Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Space Survival Gameplay

I was asked a little while ago how I would do a space survival game, since I've been ragging on them recently. I also mentioned it in a video or two. So let's talk.

Let's get started simple. Let's say I'm a Star Citizen dev, out to put survival mechanics into my pew pew shooty game. I already have gorgeous starship interiors, now it's time to leverage them. How do I do it?

Well, my goal is to turn survival into a yarnball. A soft, complicated challenge that interlaces with a lot of other things. I also want to make sure that it unfolds into a narrative according to the choices the player makes.

So I implement a The Simslike survival system. Every time you make a space jump, your various meters go up. Hunger and filth, for example.

Actually using kitchens and showers is a repetitive and uninteresting task, so rather than requiring you to use the facilities, we simply reduce the meter if you have them. If you have a kitchenette, your hunger goes up 90% slower. A full kitchen? It doesn't go up at all... until your food runs out.

We do want to push the player to exist in that space, so we do allow the player to use a facility for a temporary boost - until the end of the next jump. If we use the kitchen, we get a +20%, but it uses up a bit of food. If we use the shower, we get a +10%, but it doesn't use up anything. This bonus doesn't reduce your meters, it simply enhances your performance. It doesn't stack.

To make this into a more narratively cohesive experience, we have to decide on the narrative we want. And the narrative we want is how the pressures of space travel shape our life aboard a ship.

This is not simply about "life aboard a ship". The point is to turn challenges - the challenges of a human surviving in space - into narrative beats. The ship is our tool to do that, but the challenge it parses is the challenge of survival.

If we want a gritty feel, we could get things like life support involved. But the ships in Star Citizen are ridiculously high tech, so instead we're thinking more about the social narrative. How does the mind fail, rather than the body.

So we add a few more meters. Loneliness, claustrophobia, boredom.

When they go up, you have to bring them down. Find someone to talk to. Land on a planet or space station and step outside. Have some fun by daredevil flying or fighting or driving a different vehicle.

...

A new player buying a new ship finds it comes with a little pocket gym. The gym reduces the meter growth of those three stats by 50% each, maybe.

But the player knows they are playing solo, and are planning to go on long explorations. So the big threat here is loneliness. The others can be dealt with in the middle of nowhere by visiting any random rock, but finding a person will be tough.

So the player rips out the gym, replaces it with a media console that constantly blares news shows and comedies. She puts portraits of her family on the wall, or pinups maybe. She buys a wisecracking robot companion.

These keep her company. And she can use them to boost: give the family a kiss, get +30%. Watch a TV show, get +40%, but use up a media slot - she'll need to buy the next season of Game of Space Thrones or trade SpaceYouTube caches with someone else to get those slots filled up with new stuff. Better to keep that cache intact, so it burns at the slower default rate and lasts longer.

And sure, she gets twitchy from the claustrophobia and the boredom. But that's why canyon racing was invented.

...

On the other hand, someone else might be playing on a team. They know loneliness won't be an issue, because there's another player around here. So they max out the others. They buy giant 3D landscapes for their walls - radically reducing claustrophobia, but actually increasing loneliness. They replace their gym with a video game console.

They can go for a long ways without having to land or play around, but they have to chat with someone every two jumps to stay happy.

No problem, they're sitting next to you.

...

We can see how the player's construction choices change the narrative. The player is choosing what narrative beats to include, which ones to play up or limit. One of those players is having a long, lonely journey hopping from planet to planet. The other is on a road trip with friends.

Those are very different narratives. We didn't write those narratives: we allow the challenges to be faced in a way that turns them into narratives.

We can push this in a lot of ways. For example, if we make it so that talking to a specific person works worse every time you do it, then those long journeys get more challenging because you have to find new people to talk to. If you burn media to keep your boredom under control, maybe you change one of those "size three hardpoints" from a gun to a giant subspace antenna that lets you transfer media from space stations a hundred light years away. Need food? There's a variety of greenhouses both internal and external...

These ramifications are polish on a core concept. If we didn't have the core progression, they'd be pointless. Most of this would be pointless if the player had to return to a station every time they logged off, for example: long journeys would be limited by a player's capacity to sit at their desk and play. But since you can log off in midjourney and come back, we can assume many players will go on very long journeys.

The question becomes: what of the players that don't?

What about the players that are short-haul? Players that specialize in fighting or shipping people or freight over shorter distances?

It's a common thing. A lot of players want to sit and do A Mission Now, and be done in half an hour. They don't want to log off midmission and come back to the same thing.

Can we make our survival systems create their narratives, too?

Well... no. It's not survival. But we can use the same core mechanics.

...

We could try to add stats like paperwork that go up as you dock... but what sort of narrative unfolds with that?

Not much of one. How can we make it messier and more entangled?

Well, most short-haul specialists will have specific hub stations - or, at least, specific preferred factions.

This is where it can't be Star Citizen, because their faction system has a ceiling. But if we throw that away, we can allow the player to build their contacts with the faction.

Rather than focusing entirely on the ship, we can allow the player-generated content to include people. Both NPC crewmembers aboard your ship and people you have agreements with on various space stations.

I would do it using a similar modular setup to the one used for ships and interiors:

As you rank up, you get a better "dossier" for that faction.

Like a ship, a dossier has specialties and hardpoints. This dossier specializes in freight permissions. This one improves insurance and rates on being a passenger liner. This one's exploration-based.

The hardpoints are people. This one's a tier 3 diplomat hard point, and you can slot in any NPC diplomat that rank or lower to act as your "weapon", giving you access to more options, more goods, more security, more sites. Reduce the rank by one just like you'd do for hardpoint turrets, and hire that person as a crewmember on your ship instead of being specific to their home space station...

Because the dossiers are essentially ships, we can offload our survival mechanics onto them.

As time passes and things happen, you might gain criminality, or disinterest, or distrust. These can be reduced if you equip the right kind of person on your hardpoints, but otherwise you'll have to do faction missions to clean them up.

And now, again, we've turned a challenge into a narrative.

Building small dossiers is easy, but you quickly learn you need to tweak it to suit your style. Do you do some... not so legal missions? You'll want a lawyer and a fence installed. Do you do a lot of business with other factions? You'll want a politician, to keep the distrust low. You go on long journeys? You'll want a reporter, to keep disinterest under control. You trade with a lot of different systems from that faction? Buy a one-rank-lower trader as a crewmember, so you get that advantage in every system.

These could even be tweaked per-faction. Both by the player, depending on their interactions with the faction... and by the devs.

Your Vulcan-ish faction might never gain disinterest, but gives bonus distrust if you sell science data to other factions. Your Klingon-ish faction loses interest extremely rapidly but never gives out criminality...

This has an extremely high ceiling. At upper levels, you might be adding the president of a space station to your dossier, or using a cross-contact politician to transfer stats to another faction's dossier.

And you can go negative. You're disliked by the Vulcan-ish faction? Add specific nemesis to your unhappy dossier. It's got a few good hard points - contacts from other factions or even turncoats from this faction - but you have to fill all your negative hardpoints first, adding in suspicious cops, angry politicians, and persistent bounty hunters.

Again: build your own narrative out of the challenge. *You choose* how your story of banditry or war unfolds.

...

Hopefully this has been a fun exploration of how to make player-created content that can turn simple things (survival, faction rank) into more robust, soft, complex mechanics that create a narrative.

To be clear: I think you could create an entire game around these concepts, rather than the shooty pew pew gameplay that I find so dreary.

There's also a lot to talk about in regards to things like resource tiering and keeping inflation under control, and it's tightly related. But... I think this is long enough.

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Boiling the Yarnball

I've been thinking about why I like the construction games I like.

I'm including things like The Sims into this category. Whether you're constructing vehicles or facilities or people, there is one specific feel I like, and a bunch I don't.

I think it's yarnballs.

Big, soft, messy challenges that can be approached in a lot of different ways with a lot of different entanglements to the rest of the game.

For example, you're playing a space game. The rules are: you must have one point of life support per astronaut.

This is a small, hard constraint. There's no softness, no flexibility, no entanglement... no mess.

But in Oxygen Not Included, that rule is turned into a yarn ball thanks to the physics sim. I can create drafts of carbon dioxide, let rooms sort themselves into bands of gases and keep people in the oxygen zone, let them breath diseased oxygen, use pressure gates to optimize pressure for ideal algae conversion...

A combination of complex approaches (scrubbers, cleaners, algae, natural oxygen sources, etc) combined with complex topological possibilities (pressure, natural air sorting, air filtering, wind, etc) creates a lot of possibilities, a lot of bizarre, fun approaches that affect everything else in my facility.

It's not me balancing a spreadsheet. It's me building a facility, with all the complexity that entails.

One thing that makes this yarnball approach shine is how it ties into the rest of the construction, and how it turns a challenge into a narrative.

Challenge: you need to provide air.

Narrative: "the third and fourth floors of our Mars base are pressurized. Whenever we venture down to the first floor to change out the algae, we hold our breaths and work fast. Sandra got real sick when she couldn't hold her breath long enough."



The thing about yarnballs is that you do, eventually, sort them. Maybe not to some perfect standard, but you develop a method that works for you, and you'll usually stick with it.

That's why it's so important that the construction game is a huge pile of yarnballs.

If I sort one, there's another behind it.

More importantly, as I sort that one, I realize it's tied to the first one, and I didn't sort it well enough!

This creates an endless chain of narratives as I watch my facilities struggle with challenge after challenge, all their difficulties largely being my fault.



Another example of a yarnball is having children in The Sims.

Not only are the children themselves fairly complex, but caring for them is a convoluted, messy yarnball. You may think you have it solved, but then you realize your stay at home parent this time is a neat freak or something, and your timetable falls apart.

Or how about building a defensive entrance in Dwarf Fortress?

You have to deal with the threat of invaders, so you build a defensive gate. But how big is it? How do people get through it on their daily lives? How many resources can you afford to spend on it? What traps can you build? When you need to upgrade it, how will that work out?

And when the invasion happens, the gate helps turn the rather blunt narrative of "you lose, everyone dies" into a more nuanced narrative: "Bjornblatt lost an arm fighting off the goblins that got through the traps, and Hjornol is now responsible for rebuilding those traps into something more effective..."



I think yarnballs require a certain presentation to catch my attention.

I call it "boiling the yarnball".

This is a technique where nearly all of the game is incremental. In The Sims, your skills slowly go up, money slowly trickles in, you slowly do better at your job. In DF, you slowly farm, slowly build another bunkroom. It's all incremental.

Except then it's not. There's a challenge you're working towards.

In The Sims, is it time for a kid? Time to move? Time to get a promotion? Maybe just time to throw a big party?

In DF, is it time to build a defensive gate? Internal waterways? A magma forge? Maybe just time to rearrange who sleeps where?

What the player considers to be "a big thing" will vary depending on skill and interest. But you're usually working towards at least one big thing. You're playing the game to push the edge of what you can do, what you understand.

If the goblins trashed you last time, this time you're playing to build goblin defenses. If your sim died old and alone last time, this time you're playing to make a family. You build towards those challenges, and some part of your construction is difficult and challenging... because you haven't mastered that yarnball yet.

So the premise here is that the yarnball isn't thrown at you. It's something you walk up to. Something you explore.

The challenge that creates the yarnball might not be so gentle. The goblins will eventually attack. You will eventually get old and die. But you have some leeway before then.

Otherwise, there's not enough time to try and detangle the yarnball.



So I like to "boil the yarnball". You let the challenge that defines the yarnball simply sit there and simmer. When the player's ready, they can begin pulling at it... at which point, the narrative becomes more concrete.

To make it more concrete, I think there are four phases to this. I'm just getting started with my thoughts on this matter, but here's what I've come up with so far.

1) Planning
What challenge does the yarnball address? How will that challenge affect your facility? How will different levels of addressing it change that? How much space do you have to build in? How many resources do you have? How many workers can you divert, for how long, before things get risky?

Tie the planning into the overall flow of your facility, so it becomes part of the narrative: "in fall of 392, we began to defend ourselves. As harvest season ended, the farmers turned their hands to construction..."

2) Construction
Did you plan it right? What goes well? Poorly? What opportunities do you seize, or threats do you face that affect your construction efforts? Again, the construction is part of the narrative of the facility: "The great iron gates in the plan were changed to wood, at the request of the lord of the land, whose brother owns a lumberyard..."

There should be no real randomness in the mechanisms of construction. The randomness comes from outside: "oh, there's a gold seam where I wanted to put a wall. Oh, my workers are throwing tantrums because of the rain..."

3) Daily life
How does your construction affect things that aren't that challenge? The 'daily life'? What new opportunities does it create? What troubles? How does it integrate into your normal daily narrative?

For example, "The gate lay open, guarded by a single lookout. The lookout became very good friends with the hunters and lumberjacks, as they passed by nearly every day..."

4) Spotlight
How does your construction actually do its job? Specifically, how does it change a challenge into a narrative?

For example, "When goblins attacked, our lookout was slacking. Several got through the gate before it could be closed. Fjornblatt is fighting the intruders while, outside, torches are being lit..."



Each of these four phases of a yarnball helps to cement the narrative of the overall facility. The yarnball is positioned specifically to turn a challenge into a narrative, not just in the moment that the challenge arrives, but in an unbroken chain throughout the course of planning, construction, and daily life.

If you turn this idea towards other genres, you can see hints of it in other games. Coincidentally, those tend to be the games I like.

In an open world RPG? Building a character is several yarnballs. Watching the character face the challenges I intend them to face is great fun, as is watching that build struggle through challenges not related to their specialty. That's the part of an open world game I like.

Contrarily, without boiling yarnballs, even games in genres I like aren't very interesting to me.

For example, most "factory builders" where you assemble cars or medicines or whatever don't hold my interest. Either because the optimizations are all very cut and dry, or because the yarnball isn't presented in a way that helps me digest it.



How about you? Any of this fit into your idea of what's fun and what's not?