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 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - More on Fate, Theme and Games
Tuesday, December 16, 2008Hmm, well, speaking of fate as a theme in games:
I was playing through some old SNES games for nostalgia, and one of them was a game called SOS. It's an adventure game where you try to escape a sinking Titantic-esque ship, often trying to lead other passengers and crew to safety.
There are several characters to choose, each with their own storylines.
As such, there's multiple endings. Not only does each character get their own ending, but the ending changes depending on the other people you manage to lead to safety as well.
Now, one character's story begins with him tending to his sister, who is badly-ill. As he leaves her to rest, he expresses his doubts that he can keep helping her. Over the course of this cutscene, he leaves his room and travels around the ship.
Shortly after that sequence, the ship is capsized by a giant wave and the game starts.
This time I managed to actually trace my way back to the character's room, finding the sister still alive.
I had remembered winning the game several times without her, resulting in an ending where my character is rescued, but lamenting that he couldn't save her.
So, having found her, I was determined to save her. After all, feeling like you couldn't help her was established as a theme.
I painstakingly worked my way through the game with her (collected a few others along the way) and wound up with the following ending:
You get to the end, and there's no way to escape. Tired and weak from the journey, your sister dies in your arms, and you're left waiting to drown.
Because the other two people I had dragged there were mysteriously dead at the start of this cutscene, it leads me to believe that no matter what you do, if you rescue your sister your fate is the same. You can't save her, and dye trying.
Now, admittedly, that works with the theme. Your character was right all along: he isn't able to save her no matter how hard he tries. As an artistic statement, I think that's kind of cool. Another good example of using game mechanics to communicate meaning.
But as a player, good lord is that ever unsatisfying.
Because games are usually about a challenge, and this game is much harder to complete while rescuing people than it is to go it alone, I assumed that the character's initial claims of "I don't think I can save her" was a challenge I was meant to overcome.
I put in a lot of extra effort in trying to save her, and was rewarded a worse ending than if I hadn't bothered! It was thematically more powerful, maybe, but an ending where everyone dies? How fun!
In good game design, the rewards should be proportional to the player effort.
Does this apply to elements of the story? I suppose it depends on the needs of the story.
The ending in question violates the proportional rewards rule, but it was done to make an artistic statement, and create a certain mood. I don't think anyone can say the developers made the wrong call.
It's given me something to think about anyway.
In other news, today is the day that I'm giving my talk.
I'm speaking at my former highschool about the game industry and how to break in. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 4:26 AM 3 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Fate in games
Saturday, December 13, 2008On the Writer's SIG mailing list there is discussion of theme in games again.
Something I was just watching earlier today made me think of themes dealing with fate.
I'm personally not fan of the concept of fate, but I find that it's often featured in stories.
I wonder if fate is attractive to storytellers because fate is a metaphor for how characters function in stories.
Characters are intentionally created, built to do specific meaningful things, and fill certain voids. A storyteller's characters are literally fated to perform their roles.
So, if that's true, then I'm wondering to what degree games can (and do) shake this up.
While NPCs are characters in the traditional sense, any player character is granted a kind of free will. Players can often choose to ignore their intended role. They can challenge their 'destiny'. (Whether or not the game will accept the challenge is another matter...)
I'm sure quite a few games have already addressed this struggle. Bioshock springs to mind.
Many stories support the notion of destiny, fate, etc. How many games do, and if so, why? When it comes to the dynamics, games seem in opposition to the notion of fate. After all, when a game forces the player down a certain path, the game is derided as being "on rails".
Even (especially?) as players, humans crave free will. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 5:19 AM 1 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Theme Vs Core
Monday, March 24, 2008Spring break is over for me, and it is the start of a new quarter.
Today I had an art history class (being at an art school does require one to take quite a lot of art history courses) called "Digital Art and Culture" which looks to be very thought-provoking.
It may well influence much of what I write here!
It did in fact nearly inspire a post I was going to write for today, but I'll save it for later until that idea becomes more unified in my mind.
Tomorrow, however, I will have the first day of my other two classes: Advanced Screenwriting, and Abstract Systems Simulations.
The former will be what is likely my final screenwriting class of my academic career, and I believe its emphasis is on the feature length screenplay. That is something that I will bet is much more applicable to games than my past writing classes in television and short screenplays, as games tend to be a longer-form medium.
in Abstract Systems Simulations, from what I gather, we make a tabletop RPG.
In any case, the writing class has got me thinking on the subject of theme.
I know from past experience that it really helps going into the class with an idea for what I'm going to write already fairly formed, so the bulk of the class time can be spent actually getting it down and more importantly refining it, rather than flailing around for far too long grasping for an idea of what to write.
This idea is also encouraged in my game development classes. My development team for Abstract Systems Simulations, for example, has already been formed.
In any case, for my screenplay, I wouldn't say I don't have an idea yet... but it's not as ready as I would have liked by this point.
Like everyone, I have plenty of stories in my head, and the capability to pump out more when necessary.
My problem has been in selecting which idea to go with. This requires finding one I've already slightly formed that has the ingredients necessary to make it to a longer-form work like a feature film.
None of my story ideas at the moment have anything more than the suggestion of a B or C plot yet, which becomes of much greater importance in a longer-form work.
The one that seems ready to form side plots the most, however, is a sort of frantic jumble of ideas at the moment. To fix that, I need a theme. A theme could be used to unify this jumble of story ideas into a unified story.
This got me thinking about core game design, and how it is used in a similar fashion to how a writer can use theme.
Much like defining the core for a game, I need to decide what this story is to be about.
Then, as writing is the art of rewriting more so than writing, the theme can be used to determine what to cut, what to add, and what to change.
In a similar fashion, game design is a process of iteration (rewriting is crafting new iterations of a written work, after-all) and having a well defined core can help define what to refine in upcoming iterations.
Of course, games can have a theme as well which is usually separate from their core.
The core is the "theme" of the game's mechanics, but if the game has a story, that story can have its own theme.
It is important to note that this theme is then expressed through the core.
For example, whatever you might want to argue is the theme of what little narrative Super Mario Bros. has, it is told through having the player jump.
Granted, I don't know how well jumping, as a core, is at expressing a theme, which might be why Super Mario Bros. has so little in the way of narrative content.
This is not a fault of the game, certainly. Jumping made for a great core for an absolutely classic game.
I just find it kind of strange in retrospect that so many games feature an odd lack of unity between their core and their theme.
Can you think of instances where the core and the theme of a game were ever the same?
Or if not directly the same thing, then a game where the core and theme compliment each other in a logical and artful way?
Labels: core, design, theme, writing
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 5:55 PM 0 Comments Links to this post