Design Reboot: Clive Barker's Jericho

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?

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?

Restate Assumption: Out of Ammo

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?

Free Radical, Stalkerbot, and Other Table Scraps

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)

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)

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

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

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

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.