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: 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

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.

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.

The Sap and the Heater: Q&A

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sap and the Heater: a Design Sketch

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

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

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

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

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