gausswerks: design reboot

Design Primer: Askhat's minotaur

2011-11-30T04:36:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Eve, 2006 I was in Akita, a sleepy town in northern Japan, and posting on the internet.

I know this because yesterday a friend from polycount emailed to thank me for the advice I'd given him over the years, and he highlighted one thread in particular, which bears that date. While I'd like to think that him re-reading old posts of mine to his threads has to do with the endless wisdom one can glean from my writing, the truth is more prosaic. Askhat Mizambekov, aka conte, is an fellow game artist and polycounter (I particularly like his concept art) for whom English is a second language.

He emailed me thanking me for advice I had given him five years ago that was a little outside his grasp of the language then, and so wanted to thank me after the fact. Other than this being quite a thoughtful gesture, it was also an interesting little window into my own artistic/design thought processes from five years ago.

Other than removing a number of exclamation marks ("An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke" wrote Fitzgerald) and elaborating on a point or two, I present my same post from five years ago as a short primer on logically refining a character design, relevant for artists and game designers both.

Pictured: my illustration for this article about Askhat's minotaur,
not actually his (or my) concept of a minotaur. Wouldn't be very useful as a concept,
now would it? Where's the rest of him? Is that the star brush from Photoshop?

Sorry Askhat, I am currently in northern Japan and have no access to a scanner or Wacom tablet. Luckily for you, Eric looks to have been on a rather inspired painting streak and has provided some good input on designing the armor and some coloration ideas. Nice paintover, Eric!
I'll do what I can, though: One of the best (and easiest) ways to refine a concept is to think it through logically. Ask what this Minotaur is all about. Where did it come from? Is it a dumb beast, or intelligent in its own right? Does it have a master? If you give yourself an answer to a few of these questions, you can make your concept a whole lot more interesting. Form follows function, right?
Let's take an idea and then just run with it, see where it takes us.
Let's assume that this minotaur is a spin on the ancient Greek myth about the Minotaur, placed in the Labyrinth. Now, without getting into the particulars of the mythology and turning this into a Greek style monster, we'll assume this: there's a Labyrinth where victims/"the hero" are trapped and the Minotaur kills them/tries to kill them.
A Minotaur in a Labyrinth killing stuff is cool, but it still doesn't give us anything interesting to go on. So we introduce a design constraint (often the best way to generate new ideas): in order to really make it difficult for whomever's trapped in the Labyrinth to win, let's say the entire Labyrinth is completely dark. Pitch black.
But the Minotaur has great hearing and sense of smell, so it still manages to catch people in the darkness.
We could also suppose, just for fun, that the Minotaur's hairs covering his body are very sensitive to heat--so if the hero or victim that's trapped in the Labyrinth is foolhardy enough to carry a torch, the Minotaur will be able to find him even easier. Maybe this is just silly and we'll discard it later, but it's worthwhile to entertain different possibilities, especially in the beginning of this process.
So let's look at what we've got now:

1.) Labyrinth where Minotaur hunts down "the hero"

2.) Labyrinth is completely dark.

3.) Minotaur has very good hearing, smell, and heat sense.

Okay, that should give us more than enough to design the minotaur in an interesting way.
One approach given the lightless environment would be to pull a "Gollum", and make the Minotaur like a slimey, albino cave creature with very little pigment. But that suggests a long time spent evolving in that environment, and frankly runs contrary to the strong suits and essential character of the Minotaur. Still an option, though.
But let's just assume that while the Minotaur hunts people in the dark of the Labyrinth, it does get some exposure to light intermittently. (Or maybe they turn out the lights during the hunt, because it was getting too easy for the Minotaur to kill people.)
So the Minotaur isn't a cave dweller by nature. The next natural choice would be for it to have a blindfold of some sort, or better yet, some blinders, like a horse. If you go with that, you can create a visually interesting sort of blinding-helmet, which functions to blind but also protect the Minotaur's eyes and skull. So that's an idea.
Going along with that, the armor should protect him well in this dark environment. He's got a great sense of hearing, but he can't echolocate like a bat (or Daredevil), so let's say he navigates the Labyrinth because he's memorized the entire layout, from years of hunting people in it before they turned the lights out. But even though he knows the whole layout, he still needs armor not only to protect him from whoever he's fighting, but also to keep him from injuring himself too much if he would happen to charge into a wall or otherwise run into an obstacle. Does he keep track of his steps on some kind of counter, like a string of Tibetan prayer beads?
Now you've got a helmet and an interesting possibility for armor/equipment. How about a weapon?
If he's trying to kill something in the dark, he's probably not going to use a particularly precise weapon, either. This suggests maybe a nice big club or warhammer, something really big, blunt, and suitable for a monster in a maze to use. Something big and capable of withstanding an accidental striking against stone, like the floor or a wall. And it's left in the dark of the Labyrinth, without cleaning or maintenance, so it's probably pretty nasty.
Or maybe it's ritualistically cleaned by cult retainers devoted to the care of the Minotaur, since a dirty weapon would interfere too much with the Minotaur's highly developed sense of smell. Do the retainers/cult members have a supporting role suggestive of gameplay?
Does the minotaur consume the heroes he bests in the Labyrinth after killing them, or simply retire to his lair. And if he doesn't eat the corpses, who does? Is the Labyrinth covered over in beds of fungus in the dark that sprout among the corpses? Some kind of parasitic/carrion feeder food-chain that subsists on the victims of the Labyrinth?
Finally, just to spool out an idea related to the heat-sensitive business, you could give him a really long pelt on his back or around his neck or something, specialized sorts of hair tufts that react to heat. Like cat whiskers or something. That's a pretty bizarre idea so you may or may not be able to do anything with it visually, but it's still a potential feature.
There you go: starting with just a few basic "how about" sort of scenarios, we've been able to come up with a potentially novel approach to a minotaur design. This methodology (one of many possible) is also nice because it suggests a whole scene, complete with the Labyrinth and the hero character, and possibly even a game mechanic. Maybe the hero has a torch, but has to throw it around in order to mislead the Minotaur? Maybe the hero uses the Minotaur's memorized knowledge of the Labyrinth against him, and uses something to trip him up unexpectedly?
Blinkered creatures aren't particularly new in games (those wolverine guys in RE4 come to mind, for instance), but it could still make for something that gets beyond just another well-made, but fundamentally uninteresting, obvious Minotaur character.
I apologize for the lengthy posts, but it'll do in the place of my inability to give you a paintover. Maybe even better, since you're able to draw just fine yourself it looks like :) I hope this idea-generation technique proves useful for helping you flesh out this character and future ones.

Original post is here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=45887

Radiator Yang's Interview with yours truly

2011-11-30T03:51:00.000-08:00

There have been mild suggestions that I update this blog. Such efforts have resumed.

In the meantime, Please enjoy this interview piece by Robert Yang wherein we discuss a whole host of designerly things, if you didn't catch it on Rock Paper Shotgun.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/01/level-with-me-jack-monahan/

Missing what might have been: a thought about meta-spoilers

2011-02-12T10:23:00.000-08:00

An 8 year old sketch. A pretty decent
Geoff Darrow bite if I say so myself.

The neologism "meta-spoilers" is intended to get after that peculiar issue common to both game developers themselves and hardcore game fans: nostalgia for the path not taken. For game developers it is a constant companion, sometimes threatening to grind game production into endless series of retrenchment, feature creep, muddled design, etc.

But because I am pursuing a policy of open development, modeling after the pioneering work of Mount & Blade's development and current peers like Wolfire, this also applies to fans. I think open development is absolutely the best policy for small developers, and might actually do some big developers quite a lot of good as well, if they could only wrest their freedom to speak to fans back from their marketing departments. But there are some downsides as compared to the traditional model.

Meta-spoilers don't even require knowledge of the game development while in progress. I know a lot of people who appreciate Half-Life 2 very much, but have effectively meta-spoiled themselves by perusing that Raising the Bar book once too often... a game that triumphantly exists is overshadowed by the knowledge of what might have been. And quite honestly I have exploited this very dynamic explicitly with my Design Reboots.

Open development means sharing the heartbreak. In the coming months my posts will not be lying to you--if I discuss ideas here, or post concepts, or respond to a suggestion with "hey that's a really good idea" I am not blowing smoke if it doesn't end up in the game.

Rather, it's just a part of how games happen, or get caught in an endless loop like Duke Nukem Forever's original development cycles. There's no way out from that trap. At some point the game must collapse down from the more attractive, purely hypothetical realm of possibilities into a finite game that actually is.

I am really looking forward to people getting to know what's been inside my head for a year or more, but I thought this should be said first.

Also, with some mulling it over, I will be posting devblog updates to this site, rather than spinning off into yet another page to maintain (and sooner than later stop updating as a result). All posts will be tagged, so a simple filtering will allow you to view exclusively the development updates.

Discuss this post in the forums

Duty Calls: Kettle Ops

2011-02-03T21:33:00.000-08:00

As a part of a campaign to promote the upcoming People Can Fly/Epic game Bulletstorm, we get the following elaborate send-up of Call of Duty games, Duty Calls. I thought it was funny. But who's really the butt of the joke here?

It is not my nature to be peevish or small about this kind of thing, but there's a kind of mean-spirited angle to the parody here that actively courts it.
So here's a point by point dissection of the above from a developer's perspective very keenly interested in issues of FPS level design. (Also, just watch the video, don't bother downloading, lugubriously installing 768 megabytes for a 4 minute spoof on Call of Duty. There's a metatextual joke about the install size/gameplay time ratio in AAA games here, if only I could find it.)

@0:33 COD's leaden pre-mission voiceover cinematics are also there to disguise loading--once the level is loaded you press a key to jump right into the mission. It's interesting to point out that the Unreal Engine masquerading as COD, at least in this configuration, isn't able to manage the same; we get a second (albeit brief) loading screen after the pre-mission voiceover/satellite spoof. I think it's interesting that only by way of doing a direct parody does the engine beg this sort of comparison and here, fall short.

@0:36 Gunhaver tic: having the M4 have the wrong ammo count seems intentional, but it's only off by a little bit--what's the joke here? That we wish we had two more rounds for an in-game M4, or rather a single extra round past 30+1? That the Bulletstorm developers think it is silly to know how many rounds go into a STANAG magazine?

Also, the BUIs (back-up iron sights) are folded down, giving the weapon no rear sight. The game gives no option to sight-up on the (missing) ironsights, another COD gameplay hallmark. Or is this not present in the parody because Bulletstorm also features ironsight aiming, like everyone else chasing COD's crown?

@0:38 The voiceover is consistently funny, to me--but what's the joke about sticking the objective in the player's face? Are we saying that Epic isn't as thoroughly guilty of technobabble comm traffic about MacGuffins in Gears of War, or more pointedly, that we will be free of this in Bulletstorm? The "Story and Characters" trailers seem to suggest otherwise. An easy joke to make but harder to follow through on--leading the player by the nose with objectives is de rigeur now; does Bulletstorm offer an alternative?

@0:52 nice gag about gated gameplay areas... but once again, who is this directed toward? All Gears of War levels are rigidly gated this way, and I find it hard to believe Bulletstorm is bucking this trend either.

@0:56/throughout: an excessively linear slalom of obstacles where enemies appear at random intervals. Again, if the developers of Bulletstorm are suggesting that their game is something other than a very pretty linear corridor slalom with spectacles or special scripting at interval, consider me elated.

@1:01 I laughed at every one of these leveling up messages. But here again--really? Are we taking a swipe at one of the most successful leveling mechanics for competitive multiplayer games? Not that it isn't worth very serious questions about, as well as a good bit of fun-poking... yet Epic is one of the leaders in this kind of thing. Gears of War 2 features multi-stage Achievements that you grind like any other experience point system, in order to unlock arbitrarily gated content.

@1:05 I also laughed at the "b-b-b-bloody screen (so real)" gag every time it came up... but again. I guess the joke here is that COD pretends to some kind realism that is undercut by a regenerative health mechanic. Little argument from me on that point... but from what I understand Bulletstorm will, like Gears of War, also feature a regenerative health mechanic? (In COD the effect only vignettes the screen--Gears of War sees fit to place a bloody COG emblem dead center of the screen.)

@1:12 The M4 is not fun to shoot. The gun is limited to semi-automatic fire at a glacial pace, with a tired "boring" intoning with every shot. How is that fair? COD is king because they have gotten certain details very, very right, and one of those is exquisitely responsive gun handling. People love to shoot these virtual guns, for hours on end. Bulletstorm can potentially get a lot of mileage out of its colorful set of outsized science fiction weaponry, but the 'negative campaigning' here so to speak seems deeply wrongheaded.

@1:31 "You have picked up a small meaningless stick. Congrats." Incisive for most shooter games but again, Epic's own headlining franchise is equally as cut down here. Intel briefcases in COD single player games are exactly the same as COG tags in Gears of War titles.

@1:40 a funny cutscene--but aside from the gag about the slow-mo, the same criticism also applies to Gears of War.

@2:40 Serpentine linear layouts are equally damning to all shooters.

@3:00 "you cannot shoot me because this a cutscene." Also equally damning to most shooters, and I defy Bulletstorm to do anything with their Story and Characters that is beyond this paradigm.

@3:28 A player-openable door? Gasp. Everyone knows your COD hero player character, no matter the era, is completely unable to open doors themselves--they can press a context key to plant breaching charges, but not use that same key to open a door. So I guess this is one of the first legitimate criticisms that applies only to COD here?

And that's all of it. Exhaustively nitpicky? Reading too much into all of it? Yes and yes. Even I was tired at the end of this, and surprised at how long of a list I had gathered so quickly.

But a good parody is about nailing details right: people laugh at a very good impression of say a president or a movie star because he or she nails key elements; offhand mannerisms, vocal cadence. Looking past the wisdom of the stunt of releasing this as playable instead of as a youtube video in the first place, it's hard to see this as an effective send-up of COD when it is so slop. COD games make me very, very angry about certain design practices its developers espouse. Along with Halo, it's the biggest shooter out there.

This parody seems more than a little backhanded to the fanbase you are no doubt attempting to market Bulletstorm to. "Hey Dicktit (or other such vulgar portmanteau favored by the game's protagonist), we think the game you love sucks! Buy our game instead!"

Yet at the same time, attempting to have it both ways--vide the "Story and Characters" trailer again. (Or better yet, don't.) Bulletstorm has been very effective in marketing a loose and easy sense of humor, albeit a sophomoric one. Are we meant to deride COD for all its hoary tropes and then buy another Epic game of huge bros and (newly more modest) chicks in glowing armor on bloomed out exotic science fiction worlds and expect it to be this aware of how terrible shooters are now?

If this is some deeply coded message about how People Can Fly and/or Epic are renouncing their endless reliance on movie tropes, spectacle and extrinsic motivators strung through linear levels then I applaud them.

More likely it is People Can Fly retrenching their position as purveyors of false nostalgia--shooters dumber than the games they claim to harken back to. By which I mean Doom still has more interesting and challenging level design than most shooters of the last ten years--but we always seem to come back to on-screen monster counts and player running speed instead.

If there is a retro backlash in the works for shooter design, let it be an appeal to that lost design craft, not to some wistful desire to mentally regress to the age we were when we played the shooters we loved so much.

I look forward to your comments on the topic in the comments below or in the gausswerks forum.

Against Dilettantism

2010-12-23T21:20:00.000-08:00

I've redrafted this about four times now, but J. Shea's combined forum and blog output (recommended reading) have shamed me into rewriting it fresh and just getting it out there. Blog posts that are up are always better than the perfectly drafted ones that never get posted.

So here follows the closest thing to my manifesto--if not that, the guiding principle of my current design philosophy:

Designer, know thy shit.

The less pithy formulation being that the onus of expertise lies with the designer.

I suppose that's a little opaque; I am suggesting that a more research-driven approach benefits all game design, that it is central to sustaining the creative lifeblood of the form. And what's good for the form is ultimately good for the business.

I know what you're thinking already. "Yeah research is cool and all, but I'm not trying to make a simulation," or that perfect chestnut, "it's not about realism, it's about fun."

Let's approach the latter point first: I'm not the first to point out that the semantic breadth of the word "fun" is so huge and varied as to make it next to useless. Jonathan Blow, in a recent public talk, gave a much more eloquent criticism of game design being driven by "fun", whatever that means--and you'd better believe it means very different things to different people.

Another developer and thinker I respect is Chris Bateman, who has done excellent research and elucidation of play styles based on the work of Roger Caillois. It should surprise no one that there are greatly differing concepts of fun, some in active opposition to each other. A lot of videogames limit their markets by assuming competition/triumph over adversity as the only model. So if we are going to keep talking about fun, which we ought to, let us be more exacting in our terminology.

But it still can't be the only driving force behind a game, this amorphous conception of "what's fun." To address the former point: the idea that somehow research-driven design is going to end up with dry, simulative games because surely that's the only way we can model reality. Research does not equal realism.

Research allows us awareness, inspiration beyond our purview, and when the vast majority of game developers are still some stripe of middle class white men, perspective-taking ought to be a serious consideration. Certainly we need more diversity in our designers, but diversity here will only go so far if new voices in the industry arrive only to join the hivemind chorus--making and remaking the same terrible AAA-model titles chorus, their diversity often little more than a potential marketing ploy.

A few examples are in order of what I mean by a research-based approach.

Take one of our earliest and best designers, Lord British (also known as Richard Garriott, I suppose). The man had an enormous influence on the earliest forms of CRPGs, and Ultima series stand as a unique set of games both in startling freedom of gameplay and expression, but also in world lore. Like virtually everyone operating in some aspect of the fantasy realm, he was enamored of J.R.R. Tolkien.

The difference between Garriott and most other authors or designers in love with the Lord of the Rings is that Garriott didn't just read Tolkien in order to understand what Tolkien did, Garriott researched all the things that Tolkien researched.

This dodges that fatal generation loss that comes from making your own copy of a good thing--which is that it is worse for being an imperfect copy, a copy of a copy. The foul taste in your mouth when you play most AAA videogames today comes from knowing you've had this meal before, and better--it was a lot better before it had been digested and excreted several times in succession. Garriott followed his idol correctly. If you want to be like Tolkien, immerse yourself in the primary sources he used to create his definitive fantasy world and synthesize your own influences as well; simply reading Tolkien and changes place names or plot points won't cut it.

A quote (from here): "Designers tend to be gamers who want to fix what they think was broken in the previous game. But that's not the way to be a great designer."

Jenova Chen and thatgamecompany are also a worthwhile example of research-driven design, if a less obvious one. Their acclaimed projects are not only built on innovative control concepts, but also on exploring novel emotional spaces in games. There is a research here that is experiential in nature. In order to say, "this game is giving me the sense of childlike joy of playing in a windy field on a bright summer's day," presumably one would have had the experience in question in order to know if the game is evoking the same emotions. Maybe this is obvious; maybe not. Most game designers I know are constantly considering the world in terms of gameplay mechanics, gauging their daily lives in terms of it's potential "game-ness," and most things in life have something going that could be extracted, abstracted mechanically. The key point here is that you need to have had these life experiences to draw upon, experiences occuring somewhere other than in front of a glowing screen. (Turn off the computer and take a walk, weirdo. And stop reading blogs, geez.)

A related anecdote: Takeshi Kajii, producer of Demons' Souls, quoted an unlikely point of inspiration for the game's highly unusual but praised multiplayer component. In the game, players cannot speak directly to each other and seldom even exist in each others' worlds fully, usually appearing as phantoms--but nonetheless rely on each other by leaving messages in the world, warnings or tips. The designer said the kernel of inspiration was getting his car out of the snow with the help of strangers. "I wondered about things like whether the last person made it home, whether I'd ever meet the people who helped me again... Maybe if I'd met them somewhere else, I would've made friends with them... Many thoughts crossed my mind."

Here but for the impasse at hand these people would have no interaction at all, but they are forced into collaboration; Kajii has as chance encounter with anonymous strangers banding together to get back on their way and the memory stays with him.

The intended illustration is that varied life experiences are grist for the mill for any creative person--from poet to filmmaker to game designer.

The final and probably most straight forward example of research informing game development is JE Sawyer's lead design work on Fallout: New Vegas. Sawyer has been rightfully ascendant as an RPG designer--first on the fabled Van Buren, and later FO:NV. As project director Sawyer has been responsible for the more gun-savvy elements of New Vegas, notably the portrayal of firearms and the reloading bench system.

Since my own initiation into researching and collecting firearms (much to the general annoyance of friends and loved ones), games have seemed maddeningly obtuse in their depiction of guns. Which seems strange, when first person shooters focus on little else than the gun in your hands shooting other people and things--and most haven't bothered to get that right. FO: New Vegas redresses that in a game that most thought unlikely to do so. It both deepens and corrects the flawed gun combat in the original FO3; no mean feat/

Not that games haven't already had their endless share of gunplay-related mechanics, but so many of them are invented from whole cloth. In a laudable display of a designer's private interests informing his public work for the better, Sawyer's initiation into the world of firearms made an considerable impact on how the game can be played. Peppered throughout the world are reloading benches--essentially crafting stations for ammo, that just happen to actually exist, too. Sawyer understood the myriad "game-y" mechanics all around him with firearms, and the game is both more grounded in the way firearms actually work and also far more distinct in the series of Fallout games. It is not suddenly "realistic," but it incorporates enjoyably "game-y" elements from reality quite admirably.

So what does any of this have to do with the quote at the beginning of the article? It's from the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides and has echoes in my mind again and again over the years as an admonition of humility in intellectual endeavors. First have to admit you don't know as much as you think you know--about guns or space or marines or swords or knights or what have you--and then you can start learning. And once you're designing from a position of knowledge, rather than of ignorance, you're free to make calls as you see fit, informing your design work with some sense of authenticity, rather than as some interchangeable gloss or slight reworking of the last big game you played.

Game design will gladly continue to regurgitate and eat itself forever, much in the same manner as film and television does in such a bald and ugly fashion, if we don't strive for fresh material to process. The best way forward I know is research.

More games need to be built from a position of knowledge, not simply lateral cannibalization with some kind of new conceptual hook slathered on top.

Discuss this post in the forums (please do, it's rather interesting in there.)

GAUSSWERKS / DESIGN REBOOT forums

2010-10-10T23:24:00.000-07:00

Now open to the public. I would like to say that I have been tremendously fortunate to attract exactly the kind of thoughtful, intelligent commenters to this site that I was hoping to--so first, thank you all, and second, please let's continue to deepen the kind of discussions we have in the comments more thoroughly in the forums--see you inside.

Design Reboot one-shot: Oni

2010-10-10T23:00:00.000-07:00

Oni is a lesser-known title from Bungie, released in 2001. On a few points it was ahead of the curve: mixed third person melee and gun combat, tentative efforts at real-world architecture, and that ever so popular anime style that the kids all love now, but was quite a bit more niche nine years ago.

Rather than a full design reboot here I decided to only play with Konoko's character design and see what happened. I ended up with a kind of Franka Potente in Run Lola Run vibe combined with the original Major Kusanagi/Ghost in the Shell riff, while keeping the distinctive haircut. I was less interested in the kind of high tech armor/bodysuit deal she sported in the original (seen below)--a theme you may notice through some of my other character redesigns, I am trying to keep with more moderate, normal clothing for characters while retaining an iconic color palette.

If Konoko is going to be running around in a game doing a lot of martial arts type stuff it seemed appropriate to have her outfit light, sporty, and practical. Pictured is the point early on the game where she abandons her more cumbersome SWAT-style equipment. As for a few comments on the possible gameplay redesign, Oni seemed to anticipate a lot of what would be done later with Mirror's Edge--emphasized speed and agility over traditional shooter action. Certainly a bright, impressionistic rendering style would be appropriate here as well. What do you think?

Be sure to discuss this in the newly unveiled GAUSSWERKS / DESIGN REBOOT forums.

A dog's life

2010-09-15T03:36:00.000-07:00

(Mild spoilers follow. Like you even care, Dad.)

All puns intended, Kane & Lynch 2 is for the dogs.
Admire the poor creatures' appearances in the game itself: briefly and unremarkably, they show up to be gunned down. They inspire none of the visceral fear of the dog packs in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or COD4 (or the loathsome retread of the same found in World at War).
They come running toward you and you ventilate them with bullets, and then you wonder briefly why they were included at all. Tellingly, the last two interlopers to attack you right before the game's abrupt non-ending are dogs. The game is nasty, brutish and short, and squarely centered on the de rigueur cover mechanic.

Why would IO put out a game so blind to the company's own best strengths?

Are they so keen to distance their other games from the consistent brilliance of Hitman I wonder? Pressure from Eidos, and then new owners Square Enix? I finished K&L2 on the PC shortly after release, but continued to ponder the design decisions that shaped the game.
Kane & Lynch 1 was chiefly remarkable for the title characters. There was a rare sense of parity between the amoral chaos the duo causes both in the cutscenes and in the gameplay. The game also claims partial inheritance from Freedom Fighters (a well received former title of IO whose IP rights stayed with EA), with a good degree of the gameplay verbs given over to basic squad management. One could swap weapons with anyone in the crew, or resupply ammo; occasionally ordering your crew around made a difference tactically.
Despite the game never really delivering on the HEAT-inspired heisting that it seemed to promise along with the HEAT-inspired gunplay (which it mostly did), there was an admirable sense of belonging. Much of the game's action was centered on working alongside in crew of professional criminals, of which the title characters were in the lead. HEAT was the clear exemplar, as has been repeatedly noted: one only needs to watch the justly vaunted bank robbery scene to see why. Cops and robbers, high-power mayhem among hapless bystanders. In my mind, this counted for a lot of the first game's appeal.

Yet IO chose not to revise and hone that gameplay; it is as if they actually believed everything said about their game and proceeded to rip out all the good along with the bad. Choosing to erode core gameplay until there was nothing but an equally meager and punishing cover shooter subsistence left.
I find this puzzling because well observed iterative design is what turned the Hitman series into such a towering success. There were missteps and false notes in each game, which were gradually corrected until the most recent Blood Money: a classic, highly polished and deeply replayable game with mass-market appeal, strong cross-platform sales. (Hitman is also a remarkable case of a console-centered control makeover making life better for PC players, too. Remind me of that comment for another post sometime.)

So what's with the lobotomy on an already slight game? Virtually all of the heisting and any crew-centric verbs or gameplay/story concepts disappeared. Also missing were the highlight spectacles of the first game--a non-violent ramp-up to a set-piece (the Collateral-inspired club sequence) as well as big shootouts occuring in public with numerous bystanders.
It seems as though in the effort to correct what was critically and popularly reviled about the first title, they trimmed out much of what made the original game admirable.
To be sure there are perfunctory nods to expanding the multiplayer component, and the online co-op and revamped visual style are to be commended. But there again--why so much effort into a multiplayer mode condemned to be a ghost town shortly after release, as most non-CoD or Halo releases are?

The essential relationship between the two misfit lead characters also goes under-served. Despite a lot of the anti-cinematic rhetoric evident in my personal design philosophy I am not against a game that tells a good story, by whatever means appropriate. I like hearing these characters connect--or fail to, seeing as how they are both emotionally crippled, horrible men.
IO have taken time to establish these characters through extraordinarily nuanced choices--the costuming choices throughout the game are frankly industry best--and give us well directed cutscenes only in order to serve up variations on the same template: Oh shit, we're in another firefight. Oh Kane, oh Lynch, we've made yet another poor decision involving a shady underworld boss' daughter getting shot by one or the both of us. Is this really the only plot point IO writers can avail themselves of? Why go through the trouble of drawing the characters so vividly when the player behind them is availed even less expression than the first, "casual"-centered action title?

The game seems to have gone in precisely the wrong direction. Reduced and pared down where it should have expanded; reined in where it should have extended. It succeeds in giving us wall-to-wall action, but isn't that where all the biggest blockbuster titles make their money? Why beg the comparison?

I want to finish by talking a little bit about interstices and infrastructure. The former is where the game misses out, the latter is where the game profoundly disappoints in a way that we see over and over again in these kinds of games.

By interstices I mean the space between things; in the case of Kane and Lynch I am referring to both the gameplay and the gamespace. These interstices are suggestive of all the possible gameplay variation the game so desperately needs, as well as the connective tissue to the story.
In a key sequence, teased from the very first viral video for the game (though the video promises far more variety than the game delivers), Kane and Lynch have been savagely tortured and must escape, naked and wounded. It is one of the game's startling high points, if only for a moment. In short order the two are re-armed with found weapons and the game proceeds exactly as a few minutes ago.
Surely, the extraordinary circumstances might offer variation, but no such luck. Not even a darkly comic sequence of these two tortured men A) in some back alley stealing ill-fitting clothes off clotheslines in the back alleys of Shanghai, weaponless, and then perhaps B)breaking into a hospital or clinic to seek pain relief or other supplies.
Instead we have another perfunctory albeit in-the-buff shooting sequence exactly like the rest of the game, and cut to Kane and Lynch walking into their next ambush/firefight already with their mismatched clothes on and hasty bandages.
If IO meant to place us in panicked, caged-animal feeling of these two men in their attempt to escape Shanghai with you-are-there immediacy, surely the game would have benefitted from more careful attention to the nuts and bolts of that escape. Instead we are treated to the traditionally jarring videogame cut-to-next-level, all promise of those tantalizing interstices erased. Just press fast forward.

More often than not, the scene we fast-forward to is some kind of lazy level design staple: industry and infrastructure. It makes sense in more strictly military-minded games--after all, American warfare is increasingly fixated on attacking and defending infrastructure for sound reasons.
But this does not excuse most action games forcing us through an endless gauntlet of industrial or infrastructural spaces. I do not mean to single out K&L2 solely for this offense, but to underscore how endemic it is to many videogame level designs.
In K&L2 there are some interesting, highly evocative and quintessentially Shanghai-type locations, but there are also all the old favorites. Over the course of the game we visit a parking garage, a construction site, several warehouses, a shipyard/drydock, a rail yard/depot, a skyscraper's HVAC workings, and finally an airport's hangars and baggage handling.
One cannot help but yearn for the thousand times more interesting and mayhem-filled action to be seen on the other side of the walls one is cattle-gated through. It is appropriate to the story--Kane and Lynch are rotten bastards, trying to escape from this city at all cost--and it is also a highlight from the first game bafflingly left un-revisited in the sequel.
If only there were the checkbox on the application to work at a UPS warehouse, [X] Yes, I have played most action games over the past fifteen years and am therefore an expert in virtual warehousing (specialty in demonic warehousing). [X] Yes, I do know my way around containerized shipping, I have spent close to a month in real time around virtual shipping containers, shipyards, and commercial shipping vessels.

Much as one finds in relationships, one cannot help but feel as though while it may not strictly provide a positive portrait of what is the right path ahead in game and level design, our past nevertheless continues to furnish us with example after example of what not to do: what we have done again and again and hate ourselves for and swear we will avoid next time.

Please let my action games have breathing room enough to admit gameplay beyond shooting.
Please let my action games be set in places other than industrial/infrastructural areas.
Amen.

Open world issues Part 3: trust and the player-driven narrative

2010-04-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

I confess that every previous attempt to write this third installment has been met with some manner of derailment. Anyone unfortunate enough to have contact with me in casual conversation or on message boards on the subject of games will find me increasingly the ideologue. Any discussion about games seems to lead back inexorably to a few pet topics: the scourge of "cinematic" gaming chief among these, player agency and narrative.

As with the other two articles I hope that in identifying shortcomings in game design principles, in asking the right questions, I will have answers worth considering.

The player-driven narrative

The player in an open world wants to be in the driver's seat, literally and figuratively. I personally would like an open world to be just that: not an otherwise linear game whose mission order can be scrambled, but at the cost of endless shuttling to and from mission locations (AKA the pizza boy syndrome). As with GTA this is where the conversation always seems to turn back to cutscenes and movie-style story content because it is necessarily cost prohibitive and static. Either the movie conforms to the game (enormously expensive even to offer small choices in the main narrative), or the game conforms to the movie, which is how most games end up. Aspirations to "cinematic" games are a dangerous trap because in order to get those movie-like experiences we undercut what make games worthwhile on their own terms.
This suggests that cinematic-style high cost content--cutscenes and their related animation and voice work--have a higher impact on the quality and actual player choice than most people assume. If players and designers free themselves from the increasing fixation on the trappings of the disparate medium of film, likely it will be far simpler to allow the player farther-reaching choice and consequence in the game world.

Armed with ability

If we are to commit ourselves to greater player agency outside the bounds of movie-styled static content delivery, then we may find ourselves looking around for something to do. I do not criticize GTA's increasing emphasis on mimetic/lifestyle fantasy elements because there are fascinating, unique experiences allowable within that context.
An example I give that is similar to other stories I have heard about playing GTA4: once I had just fixed myself a sandwich but also wanted to play the game. I started GTA IV and then hired a cab to a mission destination across town, and simply did not skip the ride. It was an oddly inspired, unique experience to sit within the POV of the passenger, looking out on this well-realized virtual city traveling in real time, and eat a sandwich. While passive it was an experience I chose, one that made me reflect on various cab rides in cities in memory--unlike much of GTA4 it was not a movie-inspired element.
This is not to suggest that I want to play a slow boat to China simulator replete with various 1920s socialite passengers as the boat travels in real time (scratch that: now I do). But there are very strong elements in GTA, as with the other open world games, that are somewhat overlooked but do more than their share to immerse the player in the world.
Replacing the cinematic with the experiential would seem a critical step in vitalizing open worlds. Far Cry 2 is a game I otherwise enjoyed tremendously, but for the general shallowness of what I needed or could do within the visually lush environment. Tie my character further into the socio-economic fabric of the world he inhabits--not in order to simulate, but to create play economies, interactions with an otherwise static world.
In FC2 I am a mercenary who outside of the inspired malaria mechanic sought only weapons, ammunition, and morphine. What other needs or mechanics would serve to deepen both my immersion but also the playability of unique environs of the game?

Player input required

I would like to close with a contemplation of skill and performance. Not as an appeal for so-called "hard fun," or a return to outrageous difficulty ramps/endless trial-and-error gauntlets, but as an appeal for games to recover a capacity for the player to use their wit and intelligence. Both in rewards and in penalties.
Perhaps this marks me as too old-school of a PC gamer (or an inveterate hoarder) but I feel this is deeply intertwined with above concepts of agency, of choice. In order to let players be extraordinarily clever, I suppose it means you might have to let some players lose.
A story to illustrate: I remember playing Gears of War and first encountering the Hammer of Dawn weapon. It was enormously powerful, but clearly restricted by the vagaries of a weapon that called down an attack from a satellite. In the game Marcus can only carry two weapons, so it seemed a very clear moment of choice to me: do I drop the Hammer in favor of a less powerful gun that I can use frequently, or do I give up that second slot on the chance that later on I will be able to use the Hammer's enormous damage? I chose the latter--I was carrying two weapons of a similar performance profile so I decided it might come in handy.
Sure enough, it did come in handy later--but when I needed it there was of course another Hammer, lying conveniently on the ground just before an encounter with an enemy who could only be defeated using the Hammer.
I felt cheated. As a designer, I understood what had happened: if the player was to experience an interesting special encounter (we've got to get this enemy out in the open and then use the Hammer), they couldn't risk the player not having the weapon handy. But in making sure anybody playing the game had access to the Hammer when they needed it, the game also removed any sense of reward for my own initiative to keep the weapon.
Certainly I don't suggest that players just be screwed over with an unwinnable encounter without the Hammer--but couldn't the encounter (or similar encounter) be structured to reward cleverness or foresight, while still allowing other players an alternate, possibly more difficult solution to the problem? Say if you didn't keep the Hammer, you might still be able to whittle the Berserker's health down conventionally, or there might be another entertainingly "hardcore" method of dispatching it, like crushing it with a boulder.

Choice needs to come with its own realm of variable performance. In order that there be real benefit to cleverness, to foresight, not all players can reap the rewards.
A positive example is in RE4, with the multi-part treasures: if Leon held off on selling what looked to be components of a larger whole, he'd make considerably more money later, once he had assembled all the pieces. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this element has been "streamlined" out of RE5. Sooner or later we'll get to "streamlining" most anything resembling a conscious decision or choice out of mainstream games, but it doesn't have to be this way.

***

To restate the above points: the essence of a game apart from traditional media is the player's interaction. The more a game allows the player to choose, to drive the story, the more it is a game and not a counterfeit of filmic experience.
If the player is to drive the narrative, he will likely require a greater range of possible interactions with the world--something to do that replaces the "cinematic" straitjacket of before--and these interactions will comprise much of the meat of the game, moment to moment.
If then the player is in the driver's seat and has an array of skills and interactions available, the final step in adding depth to the play experience is to take the training wheels off, allowing variable performance beyond rote or mechanical. Hope springs eternal.

Open world issues Part 2: the Bethesda model

2010-03-24T03:44:00.000-07:00

Comments from yesterday's article prompted me to write a second update to discuss Bethesda's approach to open world games, since they're the other major player and take a markedly different approach worth discussing. We'll save the final discussion for where exactly we might like to pitch our own vision of an "open world" style game for a third installment.

The most obvious difference between Rockstar and Bethesda's approach to open world games is that the former makes action games and the latter makes RPG games. Where GTA has flirted memorably with light character mechanics with GTA:San Andreas, it's easy to see how far different the worlds are because of the RPG traditions of character creation and role assumption.
Not only am I naming and controlling the appearance of my character, the game assumes I am choosing a moral stance as well as preference for archetypal playstyles: warrior, rogue, or wizard, in the broad strokes, and all the flavors and subclasses in between.
As players we can assume much of the game/world content has been built to accommodate this spectrum of different player abilities and approaches. Tommy, CJ, or Niko we pick dress up clothes for but their stories are not ours; the traditional RPG focus of Bethesda's games assume a far greater stake in both role-creation and role-playing. We're expected to make decisions.

I explain the painfully obvious aspects of an action game character vs. an RPG character because I think it's important here in how their respective worlds are designed relative to player input. An action character has a set, narrow verb set but with generally greater resolution in those verbs, whereas RPGs take a broader approach, with a loss of fine resolution typically in action-style combat mechanics (though it's interesting here to note the hybrid forms in Mass Effect 1/2).
One key concern here is that Niko has no method to of interaction with other characters in the world, one to one, other than violence. He may play games, pay vendors for food or clothing, go on dates or hire a prostitute but these are only available contextually. Walking on the street with his girlfriend, his cousin, or past a police officer we are allowed either passivity or violence. This is why the otherwise incredibly well realized world of Liberty City seems so flat by comparison to much smaller-scoped, but more richly detailed games. We may not encounter nearly as many citizens of whatever fantasy realm as pedestrians in Liberty City, but we can be assured we have at least some shallow, non-violent interactions with most of them.

I am less an admirer of most fantasy settings; lesser still impressed when games lack an emphasis on finely tuned movement and combat mechanics, which I think has arguably been a weak point in Bethesda's games. So as with Part 1 I will use a post quote to enable discussion, this time from Internet scholar Liesmith:

I think if you talk about the Bethesda model you should talk about the Daggerfall -> Morrowind -> Oblivion spectrum. Daggerfall is really innovative and provides a ton of stuff for the player to do, but it's overwhelming and specific towns + dungeons are bland because of the random generation. Still stuff like the item rules, where you trap souls and each soul has specific properties which it adds to your items, that's awesome and really ambitious.

Morrowind is a varied experience with really cool shit to do, and the best stuff is exploring a sweet ruin or tomb that no quest pointed you to, and finding a great sword or a book in dwarvish that needs translating. At the same time the quests are a lot of fun, especially since you have to seek them out rather than having them thrust upon you. It's a little scary at first though because gamers aren't used to so much freedom. Also fast travel is resolved in-game, with silt striders, teleport spells or boats.

Then Oblivion is a game that fails in exactly the opposite way as Daggerfall. In order to ease the new gamer's fear of the unknown and lack of direction, they made everything bland and introduced an insulting quest arrow. Fast traveling is similarly dumbed down, and at every turn it feels like they made the safe choices.

There's a lot to unpack here, but I appreciate him introducing a basic spectrum to talk about complexity of the world and correspondingly the emphasis each game places on the player's own will to conquer or explore. This seems consistent with what I have experienced of each title.
Daggerfall is almost punishingly vast in scope, perhaps crippled by overarching ambition for its period; Morrowind is a balancing act of reduced scope but greater specificity in how locations are realized; Oblivion narrows scope further for better graphical fidelity as well as ease of play considerations. Popularly speaking, it seems that Goldilocks picked Morrowind, though Oblivion was by no means unpopular.

Generally speaking I find that Bethesda's approach to open world design is a lot more winning than Rockstar's, in terms of response to a player's desire to play the game by their own rules. Least of all because of this sort of thing, again from Liesmith:

Also in Morrowind, you can kill everybody. This is a pretty crude measure of freedom but it's important. Some people will break the plot if they die, and it will tell you that you have done so after you kill the god Vivec or whoever. But it lets you keep playing because the main quest isn't a big deal.

I think this is an important element because of what it means about the overall character of the world and the designer's esteem of the player.
One of my greatest issues with the GTA experience is that the free play/story mission bifurcation makes me feel as though I am a child allowed to play in a consequence free environment until I decide to "behave" and do the story missions, and over time I'm rewarded with progress in the game world: more of the city becomes available, safehouses, money, etc.
A game like Morrowind, by placing even important story characters "in the world" and at the mercy of the vengeful player suggests greater trust in the player's intelligence and desire to shape his own experience. If I begin my game and I decide I would like nothing better to do than to exterminate every character I come across, I could go a very long way toward this goal. This is a lauded feature of other classic RPG franchises, such as Fallout. Is this simply revealing how much we value mass-murdering in a game? Or is it an act of good faith by the designer?

To me it says the designers realize the player understands that if they kill the guy handing out all the quests, they're probably not going to be able to get to the golden castle high on the ridge that's at the end of all of this. Or maybe they will, but not the way they would have if they'd done the quest. But instead of considering this a gamebreaker and flatly disallowing it, it assumes that it's meaningful to the player that even quest NPCs are mortal; that there might be clever alternate solutions, ways to game the system.
In the end the game's respect for me as a player ends usually spells how much respect I have for the game in return. How much leeway as a player to do I get toward making my own fun?

How important is that to you as a player? Watch for part three for further discussion.

Open world issues Part 1: the Rockstar model

2010-03-23T00:44:00.000-07:00

Many designers and players consider the open world design a kind of ultimate, one that trumps more traditional forms.
I would argue that this simply isn't true; if only on the grounds that no one genre or design style can trump all others. (Chess is likely not improved by changing the board from 64 squares to 128.)
Yet it remains a kind of holy grail. The success of Rockstar's GTA series seems to prove there to be a valid, stable model for open world game design. But how successful is it? Certainly it makes money, but I question the coherence of the structure. Not only do open world designs open up new and typically unresolved design problems, they inherit longer-standing design issues with linear games.

The main criticism of GTA was so well formulated by Internet Rockstar Dr.Pwn that I will quote the relevant post directly:

The actions of the player character in GTA4 can best be described as the actions of two separate characters, one who reflects the player's decisions during normal gameplay (run over a sidewalk full of people, kill a bunch of cops), and one that is unilaterally imposed through scripted sequences. (Look at Niko as he shows that he loves Kate. Look at Niko as he feels bad about crime.).The game privileges the "choices" of the second over the first, even when they're in direct contradiction. The game's insistence that the player character, say, loves Kate even when the player has indicated the opposite, makes Niko defined by player choice the "fake" one and the one defined by scripted interaction the "real" one.

And therein lies the problem. Few open world games truly commit themselves to the operative paradigm. What at first appears to be a coherent world in which the player has surprising free agency turns out to be rigidly separated spheres of "fake" and "real" play. Our player Niko, "fake" Niko, drives around, dresses, and acts as psychotically as he pleases, even on dates or outings with friends, where he might endanger their lives any number of times. He may only express himself in terms of infantile rage or excess, but here he is wholly under player control.
But none of this makes the permanent record. Cops shake their heads and say "aw, shucks" to the preeminent mass murderer of the city, who goes by the hospital to pick up his cousin Roman who forgives him for the tenth or so exploding or sunken car he was abandoned to.
When we want to advance the story, we trigger a mission cutscene and re-inhabit "real" Niko, who despite being our player character we exercise little to no control over; it is as if the three hours or thirty hours we have spent running amok in Liberty City have not happened at all.

It says to the player, look: go ahead and have fun, but nothing you do will impact the true story of the game, which resides in the hermetically sealed parallel world of the story missions. Once the player acquiesces and begins a story mission, to their chagrin they are now in a linear, scripted mission with fixed consequences as one would find in any other game. And this is a "sandbox" game?
Despite the story missions taking place in technically the same world as the player's free-form antics, they are governed by the old rules. We watch cutscenes where Niko emotes in a manner often inconsistent with how we have played him. He wears the same clothes as our player-Niko, but otherwise might as well be an entirely different character. We are handed down the real story of the game in film-like format, though designers may stoop to allow the player ruling on a paltry MORAL CHOICE (please read Clint Hocking's revelant comments on this if you haven't already).

It is an elaborate charade stemming from the desire to emulate the entirely dissimilar medium of film and its emotional hallmarks. Except games are not film, and so the farther games move toward emulating film production, the farther player agency will necessarily close down.
It is exponentially prohibitive to create motion-captured, voice-acted movie-like content for all the many possible actions that player-Niko might choose. So instead of devising and building story content that might suitably conform to player agency, the designers choose instead to cripple meaningful player volition to conform roughly to that of film.

A typical scenario for GTA4 mission:
Introductory cutscene (1), which gives plausible set-up for what will invariably end as a chase sequence since Niko must kill NPC X. Player then drives to designated point, and is treated to/mocked with another short cutscene (2) where we meet colorful NPC X, who usually outwits Niko before we regain input control. At which point NPC X hops into a car or onto a motorcycle and is generally invulnerable to damage until chased successfully to another location, where he might taunt the player again (3). There we fight a number of armed goons, conjured ex nihilo, until finally we meet NPC X in yet another cutscene (4), possibly with the explicit prompt of a MORAL CHOICE to kill him or not, which means a short final cutscene to render this verdict (5a and 5b).
At several points during this mission a clever player might think of various ways to kill NPC X well before the end of the mission, but this is generally not allowed because how will the player A) watch the great cutscenes toward the end of the mission or B) know that he has a MORAL CHOICE in whether or not to kill him? (Nevermind the 20 or so dispatchable goons who stay alive as a result of NPC X and the player not arriving at the second location.)
I profess admiration for the incredible army that create several minutes worth of cutscenes that show up with every mission. But these nougats of film-like content are what hobble the player from making any serious choices for Niko; they are ultimately a trap.
Because once all that time and money is spent, those that are involved become increasingly unwilling to relegate the content to optional, possible outcomes of player choice. What if like many players I am singularly uncharmed by Kate and my version of Niko never voluntarily hangs out with her? Then we lose the entire ham-fistedly tragic arc she is involved in.
"No," says our hypothetical producer, "if we're paying for the voice-acting and the motion capture for all these sequences, they're going to be seen." Or if there points in the story where the player can make significant choices, they must be limited to key points, in order to keep costs down. Cutscenes, a technique that might have been initially deployed as an aid to player investment or immersion, ultimately end up crippling player agency.

Dr.Pwn (a real, accredited medical doctor and professor) continues:

I then looked at the "world" of GTA4 in a similar manner. Parallels can be found if one views GTA4 as an overworld, collection of mission-worlds, and number of scripted sequences (a scripted-world, if you will). The overworld is a flat, uninteractive, and basically empty place in which the mission activation beacons can be driven to by the player. It is neither host to nor reflective of any meaningful player action. The actual action (as well as all of the unique NPCs and conversations and objectives and such) are found in the missions. Unfortunately, these bear little relevance to the story, which is defined almost solely through uninteractive, scripted events. This isn't good and they should stop doing this.

I agree wholeheartedly. I'm not completely against games that rely heavily on cutscenes, but I want to make sure that they are not understood as the only and certainly far from the best way to make games.
It is as if I am reading a book and am asked to queue up a DVD or youtube clip, at the end of which I return to the book. A novel that employs such a technique might be well regarded, maybe as an entertaining novelty, but likely not considered a superior example of the form by very nature of its reliance on another medium. This is how I feel about games with cutscenes: invariably most of their energy is going toward aping a
dissimilar form. The games I have fondest memories of employed cutscenes infrequently, if at all.

But what are the solutions? What might an open world game look like when we eschew cutscenes as both an emotional/story crutch? How far propagated might player agency become, and is there such a thing as giving the player too much influence? How do we activate the play space of an open world in a way that does not rely predominantly on canned, linear-style missions?

Tomorrow we'll look at the solutions we might plausibly consider to resolve these design issues. In other words "stay tuned," cutscene fans.

Level Design Primer: Notes on Playtesting

2010-02-12T16:49:00.000-08:00

Playtesting is like working out--you can go a long time telling yourself you don't need it, and then when you finally get around to doing it it will hurt so much you'll probably stop again for too long.
But resist the temptation to quit. Understand that testing is an inextricable part of good design; what you're making is for the player after all.

You Are Not Your Work

I feel a little silly parroting this again, but it's worth it if gets through to just a few more people. Remember the lesson of every teary-eyed critique in art classes the world over--you are not your work.
It is of you, but it is not you. While you may be deeply invested in it, once you have made something it is out there in the world and separate from you. No matter how coarsely phrased a criticism may be, remember it is a reflection of the work and not you personally.
There are creative professionals that get by without learning this but boy does it cause them no end of grief. The pride and joy of creation I think must necessarily follow with detachment; a distanced, even clinical appraisal.
While I've found this kind of professional detachment also tends to shave the peaks of euphoric highs during development, it's more than worth it by pulling out of the gutting lows. You can be still be passionate and excited about your work without taking the emotional rollercoaster that comes from not being able to separate your work from yourself.

Conducting The Test

[This is assuming you're using what Will Wright calls a "Kleenex tester," a player without prior experience with the game who will likely not test again, rather than a professional or regular tester.]

Make sure your tester feels comfortable enough to talk freely, but do not get too friendly with them. Exerting the social pressures of a new acquaintance (or invoking your friendship with someone you know) means getting polite answers instead of useful ones. People will likely downplay or politely lie to your face to avoid an uncomfortable situation.

I usually start with a very short capsule summary of the game and it's premise (no more than a few sentences), along with any mission-critical info if they they're playing a level that's not the beginning of the game. I also make sure they are able to set any control preferences before they begin (though I don't know why we tolerate your kind, EDSFers. Go back to the Moon.)

Then it's time to prime the tester to think outloud. I'll say something like the following:

"What I'd like you to do is say anything that comes to mind while you're playing, things like "I'm frustrated," or "this part is cool." Don't worry about offending me. If something is really bad you're doing me a favor by mentioning it, it'll help make the game better. Ask questions if they come up while you're playing, or if something isn't clear say so and I'll respond to everything--but after the test is over. While you're playing just enjoy yourself, pretend I'm not here."

Be very aware of how much physical positioning factors into the tester's comfort level. Grab your notebook and sit several feet back, as far back as you can off to the side and well outside their peripheral vision. Making sure they don't feel like you're hovering is important--nobody likes that feeling, and testing can already feel a little weird for most people already. Giving the player headphones can also help them feel less self-conscious. You can still come up and fix a show-stopping flaw or restart the level as necessary, but generally try to make yourself invisible for the duration of the test. You're there to observe.

Slow Motion Trainwreck

And here comes the hard part. Now you get to see all your brilliant plans laid to ruin as what you thought was simple and straightforward to the player is anything but. Try to take it in stride; now when I playtest I almost feel like a classic Freudian analyst, or a scientist regarding a lab trial. Clinical detachment is useful here.

Once the level is out of your hands there's nothing you can do to help it if something goes wrong. So if during the playtest something does happen (such as the surprisingly common scourge of "player error"), short of a crash or other complete show-stopper, you're just going to have to grin and bear it. This can be one of the most punishing aspects of a playtest but this is your lot. What's hardest to take often ends up the most useful information.

So pay close attention. Get impressions down immediately, but make as many notations about specific problems as you can. Missed cues, objectives that are ignored or unseen, key dialogue that doesn't seem to be heeded, horribly unfair firefight, collision problems, the player wandering off the map--all of the above might happen in a single test.
This is your chance to see your world through someone else's perspective, so keep your eyes on the screen and write down any comments they make. Make a mental record of where they're looking--if there's an important element that never crossed their sightline, why or how did it happen? Did you misjudge the clarity of your layout?
As we talked about in the previous LDP article, no one tester's word is law, their experience necessarily represents just a single small data point. Yes, a single test can reveal a lot of issues that obviously should be fixed, but generally speaking you're looking for patterns from multiple sessions; reworking too much based on a single test can be very counter-productive. Balance your observations with instinct.

***

Regular testing will likely result in a greater knowledge of your own bias/hyperawareness of the level. What you feel like is "really overdoing it" might just be noticeable to the player, and the touches you consider "subtle" will probably escape notice entirely.
So test early, test often--it will get easier, and you'll have to redo so much less work if you get playtesters in at the earliest opportunity. Your sense of what works and what doesn't will naturally sharpen. You'll find yourself building level elements that anticipate typical player behaviors, rather than having to come and fix them after a test.

Level Design Primer: Starting A New Level

2010-02-11T18:55:00.000-08:00

When a modern FPS level takes weeks or months of production time it's probably a good idea to approach a new one with care. What follows is a summary of the six most important lessons I've learned so far about starting new levels.

1. Plan On Paper

"It is important to use your hands, this is what distinguishes you from a cow or a computer operator."
- Paul Rand

Shigeru Miyamoto and his team first designed the classic Super Mario Brothers levels on long paper scrolls. I find little hope of building a space as sublime and iconic as World 1-1 by bringing technology to bear too early--so don't open up the editor just yet. Start on paper. Try to give yourself (or beg your superiors for) enough time to think and to plan; it will pay off later.
Apologies for sounding like your gradeschool art teacher, but your most important tools are that piece of paper and your imagination. Especially in a production environment, some notes and a whiteboard or a few simple drawings can launch incredible ideas. A hundred different scenarios can be suggested and discarded before a single BSP brush snaps to the grid. Run with the ideas that intrigue you and don't worry too much about technical constraints just yet.
Get comfortable with thinking on the page; write down and sketch your internal dialogue. Don't trust that just because an idea is so awesome it means you'll remember it, or remember it in the same way. Buy a notebook or sketchbook if you don't already have one. As I point out in my article on character design, there's no need to get hung up drawing quality. Everybody can draw well enough to help develop layout ideas--simple lines and boxes will do just fine.
Brainstorm your approach to the level, specific sequences you might build around, hooks that make the experience of your level unique. Record them and then set them aside as you work. We'll cover the discipline of ideation in another update, but the important point is to not get married to the first ideas that crop up. You want to do enough thinking and doodling that you have the pick of the litter of many ideas in layout and encounters, not just being forced to execute on a small handful.
Try to complement this early planning stage with talking through your ideas with others. Kick them around with friends and coworkers whose sensibilities you trust. Try to get some feedback during all stages of development, even (especially) from people who you don't always agree with. George Lucasing it up with your own troop of yes-men is more comfortable but will ruin the work over time. Ideas get better--or at least the bad ones flushed out faster--once you try them out.

[We'll also leave out talking about research for the time being, but suffice it to say I am a strong proponent of research-driven approach to pre-production.]

2. Establish Scale

As you begin to rough in your level layout in the editor, one of your first priorities will be to establish scale. There's a reason why development textures for many games will have real-world comparison measurements all over them: you'll want constant markers and reference points to register the scale of your space.
With Darkest of Days there were several levels I sculpted the initial terrain for or also did a good amount of set-dressing, but did not script, and these are the levels I am most disappointed with because they are simply too large. The size of and therefore pacing of the levels are intrinsically distorted because I did not pay close enough attention to scale.
Terrain/outdoor spaces make it especially difficult to keep a grip on scale. You may think you can judge the scale of that hill you just raised, but in the abstract space of the editor it could be 20 feet or 200 feet.
For their part, indoor spaces also tend to require exacting consistency in calibration. Failure to do so will make for levels that will at best feel slightly "off" to the player, even if they can't articulate why.
Once you have created a terrain mesh or set laid brushes for your floorplan, immediately place objects in the world that you are intimately familiar with. Use the player character or as close to person-sized NPC as is available, cars and trucks, anything you know well. The closer they are to real-world objects the better, in order that you can fix them and your level in relation to real-world scale.
Here the first person perspective can be deceptive. your level can look normal sized while moving around in it alone because of no comparative cues--so be sure to place NPCs. In a pinch even a box, scaled to 6 foot high or so, will prove useful.
I recently did some work in UDK which was very interesting, because the tutorial/demo content is based off of Unreal Tournament 3. When a game is based on a traditional multiplayer deathmatch environment, double-jumps and all, objects and space are usually blown out a little to make room for the action.
A chainlink fence asset that I assumed to be about 8 feet tall turned out to be nearly 20 feet tall, skewed to the needs of UT3. Get to know your game's scale conversion between in-game units and the real world, so you can more accurately judge size relationships as you work.
Resist the temptation to leave obvious problems or faults in that "you will fix later." You will regret it. Small oversights become catastrophes with time. Once you're farther into building your level, recalibrating scale may become difficult or impossible without completely rebuilding.

3. Play and Pace

Play your level constantly, paying close attention to how the layout feels.
The map is not the territory, even in a virtual world. What you see or think you see while floating around godlike within your creation has little if anything to do with the experience of the player, which is all that matters. As soon as you've got anything to walk on, place scale references and start playing it.
Pace through your entire level's playable area/intended player path in real time. Do not cheat. However long your level should take to play through to completion, you should spend close to that amount of time pacing through every moment, every fight and puzzle, long before they exist to anyone else.
Go so far as to play out mock firefights, even with no enemies and nothing but a platform separating you from the endless void. Look at the outline of your level and consider the ramifications. Is this run-up too long, too short? Does the player have enough time to appreciate the clever visuals you have planned over to the left there--in fact, will it cross their sightline at all?
Changes that come from this initial read of the layout are critical. Over time, a level begins to harden and set like concrete. The accretion of set-dressing, scripting, sounds and AI behavior steadily freeze what at the start is fluid, so take advantage of it while you can.
The further into the process you get, the harder major changes become. As with planning, do not be afraid to make sweeping changes or start over. At this stage it costs a fraction of the time and energy it will to change later on.

When I build levels I pace through them obsessively, over and over; imagining the player's line of travel through the level as a kind of furrow I dig with my feet. As I walk through the level over and over, the furrow deepens and widens into a path, graded and accommodating.
When the player arrives the level will be "paved" in this way, suitable for him to travel and puzzle and battle in. Problems are anticipated and corrected by tirelessly pacing through the world at every stage of development, reducing the likelihood of playtesters discovering unknown corners, snagging on jagged edges unencountered by the designer. You built this world, you should know it better than anyone else.

4. Build Up The Canvas

This advice is also rooted in experience of making art. When painting it's very easy to get excited about a particular detail--an eye, an ear of a portrait--but then find yourself stymied, lost for how to finish the rest of the piece. You have a single excellent detail drawn but now you are worried because it doesn't seem to fit with the rest, you have no idea how to proceed--worse yet you've been captured by preciousness, wanting to preserver all the hard work you've just done, scared to ruin it.
Level designers reading this may recall similar experiences of building a room or a particular sequence to perfection, and then stare at the rest of the unfinished level with dread, unsure of how to continue.
To combat this, remember to "build up the canvas" equally. In painting, this means to develop the whole picture to roughly the same detail level in successive passes.
In level design, this means resisting the temptation to build, script, light, texture-align and set-dress a single room to finished quality and then move on. To be sure, some successive room-to-room building will occur but try not to. Your work will go more smoothly by building with successive passes, increasing the resolution of the entire design as evenly as possible. Not only will this help keep you from stalling out, but it increases consistency and makes practical sense in a production environment, allowing for more representative playtests sooner.
This principle is also applied to marker rendering techniques taught for product designers. Say your boss or your client suddenly wants the design now, not tomorrow or next week. By building the detail of the piece in successive passes, you can rest assured that if asked for early (or if it takes longer than expected) while it may not be overall to the finish level you wanted, it will be consistent and look equally "done" to the client.

Using this strategy the level always close to progressively higher states of "done". This will help you from getting caught setting a slower pace for building your level than you'll be able to complete on time.

5. Track Moment To Moment

Once you have the broader strokes, the pace and rhythm of the level right, you can step in and refine and develop the details. People remember and relate in terms of stories; refining the moment to moment narrative of your level is an excellent way to make it memorable.
By this I mean you should consider how a player would narrate, in simple terms, discrete events in your level. "I sniped the officer, crossed the bridge, set fire to the gas tank and saw some cool jets fly over, then got inside the mech and blew up a building."
A minute of gameplay is a year, three minutes of any one activity seems a lifetime. Breaking down your level in terms of these smaller sequences will identify problems and help suggest more discrete moments and encounters, avoiding tedium or repetition.
Clarify specific experiences within the level you want the player to have. where do they take cover? if they take time to look around, what details are they rewarded with? What might be found by carefully searching the scenery? Levels will often have a dialogue script, but what is the action script for the player like?

Take a look at your level and see if you can construct a basic narrative from the experience. Does the scenery blend together a bit too much? Ask your next playtester to briefly describe in basic terms what they did/what they saw, and see how easy it is for them. The more discrete moments or sequences they can recall, the better.

6. Factor In Testing

This is one of the most important aspects of level design, of game design as a whole: test early, test often.
Other people playtesting your level needs to happen almost as much as your own in-game appraisal of the work. The level is ultimately to surprise, delight, and challenge the player, not to hold a mirror to your shining glory and genius. You will have no understanding of how successful your level is--or how potentially rotten and recycled--until other people play it. Often the difference between good and great levels are just how much more thoroughly tested the latter are.
I feel the need to qualify this carefully given the rise of a certain perception of playtesters end up "dumbing down" great levels and mechanics, particularly for console games. There is a kernel of truth to this; occasionally games have been altered for the worse by improperly factored testing.
We must remember that the designer is not the player and the player is not the designer.
I could expand this key concept--a variation on what Warren Spector considers the "co-authorship" of games--into an entire article on its own, but the point is that we cannot let player feedback alone override good sense and instinct.
The player is not the designer. Playtesters are usually filled with a lot of worthwhile suggestions, but these should be considered with care. Watching a player play, monitoring their action directly says far more than they will tell you went wrong or right.
When you observe playtests you are looking for patterns, the larger and more varied the sample the better; unless hugely positive or hugely negative, no one single playtest should too strongly skew your perception of your level design.

But there again, the designer is not the player. There is no greater criteria for a level's quality than how well the player enjoys it. All that we do comes to nothing if it is not done with the player in mind. Developing good habits and remaining acutely aware of how your new level is taking shape can take a lot of the pain and frustration out of a long and sometimes maddeningly complex task.

***

Tomorrow: the playtesting bonus round. Detailed description of my own methods, an argument for playtesting protocols, and why conducting disciplined playtests will make you a better designer. Quoth Aubrey: GET PUMPED.

Design Reboot: Clive Barker's Jericho

2009-12-09T19:16:00.000-08:00

Note: To clear up a common confusion to newcomers to the site: I did not work on Clive Barker's Jericho; this is the hypothetical/speculative work of an outsider to the game's production, as are most all of my posts.

Arcade Fire - My Body Is A Cage

Jericho was good enough to get itself into trouble. Most people seem not to take issue with unremarkably bad or uninspired games, but games with enough good ideas to spark a wistfulness for what could have can be upsetting. Glancing blows with greatness--really, it's these sorts of games that inspired this site.

We might not care about Jericho, had Clive Barker (an admitted non-gamer) not first lent his ideas and name to Undying, a horror FPS that found a cult audience following initially poor reception. Jericho may share some elements of the game's atmosphere, but the inspired mechanical depth of that title is unfortunately lacking with Jericho.

Peruse the rather over-detailed wikipedia summary for a plot synopsis: Jericho is about a supernatural SWAT-team of seven characters out to re-trap God' first creation, the Firstborn, in a sort of time-anomalous ruin in the middle east called Al Khalil. In order to do this, they travel back through dimensional pockets back through time.

To say the game doesn't live up to it's potential is facile to the point of meaninglessness, despite how oft-repeated the criticism is of games it's applicable to all but the most perfectly scoped and executed titles; rather we will point out the major issues, and more importantly the kernels of good ideas and expand upon them.

Problems

Jericho's largest faults lay with the dearth of challenge in uniquely videogame terms. Yes, some of the fights are difficult, but all puzzles are solved for you (anything blocking your passage will prompt you immediately which team member is needed to clear it), and logistically the game is lacking any depth with the employment of both regenerating health and regenerating ammo.

There are absolutely no items, power-ups, or collectibles to be found in the environment and very little to interact with. This makes the straightjacket-linear levels, convincingly rendered as some of them are, completely dead to the player; much player involvement is lost when there is no need to investigate surroundings.

Level layout typical of the original Jericho. Linear, with nothing to collect.

There were bright spots however--the early game twist of your stalwart, generic white male hero player character getting killed and becoming a ghost is one of them.
From that point you can possess the remaining team members at will, imbuing them with the character's own healing powers.
There is one other character (Father Rawlings) capable of resurrecting characters so there is a reasonable depth to battles where you must ensure that the squad stays alive by way of resurrecting fallen teammates. With no one left alive you lose and must restart to the last checkpoint.

Resolutions

This gameplay concept is what's worth expanding on, with the attendant hooks in the world fiction. The most obvious problem solving would be to re-activate the world in terms of interest. The player and his squad need to be able to look for supplies and feel rewarded for it; the player also could use level layouts that actually provide some tactical depth.
Longer engagement distances (allowing the player to set up and use Black, the sniper character, effectively), and more varied enemy attack patterns other than straight forward suicide charges or stand-and-fire would also be important additions.

Proposed level layout style: multiple approaches, some which require certain squad mates to still be alive to access, items/collectibles, differing engagement distances.

As covered in the redesign of the game's characters, I think an essential element of a horror atmosphere is the vulnerability, humanity of the team themselves; introducing ways in which they might deteriorate in a decidedly un-videogame-like fashion could be very interesting.

There was an Apple II game, the name is lost to me, that involved rescuing hostages. There was a "practice" and a "for keeps" mode--if you played in the latter and lost a hostage, that hostage's profile was deleted permanently off the 5¼-inch floppy disk.

I thought about this in combination with an element from Hitman: Contracts. In that game, there is a collectible weapon in plain view behind a locked door, the key to which is only acquired in the second to last level. The player needs to get the keycard and then re-play the first mission to get the gun, which like any of the collectible weapons, can then be used in any other mission.
This may just be an aspect of the game's fiction setting up most of the missions as being replayed in 47's memory, but I don't think the framing device is necessary; these sorts of things keep to game-logic, and that is enough. It is unique to the medium and therefore should be used freely, as it is something that is ours alone.

Where I'm going with this is a change to the core mechanics of Jericho that would follow, in terms of achronological game logic: we'll say that characters can be resurrected, as they could be in the original game, but with a price.
There is some toll extracted, shuttling to and from the mortal coil such that after a certain number, teammates will become listless and withdrawn, though their combat effectiveness stays roughly the same. I am thinking of the slow graying, darkening of Wander, the player character in Shadow of the Colossus.

The "death counter" increments regardless of save state, the only way to reset it is to start a new game. This means that together with some more conventional restorations to the gameplay--more interesting levels, item collection, non-regenerative healing/ammunition--the game takes on longer-term ramifications. After say ~20 or so deaths (the threshold number would change based on chosen difficulty), a team member is no longer themselves, a short of walking shadow of their previous selves--so you have the option of leaving them to die permanently. Final team makeup and their death counters figure prominently into what kind of ending you receive, but also the choices the player makes in the narrative.

The idea being that as you progress in the game, there are real cost/benefits to how you fight the battles, who you use or push harder. You can rez your teammembers indefinitely if you don't care about them as characters, but at the end of the game you end up with a set of shadow-men, ghostly revenants. There might be inherent conflicts of interest--unlike the original game we'll say that the Priest and the guy with the fire demon possessing his arm don't exactly get along.

You might let a few of the squad members take more hits than others, and sacrifice them later in order to smooth out team dynamics--say I don't care for Church's ninja-style abilities or how she bickers with Black, so I use her as cannon fodder until late in the game at which point I let her die.
Like the original game, there would be roadblocks that would require a specific teammember's abilities to pass--but they would either be alternate paths/shortcuts/access to secret caches instead
A sketch of ending patterns as follows, many of them can be achieved simultaneously:

Shadow King: all teammates revenants (50+ deaths) at end
Alive Alone: all teammates dead save one at end
The Vocation: Father Rawlings (not player) handles all rezzing; no revenants at end
Rude Mechanicals: only Delgado, Black, Cole alive at end
Get Behind Me: Delgado survives fire demon exorcism
Preservation Society: End playthrough with all original squad weapons intact
The Loss of Ross: game ends with team leader's ghost lost forever
Sun King: No revenants, all teammates survive end
The Story is the Same: team agrees to sacrifice themselves containing Firstborn
The Story Changes: team defeats Firstborn

My only nagging concerns with this concept is that they fall into the same traps of other titles with multiple endings, being that one ending above all others is considered the "best" ending, whereas others are "bad" or less preferable. I'm more interested in games with narratives centered on player actions, holding a mirror to how the player makes sense of the world and their choices, rather than stale, one-dimensional moralizing or cheap counterfeits of storytelling in other media.
What, dear readers, do you think are ways to resolve this issue?

Visual Clarity in Character Design (Part II)

2009-11-21T14:00:00.000-08:00

In Part II we'll consider the key characteristics discussed in the first entry--silhouette/scale, color/patterns, and materials/detailing, and see if we can't make an existing set of less than optimal characters "read" more clearly in gameplay situations.

The very gothic Jericho Team.

For candidates, I looked no further than a game I had finished playing just recently: Clive Barker's Jericho.
It was not well received and mostly for good reason, but there are some inspired concepts running through it. It's ideal for our purposes because you control a larger than average team of six characters, and it's tactical enough that identifying characters different squad members at a glance makes a difference.

Hanne Lichthammer, an undead Nazi boss character in the game, seen out-gothing the Jericho team by a wide margin.

Trouble is, the game revolves around a decidedly goth-leaning, melanin-challenged (even the black man of the team is ghostly pale) supernatural special ops team with a fondness for shades of black.
With the exceptions of Delgado (the big chain-gunning fellow) and Church (the small-framed ninja), this is a large group of friendly characters that are difficult to tell apart in combat and/or low light levels--both of which recur regularly, often together.
Here's a collected image of the original characters and their names, so you know who I'm referring to for the rest of the article:

Where to begin? Many of the problems with the team extend further than just visual appearance and into their broad, even offensively stereotypical characterizations.
Delgado is the sass-talkin' latino, Father Rawlings is the deep fried southern preacher-type, Black is the militant lesbian sniper, etc.
(I think the game interesting enough that the follow-up to this entry will be a full-fledged design sketch.)

For now we'll stick to their appearances: in keeping with the gothic, spooky ambience befitting a Clive Barker game, the entire team is pale and black clad. This ends up as a significant issue in two ways.

The call is coming from inside the crypt.

First off, from the point of view of player investment and interest, these six characters are a hard sell--they walk into this hellish landscape overpowered with magic and arms, imminently well-qualified to deal with the problem, and the game mechanics as well as fiction hold that the team can both resurrect members and resupply them with ammunition indefinitely--so why do they need my help at all?
What's horrifying about these gothic sulks having to deal with the end of the world, aren't all their own apartments furnished in the same style as the oozing rivers of blood and hellscape they now traverse? In other words, the team seems to be lacking dramatic contrast to their environment. Far from being put out and suggesting fear and terror as appropriate responses, they seem at home.

Second, even if I did feel invested in the obnoxious stereotypes, I often have trouble seeing them at all, certainly in telling them apart at a glance. A few of them are attired in shiny black catsuit-type material, which improves their visibility somewhat in low light conditions, but not enough to be helpful. Most of the characters are designed with a kind of runic filigree covering their suits, presumably as a replacement for lack of shape or form differentiation, but it's none too successful.

At left is a sample palette of the game's environments, derived from pixelated averages of a few representative screenshots.
The game is heavily atmospheric--fog, smoke, fire predominate to good effect. Mounds of sloughed off rotting flesh and rivers of blood show up as with any self-respecting time-fragmented hellscape, so the general palette of the game tends to run to warm, flesh and earth tones, and generally very dark.
While thankfully the Jericho squad isn't wearing blood-red catsuits, which really would make for unfortunate camoflage, the black suits don't really help visibility, especially for the extended sequences shrouded in darkness (perfectly appropriate for a horror game).

So as we begin, we'll identify the specific issues we wish to solve: shape/silhouette differentiation (for when color information is not present), visibility of material and detailing in warm colored and low light situations, and finally player sympathy/horror game appropriateness of the character designs.

First things

The temptation for me as an artist is to get to drawing and painting characters immediately, but this isn't actually that helpful when I could end up with a lot of wasted time for a redesign of such a large team of characters. So we'll stick with a consciously simplified approach--not only does it keep artists from pouring too much effort into a design before it's well considered, but it's simple enough that little or no drawing ability won't stop someone from using the same process.
We begin with a simple diagrammatic layout of the team divided into their control squads, Alpha and Omega.

Like the L4D color comparison in the first entry, I'm using simplified representations for the characters in order so I do not distract myself with painting and rendering too early.
A well drawn character can mask design flaws that don't manifest themselves until it's too late--the model and texture are done running around in the game. Revisions at that point are extraordinarily expensive in money and man-hours; far better to squash as many problems before they ever happen when revisions are as cheap as the point of an eraser, the point of a pencil.

Scale

So now we've got three men, three women in simple outlines. The scale relationships of the team originally are a good starting point, so we'll stay fairly consistent to the original team designs.

Cole is the "medium" female, Jones the "medium" male, Delgado the largest of all characters, Black the tallest of the females. We'll make Rawlings a narrow, vertical form, while Church is the diminutive ninja form. Like so:

If it seems simple, that's because it is, but take the time, foundations are critical.
It's also instructive to do this kind of designing with all characters visible on a sheet--small as it is, this workflow reinforces the necessity of cross-checking all the character designs against each other as much as possible.

Silhouette

The biggest change here is giving Black a sort of Ghillie suit/dress, instead of the black catsuit that appears in the game (and makes her look very similar to Cole). Otherwise, most of what I'm paying attention to here is a simple factor of how much skin is visible. Something tells me tacti-shorts are right out when rethinking a supernatural tactical response team, so I'm mostly looking at collar cuts and sleeve lengths.
Though it's not pronounced at this stage, I'm already thinking of exaggerating Cole's augmented reality visor's scale in order to giver her more of a Daft Punk head silhouette (added bonus of hugely reflective helmet), whereas Jones gets a high, protective collar, almost like a bomb technician. Rawling's duster/great coat remains largely unchanged.
(There's evidence the development team ran into these issues, as the concept art for Church doesn't have the large suit cut-out panels. Either they realized the difficulty of recognizing the characters in the dark or needed some sex appeal--or both.)

Patterns and Colors

Knowing that most of the game's environments are in ruddy/earth tones, I swung to the complementary color on the wheel: green. Olive drab, more specifically. I considered this in tandem with my problem with the game fiction and player identification issue: even if there are potentially world-ending supernatural threats out there, I have a hard time believing that the government would actually give decent funding for their super secret "Department of Occult Warfare" were it to exist.

This gave rise to the thought of a second-rate secret force, a kind of discount BPRD: what if the team didn't get all the latest gear and an unmarked Blackhawk helicopter to deliver them to jobs? Still saving the world, but without commensurately magical budgets, because who would honestly believe them, anyway?
Certainly would help make the team less invincible-seeming, more personable, and helps free me from having to straightjacket all of the characters into the same vaguely high tech gothsuits.

I'll explore these concepts later, but for now it means that the characters end up more irregular military-looking, rather than pale and black everything. The black character in the group gets to actually be black, a small kindness.

I've also given the different squads identifying armbands with associated colors. Here again is some surprising vestiges of discarded decisions from the original team: if you look closely at the set of six original character designs, you'll notice that only the Omega squad (bottom row) have red armbands.
Looking at the original Mercury Steam concept art for Delgado (above and right), you can see a blue armband. I can only infer at some point, Alpha squad had blue armbands to go with Omega's red armbands, but in the continuing quest for true gothification, these were discarded, with the assumption that you only needed armbands for one of the teams, making the other team distinct by nature of having no armbands.

The fact that it took partway through writing this very article to discover that Omega squad only had the red armbands should be proof enough that this is less than successful. I can only think that the earlier thought of red and blue-coded squad armbands was the better choice, and in my redesign it is one I have reinstated.

Summary

Here's an animated .gif of the above stages, showing that it doesn't take a lot of time or even drawing ability to take a large group of characters and make them distinct from each other. And if you are an artist, it's a smart step to take before you launch into fully-detailed sketches. Time is money, or rather time is what you're wasting toward the end of the day when the art director comes over, sees what you've drawn, and asks for a complete revision.

Finally, the completed concepts, with accompanying revision notes (reference the laughably game guide-esque Wikipedia entry character bios for comparison, before they get scrubbed):

Cole

I made sure to exaggerate her defining feature, her helmet. Otherwise, her stance is the other major defining feature of her silhouette.
Instead of the nervy rookie presentation, Cole's bulbous augmented reality helmet (retrofitted 60's astronaut equipment as it happens) keeps her at a quiet remove from the rest of the team. Her modified FAMAS rifle scope feeds into the helmet HUD; it's 5.56 rounds are shared in common with Delgado.
Poise: shoulders back--professional and assured, high rifle carry.

Jones

Jones is reconfigured as a player surrogate, the most "normal" character for a shooter player; gear trappings like that of a modern soldier or PMC.
Though still a telepath, he treats his power with a matter of fact sensibility (reminiscent of Miles on Lost). He carries an old school M14, which can share rounds with Black's sniper rifle.
Poise: hunched combat glide of a trained, experienced modern soldier.

Delgado

Delgado is still the heavy weapons man, but stripped of both the distractingly overt power armor and stereotypical mannerisms. While the onyx sheath on his right arm was interesting, his former man-portable minigun was distracting and over-powered. The whole get-up distracted from his humanity, any sense that he might actually be vulnerable to attack.
Delgado pulls the glove off his right hand to unleash his pet fire spirit. He carries a vintage Stoner 63 machine gun.
Poise: casual swagger, nerves of steel.

Black

Black retains the coarse manner, but ideally without the ill-timed and obnoxious barks. She's unhappy that she couldn't plan ahead with a hell-colored Ghillie suit--though even in the infernal backdrops of Al-Khalil, once her Ghillie suit is zipped up and hooded she makes for a hard target. She sports a bolt-action CZ 700 sniper rifle, which means she can share .308 ammunition with Jones, but he's not likely to get any of long-distance-balanced handloads short of begging.
Poise: crouching, furtive gait of a sniper out of position.

Rawlings

Father Rawlings is redesigned as a non-combatant--as glorious and hideous as his double deagling was before, it makes more sense with his priestly vows and deepens tactical considerations that the healer/resurrector of the group cannot directly defend himself.
He's considerably moodier and sardonic, less drawling southern; the missions of Team Jericho have initiated a long "dark night of the soul" for the priest.
Poise: hunched and glowering.

Church

Church is still the ninja of the group but with a more elegant strain to her bearing. As a blood scribe, she wears a mysterious tattoo covering much of her back. She carries the coffin-magazined Italian Spectre M4 submachine gun, in addition to her katana.
Poise: strictly ninja.

As the modified dossiers suggest, another update will feature a wider critique of Jericho and a matching illustrated design sketch.
I feel as though I haven't explained my re-design choices all that well in terms of justifying their enhanced visual clarity, but this entry is getting quite a bit too long already--what say you?

Visual Clarity in Character Design (Part I)

2009-11-09T16:55:00.001-08:00

With the release of Left 4 Dead 2 coming up, let's talk about visual clarity in character design. Valve has learned quite a bit about doing it right in recent years, so it's worth dissecting a few of the lessons they've learned.

We'll start with some background, and then cover three main concerns: silhouette/scale, color/patterns, and materials/detailing. In another update, we'll apply these lessons to less than successful character designs in another existing game and see what we come up with.

The L4D Survivors before and after major reworking, after Turtle Rock Studios' absorption into Valve proper.

Valve's visual bravura arguably dates to Half-Life 2. But HL2 was more of a breakthrough in terms of memorably drawn characters, rather than a variety of pragmatic concerns we'll be discussing here--a single player game with invincible/high health friendly NPCs is not the same as designing for team/co-op multiplayer.
By pragmatic, I mean the kinds of things that have a direct impact on gameplay. For this, we'll look at Team Fortress 2.

Players may remember that TF2 was originally--circa 1998 or so--going for a more realistic visual and gameplay style (seen at left).

Thankfully while in development, in they were soundly swooped by a number of different games, most notably the Battlefield series of games.

TF2 was ultimately redesigned closer to the original Quake mod roots of the game, but with a clean, stylized look harkening to the work of classic 20th century commercial illustrators.

We see the particular stamp of Moby Francke's visual style, which from an outsider's perspective seems to be the strongest artistic voice on where TF2 would end up, visually. (I have no doubt this greater movement toward visual clarity in character designs was due to others artists as well, but Francke's work seems the single best artist at the company I can point to.)
Prior to his work on TF2, witness his Counter-Strike: Source model sheets (below and to the right).

While the character designs had already been more or less decided with the mod version of Counter-Strike, notice the presentation of the model sheet itself. Major shapes and silhouettes are emphasized over detailing or texture.

This is a crucial concept governing much of the successfulness of TF2: a clean, uncluttered, "readable" look. The CS:S models are not hugely different from the original CS characters, but they are an iterative improvement and a step toward what would become TF2.

Below, one of Moby Francke's character designs for TF2. Same presentation for the model sheets as for CS:S, but with the style of the game he's able to work in more memorable silhouettes. Simply by considering the various TF2 characters with relation to each other you can reverse-engineer most of these lessons--but let's talk about them more in detail.

Silhouette/Scale

Even some of the most casual players are probably aware of silhouette design issues. This is perhaps the single most important factor when designing any videogame character. Look below--do you have trouble identifying any of the characters below solely by their silhouettes?
With TF2, Valve realized that the more quickly the player needs to identify other characters and act on that information (friend or foe, what class the other player is) the more important it becomes. The demands of a hardcore, team-based competitive multiplayer game helped drive the visual style for TF2 to not only be attractive, but also transparent to the needs of the gameplay. This transparency would be honed and show up again with L4D 1 and 2.

Character designs can be placed on a spectrum from the naturalistic (L4D) to stylized, to the almost completely abstract (say, Space Invaders). Above, these characters are all nominally human, but their silhouettes vary wildly. The more stylized the game, generally the more wiggle room you'll have to play with in terms of defining through silhouette.

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics has a very useful lens to consider this concept--the "Pictorial Vocabulary"--that applies equally as well to videogames as it does to comics. (A more detailed version with examples of this is available here.)

As games become more abstracted either up or to the right of this triangle, the more dramatic the differences in silhouette (may) become. Game mechanics tend to track similarly, though it is not strictly correlated. (There are a lot of games with somewhat realistic graphics but highly abstract mechanics and world.)
Start with a normal human silhouette, think about the various different messages it sends--height, weight, gender, age; the interrelations of shapes (held weapons also count a lot for unique silhouette), the character's most common postures, style of animation, etc. Silhouette is one of the most identifying factors so long as the character in question is not significantly occluded visually, or they can be clearly discerned from the background.

It's worth noting that for L4D, silhouette will also communicate important information like being gravely wounded--once a player has very low health they transition to the stooped, wounded stagger in place of a normal gait.

The natural corollary to silhouette is scale. A silhouette may identify a character well, but introduced together with scale variation, a character's readability is boosted considerably. With L4D, all characters are realistically scaled/silhouetted human characters (no giants, no dwarves, and no spikey anime hair) and yet the characters are all well differentiated on these grounds.

Color/Patterns

This is one of the least appreciated aspects of good visual character design. Clear, simplified application of color and pattern can be one of the best ways to create well differentiated characters--and it is here that arguably the L4D character designs are strongest.

Let's look at character concepts for both L4D1 and L4D2. Then consider the color schemes, divorced from all other aspects besides color by applying them to the same Lego minifigure-like template. Players familiar with them will have no trouble naming all 8 characters:

Simple, strong combinations of colors in different arrangements can by themselves create memorable, easily differentiated characters that can be IDed by the player under duress reliably, which is the holy grail for functional character design.

Materials/Detailing

Out of all concerns, materials and detailing are some of the most difficult to explicate, but still crucial to overall presentation. Material choice--say, a glistening bright shine on armor or a weapon vs. a matte finish--can go a long way, especially when other information isn't available to the player.
Extremely low-light conditions will strip players of color information, leaving only silhouette cues and in many cases not even that. Extremely reflective materials, on the other hand, will still "read" differently than matte ones in low light. (Which is part of why most real-world military firearms feature some manner of matte finishing, parkerizing and the like--so they won't reflect sharply in the dark.)

The associated problems here are why we've got the single biggest crutch for videogame character design: glow-y bits. Everyone from Sam Fisher to Marcus Fenix can orient themselves easily in a pitch-dark room, thanks to gratuitous glow-y bits. Your future power armor design lacking that necessary punch, or clarity? Glowing tech-bits are every lazy s.f. concept artist's best friend.

The slippery slope.

Detailing is a sort of catch-all description for other concerns too numerous for the scope of this article, including the overall visual complexity of a character. As such it should be considered carefully, as should the overall visual complexity of your game, as it relates to your gameplay.
Marcus Fenix and the other COGs in Gears of War are deceptive cases: with careful deployment of certain techniques, in combination with more overt ones such as glow-y bits, you can still maintain fairly good legibility--even if tastefulness remains elusive.

Color-overlay shaders reveal a breakdown of basic visual clarity in UT3.

But it can be tricky--Gears of Wars' near sibling Unreal Tournament 3, despite a very similar aesthetic, fails almost completely in terms of clarity of visual design. Busy, techy character designs against busy, techy backgrounds mean that in team games, characters and vehicles (!) at mid-to-long distances are overlayed with a red or blue shader shell, in order that they're readily perceptible at all.

I apologize if some of these concepts aren't fully explained, but with Part II we'll be applying all the lessons to some existing designs in another game. In the meantime--what are your favorite examples of visually successful and spectacularly unsuccessful visual designs for videogame characters?

Further viewing: Illustrative Rendering in TF2 Presentation

Level Design Primer: Keep It Wide

2009-10-24T10:20:00.000-07:00

I credit this rule to a friend of mine, Drew Risch. Mr. Risch was a professional architect for some time before going on to do level design on such titles as Planetside, designing several of the base layouts. Since then, Drew has recovered his sanity and traded in level design for effects work--but his design mentoring always proved invaluable.

This rule comes from the early days, where FPS players lept and bounded like strange, violent gazelles. Our younger readers may not know how different the early games were; for example, the running speed of the original Doom Guy in real terms is said to be about 60 mph. He could keep pace with a rocket fired parallel to him.
With so much play centered around mobility/maneuverability, a fun level was one that gave you enough space to work, but not so big as to be slack. You need room to circle-strafe, clearances to rocket-jump to. We may not be doing much of that in modern FPSes, but it's still important as ever to give the player room.

Boxed In

Recall the refrigerator box: the player is more unwieldy and blinkered than he thinks he is. Because of this, the level designer is called upon to build spaces around him that appear realistically scaled, but also tailored to mask the player's shortcomings. The simplest formulation of this design maxim? Keep It Wide.

This is to say, give the player room to maneuver/direct fire, and give enough space for clear visual navigation. A necessary corollary to this: the more players that play together in a space, the more room is necessary. Like all design rules, there are good reasons to violate this rule which we'll get to, but consider it good general practice.

Let us consider two scenarios--one from Valve's own Left 4 Dead campaign No Mercy, the other an excellent work in progress custom campaign, Highway to Hell.
Both campaigns begin in an apartment complex, but there are some crucial differences.

No Mercy: Bill is puzzled that the apartment's hallways are so generously sized, but knows he's got room to maneuver.

Highway to Hell: the survivors tend to see more of each other than zombies in some hallways. No place for a shotgun.

The setting and quality of set dressing are nearly identical, layouts very similar. One of the few small differences is that in Highway to Hell's apartment building, there are some extremely tight spaces for 4 players to fight through effectively. In L4D all players can freely clip through each other, which eliminates a lot of common related issues of this kind, but not all--friendly fire is still dealt. Which is exacerbated if players don't know the common practice of crouching if out in front.

No Mercy: Maybe a little oversized for the kind of mid-level apartment it would appear to be, but it gives room to play. No one joyfully shouts "this is so realistic!" when they're not having fun. (Outside of ArmA2 players, of course.)

Play through the beginning of No Mercy, paying attention to horizontal space. Most areas are built to accompany at least two abreast at any point--meaning if the two forward most players kneel, this is clearance enough for all four players to fire forward.
Not only does it make the game's stated emphasis on co-operative play viable, but it makes navigation easier as well--the more spatially restrictive an area is, often the harder it can be to clearly navigate. (In another update, I'll elaborate specifically on navigation considerations.)

The above shot is perhaps the diciest example from Highway to Hell. Most of the way through the map the survivors will wind their way through a meticulously recreated gas station.
The sense of place is very real, possibly to a fault: this communicating hallway is narrow and has a whopping six doors connected to it--to the front of the store, the back door, the break room, the restroom, and so on. While this is laid out realistically, suggesting it was all modeled on an actual gas station, it's also a death trap.
It's deceptively hard to move around in and direct fire, and if the Director throws down on the players through one of these connecting rooms--as it is wont to--the players might have a very hard time escaping, much less as a group.

I haven't had the pleasure of playing this map in actual co-operative play, only with bots, so I can't speak to whether the experience of it is panic inducing or annoying. The rub is that these two kinds of experiences live in very close proximity to each other.

Exceptions

This brings me to exceptions to the rule. Valve violates "Keep It Wide," that they otherwise strictly observe, in several key points throughout L4D. There is a storm drain sequence where it's obvious the players will only be able to advance in single file, a dangerous proposition in a world of zombies.
The above communicating hallway layout from Highway to Hell may also be an exception: despite being uncomfortably narrow to move and direct fire in, it is also small, and well connected, and veteran players should be alert enough in such a tight space. (Designing with the 360 version in mind would mean this area is simply out of the question, however.)

The more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to think it is an exception. Though I would note that the navigational issues (difficult to orient in such a nondescript corridor with so many doors) would be helped by introducing orienting details: restroom decal and possibly some chinsy art hanging on the opposite wall.

But the truth is, like every design decision made, you won't know until you get playtesters. If this area is consistently panicking players or making for some tense little shootouts, it's worth keeping, but if it's producing disproportionate casualties or an untoward difficulty spike, then it's worth revising.

Any design decision that violates best practices for level design in your game must be carefully considered. Is it breaking a rule in a fun, tension-inducing way, or is it doing it in a completely unfair, obnoxious way? You won't know without playtesting.

But rest assured that you'll address many aggravating issues with playtesting before they start if you remember "Keep It Wide."

[This was by no means intended to pick on the designer "Unlawful Combatant." Highway to Hell is absolutely professional quality work, and once its polished and completed it will rival or surpass a number of the original campaigns in the game; readers with L4D should check it out and see just how many of the previously mentioned Level Design Primer concepts they can spot (hint: basically all of them).]

Reboot Reboot: 1-800 HOW'S MY BLOGGING?

2009-10-19T20:03:00.000-07:00

If you're reading this, I consider you an important part of the site, some element of it's now-forming nucelus of commenters/contributors.

Articles have been posted over the past months but I consider the site newly live and active, and it's time for some critical assessments and adjustments.
Your input on the following is greatly appreciated:

1.) Nomenclature

Some of you may have noticed by now that the title term "design reboot" gets flung around an awful lot, but the majority of the content I post is not actually about doing a "reboot" of a francise or IP at all, it's spinning out a new idea using the old game as a point of departure. What should I call these? design sketches?

I reserve the right do to "proper" design reboots, I'd just like to clarify things. Should I just tag the posts with design reboot/design sketch and just title them differently?
"Design sketch" is a lot more accurate for what most of these posts are about, and likely will be in the future. I don't like starting off every post title with "design reboot," it's redundant information if that's how most of them start. I'll just better use of the tagging system.

(I still think "Design Reboot" is a perfectly good title for the site so don't worry. I'm far too lazy to go about redesigning that beautiful header--and hopefully there will be more content that is worthy of the inspiration for the site's name)

2.) Content

People seem to be interested to read the game comments, but the level design primers and other design discussion related posts seem to draw interest as well. What is your favorite content? What would you like to see more of?

What about update regularity--would you prefer more frequent updates, as they are now, even if the writeup isn't all that thought through, or would you rather see more developed write-ups?

As I just hinted in at in the comments section, I think I'd like to start "iterating" on design posts. There are so many interesting and worthwhile ideas posted in the comments, I would leave the original posting up, and then periodically revisit it, probably with additional artwork, with the commenter ideas factored in and elaborated.
This could then in turn spawn fresh discussion which, with enough momentum, gets rolled into another update later on, and visitors at that point can click back through the idea at different stages.

3.) Tone

This is one of these things I'll probably have to iron out on my own, but input would be appreciated. For instance take the most recent update. It makes fun of Alone in the Dark and then segues into an original idea. I'm concerned that this comes off as glib or disrespectful, especially in close proximity to a game idea writeup--I'm not trying to give the impression of superiority or "knowing better."

It's confusing because it's not a reboot and is labeled as such (see item 1), which has lead some people to think I'm disrespecting the talent and ability of those that worked on the games I'm re-imagining. Nothing could be further from the truth; the one major title to my name is Darkest of Days, a game that was not received charitably. I don't need to be adding to the general pile of flippant remarks posted on the internet. It's not what this site is about.

I guess there's not much of a question here, so much as a resolution to be careful about tone. I like to be funny, but it's bricks and glass houses when I'm talking about other developers. I need to keep my deprecatory comments limited to my own work, and address criticisms of other games more respectfully.

4.) Presentation

The other issues I wanted to bring up would be the formatting for the game idea posts. I've received comments that the hypothetical Metacritic ratings are distracting and the youtube embeds come off as amateurish--what do you think? The youtubes came from initially wanting to just embed some music for certain posts, and I got that all wired up but I didn't have a solution for hosting the mp3s. I agree that the embedded youtubes are probably distracting.

Are there any elements to the regular design write-ups you'd like to see? More art, even if it's rougher sketches?

DIAL 1-800

Any and all comments would be invaluable. If you enjoy this site, take this as the Public Broadcasting "viewers like you" moment.

And if you've made it this far: tune up all your gripes about fantasy gaming tropes and dust off those melee combat paradigms, because we'll soon be exploring the overripe world of western fantasy RPGs.

Design Reboot: Torch

2009-10-19T09:43:00.000-07:00

What to do with Alone In The Dark?

Pictured: catwalk over electrified sludge, spider enemies, pipes.

The original was of the very first survival horror games. It went through increasingly abstruse sequels, until suffering the double indignity of an Uwe Boll movie adaptation and then a high profile reboot that was the most overstuffed hot mess of a game I can think of.

A short list of crimes:

control shenanigans
inventory system designed via divination/casting reptile bones
camera shenanigans
"cinematic" storytelling
mysterious powers
spider enemies
tentacle goop with mysterious powers
"cinematic" driving sequence
NYC-centrism

The game can't be faulted for a clear and admirable desire for innovation, despite its control issues. On the other hand, it's a posterchild for modern, multiplatform bloatware that overreaches in just about every category (if I want "cinematic," I'll go to the movies). Alone in the Dark seems like an ideal candidate for the "back to basics" treatment.

Jack White, of the White Stripes/Raconteurs/Dead Weather, is a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to making music in the studio. He's outspoken about wishing that bands were forced to make their first album on nothing more than a 4-track--and while with any such sweeping generalization it's easy to think of reasons why it's not the best idea, I find it an aspirational sentiment. Something about nailing the basics before you get fancy.

Disparition - Timişoara

And in that spirit we frame today's design reboot: Torch. Take away the crawlie things, the Powers, mysterious past, the glowing tentacles that grab NPCs in scripted sequences, fixation on another medium's way of storytelling, scrape it all out and rinse with the garden hose--until you are only left with being alone, in the dark.

Torch is a game about delving deep into our most basic fears. Home invasion, kidnapping. There are no cutscenes, no long dialogues with celebrity voices. You play a string of characters that need to survive the worst night of their lives.

[A key inspiration: the film The Strangers. In his directoral debut, Brian Bertino takes a small cast, a single location, and sets about wreaking havoc with little more than mounting dread and suggestive framing. (Do not watch this movie with anyone who is even a little bit scared of home invasion.)]

Just as horror movies benefit from minimalist production, maximalist dread, Torch would be built from the two titular elements of survival horror. Probably near-third person or first person, set in small but densely constructed and detailed levels. The control layout would be adequate but unfussy, but this would be offset by a positively austere use of HUD elements (ideally none).
The game opens directly from the desktop with a black screen while loading, no splash or title screens. A text-only menu on black background. Players choose from a branching list of progressively worst-night-of-my-life scenarios of various ordinary characters, given first names only, a one or two word bio. Ellen, homemaker. Alex, dentist.

One of the first stories presented is being at home at night during a break-in. Barring aggressive play, it should be reasonably easy to "win," but the player has been given a taste of the atmospheric dread to come--NPC assailants vary their numbers, start locations and motivations on every playthrough.
Other early scenarios are a walk home at night, finding the car in a dim parking garage. A laundry list of sequences based on exactly the things we're most anxious about in life.

Through the shorter introductory scenarios, the player masters the essential survival skills: the flashlight, the small combat sequences (dictated by the abilities and identity character they're playing and weapons available), but mostly the timing/decisionmaking, situational awareness. Learning to take careful cues from the environment to survive. Running.

Soon the most difficult scenarios unlock. Waking up in the den of a serial killer (tonally dark but without any overtones of sexual abuse) with all but locked doors and needing to escape--you can try the phone, but how do you tell the police where you are? Violent home invasion, and the like.

Upon it's small, PC digital-only release, Torch is judged with a very favorable 83/100. Critics enjoy the freshness of the back to basics, no-frills approach to harrowing situations. The game doesn't take many hours on paper to complete, but played with headphones and the lights off, most players voluntarily take their time savoring the panic.

Design Reboot: Flatlander Woman

2009-10-16T19:13:00.000-07:00

"The mission will require us to do more than frighten the NSF

with our baggy coats that make us look bigger than we really are."

For the ice queen, Gyges' Ring.

The Knife - Silent Shout
It seems legitimate to assume that an elite assassin who can turn invisible would equate morality to a single question: did anyone catch me? And of course, Anna Navarre has never been caught. Not yet.

Consider Flatlander Woman: a stealth game where the years of training, mechanical augmentations, and the cloaking device ensure that stalking prey is only as sporting as cat and mouse.
Killing isn't the hard part, but it is the problem: like most FPS players, Anna prefers to resolve her issues with a liberal application of violence. It also happens that there are no unkillable NPCs in her world.

The game is structured to anticipate/accommodate Anna killing any character in the game, so the question becomes whether the player is, too?

Think of the extended sequence in Nikita (right) where the cleaner played by Jean Reno does damage control by increasing the bodycount. Now replay those same scenarios as the elite Anna Navarre--you're not limited by how many you can kill, but how many kills you can get away with. Like the high stakes tension of a body-hiding sequence in a Hitman game, but compounded over the game's length. The emphasis is slightly less on the deed itself and more the constant cold-blooded calculations of what any given murder will or won't do for Anna.

There could be unforeseen consequences; there could be blowback.
Especially if Anna disappears someone back at headquarters (not just a target, and the target's family, and all the first responders while on a mission). There are a lot of possible reasons for this--the game could feature a "catch the spy" subplot, a whodunit with randomized suspects, and Anna needs to be sure the mole is dead. Or maybe just someone didn't refill the coffee maker after the last cup, and Anna/the player really wants to see how many people they can kill. Pushing it as far as they can without a killphrase getting invoked, or SWAT teams descending at night on Anna's bunk.

There are obvious structural snarls that would come with building a game like this, but the payoff is something of a freer form Hitman experience. Navarre still has her targets on missions, but back at headquarters she exercises Darwinian fitness in protecting her own interests, as well as her one soft spot for the well-being of Gunther Hermann. It's a rolling assassin's gallery, where the killer's own reflexes are what get her the most into trouble.

On release, Flatlander Woman and its paranoid super assassin bloodbath rate 77/100 on Metacritic. Despite carefully meted tutorial content, casual players find themselves bewildered by having too many possible targets, or being frustrated by what they feel is not clear enough explanation for the consequences of impulse killing sprees. Critics are warmer but anyone not already a part of 47's congregation is not impressed.

Design Reboot: Laputan Machine

2009-10-15T06:55:00.000-07:00

"I am not a machine."

This is a Darth Vader story.

Skip the part about the screeching kid and the Oedipal overtones and the retroactive ruination of a classic film trilogy--skip all of it save the image of a man in black, eaten up with machinery. That's Gunther.

Portishead - Machine Gun
In Deus Ex (2000) Gunther Hermann is mostly a punchline: a psychotic dinosaur, a mechanically-augmented agent rightfully fearful of being made obsolete by the new-model nanotech Denton brothers.

But picture a prequel centered on Gunther's descent into monsterhood. Start with a well meaning field agent with the deck stacked against him. End with an echo of a man, steeped in blood, pleading for a clean slate.

A friend once told me what they wanted out of games was feeling "like I had just jumped out of an airplane with no parachute."

Laputan Machine is about that suicidal freefall: a series of choices between bad and worse, how a man's moral compass is broken by way of desperate self-preservation.

The game starts with a fully human Gunther Hermann on his first major field op. It is a disaster, a bloodbath, the wounded Gunther barely escaping with his life. While convalescing he is talked into receiving his first mechanical augmentation.

At first he is elated; the young agent is given a bulwark against mortality, an easy upgrade to dramatically increased operational fitness, the player behind him given a seemingly familiar route to more mayhem (shadows of Syndicate's classic agent upgrade system, pictured right).
But here also begins the central conflict/negative feedback loop of the game: balancing Gunther's mental stability/grasp on humanity with the dehumanizing necessity of mechanical augmentation. (Perhaps implemented something like the "sanity" system of Lovecraftian horror games.)

The more indiscriminate the killing, the higher the bodycount, the more unstable Gunther becomes and the more he gives in to the mech-augs enabling the bloodshed, dimming his conscience and humanity. Give in to the machine too quickly, or kill too many and Gunther loses it, the game ends prematurely with the first major alternate ending: Gunther being put down like a rabid dog by his disappointed handlers.

As in the original Deus Ex, the game may be completed with predominantly non-lethal tactics employed for most missions. This limits Gunther's recourse to mech-augs and eventually earns the second alternate ending of Gunther finishing with his mind mostly intact, possibly even leaving the newly established UNATCO, but this is an ever increasingly difficult path.

The player is in Gunther's shoes: ultraviolence by way of mechanical augmentations is the easy way out, but also the road to lost humanity. Do you take the increasingly difficult moral high road, or does Gunther give in to the machine?
Going the full mech-augs/1,000 killcount scenario earns the ending that places Gunther as he is at the beginning of Deus Ex, with the revelation of where Gunther's childlike psychosis stems from.
Conflicted over his lost humanity and psychopathic killing, Gunther begs his handlers to finish what the mech-augs have started: memory erasure/ personality augmentation. He loses most of himself, even losing the cherished memory of the final stage of mechanical augmentation available in the game: the skul-gun aug.

The game encompasses the classic cyberpunk question of humanity eclipsed by technology, but is also centered on the questioning the moral ramifications of an action videogame protagonist's typically guilt-free mass murdering sprees.

I personally love IO Interactive's Kane & Lynch (2007) for most of all the reasons Jeff Gerstmann famously hated it: the characters are exactly as ugly and unredeemed as their actions would dictate. There is no mystifying disconnect between the character and their actions in the game. I think it's an idea worth further exploration.
[For me this is the major cognitive dissonance in Uncharted--Drake efficiently killing swaths of men, then gets back to effortlessly chucklehorsing around with the cute blonde in cutscenes. Uncharted is hardly alone in this, but the extremely high quality of the storytelling heightens the dissonance above most other games.]

Upon release, Laputan Machine earns a Metacritic score of 69/100.
It slowly builds a following from Deus Ex fans, but many critics and gamers are off-put by the frank, "un-fun" depiction of violence and gore; the game's themes are judged too heavy handed, the story too much of a downer. Who wants to get their nose rubbed in the violence they're complicit to?

Check in tomorrow for the companion piece: Flatlander Woman.

Design Reboot: Invasive Species (Part II)

2009-10-11T22:48:00.000-07:00

Homelife - Scrivener's Waltz

Part II on Invasive Species is an overview of the major players and variables in the world:

The first major variable is the roughly eight or so escaped convicts: they're unpredictable, amoral bastards (just like an FPS player). Each has a certain profile, habits and goals, though most want to escape the planet as well. Every playthrough a couple of them die at random in the crash and their starting order (time at which they escape from prison ship wreckage) also randomizes, which increases replayability.

This is partly inspired by the uncompleted Black Isle Fallout 3 design (Van Buren). Chris Avellone posited that the most dangerous force in the world as other player characters and their parties. The player is always the prime mover in games--what if NPC characters were given the same volition?

The second variable is the deathgrass: the crash will scatter the spores somewhere different for each playthrough, which may hurt or hinder its chances of growing, and alter the local geopolitics considerably when it does. While the crashed ship is always in the same location, the deathgrass is not. As the playthrough progresses, the deathgrass is more and more a factor, moreso if it's not dealt with early on.
Deathgrass, contrary to it's name, is not strictly lethal. But it hurts and will impede movement. To a healthy player it's scarcely an issue, but to find oneself in a firefight deep within a field of deathgrass is asking for trouble.

Third variable is the local population. Unlike in Unreal the Nali are not a stock alien slave race/noble savage stand-in. They can and do fight the Skaarj regularly.
The Skaarj on the other hand are feral, bestial race of hunter gathers who rule the majority of the considerable jungle/forest areas in the game. They are far more difficult to gain trust/alliance for the player, but it is possible.
An alliance with the Skaarj will net basically no new technology or supplies other than basic food, but will allow safe travel through considerable portions of Skaarj back country as well as some helpful friends for certain fights.
Depending on your character's diplomacy and/or xenolinguistics, you may ingratiate yourself with either side, or be the bane of both by raiding food and supplies. Other convicts coming into contact with either side before you do first will also change things.

The final variables are the other crashed spaceships on planet aside from your prison ship, including the pursuit ship. Skiptracers are out for what they think is easy money when their ship crashes; other ships crashed and have been marooned for centuries. In them might be dormant aliens or powerful weapons, but like other factors in the game their location and presence are not reliable.

If it sounds like a too-busy free for all, good. Nothing worse than a neat game environment with nothing to do in it, or replayability reduced to nil because of strict linearity.

If you think it vaguely resembles S.T.A.L.K.E.R. if you cock your head at an angle and purge enough radiation from your system with GSC vodka, you're right. That game reaffirmed my believe that you don't sweat player choice if it's not really that tough to let them have it, all else being equal. And you can let them have a lot more choice than most, if you plan from the start to allow for it.

Invasive Species becomes about what the player wants it to be: the stated goal is to escape, but there are no forced failures if they decide to stick around. Myriad 360/Steam achievements are wired in to recognize various player-set goals: capture all other convicts to bargain for your own release, kill all other convicts, King of the Nali, King of the Skaarj, I Survived 200 Game-Days of Deathgrass spreading And All I Got Was This Achievement, and so on.

On release, Invasive Species receives a Metacritic rating of 83/100. It is roundly praised for the extensive replay value and the variability of one person's playthrough as compared to another. Gaming forums have multi-page discussion threads where players recount specific playthroughs and their attendant unexpected gameplay moments. Other players dive into their own new playthroughs in an attempt to reproduce such scenarios.
And so by request a patch is produced that allows players, upon a single successful playthrough, to start a "New Game +" that exposes a number of otherwise hidden variables for seeding the gameworld.

Design Reboot: Invasive Species (Part I)

2009-10-11T05:35:00.001-07:00

Unreal (1998) was Epic Games' first FPS. Compared to their blockbuster Gears of War franchise now, Unreal was rough, unfocused, and ponderously long; but it was also immersive, fun, inventive and visually stunning. A proud moment for a company that has come a very long way in the eleven (!) years since.

The famous waterfall (give 1998 a break, OK)

Players will likely remember a key handful of scenes: the prison ship introductory level that opened up into an impressive waterfall reveal, the first Skaarj fight as the lights turn off, the four-armed Nali and their healing fruit, the "Big Man," and the Sunspire (if they got that far).

Start with the same premise and extrapolate from what you remember best and fondest, not what was. Stir in exploration elements and some Metroidvania while you're at it. Put it all together with the rigor of modern design methodologies--but stay with the neophytic verve that informed the original.

Invasive Species starts again with you as a prisoner on a prison ship. Expand the vestigial kernel presented at the beginning of Unreal (a choice of male or female character model/sound set) into a full blow character selection. Multiple options for character appearance, and more critically, a selection between archetypal backgrounds which dictate starting abilities and conversation options.
(It's time to stop with the silent protagonists already.)

Discovering the deathgrass

The prisoner emerges from the prison ship wreckage to find a breathtaking alien world: exotic and fecund, though the flora seems close to a Earth-tropics analog. The player's objective is simple: escape the planet and evade re-capture, should anyone come looking.

Complicating factors reveal themselves in a sort of spiraling cascade:

1.) Someone does come looking

2.) That someone also finds out the hard way that the planet has an atmosphere/magnetic field etc. that likes to crash spaceships, a sort of planetary Bermuda's Triangle

3.) Yours is not the first ship to fall to the surface

4.) The other convicts from your ship are loose and have a headstart on you

5.) The indigenous Nali are locked in a decades long war with the Skaarj, both may very well be hugely xenophobic

6.) The crash of your ship has introduced an invasive species of hivemind fungiform deathgrass, which is going to wreck the planet's proverbial shit

What the player gets is a planet-wide Battle Royal, with all manner of jockeying for position and shifting alliances, and a running day/night system by which new developments are doled out--say between day 7 and 10, the pursuit vessel crashes. Around day 15 the deathgrass spreads enough to become self-aware, and so on.

Check back tomorrow for the Metacritic score, more illustrations, and a breakdown of the various factions/wildcards of the game world and plot outline.
In the meantime, anyone have a better (and hopefully pun-less) title for this one?

Edit: name changed from "Lost In Space Marine" to "Invasive Species" courtesy of Design Reboot regular Johnnyburn.

Additional reading:
Screenshots of classic scenes
Interesting tech demo/beta Unreal screenshots and gameplay footage

Control Resolution: I'm Good With My Hands

2009-09-16T03:50:00.001-07:00

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood features a showdown mechanic which doesn't quite work--and the reason why is control resolution.

Get ready to draw like you're holding the pencil in the wrong hand.

But what do I mean by control resolution? In short, what and how much I control with what input. Much ado has been made about Batman: Arkham Asylum's largely one-button fighting system, yet generally people approve because it makes sense. Batman is Batman, fighting a group of thugs to him would be as easy as, well, pressing a button.

COJ:BIB is an FPS, which assumes that the majority of skills needed for gunhandling the character does automatically.
Breath control, muscle memory, there are a host of issues that come into play in reality which we may happily elide for sake of whatever kind of gameplay we want to achieve for most casual games, though ironsight-aiming has come into vogue.
(Simulation games are typically about the player directly controlling more actions. While hardly simulative, America's Army does place breath control into the hands of the player, whereas most FPS games reserve such a mechanic for long range shooting.)

It's a Western game, so absolutely Bound in Blood should feature a showdown mechanic. The trouble here is that the game experience is about me playing a character that is a gunfighter.
But then for a short minigame I play his arm, not the gunfighter.
During the showdown I'm suddenly given fine resolution control of Ray or Thomas' shooting arm in screen space, which is a completely foreign control concept to the game. Which means I glide through most of the game, feeling appropriately bad-ass as a gunfighter, and then I'm forced through a minigame repeatedly that shatters my sense of mastery.

I found myself wishing it were more gestural. A gunslinger stays alive with fast-twitch muscle response, split-second stuff, and in this game I'm a gunslinger. Pitching the resolution of the simulation down to gross motor function in that kind of set-up without accordingly narrowing the setting/gameplay (like fight night, which makes sense) is a serious misstep.

Trespasser rather infamously featured an arm that you controlled like an alien might control the body of an earthling, and the problem was the same. It's a neat idea, but unless the game were, in fact, written to be that the player takes over an unfamiliar corporeal form, it makes the experience about a very strange person trapped on an island, wrestling with controlling her own arm. The ghost of proprioception rides again.

Same basic issue with Alone in the Dark's disastrously misconceived inventory and control system, taken even further. I don't want to play as a character with some motor control problems, I want to play a guy who understands how his own hands work.
I press a button to swing a fist or swing a chair at someone's face because the guy understands that basic action, I shouldn't have to do it for him.

The game's control and inventory system conspire to produce the ludicrous experience found in the demo, where I'm tasked to dispense a supernatural villain who will keep coming back lest he be put down with fire. I understand with the gimmicky operation of the combine-o-tronic inventory system I'm probably going to need to fashion a lighter-and-hairspray flamethrower, but I'm left to figure out the laborious inventory system and combine these items, in real time, while my assailant beats me about the head, neck, and tender bits. No thank you.

Ultimately what I find interesting about this problem is that it can be discussed in a somewhat academic sense, as above, or it can be solved with a question of role playing. If you're building a game around a certain type of character--a professional athlete, a professional warrior--are you pitching your control resolution to a level that makes sense?

In Praise of The Deep End

2009-09-14T02:30:00.001-07:00

Death to Spies: Moment of Truth is lauded/derided as Hitman in WWII, which was enough for me to check it out. Little did I know that I'd be dropping straight into the deep end of the pool.

Now mind you, game difficulty is a different beast for me these days. I'm a level designer and more and more mainstream games are less geared toward making the player actually figure anything out for themselves more than greasing the skids.
It's a mark of professional pride--I make levels, I make the puzzles in reverse order too, and I'll be damned if there's someone else out there setting out puzzles (outside of Jonathan Blow) that's going to stump me for any length of time. But have the past few years of soft-pedaled difficulty in games dulled my skills?

Knowing the typical workflow of setting out challenges for players doesn't always aid me as a player. Playing all the Hitman games didn't set me up for what I was getting into with DTS, and neither did the game itself.

It was a flashback of sorts. Long-time fans of Hitman will remember "Anathema," the first level of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, with either fondness or loathing. It's a superb mission, but largely ill-suited for the start of a game.

Sure, the tutorial/intro gives you a mechanical understanding of 47's capabilities, but not the rules of the game world or what to expect from the mission proper. And so Anathema starts you with perched on a hillside overlook of an Italian villa, with a priest to rescue and a man to kill and damned if you had the faintest idea of how to go about it.

Which in some respects is a pity--once you know the rules of Hitman games the missions become sublime; you can finish them the first time through with a Silent Assassin rating (given for surgical prowess) without prior knowledge of the mission simply because all missions are constructed with certain unwritten rules in mind.

On the other hand--isn't the genius of Super Mario Brothers that the elegant simplicity hides the depth of play? Trading tips with friends, secrets? Remember riding home from a trip to the store with the game box in your lap, pouring over the manual for every kernel of information about the game you were about to play?
If through trial and error you bested Anathema and gone on to even greater challenges, later you could return to that first mission and find it all laid out before you, clear as day.

But back to Death To Spies. I start the first mission and am given a weapons loadout screen with actual choices--and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck with the rarity of being given choices, right out of the gate, that I know make a difference. You can equip a variety of primary and secondary weapons, and if they are of Russian origin then they'll blow your cover, even if you've gotten yourself a German uniform (I would find out that you need to make headshots if you want to take a German's uniform, since you can't go around wearing blood-soaked camo). I have a choice between suppressed and unsuppressed sidearms as well, which is also a big deal in a stealth game.

I feel a little lost, but I also feel as though I'm being treated like an adult; a welcome change after the tutorializing excess of several recent AAA titles. I happen upon the F1 key, which actually does give me a pretty good overview of individual mechanics, even if it doesn't give me a thread to string them together.
I am cautious, I save and reload and restart the mission with a different approach, intent on gaining this game's equivalent of Silent Assassin rating--but this game follows the travails of a Russian SMERSH agent, do they care about bodycounts so long as the job gets done?

About an hour or so in on my first tentative mission of a surprisingly difficult game, I hesitate.

The most looming game in terms of difficulty slope and esoteric knowledge is X-COM. After selecting difficulty level, literally the first mouse click on the Geoscape (placing your first base) can have far-reaching consequences, very possibly damning you to an early defeat.
Now that's the deep end. I know I probably wouldn't be looking back on the game fondly at all without the steady stream of reliable strategems and real-time advisory from siblings also having played or currently playing X-COM--but the truth of the matter is that I do look back fondly, much as a whole generation of children, regardless of their predilection for gaming now look back fondly on trading tips and mastery of Super Mario Brothers. (Except not at all; those kids were clearly too stupid to save the Earth from an insidious alien threat.)

I still haven't made much headway in Death to Spies but it's a welcome return--a return to the days where developers assume the player can think and can deal with consequences on all by themselves. That I can appreciate.

What games do you admire despite/because of their difficult learning curve?

Restate Assumption: Out of Ammo

2009-08-07T00:59:00.001-07:00

Restate assumption:
The player should never/sometimes/often run out of ammo.

Which statement makes sense? Continuing on the nostalgia trip of my examination of Doom's E1M1, I think of how those early games turned me into an ammunition miser. (Was it the game? Was it, as my brothers and I now wonder at now, peer reinforcement about Dad's fiscal conservativism?)

I remember finishing the first episode of Doom with 95% of the rockets I picked up through the levels, taking down the Barons with excessive zeal. Finally, I could spend those rockets because there's no way to keep them after the last level. I hoarded ammo because I might need it, and unlike many modern shooters, actually running out of ammo was a real possibility.

Maybe it put a crimp in my fun--that BFG-9000 unfired until the Cyberdemon showed--but maybe ammunition conservation is it's own kind of fun, it's own mechanic and reward system.

It's a game sub-system that modern shooters with infinite pistol ammo largely forgo, which is a shame. When gamers are continually re/over-supplied to their hearts' content, the strategic long-term questions about rationing or expenditure recede entirely as does challenge.
I would argue that it undercuts the modest yet crucial roleplay that comes with a shooter: I'm a space marine, I'm a Rainbow 6 operative, I'm whoever Call of Duty calls me to inhabit, and to a man every one of them should be mindful of their ammunition.

I think of every time I've needed the Hammer of Dawn in Gears of War, well low and behold, here one is conveniently dropped and I feel like a chump for keeping a weapon around that is guaranteed to be given to the player again if he ever needs to use it.

More simulative shooters give the player realistic ammunition loads but also restrict information about exactly how many rounds are left: SWAT 4, Red Orchestra come to mind.
Killzone 2 has the option to reduce or eliminate the HUD entirely, something I enjoy tremendously. I'm only about halfway through that game, but I have never once truly needed to know how much ammo I have left. (Though proprioceptive/body awareness cues advanced creatively would be appreciated, like being able to look down at a chest harness and see remaining full magazines.)

Not to say there aren't modern games that consider and tweak the modern conception. Mirror's Edge is a wonderful example of more or less bypassing weapons and ammunition entirely; they are of limited use to Faith. If the player chooses to use them, Faith stops at stooping to reload the things, giving them a temporary power-up like quality. But that is dispensing with weapons, not really reconsidering ammunition useage.

A better example would be more traditional survival horror games, such as old Resident Evil titles, which severely restricted available ammunition. Adherents to this first games generally crabbed at the relative surplus of ammunition available to Leon in RE4 and then later to Redfield and Sheva in RE5, though it's still scrounging by the standards of many games.

As with so many modern shooter paradigms, I think it's Far Cry 2 that has come out with a fascinating balance to this question. Using your own weapons usually means you can stay well stocked, though sometimes with supply runs to the weapons depot; the far more interesting risk/reward mechanic is picking up rusty weapons off your fallen foe. There is a kind of economy of bad-assedness which dictates that your super killer mercenary character should be able to pick up any guns he comes across and kill with it, increased weapon jams and all. And taking his malaria pills in time.

But I can't help but think there might be some more interesting spaces to be explored with very limited ammunition loads, or artificially scarce ammunition, like the aforementioned Detective game concept. Or maybe a game that would play like a sort of no-tech Crysis--instead of playing the super soldier Predator-ing around an island with armed thugs looking for him, it's more of a Manhunt scenario where the player can--and should--use every dirty trick in the book to take down his target. Six bullets, six targets?
Playing a game version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, where only one round left is an even grimmer proposition than usual?

GAUSSWERKS goes live

2009-07-26T06:45:00.001-07:00

Unlikely as it seemed in my mind that I'd ever get three different sites up with unified layouts online, it's happened, and what's more I've gotten my portfolio back online.

So for those counting at home:

http://designreboot.blogspot.com (the site your are on.)
http://gausswerks.blogspot.com (design+concept image site.)
http://www.gausswerks.com (newly relaunched portfolio.)

You can also navigated through these three sites with the links at the bottom of every page. Because you know, everyone goes scraping round the bottom of a website for more links, naturally.

Design Reboot: Dr. Ivan Just Can't Die

2009-07-16T18:51:00.000-07:00

What high profile game series is least in need of a design reboot? Probably Half-Life. Let's do it anyway. Mental exercise is good for you.

Tricky - Vent
Start back with "Ivan the Space Biker," the earliest incarnation of the Gordon Freeman character model. The chunky hazmat suit, the bushy beard, the flat-top hair cut, the Ted Kaczynski eyes; what's not to love?
We know Gordon Freeman as a cypher, a mute avatar that is nonetheless a heroic figure among videogame protagonists--but how different the original game would be if it were filtered through the perception of Ivan? What gameplay would match the his sensibility, the low constancy of his gutteral rantings?

Unlike the more winsome Dr. Freeman, let's assume Dr. Ivan is as deeply paranoid and reclusive as his appearance suggests.
You're clearly a long term employee of Black Mesa, knowing more than a few dark secrets but also intimately familiar with the layout of the place.
Your status as the facility's recluse means that your tenure at Black Mesa is tenuous at best (ha!)--so you're called to do some cart pushing in the test chamber. Reluctantly you agree in order to keep your job.

The catastropic events that follow might best be described as Diehard meets Andromeda Strain. And you say, "hold on, couldn't that trite movie pitch formula be used to describe the original Half-Life?" to which I say shut up, Dad. I learned it from you.

The game would play as a mayhem-filled survival horror scenario instead of heroic run and gun. As Dr. Ivan, you freak out and hole up in a pre-arranged safe room/storage area deep in depths of Black Mesa, emerging months later very hungry and with a prodigious beard growth, your worst fears confirmed.
Virtually all of your former colleagues are long dead. The US Military is still not far from using the nuclear option on the now alien-infested facility, though desperately trying to reclaim it with conventional means.

But as the time frame is far past that of the original game, the entire base is essentially "behind enemy lines." A First Person Stealth/Insanity Shooter (FPSIS). With cunning, ingenuity, and the self-preservation of a full-blown paranoiac, you'll guide Dr. Ivan to survival, escape... or is it that you've always secretly wanted to go to another dimension and never come back? And what's up with this Barney guy, anyway? Is he on the drugs?

On release, Dr. Ivan Just Can't Die receives a Metacritic rating of 73/100. The game develops a considerable cult following over some years (and a boost in sales once the v.01.05 patch is introduced, which allows players the option to turn off Ivan's rantings), but not enough to fund a sequel. Fans are left wondering just what a deranged, fascinating sequel might have followed from such a difficult, unusual game.

Free Radical, Stalkerbot, and Other Table Scraps

2009-07-16T03:03:00.000-07:00

It was 2005, and like a lot of people I was obsessed with Half-Life 2.

I was still fairly fresh out of college and possessed of just enough ability, and time, and leftover invincibility that I believed if I worked hard enough, I could put together a targeted concept art portfolio that could get me a job at Valve. (Spoiler alert: it didn't.)

It was an invaluable lesson; the time spent playing in and around someone else's universe was an education in itself. Possibly more valuable was the understanding that a targeted portfolio can beg unfavorable comparisons to artists like the peerless Viktor Antonov, which is unwise.

I wrapped the images up in a special section of a larger but no less carefully curated portfolio, fiddled with the resume, and then sent the email off to Valve. Riding high, I posted the images on a few artboards including the conceptart.org forums.

On CA.org I was roundly excoriated by one poster in particular armed with a short, blunt list of my stylistic and technical shortcomings. Incensed, I clicked to the poster's profile--who were they to criticize, exactly?
It happened to be somebody with an email address that ended @valvesoftware.com (no, I didn't recognize the name). I considered it my official unofficial reply from Valve, as none ever arrived in my inbox, and that was that.

Dreams settled back down to the earth and between then and now I traveled extensively and worked on various projects.
Years later, I feel rather fond about these illustrations overall, and consider their posting here a kind of exorcism of that old feeling of defeat--I've learned since to consider the work itself the reward, and the things that come or don't as a result entirely secondary. Life as an artist is a lot happier in this frame of mind.

But before I get to the "Valve Portfolio," I was referring to, here are a couple of mod/expansion type ideas I thought about in those days. Like everyone else--who wasn't thinking about Half-Life 2 then?

Free Radical would be the one and only clever name (in the vein of Blue Shift, Opposing Force) for a HL universe project that I ever came up with; the idea itself wasn't so great. Something about a rogue Combine soldier type's journey to the other side; maybe early levels would involve fighting against the Resistance but coming round to following Freeman eventually.

It was conceived to be graceful under the constraints of a one man mod project and so is naturally consigned to triviality by that nature... I still like the image, though.

Michelle is the leader of a small enclave far outside the realm of Combine control--she wears a trophy Combine Elite uniform as a dress. Largely intended as a anchor character for a group that the player encounters and possibly embroiled in petty politics. Gameplay scenario is the "drifter comes to town" where the player becomes familiar with a small, mostly closed defensive layout and then Combine stage a vicious assault. Player must defend and then help with the emergency withdrawal.

Stalkerbot (working title--I suppose Free Radical would have worked here too?) was more ambitious, though still basically a smallish mod project. It was intended as a day in the life experience of someone who slid hopelessly underneath Combine rule.

It opens on a HL2-style limited POV cinematic; periodic time-lapse montage from a vantage point inside an apartment whose walls peel as times go sour. You are a man who watches his wife wither and grow desperate and the (tastefully implied) death of a child from malnutrition. With no other option, you volunteer to become a Metrocop. One of them.
Actually building this thing would have dictated the resolution of the story here (how much Metrocop training/indoctrination?), but I liked the idea of showing how by degrees, even decent people (even you, player) can get roped into evil things.
Before long there's the sequence where the player is an active participant in the brutal suppression of a food riot, probably staged at the very train station from the opening of HL2. You thump on those helpless civilians and it's probably fun, in that Stalinist regime sort of way. You fall a little further down but at the critical moment there's an awakening, a forced ultimatum by a superior say, and it pulls you back to your basic humanity.

And for that, you're hauled away and turned into one of those ghoulish "stalkers" that haunt the corridors of the Citadel.
You end up being further dehumanized by random incorporation into an experimental man-machine weapon rig of the Combine (pictured right), and then fight war-crime worthy mission against the Resistance.
It'd be like fighting in a small-sized mech, HUD and all... at which point there again you reclaim one last stake in your humanity and I don't know, take the Citadel of City ## with you in an enormous explosion. These things always end in explosions. I'm sure it would have been really touching/ass-kicking.

A very early sketch from 2005 of Breen being confronted by three Advisors. I abandoned this fairly quickly when I remembered the implications of the ending of Half-Life 2--Breen would never had this sort of confrontation for the defeat at the hands of Gordon Freeman, because at that point, in order to escape the Citadel Breen had to abandon his body. Oops.

Looking back now, my trouble with the all of the above is that they are generally more story-centered than anything that is concretely related to gameplay, which I think is a classic beginner's mistake.
We are taught to think in stories, perceive the world and recount it to others in stories; it's very difficult to make the transistion to being a designer who focuses on the gameplay experience of the player and the "story" experience as an outgrowth of that, not as the primary concern.

And I must also point out as a fairly slavish devotee to the House that Valve built that however much I like the cold moderism of the Combine "stalkerbot" look, I believe it at odds with the established fiction. The Combine generally developer bio-weapon/quasi-organic solutions for this kind of thing, as evidenced by the Strider and the deleted supersoldier character seen in the (excellent) HL2: Raising the Bar book, not cybernetic.

And finally here are the "Valve portfolio" pieces themselves.

I still like the Civil Protection Carrier & riot shield designs very much despite their derivative nature; I was a little let down by Episode 1's lack of depiction of civil unrest in the face of the Citadel's destruction (alluded to in the first image).
I also thought that Metrocops with riot shields were a gimmee for gravity-gun play--say you still couldn't grab the cops, but you could grab the shields and then launch them at the other cops, or hold one up in front of you to block shots. Great fun.
(This first image is the only one I really noodled with in a fit of George Lucasing before posting. Feel free to examine the original version to the left from November of 2005 and tell me Han shot first or whatever.)

The City 16 material is middling, mod fodder at best; though the citadel on Xen is still a strong visual to me and agreeable callback to the first game. The aerial shot was the very first of its kind I had ever attempted.

The Mobile Barrier is an almost complete failure since not only is it nonsensically redundant--functionally the same as the citadel's creeping outer walls but not as pure, not as abstractly menacing--I failed to communicate the key aspect of the design, which was that the upper boom-arm would in conjunction with the other barriers project a forcefield wall, a key visual I neglected to actually depict.

I've always admired artists that leave out early evidence that they were once mortal men--I'm still terribly mortal, as an artist or a designer, but here's hoping a generosity of spirit gets me somewhere later on.

Design Reboot: SIN Episodes (Part II)

2009-07-13T17:48:00.002-07:00

Continued from the previous post, here are character redesigns and dossiers.

Ocuban - Syndrone

Largely a cypher as most FPS protagonists are damned to be, at least John Blade now has the dignity of shedding the vinyl vest and leather and chromed jackboots. He sports a hand-made SMG reminiscent of a vz. 61 chambered in a rifle caliber, dangerous and short-ranged. The leather shoulder holster is for laughs and for show.

Jessica Cannon is a harder woman than she looks or her wardrobe might suggest. She eschews "The Tactical" for a lower profile in public, just another affordably pretty face. Then the heirloom paratrooper M2, kneepad and mag-purse come out of the trunk. She has had a long and mostly business relationship with Blade.

JC is a huge dork, but very capable at his job as the hacker/support character of the group.

SinTek's property guards and shock troopers are in bondage, body and soul. Company store tactics keep them without other employment opportunities; some just really like the outfit. Their weapons can be carefully reverse engineered to operate region-free, if you know someone who can do the work.

Elexis Sinclair looks nothing like her baby picture. She hasn't left her penthouse for the last seven years. Guests invited to rare semiannual events there sign extensive waivers and are allowed no recording equipment of any kind. Her latest event left a body in a dumpster.

Design Reboot: SIN Episodes (Part I)

2009-07-13T17:48:00.001-07:00

What follows is a short sketch of a hypothetical design reboot of the SiN (1998) and SiN Episodes (2006) game and universe.
Some of these ideas and sketches I've been kicking around for a couple years but finally decided to commit them here. I enjoyed both games very much--Sin Episode 1's gameplay in particular has aged better than I remember and I invite people to reload it on Steam--but much of the tone and presentation left me pondering.

Try a neo-noir detective role for John Blade; the world-weary spirit with a heart of violence. Jessica Cannon reframe as his classy gun moll, all haute couture until the guns come out of the trunk of the black 1963 Buick Riviera.

They're anomalies, small fry in a world much as the ill-fated Episode 1 only suggested: a teeming metropolis balkanized by corporations. Citizens dead within prisons of their own desire. Microstates where international law changes at the edge of a wifi hotspot.

Latex gimped thugs patrol with plastic furnitured, electronically fired assault rifles governed by the same network zones--they can't shoot outside their turf, but our heroes' vintage/custom weapons can.

Elexis Sinclair is the delusional second generation CEO spending her father's company into the ground while she lives a dollhouse princess fantasy, perverse and eccentric... and now she's overstepped her bounds.
Now there's a body in a dumpster one foot over the line into the wrong territory, and Blade snags the biggest client he's ever had without knowing the stakes of the game he's in.

(He's in an FPS with innovative mission layout and story control, weapon customization and mild strategic management elements. First Person Erotic Action-Noir (FPEAN), if you will.)

The Knight-Errand of the Modern FPS

2009-06-02T21:41:00.001-07:00

Working on Darkest of Days I was slow to incorporate a common hallmark of modern shooters, the Objective text. An objective is completed, a new directive takes its place. Perhaps it was that my great intelligence is only rivaled by my laziness, or perhaps it was some internal sense of how player agency has been whittled away to near-nothing in our shooters.

How did we get to the point where the shooter experienced was meted out with bullet points on a to-do list, instead of just bullets?

Once I was a space marine, feeling each Giger-esque tech panel for secret stores; now I am a pizza boy with the Doom guy's armored pecs and inexplicably bare sixpack drawn on the front of my t-shirt, taking orders from NPCs.

Take a moment to compare: play Doom's E1M1 to E1M3 again and then any modern shooter of your choice.
Chances are the navigational complexities of the game are equal to or far less sophisticated than Doom, even 10 years or more removed from that seminal work.
So while the operational assumption has rarely changed--get to the exit, kill everything along the way--many elements are far simpler: health, weapon logistics, and direction of travel. Adult supervision.

For this marginal increase of variety and novelty with which the player is presented in the game, we pay the cost having some buzzing kindergarten teacher in the ear and the loss of even illusory volition.

In my experience as a designer in this mode, basically any time you want the player to shift modes, you send him a new objective and/or maybe get an NPC to bug him.
Then the same NPC might end up giving away the solution seconds later to the just introduced problem, because the modern player has been cowed into this passive state and can become enormously frustrated or confused the moment anything like unprompted choice or decision-making appears.
Player choice extinction.

[A small mercy with Darkest of Days is that early on we made the decision to completely forgo the radio earpiece convention. Handy as it is to cue and clue (or goad and cajole) the player, it is a lazy crutch. We may not have escaped the modern "go here, do this" ping pong player, but at least we didn't give the player a sassy or spunky NPC yammering away constantly to point out the obvious.]

Illustration derived from Ian Albert's excellent Doom Map visualizations.

Open up E1M1 again and consider it from modern vantage: first we'd have the obligatory intro cutscene, naturally, and assuming that we'd start the player in the same point, think of the additional time spent where the radio crackles and then your space marine's situation is explicated for a few minutes more.

Then we'd tutorialize the first few enemy encounters. A short, difficult-to-fail "cinematic" style chase sequence might follow. Exploding barrels explained at length to no one in particular. Then, like a newly released ex-con, the player is allowed a probationary period of fun.

The apparent tradeoff is a series of varied gameplay situations that, like carnival games, the player will be allowed to enjoy to distract from an apparently wearisome core gameplay.
Here's a vehicle sequence. Get ready for a quick time event. Surmount this obstacle (but not too creatively). Woah, get ready for a cutscene, because this animation was deemed far too expensive to produce for you to miss.
Protect this NPC with a mission failure condition if he dies, only to watch his death in a cutscene immediately after.

The heart of the problem to me are these two conflicting design impulses: providing a player a specific (often "cinematic") experience, versus cultivating player choice and expression. Obviously no one game is completely one way or another, there is a broad spectrum of possibility and room for all.
I am happy to play "cinematic" styled games, but not to the complete exclusion of games built for the player. All too frequently I seem to be experiencing the outlet of a stymied screenwriter, not a game designer.

Warren Spector, in his Master Class series at the University of Texas, characterized games at their best a co-authored experience between designer and player.
This is what games do, a shared medium where the experience can only come from the two working in concert.

Games need both the designer and the player; much as an author needs a reader's imagination to give his characters life, so too the designer needs a willing subject to make believe, to give the world a spark, for it is for the player the world was constructed. Games are about interactivity, but this core designer-player interplay is often overlooked.

This is not the oft-made call for all games to feature sandbox gameplay, which is not actually the natural endpoint of game design evolution. (Chess is not improved by being played on a 128x128 square board.)

Rather, it is a call for designers to stay faithful in their role of collaboration with the player to create an experience. Rigorous, regular playtesting helps keep designers honest, as does asking this simple question: "Is this for me, or for the player?"
Is the game a railroad through a laughable third rate imitation of a film script, or something that not only rewards but necessitates the player's involvement?

Cutscenes are not what's wrong with games, but they are symptomatic of what is. Skillfully employed they can enhance and punctuate the experience; but increasingly the "cinematic" mindset blinds developers to the poverty of the core gameplay.

Not only are we railroaded through "cinematic" linear experiences, but I feel as though we lose abilities and insights we once had. The ability to make fun for ourselves. Far Cry 2 has met severe criticism for "boring" stretches, when in fact the game is one of the strongest recent invitations for gamers to truly play the game as they want to. Creative expression still has a place in the modern shooter.

Multilinear Level Design For Left 4 Dead

2009-05-27T16:47:00.000-07:00

Two pages from my sketchbook, as I puzzle out nonlinear level layout possibilities for L4D.

Left 4 Dead is a well polished, mostly traditional FPS experience with a notable innovation: the Director.
Valve designers found that no matter how cleverly zombies were placed, players would quickly begin to anticipate them on repeat playthroughs. So they developed an ingenious system to handle the zombies.

The AI "Director" controls most of the zombie mobs placement and modulate their strength in lieu of traditional designer placement. This makes for wildly variable experiences in terms of enemy encounters, density, and where the Survivors make their defensive stands/when they decide to run.

But on the heels of the L4D SDK's release, my thoughts return to how this governing principle might be more completely extended through the experience--namely the level design.

My own experience of the excellent co-operative L4D experience was that I enjoyed it, but felt not much prompting to replay it because I had experienced the whole "ride".
Despite being a superior specimen thereof, it's still of the linear "funhouse" style FPS experience. I creep around the next corner of an expertly crafted environment, but my friends and I have no say as to where we're headed, which seems contrary to the spirit of a "surviving a zombie apocalypse" game.

Just as the Director unmoors zombie placement from direct designer control, what if the level layout were (to a smaller degree) unpredictable? What if alongside semi-random obstacles and dead-ends, the players had to fight but also actively navigate to freedom?

Arguably this is counter or more complex than Valve might deem desireable or saleable, especially for a game so well designed for perfect casual 30-45 minute play sessions. But for players who have invested enough time in the game and want a more challenging but also more varied experience, I think the idea has merit. Certainly worth further inquiry.

The initial plan is for the player start to be in the dead center of the map, with roughly four main paths radiating outward, like a pinwheel. In addition to these four main trunk lines, there would be interconnecting spokes. This gives players four possible paths with out-bound linear paths, but also lateral movement by way of the spokes.

The "pinwheel" design sketch. The paths are in a roughly square configuration to minimize lateral travel time between main trunk lines. In a finished layout, the actual player-paths would be more s-curved and kinked.

Instead of simply choosing one of four paths--in which multiple playthroughs would very likely expose one to be the easiest path and become preferential to players--there is a degree of chaos introduced by semi-random blockages or dead ends that would appear at various points along these paths and spokes.
This plan is far from a "sandbox" approach, but would ideally allow for complexity by way of multilinearity.

Further updates as I refine and implement a test case with the L4D SDK.

UPDATE: Multilinear layouts are not supported by Left 4 Dead.

Screenshot from test level. It shows that despite the test level having two safe rooms, the escape_route--how the Director and AI reckons player progress through the level--can only route to one of them, not both.

The bright spot here--other than providing a nice way for me to familiarize with L4D's AI/navigational architecture--is that I successfully predicted a design issue with a multilinear path.
Above I wrote that the trouble with multiple routes is that players would likely adapt to one preferential route quickly, without something like semi-randomizing dead-ends or blockages.

After writing the above update I downloaded the SDK and starting working with it. Then I remembered that I hadn't played the L4D commentary mode, and so I played that.
In it, one of the developers (Mike Booth maybe?) mentions trying an early non-linear city block level, and that the trouble was in fact that experienced players quickly found a preferred route (and that bickering about which route to take taxed teamwork).

Now, I don't think this would be as much of a problem if different routes actually provided vastly different endpoints--such as heading north means the suburbs, west means the slums, east meant the industrial outskirts and south meant the forest--but at this stage that's pure conjecture.
L4D is a particular sort of game and a very good one for the design elements chosen. I'll have to wait for another opportunity to experiment with the kind of level structure as outlined above; in the meantime I'm still quite piqued at building a L4D map/campaign.

Thoughts on Game Recycling

2009-05-11T18:02:00.001-07:00

I spent about two years of my life working on an FPS called Darkest of Days.
While the release date is not yet known and the game's popular and critical reception remains unfigured, the experience taught me just what an arduous experience a production cycle can be.
As rewarding as the whole experience was personally, in retrospect something seemed extraordinarily wasteful about the whole enterprise, even at the fairly "indie" part of the spectrum. Is this how it's supposed to be?

There were so many assets created, tools furnished, lines of code completed and yet there are significant portions of the finished game we weren't happy with.

Or at least I wasn't happy with it; it wasn't the game I thought I ought to be making. However close we were to a better game is immaterial--games have to be finished, even if it felt as though we had only just laid in the foundations for a better experience.

It would be far less work to pick up where I left off and re-use assets and design concepts I am already familiar with to make a better game. Yet the way the industry works means I am assured to have to try my luck working on a completely new game, or possibly end up working on an expansion or sequel.

But the trouble with an expansion or sequel is that you are largely constrained by the scope and feel of the original game. If the original game wasn't quite what you had in mind, chances are slim to "complete" it in an expansion.

I reflected on just what a universal phenomenon this seemed to be--glimpse the game industry as journeymen laborers crafting near-exquisite works and then abandoning them. Rare is the chance any developer gets to go back and "make it right" (much of why I am keen to play the updated edition of Butcher Bay included with the new Riddick game Dark Athena); far more common is the endless parade of almost good games, a sea of reasonably good.
At best I play games that feel 90% or even 95% of what I want, yet that last 5% feels unfinished or somehow otherwise mismanaged.

It's as though a beautiful two story house is constructed, with only half the furniture is moved in and no paint on the walls, but the prospective homeowner stops there and elects to simply build another house instead. That's how modern production cycles seem to function.

And so a thought returns, a kernel of an idea.

Keel from Quake 3, done in Painter IX.

The thought occured years ago while I was enraptured by Quake 3, and the nagging thought returns now as I contemplate Unreal Tournament 3, two games removed significantly in time but not in concept or execution.
Quake 3 is a clean machine, a very "pure" game in ways that other id titles have not been, but at the time it was the first id game to eschew a proper single player portion.
(Which was difficult for a lot of FPS devotees at the time you'll remember. Most have returned to providing some token singleplayer game in addition to emphasized multiplayer, but this shift now seems paradigmatic for shooters as a whole.)

The thin scrim of fiction for Quake 3--a line or two in a vestigial manual to needlessly justify a multiplayer-only DM/arena game--was an obvious afterthought, yet it hinted at a far more interesting game made from the same constituent parts.
What if you did make a game about great warriors doomed forever to combat in strangely abstract arenas, a sort of self-commentary on the deathmatch genre?

Or what if you built a game out of an existing game, that was neither a sequel nor a mod? Something that re-used all the interesting world building, assets, characters etc, but went somewhere else with them? Why start all over again?

The thought recurs with Unreal Tournament 3 and its ilk.
My primary complaint with the game is much as it was with UT2k3 and 2k4--namely that game's visual fidelity far outstrip the interest that its traditional multiplayer mechanics give me.

An environment from Unreal Tournament 3.

It took me a good 45 minutes for a cursory glance around the levels that ship with UT3. It's a beautiful game with a surfeit of visual ideas and settings; deeply generous in a way that most games aren't, delivering and endless array of the kind of stunning visuals that Epic has become expert at creating. Yet the gameplay itself provokes no similar reaction.
This is not a complaint that UT3 was made into the game it was, I enjoy it for exactly what it is. (As a friend once pointed out, many gamers' criticisms can be likened to criticising basketball chiefly on the grounds that it is not football. This is not my intent here.)

But the thought persisted--if a game is a nearly-finished house, why couldn't someone move in and, with comparatively minor effort compared to what it took to raise the house in the first place, make it their home? Move some furniture, paint the walls?

Perhaps I'm not making any sense here, but it's a thought largely unarticulated until now so you'll forgive my lack of concision.

But there would seem to me a middle path, something between the land of fierce indie development (relegated to artistic sidescrollers) and the impressive world-building (but conservative linearity) of AAA big budget development.

Some might consider this the purview of mod development but that's not the shape of what I have in mind. There are too many amateur connotations to that word, and not enough fundamental change to the identity of the game in a "mod", despite the look remaining much the same.

Kana, from Unreal Tournament 3.

I'm thinking about what it would be to make a "new" game with mostly old parts. The unexplored connotations of what that great big spacestation level in UT3 could mean, the wide-open rolling plains with already excellent vehicle handling. Imbue all this great art and set dressing with some meaning, rather than completely interchangeable visual glosses. Build a new world from the old one.
And by "meaning" I mean gameplay mechanics, not Story.
(I think most misguided design impulses come from that tourist hag Story, but that's a discussion for another time.)

So picture a single player quasi-free roamer, or even a co-op shooter, re-using as much of all the phenomenal work already there as is applicable, but in a very different play style... the actual design sketch here I'm afraid will have to wait for another update.

Players say that what they really want is deep and engrossing gameplay, not just another empty graphical funhouse ride. But how would they really feel if they had "seen it all before" with the production art, but were really given a brand new game to play?
Could you build something more than just a "mod" that successfully alters the meaning and gameplay content with mostly the same assets?

The above was written and then left in a draft about three weeks ago; some of these comments seem oddly prescient to me in the wake of 3DRealms' demise. However misguided, there was a team dedicated to getting a game finished just so.
A cautionary tale?

Also, my friend Steve Gaynor recently wrote on the subject of what he calls "Single-A" game development, a far more coherent thought on a similar track. Please have a look.

The Sap and the Heater: Q&A

2009-05-07T16:43:00.000-07:00

Further development of the "detective game" concept (posted here), prompted by message board discussion. Thanks to SA Forum User Dr. Pwn for the questions.

Q: How would you allow the player to execute any of these dialogue options, gambits, and counter-gambits in actual gameplay?

A: Good question, hard to say. One of those things you'd unravel ultimately through rigorous playtesting, even week one stuff.
I imagine it wouldn't be far from how some games incorporate interactions like human shields/hostage taking, since what choices are available to you are pretty contextual.

You'd need a lot of scaffolding to support unfamiliar gameplay. For instance, very specific audio cues--maybe slightly exaggerated "walking in hall/door handle/door opening" sounds so players have time to decide or react, for starters. It comes back to playtesting.
All the choices in the world dont mean anything if the players don't know they have them available/have chance to use them.

Beyond that, probably something contextual having to do with basic states. Talking to someone with a weapon in your hand would be different than if you're in the "being held up" state; obviously you're trying to reason with them in the latter, while the former case could be a couple of different ones.
Simple one button use/converse key, possibly with a small branching option.

Another important aspect to this sort of system is that it makes a verb out of the sort of thing that action games most traditionally ignore. Characters always react, it's just that in most games they bark and go straight to shooting, and that's it.
It's easy enough to make characters react to you pointing a gun from the hip in their direction, and even moreso when you aim at them.

Say if you've got your gun up and aimed at someone, "getting the drop" on them, he'll voluntarily disarm (that might be a vocal prompt, not unlike SWAT 4).
Then if you don't shoot him right there, further use of "converse" turns to interrogation. Though if you look away or fail to target him, he may re-arm and attempt to shoot you, like the Jim Zubiena clip.
What works so well for Hitman: Blood Money is the use of dropdown menus--not the most action-y choice but a game sketched out like the detective game I describe, with crime scene examination and the like, would generally be more paced like Hitman anyway, instead of an out-and-out shooter.

So I'd say that the actions described are: branching, contextual to time, space, and situation (armed/not armed/drawing gun/gun drawn, having a gun pointed at you/pointing the gun)....

I am somewhat loathe to use it as an example, since the series was for so long the posterboy of out of date control schemes, but how MGS4 allows Snake to crouch, or go prone, and then flip over and lay on his back and shoot all pretty easily.
The key is that Snake can't just go straight from standing to laying on his back (unless knocked back by an explosion); at various postures he has branching access to other postures, generally not all at the same time. Not the best example of what we're talking about here, but something similar.

Q: That's really cool, but how would you reconcile sequences in which the player-character can be incapacitated by a single bullet with real-time gameplay that usually allows the player to absorb ridiculous amounts of damage?
Would every encounter/firefight in the game be primarily a matter of "getting the drop" on someone?

A: I'd honestly go so far as to at least try to center the gameplay around very high lethality gunplay, yeah.
Something with a completely different flavor, to go with the atypical emphasis on having a gun and pointing it at someone being Serious Business...though again, this is only only ballpark stuff with something that would be so central to the gameplay without playtesting first.
[I follow the Valve model in that respect--design iteration is completely enmeshed with playtesting.]

I'm a huge fan of the whole milieu of detective fiction--Chandler, Hammett et al.--and there's a well established trope of the detective getting cold cocked and left somewhere compromising (which we're well familiar with from the bleedover into all sorts of pulp-inspired entertainment).
This is something that would translate well as a gameplay mechanic.
In this setting, gun battles should be dangerous, lethal, and therefore initiated rather infrequently. Usually when the deck is stacked in your favor, and even then it's not very detective-y to cut a double digit body count through the city while protecting the interests of your client.
So while you could get into a proper gunfight, for this exercise I'd like to get away from the all too familiar linear game problem of "you will play the story this particular way, or you will fail completely."

Mount and Blade, whatever you think of the game generally, proves something of a relevatory experience when played in the recommended no-save/loading mode. Falling in battle strips you of a piece of armor, a prized weapon or your warhorse, though you yourself are simply knocked unconscious/left for dead. The game continues in time.

Played this way, "failed" battles that would have otherwise devolved into tedious save/load festivals on a linear storyline in another game (cutscenes and all) went 1.) far faster without any repetition, and 2.) become a part of my player narrative, my story, rather than an impediment to progress through a canned plot.

So to me, getting rid of the traditional save/load mechanics but also ejecting forced failure and repetition of play segments allow you to own the play experience that much more thoroughly.
Leave the flawless runthrough to the savants and the tool-assisted players of the future, embrace your mistakes as part of the experience, not an error to be rewound until you "get it right."
I'm tired of playing along to a fake movie, with none of the impact of a movie and much of the baggage, and a character following someone else's conception of him, not mine.

So that's a whole lot of words, but I'd love to make a game with these mechanics.

Even say it's actually possible to actually die, straight up. If you're mortally wounded, you start the game over.
Or if you're shot, you need to limp to the phone or otherwise get help and end up in the hospital.
(In which either your whole case goes a whole lot colder and its harder to interview people or you just end up with a "convalescing in the hospital" ending--maybe you can keep this character and his stats for a new game+ type run through?)
For the most part though, you won't get into truly lethal gunfights often if you play smart, like the smart detective you ought to be.
Then when the goons "get the drop" on you and you are unsuccessful in weaseling or shooting your way out, you just get cold-cocked and a similar small penalty for being crappy:

-Bad: you wake to find they have snatched up some small clue/polluted crime scene (end game total for clues collected or how thoroughly you make your case or whatever, fill in the blanks)

-Worse: your gun is taken (humiliating for your character and you--or are you a detective that prefers not to be armed?), or the thugs sap you and bring you in for a short meet and greet with the nemesis (could be triggerable to happen later in the game)

-Worst: you wake to find either at the crime scene or somewhere else entirely, a freshly fired gun in your hand and a dead blonde on the floor and the police are soon to knock on the door. Oh shiiiiii--

Level Design Primer: The Sawtooth

2009-05-04T21:35:00.001-07:00

Level Design Primer is an introduction to the high level concepts of first person shooter level layout and design.

As to credentials: for two years I built the majority of levels for the forthcoming single player FPS title Darkest of Days. Anything written here is backed by my own experience and observation from building and playtesting.

The sawtooth is such a universal staple of level design that once sensitized to, you will notice them everywhere. It is simple, effective, and (generally) foolproof.

The sawtooth stops the player from going backward. Simple as that. But as with other central design tenets of level design, simple can have far reaching connotations.
It takes innumerable shapes and forms: a broken staircase, a drop-down, a chute, a sheared cliff. Some are obvious, some are seamlessly integrated into the environment in a natural way, some are completely blind--like a ventilation duct that drops out from under you (groan).
Careful modulation of both the obviousness of sawteeth and their frequency are critical to the player's immersion. And the more "realistic" a game purports to be, the more carefully masked and generally less frequent they'll need to be to not be disruptive.

But why impede backward travel in a level? For single player games, there are a number of reasons: it makes life easier for the designer and the for the player in several ways.

The designer no longer has to worry about whatever the player is doing--getting lost, wondering where the party is, getting bored, and eventually quitting (which is the worst thing that can happen for a designer).
They can provide natural break points in the physical layout of the level to complement save points--which save in time, but not necessarily in space. Loading from a save point doesn't mean the player isn't still lost and might wander back to the start of the beginning of the level; a sawtooth means the designer knows for sure.
It's useful in tightly scripted "cinematic" action sequences where if the player otherwise may not know where to go or could veer off course too much and lose the immediacy of the engagement at hand.
Or, if the designer wishes to ambush or really rattle the player, certain kinds of sawtooth elements are useful to prevent the player from simply backing away from the encounter and cherry-picking the enemies from a safe distance.
The designer can also deactivate scripting or delete performance heavy entities or effects that they know for certain the player can no longer see.
This may just sound like its covering for lazy design, and while that does happen it also helps designers concentrate on crafting "the good stuff" rather than an increasing load of invisible-to-the-player housekeeping.

For the player it means a discrete point where, so long as he sees the sawtooth in advance, he knows he must be ready to progress.
For compulsive item and ammunition collecting players, approaching a clear sawtooth is a kindness; certain players hate not knowing if they'll be able to back and scrap up every last round of ammunition before moving forward.
And as previously mentioned, it ratchets physical progression through the level itself, effectively gating the play space into manageable chunks. This is helpful for designers, but aids navigation as well. In traditional "funhouse" like linear layouts, nobody wants to spend time wandering around the dead, empty portions of what they've passed through.

They're not just for single player layouts, either. For multiplayer levels whose flow tends to be circular and concentric, like a heart pumping its warring players into collision, sawtooth elements can still be useful in order to restrict two-way flow into more interesting one-way channels, say around a power-up.

To find examples of a sawtooth element, look no further than the best known FPS franchises with a linear single player or multiplayer component. A short list of recent titles would include Crysis, Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Killzone 2, Left 4 Dead... you can find examples everywhere, once you look.

The critical view to sawteeth elements and their universal employment would be that they're a crutch that continues to prop up sloppy design and overly linear world design. So long as the kinds of things that make sawteeth such an obvious choice to use are present in level design, we'll continue to get fairly rote, linear "funhouse" type experiences.
But something as monumental as challenging concepts of linearity is outside the purview of this update--more on this sort of thing later.

The Sap and the Heater: a Design Sketch

2009-04-06T10:42:00.001-07:00

If you had a game with a wider range than basic military combat scenarios, you could create simple but interesting mechanics out who gets the drop on whom.

For example, you're playing your Chandler-styled 30's detective game and snooping an upscale hotel room crime scene before the police show up.
Unfortunately for you, the goons of your shadowy nemesis had the same idea and have just arrived outside the door.
Hearing the door creak, you could pull your .45 before they get around the door, maybe even shooting one of them through the door.
Here, the alert player is rewarded with scenario played his way, not according to a canned "thugs enter the room" cutscene. Or the goon steps into the room without seeing you, and so is still at your mercy if you get your gun trained on him first. He can try to draw but you'll always be able to react faster with a pistol already in hand. You are free to shoot him or try pumping him for some information before pistol whipping him/shooting him.

Say you didn't hear or see him, so he draws his gun on you and then tell you to put your hands up or disarm, if you were in the process of drawing. He drew first, now he has the upper hand.
Then you try a verbal feint ("look over there!") or persuasive argument, or a grappling move if you're close enough. Anything to get him to break eye contact or allow you to dive for cover--anything to break the "holdup" phase.
Disarming his weapon puts you back in charge; mutual disarmament might prompt a close-quarters fisticuffs. Only after these possible paths does the encounter becomes a more traditional pitched firefight.
Or yet again in place of a firefight, maybe you attempt a feint and are unsuccessful, meaning the goons disarm and sap you with a blackjack, leaving you to wake up as the police arrive (losing the potential clues at this location). This is a setback, but not a full stop/fail-retry game over.

The point of this design sketch is that every encounter need not instantly ramp up to a full firefight, allowing even a game mostly about shooting to have much more varied basic fighting. The game can still be nominally about shooting, but there is a lot of rich potential gameplay missed out on in most games in favor of always "cutting to the chase."

For reference, consider a clip from the original Miami Vice show. An actual expert shooter was used to act out an assassination, using a more realistic version of the sorts of balance of power-play just described:

Level Design Primer: S-Curve Variations

2009-03-30T17:58:00.001-07:00

Level Design Primer is an introduction to the high level concepts of first person shooter level layout and design.
As to credentials: for two years I built the majority of levels for the forthcoming single player FPS title Darkest of Days. Anything written here is backed by my own experience and observation from building and playtesting.

Virtually all levels are about basic spatial progression, getting from the start to the finish alive. The job of a level designer is to make that progression as varied, interesting, and worthwhile as you can. Or as I like to think of the work: your job is giving the player an idea and make him think it was his. The better immersed he is in your world, the more he believes it to be his.

With this introductory primer, we'll be looking at some basics of path layout, high-level approaches that keep even a linear path interesting to most players if handled well.

1. The S-Curve
One of the single best guiding design principles for single player level design layout is the s-curve. The s-curve is central because it is the intersection of a variety of desirable qualities: ease of navigation, visual fidelity, interest and surprise. As a guiding high-level concept it will not make a level for you (nothing will), but it will enrich every level that it is incorporated into.

An example scene built in Far Cry 2 on a straight line. While this scene is fairly well composed visually, the path ahead is devoid of surprise. The player can see all three buildings on either side of the street plainly.

Starting out on a straight street or forest path with everything visible from the starting point makes traversing the space a chore; there are no surprises, it is merely ground to be covered.

Take the same path and introduce a slight s-curve. While the direction of travel is still clear, now portions of the path are occluded. Which makes for natural cover placement, enemy placement, or other points of interest. Now introduce vertical variation as well, and there is yet more occlusion as well as potential elements for vertical play. (This helps with the design maxim well understood by Valve that we'll get to later, which is that "players never look up.")

The same scene with a slight s-curve. The left portion of the street now "opens up" to the player, drawing his interest, while at the same time the middle right side of the street is occluded--to find out what's there, he's going to have to go down the street. Two sides of the bridge are now visible, making it more attractive as an endpoint as well. Where the player is standing is also slightly higher than the riverbank at the bridge, introducing more visual interest.

While only a brief sketch, we see how much more "opened up" the very slightly s-curved street layout makes the scene. This works hand in hand with "keeping it wide," another crucial level design maxim.

2. The Kinked Line
Take a soft s-curve and twist it around a bit more and you have what I call a kinked line. Like a garden hose held in hand, it restricts and slows down the flow of play in ways that can provide interesting variations, or opportunity for ambushes and the like. Hold a garden hose too tightly and the water stops completely, but held carefully and the flow can be manipulated. It helps creates more interest points in the path with reversals of direction, even if the overall direction of travel is still forward.

A benefit is that previous or later segments of the line can be made visible to the player, providing visual interest and incentive to continue, as well as helpful visual landmarks.
Kinked lines are quite regularly employed in linear games with real-world settings, since a kinked line or broken grid (see below) progression circumventing "normal" course of travel is accounted for.
The majority of the level paths in Left 4 Dead, for example, can be considered kinked line-style layouts.

3. The Stacked Line
Coil the player path even tighter than a kinked line and you get a stacked line. Like a ropey coil of intestines, the stacked line provides maximal travel time over the smallest area. It is useful for restricting player movement even further, for mood or practical reasons, or maximizing unexpected corners. With environmental density often at a premium, a stacked line can provide a "high value" area for production (though be warned that the player may not share your same estimation of "value.").

Anyone who has been to Disney World has seen stacked lines managed ingeniously--a large room might be used as the foyer to a ride. Yet instead of revealing that the entire room is filled with people waiting for the ride, partitions are introduced, blind corners, stacking the line in a coil which maximizes the room space without alerting any one segment of the line to the rest of it. Done poorly and the patron (or player) will realize what is being done and will be impatient, possibly indignant about the deception. Done well, and the subterfuge is invisible.

Stacked line sequences can be used as a "cool down," puzzle, or other severe restriction on the relative speed of player progression through the world, since the high frequency of 180 degree turns give them a maze-like quality. These must be employed rarely and with great care; perhaps one of the most notable examples of this layout style is the Nova Prospekt sequence in Half-Life 2. A number of levels from that game end up in this category, given that space is more of a premium and the largely corridor-based environments lent themselves well to this style.

4. Broken Grid
A classic level design form is what I call a broken grid, which is simply an interrupted grid with a snaking path or paths through it.

An area is devised along a grid--a city block, a warehouse interior, a colonnade--and then is "broken" so that the grid is only traversible in a modified path, though the grid itself is intelligible. This could be a deathmatch arena, with the breaks simply to provide cover and unique features, or more typically just a form for a single player linear path. The path is still variations on s-curves, but the player appears to be traveling through a grid (though not at all in a gride-like fashion). A broken grid is one of the easiest methods for creating an interesting or potentially multi-path area to progress.

A superlative example of broken grid-style layout on a larger scale would be Silent Hill 2. While the town of Silent Hill itself is shown on the map as a normal grid of streets, the player comes into contact with walls, fences, or gorges that break the grid in challenging ways. While the structure of the town and the basic path seems clear (and visible on the map), the complicating elements provide challenge where there would be little to none otherwise, and are dynamically marked on the map by the player's character.

All these examples may seem simple, but the strength of s-curves applied all throughout the many stages of level design work will eliminate many common problems relating to player confusion or slack time. When the world itself, devoid of items and enemies, is rich and appealing to navigate on its own, you are far less likely to have problems elsewhere.

Considering Mirror's Edge

2009-03-24T15:02:00.001-07:00

In our first entry we talked about the how the player character in FPS games could generally be likened to a refrigerator box. But is the box the problem, or an unfortunate but necessary convention?

After all, despite the inherent problems the box entails, the player generally isn't aware of the issue. They simply know that they have a frustratingly narrow bandwidth for interacting with what seems like a rich and interesting world. Perhaps it's the narrowness of agency. The inability to "do" anything other than (admittedly exquisite) variations on shooting people in the face.

A game that's addressed much of what was brought up last time is Mirror's Edge. DICE is a veteran FPS developer, and with Mirror's Edge they sought to redress a long-standing conventional flaw of the genre.
They set out a considerable design challenge for themselves: make the first person shooter a first person jumper. By focusing on this as the core experience, they solved much of the attendant issues as well as creating novel gameplay.

Reason would dictate a game about parkour fleetness would best be executed in third person, but DICE stuck by their assumption that first person could sustain such an experience with far greater immediacy, provided enough proprioceptive cues were given and the player was given tools for the tasks at hand.
And to that end I think the game quite successful. It mates a fresh visual style with a carefully nurtured sense of corporeal possession of Faith. For once, our point of view is not a shell-like avatar but a character, which aids the nearness of that corporeal possession to the core gameplay. Gone are the smashed or absent mirrors of Gordon Freeman's world.

The key is that the narrow, exceedingly specific set of verbs given to normal FPS avatars--aiming, shooting, grenade throwing, weapon switching, fire selecting, jumping, crouching--mutated into something tailored to the experience DICE had in mind. Faith is far more nimble than other FPS avatars--but at the expense of verb resolution when it comes to firearms. She's capable of handling firearms; she's just not as interested, and they won't get her where she wants to go.

A critical rejoinder to the above would be that Mirror's Edge approach to making a better first person shooter is to no longer make it about shooting at all.
Which is a fair point. The game makes a compelling experience out of subverting the basic structure of the FPS, not by forwarding it. This is a breath of fresh air in a stale genre, but it addresses standing issues by refocusing gameplay away from the "pure" strain--though the argument could be made that hybridization is the lifeblood of action games (notice GTA games absorbing current genre conventions like cover systems, amoeba-like).
Anyway, I'll be the first to admit that I am still very, very interested in the business of shooting people in the face, as much as I enjoy Mirror's Edge.

Yet even if we're looking to improve the "traditional" FPS game, Mirror's Edge is still a useful study. Modify, limit, reshape the agency of the player in the world and you radically change the world for the player. Control schemes and core "verbs", as some designers like to speak of them, are much of the heart of any given game experience.
So instead of reshaping and refining movement as Mirror's Edge did, think of ways a FPS might be reshaped and broadened in terms of the gunplay.
By clearing debris from the core of what is a very conservative genre and reconsidering basic assumptions of how these things work--you're a man with a gun always pointing out into the world, at friend and foe?--intriguing solutions begin to present themselves.

Next time we'll sketch out just such an approach--not a radical redesign of FPS mechanics, but one that would consider existing actions--drawing, pointing a gun--and give them significance where none existed before.

On Influences

2009-03-24T14:10:00.000-07:00

A brief personal note about influences and creative synthesis: I take great inspiration from the work of television producer David Simon, creator of The Wire and producer for Generation Kill. Both of these shows are about the most tired subject matter imaginable--cops and marines respectively--yet they're better than almost anything on the same subject because of Simon's emphasis on journalistic verisimilitude.
Not surprisingly he was a journalist before moving to television, and it is that attention to detail, a feel for the real that informs the spirit of his work. The people in his shows, either fictional or based on real people, are human to us.
Without exactly turning this whole entry into a paean to David Simon, the point is this: marines, even their space-based brethren, are not boring. We have made them boring.
They are boring because they are tired copies of copies, faded nth generation reproductions of recycled popular culture. We might not have some of our classic videogame franchises without the all-pervasive influence of Cameron's Aliens, but we might have a lot more interesting games.

I believe the onus of expertise is on content creators, not on the audience, and it is therefore up to us to research and craft characters and gameplay and situation that hews as closely to the unimaginable variety and wonder of actual events as possible.
And so regardless of our aims as to "realism" or simulation in our games, a journalistic desire for truth, or the artistic "lie that tells the truth" (to paraphrase Picasso) should inform our work at all times.
This is fairly major current in my design philosophy these days, so it seems pertinent to mention early on.

The Refrigerator Box

2009-03-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

In Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, there is a chapter called "The Disembodied Woman" (excerpted here).
In it we read of Christina, a woman who has lost all sense of proprioception. She learns to puppeteer her own body; if she is not looking at a limb, she has no internal sense of what it was doing.

A nightmare scenario for anyone, but one that sounds oddly familiar to gamers.
Proprioception is what we aim to replicate, albeit distantly, when we talk about "body awareness" in games--to look down and see your body is the most basic feedback for a body we cannot sense.
I want to use this as a way to look more generally at the sense of immersion, of being embodied in the avatar, and how FPS games are limited in this respect. Before we talk about any design changes or solutions, we need to understand the problems.

We'll never be able to capture full proprioception (nor would we likely want to), but that same sense of "being there" is critical to immersion. Lack of proprioception is much of the difficulty for new players to grasp FPS controls, given the relative dearth of sensory feedback, and why even experienced players may become injured or killed in the world in a way that seems "unfair."

If FPS players ever feel as though they're a walking refrigerator box in the game instead of a person, it's because they are. Many games refine hit detection for the purpose of assigning damage, but collision-wise most player characters really are just ambulatory refrigerator boxes with a small view slit and a gun, and games are designed to suit.

This box-and-gun model has implications that have shaped and limited FPS games more than we might care to admit. First we'll talk about the player's field of view, then basic collision in the world and scaling issues, and finally a little bit of what this means for the game space and interactivity.

You may recall the furor over "true widescreen" shortly after Bioshock's release. Without getting into that fairly snarled topic of debate, it's worth noting that it was all over a few degrees of field of view. With the standing box-and-gun model for the player in FPS games, the player's field of view (FOV) is a critical window to the world outside the refrigerator box.
In reality we enjoy 140 degrees of binocular vision, where the overlap between the two eyes' vision gives us depth perception, as well as an additional 40 degrees of peripheral FOV.
Stepping inside the refrigerator box gives us monocular (i.e. non-depth perceptive) vision limited to about 90 degrees, and typically far lower, all with no periphery. (A move to third person would expand our practical FOV as well dramatically improve our body awareness, but with other far-ranging costs and implications to the game design, so we'll talk about that later.)
What makes this so troublesome is that maximizing player FOV in order to play the game effectively--situational awareness and target acquisition and so on--can run contrary to other design imperatives.

FOV 75 and FOV 90 on HL2: The Lost Coast. The man appears more distant at 90, even though we are standing face to face. Note that the crowbar remains the same, as it is rendered separately to prevent distortion.

A well known case is that of Half-Life 2. Evolving from the player's fondness for the non-player characters in HL1, Valve spent a great deal of time and effort modeling, animating, and voicing NPCs like Alyx and Barney, characters that would make up the emotional core of the experience.
They quickly found that their wide-angle FOV, ideal for fighting enemies in the world, made these friendly characters appear farther away then they would have liked, even when standing face to face (or face to box). HL2 shipped with a standard FOV set to 75 degrees instead of 90, with a special case that opened it up to 85 degrees during vehicle driving sequences.
Bethesda Softworks would take a different approach to the same problem for The Elder Scrolls IV:Oblivion and then later Fallout 3. They retained a higher, more "distancing" FOV, and chose to dynamically zoom in on any NPC in the world that the player talks to to simulate the desired visual intimacy.

In addition to the relative perceptual difficulties related to FOV and characters in the world, higher FOVs introduce distortion, given from projecting a spherical perspective onto a flat screen. While this can be cleverly incorporated into the game, as with playing the alien perspective Aliens Vs. Predator with a very high "fisheye" type FOV, it's a problem for weapons in first person.
And when you're a refrigerator box with a hole cut out, the gun you hold in your hands is a central visual hallmark, your primary (and often only) agency in the world.
At higher FOVs, the gun in hand begins to distort along with the world, its apparent distance from you potentially more disconcerting than the apparent distance to NPCs. That the gun is often rendered separately from the world may ameliorate this, but alienate the player in other ways, furthering his or her apparent separation from the world. They're already a firm proprioceptive barrier away from the game already; any additional layers between the player and the world become prohibitive.
But this is enough to sketch out the myriad of issues associated with the first person perspective and FOV; I'd like to talk about the box out in the gameworld.

People understand that their avatar is clumsier than themselves, and that with practice a player is able to overcome or compensate for most shortcomings. This means they're nominally past thinking about the refrigerator box, but the box is always there. Often we can feel it, more often if the gameworld has not been scrupulously designed to accomodate the problem.
What I mean is that with level design there's a tricky balance between visual scale and player scale. The immersed player forgets that he is a refrigerator box, yet the world still need be scaled to accomodate his generous girth.

A friend of mine and fellow level designer Drew Risch taught me the simple, fundamental rule for good playspace in an FPS: keep it wide.
It's relatively simple to establish scale for all buildings, objects, and characters in a game to correspond with reality, but real world scale is unbearable for a refrigerator box to negotiate, even if the box itself is the relative dimensions of a person. You're a box, a box with only a small hole out the front with which to engage the world, so allowances must be made. Despite being a box you must be made to feel the hero, and heroes don't have to carefully negotiate kitchen furniture like the morbidly obese.
To that end the gameworld must be carefully widened, ballooned to allow the passage of this refrigerator box player and his often as-clumsy-if-not-clumsier AI compatriots.
The trick is to make this work mechanically, while still visually keeping the world in the ballpark of reality. It won't match, not if the world is truly wide enough for the player to move around comfortably, but these discrepancies can be carefully masked. In HL2, the corners of the Gordon-box can get the player stuck neatly into right angles of tight spaces such as elevators--level designers place invisible wedges in corners to prevent exactly this.
(In third person these sorts of issues are even more pronounced, though in different form; replay the beginning of Max Payne 2 and observe a world necessarily warped to accomodate Max's bullet-dodging antics and follow camera.)

We begin to see clearly why information systems, usually delivered via some sort of heads-up display (HUD) become so critical to helping the player over such considerable handicaps. The player has a narrow FOV and no proprioception, so environmental cues of sight and sound (plus a little rumble, if on a console) are all he or she is going to get.
Detailed sound design with corresponding sensitization of the player that these sound cues mean something (like the dry snapping sound of a bullet passing close by) can help close to gap left by so many missing senses, but won't fix everything. Which is why damage indicators and the like are now considered standard, as there is simply too much critical feedback the player needs to survive.

But I feel as though we've opened many doors without much sense to how we might approach a solution or a change from the problems these issues present.
At this point, what I want to impress upon you is that the player character is a refrigerator box with a hole cut in it and a gun sticking out, and so long as he remains such--a mute, verb-poor box, murdering everything in his path only to pause occasionally to flail at an oversized green-lit button or watch a mandatory cutscene--FPS games will likely remain the dim spectacle that they've been for years. There certainly is hope, but there's also a lot of dead weight carried from sequel to sequel that ought to be reconsidered.
But I'm getting ahead of myself and betraying more ambition than I care to for a first entry.

Next time, we'll talk about methods to overcome these seemingly crippling limitations, and explore other design issues present with the status quo.

Summary of embedded links:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat on Amazon.com
Excerpt from The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, "The Disembodied Lady."
Wikipedia entry for Proprioception
Wikipedia entry for field of view
Valve Developer Wiki on FOV in HL2
Excerpt of Max Payne 2 playthrough on youtube