Design Reboot: Flatlander Woman

"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

"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)

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)

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

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

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?