Radiator Yang's Interview with yours truly

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

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

GAUSSWERKS / DESIGN REBOOT forums

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

 

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.

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?

Visual Clarity in Character Design (Part II)

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?

Design Reboot: Torch

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

"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

Design Reboot: Dr. Ivan Just Can't Die

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.