and GDX) and so almost all our special guest speakers/judges/etc. were people I've met before. Yay networking.
Also, getting the opportunity to alpha-test a game for Hi-Rez has been pretty awesome. :)
In any case, in a couple hours I fly up to Boston for two more sessions of the camp.
I can't wait. Boston is a great area, and many of my friends have jobs/internships in the area this summer. Plus, I miss the Boston Post Mortem gatherings.
So for those of you up in Boston, I'll probably see you sometime there!
Don't worry, Atlanta. You haven't seen the last of me. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:35 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - In the GGDA newsletter!
Tuesday, June 24, 2008Any of you who may be on the GGDA's mailing list may have seen the nice little blurb sent out today about the tour of Hi-Rez and playtesting session for their game me and my students got to do a few days ago. It's also a small blurb on their site (linked above, or try a direct link to the article.)
Neat! posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:01 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Oh Dear, it's Sporn
Saturday, June 21, 2008A rare NSFW sort of entry from me:
Given as I study under someone who quite literally wrote the book on sex content in video games, I'm familiar with quite a bit of weirdness in that area.
So, the whole issue with all the, er, "anatomical" lewd creatures people are making with the Spore Creature Creator (now termed "Sporn") is something I've been following. I'd like to see exactly how this goes as far as censorship. As Spore is supposed to be a family game, there is apparently some sort of system available to help flag certain creatures as adult content, although I'm a bit confused as to how this works.
Some comments I've read implied that any user can flag a creature as inappropriate, and others have said it's up to the creator to tag their own creature as offensive, or risk a cease and desist letter and/or ban if they fail to do so once their creature is discovered.
In any case, this is a prime example of Brenda's tip: if you give the player tools, they will find a way to make penises with them.
Honestly, the creature creator doesn't even make it that difficult to do so. Players have gone much, much further out of their way to make phalluses in games (killing enemies so the bodies can be arraigned into certain lewd shapes, etc.) that a tool as easy to use and powerful as the creature creator was bound to be littered with offensive content. Some of them are actually pretty creative, and I even learned some advanced techniques from seeing a few of these abominations, like how one can make extra bodies out of limbs.
Unfortunately, I happen to be teaching a bunch of immature high school students when such a tool comes out... oh well. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 9:57 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Good Day at EGD
Friday, June 20, 2008Yesterday was a good day. It was the kind of day that is the epitome of why my job with EGD is great for my career.
For one thing, I got to meet with and present a speaker who is a game design legend, one whom I had met before at SIEGE. Again, meeting with the speakers I get to present is one of the biggest perks of this job.
*The other perk is the studio tour, and this one was particularly great. I've been blessed with the opportunity to tour 4 different game development studios now (through this job or otherwise), and most are fairly standard.
But this time it was Hi-Rez studios, and A.) I was allowed to play-test the alpha version of their game. I've only ever been able to see the alpha stage of my OWN games, so seeing someone else's was particularly interesting. B.) I also signed my first ever NDA, so I can't tell you anything about the game at all. ;)
Labels: EGD
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 10:14 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Business-Sim Makes Everything More Interesting...
Wednesday, June 18, 2008Well, it's official: I'm addicted to playing with the Spore Creature Creator.
My students are a little alarmed with how many creatures I've made already just today.
What can I say? My designer mind means I have to play with, explore, and test every possibility ...
Plus I'm a sucker for any game with a good character creation system.
However, prior to that, one game I was picking up again under a perhaps false claim of 'research' was Evil Genius.
(I'm also a sucker for Dungeon Keeper style games, playing the villain and setting devious traps... after all, the game play of those kinds of games is strangely like the more fun parts of level design...)
How is it research? Well, I've been toying with (in my head only, so far) a very similar game. The major difference being that my idea is about superheroes rather than supervillans.
See, I've determined I like to freshen up any genre by blending it with the business-sim game genre (or "tycoon game," if you will). Since supervillain business-sim was basically already taken, I decided to snatch up the next best thing and try for the superhero angle.
Even cliché styles and genres (like, well, superheros) can be given a little bit of unique interest if you consider doing an economics simulation out of the topic rather than the obvious. For example, there's tons of zombie-shooters out there, but nothing as wacky and quirky as a game where you manage a company that hunts zombies for profit or something. (My mind was kind of stretching there in an attempt to combine "zombies" with business-sim...)
In short, I find the business-sim is my go-to game genre when I want a little more originality and quirkiness when thinking through a game concept.
Labels: business-sims, design
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 6:45 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - "Fluffy: Destroyer of Worlds"
Tuesday, June 17, 2008There are two game projects we give our students for EGD, besides their final game.
One is your standard "box of crap" exercise, where students are given a collection of random junk and asked to make a game out of them within a brief time limit.
Actually, that's the very exercise they have just been given, and are attempting while I write this.
The other is one my boss likes which has now been dubbed "Fluffy: Destroyer of Worlds" named after one of the (hypothetical) games it produced last year. It's a fun exercise to get students started in game design as it doesn't actually tackle much in the way of mechanics or dynamics, but instead invites them to make a purely hypothetical game to urge on their creative side and think in terms of game development. To make them think, in other words, of what sort of preproduction is needed for a game, and how to pitch a game properly. It's nice to see that some of my students actually included in their pitch such things as what ESRB rating they're shooting for, etc.
Basically, the instructor draws an image on the board, and the image we use is of a stick man standing on top of the world, with arrows indicating that both the stick man is moving and the world is rotating.
That's it.
Based on that ambiguous drawing, teams are formed and invited to think up a game to pitch based on it.
The resulting pitches are usually pretty out there, and highly amusing. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:49 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Frustrations in Hapland
Monday, June 16, 2008Getting some gaming done here at camp can be a bit tricky, as while I'm watching over my students I can't exactly be playing on a console. There's also a lack of television sets to plug one into here anyway. However, as was suggested in a comment at Brenda's blog not long back, all the various online flash based-games are very available to me. I do spend all day at a computer lab with this job, and flash games are generally 'casual' enough that I can take frequent breaks for answering questions and patrolling the lab to ensure the students aren't lost in their work (or playing games when they shouldn't be, etc.)
Interestingly, right on cue for that observation, one of my coworkers directed me to a site with some flash puzzle-based games he liked: the farcade at foon.co.uk.
He in particular directed me to the Hapland puzzle series there.
Having played them, I think it's a case of the game designer having more fun than the player. The first one I had at least mostly figured out on my own. The only reason I didn't solve it was I didn't understand that certain parts of the puzzle required the timing of simultaneous events. It eventually drove me insane enough that I just looked up the solution. I can't say if I would have figured it out eventually or not, but on seeing the solution to the first game I didn't feel cheated except for one small part that seems to defy my expectations of physics a little bit. Some of the parts I was stuck on involved phenomena I had observed and in retrospect I felt like I should have realized it could be used in that way had I thought about it in a new way. That, I feel, is a great place to be in puzzle design. I don't mind being horribly confused, as long as I don't feel cheated, and instead feel dumb that I didn't think of something that in retrospect seems logical or obvious.
I started the next one however and it was even harder and more frustrating. Eventually I fell to using a walkthrough for that one as well. That one contained a few portions I don't think I would have figured out on my own at all. There are some problems with communication to the player in that one, in my opinion.
From reading the walkthrough though and completing the game just through a walkthrough, I realized that sadly I had more fun doing that than actually racking my brain to solve the puzzle. Maybe I'm just not the puzzle type, but I found the puzzles of this particular game just too frustrating.
Going through it in the walkthrough I got to see the pieces all fit together cleverly and the 'story' advance to its conclusion. That would make for a great thriller movie, perhaps, but as a game I just wish I could have been able to experience that without cheating. I got to see the fun the designer must have had, crafting such an intricate puzzle, with hilarious animations, that all follows a sort of story... but I didn't have fun playing it.
Labels: design
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:50 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Hello from EGD!
Thursday, June 12, 2008Despite being on computers all day, I've been so busy trying to get myself back in shape with some of the tools I'll help teach that I haven't been posting around here much like I said I would. My employers keeps me pretty busy I suppose.
In any case, I've been here in Atlanta all this week, in training for another great summer of my job teaching some basic game development to high school students.
The EGD team seems great this year and the students come very very soon (the 14th!), so i'm excited.
It's always especially awesome when you have students who really get into it and make things like asset lists entirely on their own, or form a team and get started early, just so they can make a better game.
I hope to see some more students like that this year, and some even better games from them. It can only make me look even better. ;)
Labels: teaching
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 8:32 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - My Parents Bought a Wii.... for the Exercise.
Friday, June 6, 2008I leave for Atlanta to start my job with Emagination (EGD) again tomorrow. Huzzah!
But since my time here is brief I'll only write about an odd phenomenon which I meant to write about earlier but it slipped my mind:
My parents bought a Wii. Specifically, they bought it for the new Wii Fit. They both have to do a lot of exercise now because of health issues in their old age, and they figured it looked a little more appetizing with Wii Fit.
In effect, my aging parents have purchased a contemporary, next-gen video game console as a piece of exercise equipment.
I find this very strange.
I won't say I haven't been able to get them to play the occasional video game over the years, but they haven't ever really enjoyed it.
Modern video games were just too complicated for them with too many buttons.
Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised. They were once no strangers to video games. They seem to have been some of the ones who got lost in the shuffle of the great game crash and never found their way back as they remember playing games like Pong and Pacman with great fondness. This wouldn't even be their first console -- I inherited the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a my mother apparently played with while I was still in the womb (as such it was my first console too!)
And yet, I don't think this is just a case of the Wii's trademark image as a non-intimidating game console that even grandma can play (i.e. like the games they were used to.) They knew of the Wii and we had talked of them, but they had no real interest in playing with one until now.
They had no serious interest in the Wii until Wii Fit.
They will likely enjoy a few other games now that they already own it (I plan on bringing home my copy of WarioWare: Smooth Moves as I think my mom would like it) but they initially purchased the console not as a gaming platform but as a piece of exercise equipment.
Well done Nintendo, for embracing so many rather out-there trends for our industry: the exergaming branch of serious games, and a casual-gaming sense of simplicity that anyone can understand and enjoy.
It grabbed you two new customers that I thought was lost forever from video game purchases. Which is saying something, given that their son wants to make video games for a living. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 6:06 PM 1 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Design Challenges: Unusual Materials
Tuesday, June 3, 2008Sorry for the lack of posting lately. Technical difficulties continue to plague me.
However, in a few days I'll be working at Emagination again, and will have enough free time around computer labs there to post nearly every day again.
In any case, one thing that's come up since I last wrote here (and has been rattling around inside my head again today) was finals. One team's final presentation on their game in one of my classes (Brenda's "Abstract Systems Simulation" course) has me thinking about an interesting thing to play with in my game design experimentation.
The team realized that due to one of their game's player classes (which 'moved' by merely multiplying itself to fill more squares of the game board) that the number of tokens they'd need for that class alone was astronomical. So, they devised a really cunning solution: they constructed a mold, and the game materials in the box consist of a couple of these molds plus various colors of clay.
Players use these to make their own tokens for the game by ripping off a tiny portion of their blob of clay and pressing it into the appropriate part of the mold to mark it as whatever kind of token they may need.
Not only is it clever solution to their problem, our class thought about it and realized clay is rarely used in games, which seems almost odd given as it is a staple of playtime in children. Smooshing clay around is itself strangely fun, and board games in particular almost demand a high degree of tactile stimulation for the players.
Playing with clay is a very tactile sort of fun, so it would seem to fit naturally.
And yet, the only commercial game we could think of that involved it at the time was The Grape Escape. A peek further into boardgamegeek reveals a few more games that involve clay, but not many. (I found less than 10...)
So, I think I might invest in some Play-Doh and experiment with some clay-based mechanics.
A few were predictably just a sort of sculptural charades game: sculpt an object or whatever instead of drawing it or acting it out while people guess what it is.
However, a fun twist on that mechanic was the mechanics used in Barbarossa and Cluzzle, where you have to make a sculpture that is just ambiguous enough as to what the hell it is. Too easy to guess and you lose points, but if NOBODY gets what it is, you also lose points.
Clay-O-Rama and its expansion set have some fun clay mechanics as well, what with the way you sculpt your character affecting how it acts in the game, and then the fun of getting to literally squish your opponents.
All of this, however, reminds me of an earlier note I had scribbled down for myself: "Design Challenge: Make a game using tape."
I have no idea what was in my head when I wrote that, but I bet there are quite a lot of neat game ideas one can invent using all the properties of tape.
Plus, everyone usually has tape laying around the house...
One term that's come up in my game studies that I hear is more academic in nature and not actually used in industry is the concept of affordances, which are the properties of an object or material. For example, present the player with glass and he's going to assume he can look through it, and shatter it in a giant crash of shards.
Affordances seem to be a great starting point for random design challenges.
Last summer at Emagination, in order to teach myself the FPS-making package our students use, I enjoyed playing with the physics engine and designed a puzzle game based entirely around the affordances of hand grenades. No enemies to blow up, instead you used your infinite number of grenades to solve puzzles: blowing open doors, tossing grenades to places you couldn't reach to activate/move objects to a place where you could, etc.
Of course, that was a case of virtual materials. Thanks to all the non-digital prototyping done in my design classes at SCAD I think I'll play around with the affordances of some real-world materials and how they can be used in games.
Labels: affordances, challenges, design
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:23 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Two Birds with One Stone: Make The Games that Get your Name Out There
Thursday, May 22, 2008I forgot who (probably one of my art professors at SCAD), but someone once told me that an artist should spend 30% of their work time actually making art, and 70% promoting themselves. Whether or not that's true, the point is to stress the importance of self-promotion so you can get enough work to survive.
However, it seems to me that you can often kill those two birds with one stone, and make art that also is great at making a name for yourself.
For example, Brenda often encourages us to avoid making games with cliché topics like zombie-shooting and instead try to tackle current socio-political issues or similar experimentation of subject, because doing so not only lets us explore games as a medium, but also are likely projects to get noticed by the game development community!
(A great example of this would be the student project Hush.)
In the past two quarters I've worked on a ton of games, and a few of them have been great self-promotional tools. Project Loyola got almost too much press for it's own good, and Rats getting a postmortem published was also a nice treat. I'm not working on a game that promises to draw some serious attention as well: we even have a PR person! Not bad at all for a student project.
So my fellow game development students, when choosing what kind of game to work on for class projects, or what extra-curricular student game development teams to join, look for projects that look like they'll be great at getting you noticed by somebody.
Every little bit helps!
Labels: self-promotion
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 2:57 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Design Tips: Mercy Killing
Monday, May 19, 2008Sorry for a lack of posting here.
My cable (internet and television) has been down for a week now at my house and my cable provider fails to show up any time I set up an appointment for them to come figure out what's wrong.
I'm currently posting from a computer lab at SCAD.
Anyway, it's time for another design tip:
"Mercy Killing is the Law (Don't put band-aids over crap)"
If something isn't working in your prototype/design, and attempts to fix it are going nowhere, then get rid of what's not working before you waste any more time. This is also known as the mercy-kill: just let it die, as it's for the best.
Brenda often uses the great line "don't put band-aids over crap" to put another metaphorical spin on the mercy-killing concept. You can try to fix it all you want, but everyone will still be able to know that underneath all your fixes: it's still crap. It's especially bad as often fixes will throw other dynamics out of whack, and trying to fix that will require more fixes which break something else, etc. etc.
Now, throughout my time as a game design student here at SCAD I've had a handful of projects where I took this mercy-killing 'law' to the extreme: what I will, for a lack of a better term, refer to as the total systems implosion. Where you kill so much of the game you basically start over.
A great example was Artificial Evolution, where we recognized that our alpha milestone was basically upon us already and the game's core system wasn't working.
It technically worked, or we wouldn't have gone that far along, but the process of writing it into the design document let us see how bloated and clunky the system was.
So we decided to kill it, our core system, and redo it in a newer, smoother, intuitive way. It nearly killed us, but the effort (and loss of sleep) was worth it: the game was much better once the core was rehashed into something that wouldn't take an engineering degree to play. That game was the one from our class picked by industry designers as the best project produced, so we must have done something right!
Well, the same thing just happened in a current project of mine: We switched our tabletop RPG's combat system from one that involved dice rolls and a bidding system to one that involves a CCG. The best part of it all is that the old system worked great and was even pretty fun: fairly innovative, involved plenty of strategy, and worked smoothly enough.
It was just, as we all felt, a little more complicated that it should have been (particularly for our target market) and plus we liked the novelty of a CCG-based tabletop RPG and the initial prototype of it seemed just slightly more fun (just as strategic but more intuitive and fast-paced.)
Unfortunately, switching to cards basically meant throwing out our entire game and starting over: our old player stats didn't fit neatly with card-based mechanics.
We basically tossed our past month-and-a-half's worth of effort and did it over again (differently, better) in the span of only two very crunch-y evenings.
Because we rock. ;)
As terrifying as it is each time (apparently I've caused total systems implosions on 3 different projects now...) the mercy killing has always proven valuable and in the end rewarding.
Especially so on the student level, as it lets me try out variations in design and encourages me to push my limits, designing with more speed and efficiency.
In this way it is similar to giving oneself regular 30-minute/1-hour "design challenges", which are great exercises for aspiring designers.
So remember kids, in game design mercy-killing is the law, and don't put band-aids on crap.
Labels: design, design tips, mercy-killing
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 5:06 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Episodic Mobile Phone Games?
Tuesday, May 13, 2008Is it just me, or has anyone else thought of how perfectly suited to mobile phones episodic gaming (like Telltale Games' Sam and Max series) is?
Telltale's episodic game "episodes" are shorter game experiences, which would seem to work well with mobile phones given the limitations of the mobile phone hardware...
Also, mobile games are downloaded into the phone, which seems to be an efficient way to acquire new (small) episodes of an episodic game series.
Stuck waiting in line at the post office? Download the next adventure for your favorite characters, etc. etc. Especially interesting would be to do an RPG series that saved your characters and continued to use and advance them in each adventure you download!
Of course, the catch to making a successful episodic game is doing a series that can actually last. Telltale's Sam & Max series is working with a well-loved license that allows them to write some really hilarious dialogue to keep players coming back for more.
A game for mobile phones couldn't rely on dialogue nearly so well. I'd imagine it would be difficult to create a mobile game experience players will want to keep coming back to again and again, with each new episode that comes out.
If one could, however, manage to make something that worked... well, that sounds like a golden opportunity to me.
Labels: episodic games, mobile games
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:28 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Interactivity Comes in Degrees
Sunday, May 11, 2008I've been thinking for a while on the nature of interactivity, and how it exists on a scale rather than as a binary quality (i.e. something can be more or less interactive, not interactive vs. non-interactive.)
Typically, I think, people think of it in the binary sense. My professor currently for my class "Digital Art and Culture" at least adds a third degree in, what he calls "Reactionary". Whereas one could consider interactivity a continuing, back-and-forth conversation between the user and the program/device, reactionary devices merely involve only one message-response communication. His example was a vending machine: user puts in money and makes his selection, machine reacts by providing the selected snack or beverage. Therefore, his paradigm uses the following scale:
Non-interactive - Reactionary - Fully Interactive.
I've always been kind of intrigued by the idea of, as a fun experiment and programming exercise, doing a work of interactive fiction where the user only does one thing: rolls up a starting character, and hits the "go!" button, then sits back and reads/watches the story that unfolds based on the set of choices he/she made during character creation. The program would make constant checks to the rolled character's statistics and branches the story in wildly different directions in response to them.
At the time I called this level of interactivity "Proto-Interactive" although it is equivalent to what my professor calls reactive media.
Now, I'll fully admit, that's not much of a game (and according to most definitions of games, not actually a game at all). I just thought it would be interesting to see how different that experience was compared to a proper game, and hey, the writer and systems designer in me would love to come up with the branching story algorithms.
Of course, that's a case of the designer having more fun than the player, but again I was going to make it more as an experiment for myself rather than as a commercial project anyhow.
Now, I had always assumed that the resulting product would actually still be rather interesting and fun. My argument was based around my experience with Conway's Game of Life.
Conway's Game of Life is strangely engaging (I think it's fun anyway!), and yet is definitely what I would define as proto-interactive or reactionary: the user sets the starting conditions and then hits the "go!" button and watches what happens as the system reacts (without any further user input) to the starting conditions the user created.
I figured if that program was fun (as I found it) then an interactive fiction work operating under similar principals would be as well.
However, I now have evidence to the contrary. I recently found, download, and started to use Progress Quest. It at first looks like a simple RPG video game, but is, however, again only a reactionary program. You roll up a character and then just watch the game play itself.
Granted, the 'game' plays up the irony of its nature as a game you can't actually have fun playing by basing its design/interface around progress bars (hence the title), evoking imagery of all the excitement that is waiting for a file to download.
We've all had moments of irritation staring at slow moving progress bars, and so Progress Quest mocks us by being a game that consists of nothing BUT an endless series of progress bars.
So, perhaps some of my frustration stems from that little joke in the design.
However, I kept feeling as the game went on how much I just wanted to actually DO something.
It made me really want to actually take control and begin active play with the character I had made.
Now, to potentially address this 'problem' of reactionary software, I bring to you the topic of this entry's title: interactivity comes in degrees.
At one point when reading Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling he mentioned briefly that it would be possible to do such an interactive fiction work as I described above: roll up a character and the program determines what would happen to that character and outputs that story to you. It was but a brief mention of the book honestly, although reading it, an idea occurred to me:
If it is not enough to have players provide input only at the start of the story, then what happens if you let them have input at the end of each chapter as well?
Every chapter break allows the user to level up a few stats in his character, providing just a little bit more agency over the course the story goes.
Again, it's still not much, compared to most games.
But the point of that little thought experiment is to consider where that hypothetical game would exist in the interactivity scale I provided above.
Compared to most games one would describe as "fully interactive" it falls short, yet it is definitely more of a back-and-forth communication than a merely reactionary work. It exists as a new degree between the two. The same logic dictates that you could continue to split the game into smaller and smaller units between player inputs, until you eventually have a game that functions in real-time like an RTS.
All that above was bubbling around in my head when I read Brenda's blog post about frequency of choice she wrote almost a month ago. The extent to which interactivity comes in degrees is very much related to (if not exactly the same as) the frequency with which players are asked to make choices.
After all, the user's mode of 'speech' in the 'back-and-forth communication' that is interactivity as I define it IS the choices he or she makes. A higher frequency of choice means the more communication is traveling between the player and the system.
Video games have interactivity on a very high degree of depth compared to most other media. I have to wonder, however to what extent this phenomena can be used to legitimately judge a game.
As Progress Quest has shown me, a game with such a low frequency of choice can be maddening. Yet, at the same time, I find Conway's Game of Life fun and fascinating, which features only a slightly higher frequency of choice. Admittedly, you can more easily start over to create new starting conditions to experiment with in the latter program than you can with Progress Quest. Is that slight change what makes all the difference? Where then would my chapter-break interaction idea fall in that scale? In between those two, or somewhere beyond Conway's Game of Life? If it falls beyond it, then does that make it somehow better than Conway's Game of Life?
Labels: interactive fiction, interactivity
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:33 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Wonderful Imbalance
Tuesday, May 6, 2008Today our class discussion was on balance. In particular, it was on not making games so balanced to the point that they aren't fun.
(Someone in class provided the useful example of tic-tac-toe to explain how a game can be so balanced as to be boring.)
We were asked to experiment with a small game design challenge, expected to push past our desire to balance a game completely.
My team made a neat little pseudo-educational game about sub-atomic particles forming into atoms ("I use my protons to steal your electrons!") which could be interesting given more development time.
In any case, the gist of Brenda's point with the experiment was along the lines of the design tip I hijacked from her and wrote about in an earlier entry.
In brief: players want to have noticeably powerful effects over a game. It's fun to achieve godly powers in a game and completely obliterate everyone. Equally powerful are times when you overcome seemingly impossible odds stacked against you (beating the Dragonforce song on expert level, for example…)
Now, just a few minutes ago I was recounting to someone a gaming story I'm particularly proud of: the time I beat Fallout without ever entering combat or killing anything (as far as the game was concerned...)
This game session didn't have anything to do with balance issues.
However, it did have to do with how broken the game's combat system was: I achieved my feat of a perfect pacifist/stealth run through the game only thanks to heavy exploitation of flaws with the combat system.
I'm wondering, then, to what degree these two examples/phenomena are similar?
In the former example, a game is made more fun by being a little broken in the balance department (fun BECAUSE of its imbalances!)
In the latter example, I had a blast with a game that had a broken system (specifically having a blast with that system's very brokenness!)
---
In a related note of both design challenges and big guns, I submitted an entry to this week's James Portnow's Game Design Challenge, which asks participants to design, well... a new gun.
Results will be made available in a week.
Labels: design
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 9:45 PM 0 Comments Links to this post