Control Resolution: I'm Good With My Hands

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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


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

In Praise of The Deep End

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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?

GAUSSWERKS goes live

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

So for those counting at home:

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

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

Design Reboot: Dr. Ivan Just Can't Die

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



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

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

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

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

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


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

Free Radical, Stalkerbot, and Other Table Scraps

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.