Some of you may recall a time when all the conversations about game design seemed to be about the "magic circle" and "immersion".
A little while after that, those terms became unpopular.
I think we need to bring them back. Actually, I think they became unpopular because anyone who can read trends knew damn well the games industry was trending against them with the rise of casual games. But trendy or not, I want to bring them back.
See, back in the day, most of the times I disliked a game, it was because either the gameplay got stale or the story had a gaping hole in it. Both are a loss of immersion.
Easy example: FFIX introduced a character so loathsome, so like essence-du-Jarjar, that I got deeply annoyed every time it popped up on screen. I wasn't thinking "what an annoying character". I was thinking "what the hell were the developers thinking?" Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing.
Similarly, in Tales of the Abyss, a major plot point involves blaming a seven year old for something that A) was prophecy and B) he wouldn't have done if anyone had ever bothered to tell him anything or even treated him vaguely nicely. Again, such a worthless story hole that I lost all respect for everyone. Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing.
But, boy, I long for those days. These days, the awkward story and horrible gameplay of top-flight games is still just as awkward, if not more so, but I rarely get too upset at it. Because now there's a new contender: directly breaking the "magic circle" to try and rope the player into some more publisher-advantageous situation. Usually, in-app purchases. Hoo boy, I say "a new contender", but what I mean is that the Tiger Woods of immersion-breaking showed up and is just making every other immersion-breaker look like a child.
For example, remember Sleeping Dogs? As GTA-likes go, that game was best in breed. Interesting setting, excellent level design, fun gameplay, interesting characters, decent dialog... the game only had one flaw for me. On literally every screen aside from the actual gameplay, there was a scrolling marquee: "Log in for the REAL Sleeping Dogs experience (TM)".
Every screen.
And this excellent, super-immersive game... just kind of slipped away from me. I never logged in. Maybe they just wanted to share high scores, and not to sell me pricey DLC. Who knows? It doesn't even matter, because the "magic circle" was broken. My immersion slipped away every time I hit the menu button, every time I hit a loading screen. Even though the game was excellent, I was losing interest and eventually stopped playing about six hours in. It was just too hard to get into the swing of things when the game kept telling me that I wasn't playing the real version of the GAME THIS IS A GAME WE WROTE IT WORSHIP US PLAY IT LIKE WE DEMAND YOU TO THIS IS JUST A GAME STOP GETTING IMMERSED POKE POKE HEY ARE YOU LISTENING.
That's how it felt.
I picked the most extreme sample - the best game with the smallest amount of "magic circle" breakage. It was still enough to destroy the game for me.
Most games are significantly worse, especially AAA games. Obviously, it's all inherited from casual games. And a lot of people will say that casual games kind of changed the culture to make it acceptable, so now it's acceptable. But the thing is, I never bought that excuse. Even in casual games, it's distracting and makes me want to stop playing. I like casual games where I can play the game fully immersed.
As an example, Triple Town. An excellent and immersive casual game... until you run low on moves, at which point it breaks the magic circle and tells you to buy more moves (along with other upgrades). It should be noted that this was when I lost interest in the game.
"Don't you hate paying for stuff? Isn't that the problem?"
Well, no. Trophies are just as bad. When a casual game starts popping up trophies, I'm basically done with it. It's sabotaging its own magic circle. That was the downfall of Farcy 3 to me: three different kinds of popup trophies. So a great game was brought low by magic-circle breaking... even without asking me for any money.
Sure, asking for money tends to be worse... but that's because the implementation tends to be a lot more aggressive. That's because money is involved: the developers or publishers want it to be more aggressive so they can make more money.
With me it backfires, but I don't know whether that's true of a lot of people. Obviously, there are a lot of people who are fine with the "magic circle" being broken. Trophies as standard practice make that obvious, as does the success of in-app purchasing. But I think maybe it's time to consider that people may not know what they need. Many of these practices abuse gambling disorders and addictive mindsets rather than actually providing an interesting game. Maybe there is a way to make money by offering a good game, rather than by making your game crappy but addictive.
I also think maybe it's not as straightforward as it looks. I think there probably are a lot of gamers - the vast "silent majority" - that don't buy into this distracting trophy-and-IAP stuff. However, they might buy into a game that is properly immersive. The question is - how can you make money off that? Off me, to be specific?
First, I guess we should talk briefly about "magic circles" and why I keep putting quotes around the term.
In brief, the "magic circle" is a concept where the rules and scenarios of the game define a reality that is different from the rest of the world. There is a clear line - this is within the game, that is outside the game. It was a concept very much in vogue for a year or two, but then everyone realized that it's far too simplistic to represent the actual situation that games create. Personally, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. While insufficient, I think it's a good starting point.
I think the heart of our discussion isn't about "how to make money using the magic circle", but instead "how to put money inside the magic circle". This is why secondary currencies are so popular. Buy the secondary currency with real money in one brief moment, and now that currency has been put into the game world and can be spent without breaking the circle. People talk about how those kinds of intermediate currencies "trick" the player into "mis-estimating" the "actual cost" of a transaction... but I think it's simpler than that. They simply lower the barrier. If the money exists in the game, you can spend it in the game.
If the money doesn't exist in the game, then the quality of your game is a barrier to spending money. The better your game is, the less likely a player is going to want to break the magic circle and screw up the game. So, conversely, crappy games may actually have an easier time getting players to spend outside money, because the player is okay with "surfacing" and breaking the crappy "magic circle".
It's certainly possible to put things inside the circle, but it's also possible to put things outside of a weak circle where players are okay with surfacing for it. For example, every multiplayer game has expanded the circle to include many players, lobbies, and so forth.
If you think of these games as a series of gears rather than a magic circle, you might see how this is done. There is one gear, small and fast. This is the gameplay itself. Very immersive, very deep. Alongside it is a larger, slower gear. This is the lobby and scoring system, where you can show your enthusiasm, set up new matches, alter match parameters (such as what you are wearing) and so on.
The two gears drive each other, serving two different needs. The small gear drives the large gear, yes. In turn, the large gear offers a valuable stop-off. While the large gear isn't very interesting or immersive on its own, it's almost painless to go from the large gear to a real-money store due to the shallowness of the circle. Similarly, switching between the gears is much less painful than jumping directly from the match to the outside world or visa-versa. The power of the core game gear keeps the large gear spinning even though it doesn't have much power itself.
You don't have to take this geared approach, though. Several "massively single player" games have come out - Dragon's Dogma, Dark Souls, and so on. Most of the things that would be in the large, slow gear are made almost entirely automatic, and handled within the game itself. Can you monetize it? Maybe, if you can put monetized currency in that primary game.
The core concept here is that in order to monetize a game without alienating me, you have to monetize it without breaking the "magic circle". There are, in my thinking, three basic ways to do this. Just to recap, they are:
1) Charge before I play. Classic method, yes, but also useful for expansions, renting servers, etc.
2) Create a gentle gradient to the outside world by "gearing" your game. It has to be really gentle. Generally, a store accessible from the slowest, shallowest, most meta part of the game.
3) In-game currency fueled by out-of-game purchases. However, this is excessively easy to screw up. Your core gameplay loop can easily be damaged by it, in addition to the less tangible risks to the "magic circle". It is very easy to use an intermediate currency and still break immersion all the time.
Anyway, as mentioned, it's clear that many people don't have a problem with all this un-immersive stuff. I may be an outlier.
Or I may be more common than you think, and we're a market that everyone is ignoring.
Monday, August 05, 2013
Thursday, August 01, 2013
Fighting Tabletops and Manga
An adventure RPG is interesting not because of the combat, but because of everything else. Combat is very important, and in many cases it is the cornerstone of the game... but the real joy of those games tends to be the adventure, not the individual fights. I'm always interested in getting a different feel out of my games, so I always wondered: can you make a game that focuses almost entirely on the fighting? A game that feels more like pro wrestling, or an old kung-fu movie, or a shonen fighting manga.
The core "problem" with this approach is that the fighting is highlighted to the extent that the adventure part suffers. Unlike an adventure RPG, the noncombat sections aren't really adventurous. It's rare for them to be about discovering what's over the next hill, or finding a hidden treasure, or saving a village. Instead, they use a variety of soap-opera interpersonal tactics combined with high stakes and emotional training sequences.
My question is: can you put that into your tabletop RPG instead of the adventure hooks?
One core piece is the fighting mechanics themselves. You can't use the same mechanistic approach other RPGs use, because the fights serve a much larger role. In a normal RPG, the fights are obstacles, and the character development/role playing usually happens outside of combat, during an adventure sequence. But in a combat game, much of the role playing and representation need to happen during the fight. Inside the fight.
Similarly, in an adventure RPG fighting is an obstacle is to wear the player characters down. Fights serve other purposes, too - pacing, foreshadowing, drama, plenty of other purposes... but the core mechanics are about attrition. It's pretty rare for combat to actually be life or death in an adventure RPG: most encounters are going to go the players' way, it's just a matter of how many resources they burn. And, of course, between combat they will often take actions to reduce the difficulty of the next fight - bar the doors, burn down the fortress, cast a sleep spell, whatever.
Fighting games can't do that. Or, rather, they have to do it DURING combat, somehow.
So the combat needs to be radically expanded.
The fundamental change is that combat needs to have pacing changes similar to the pacing changes you'd get from a dungeon crawl. Clashes followed by short reprieves. Times when you dominate, times when they dominate. Moments when you might be able to steal a few seconds to recover the feeling in your stinging fists - or would it be better to rush in so he doesn't have time to catch his breath?
There are a lot of possible mechanics to allow for that kind of clashing, but because simple is generally best, I think I would use a very basic "clash and away" system. Every clash lasts a certain number of rounds, then you get an "away" period where you recover, tag out, shuffle for position, or even just cut the away time short to try and get an edge in the first round of the clash.
The damage system would need to be adapted to have all the complexity of the normal RPG's full attrition system. That is, things like consumable items, powers, mana points, and health all need to be rolled into the combat system. Of course, they don't have to have the same justification or color - we just need the statistical backbone. So you would use up some resources during the clash, and try to damage the enemy not just in terms of health, but trying to deplete his resources or foil his resource-consuming attacks. It needs to be a battle of attrition, because that's the actual play of an RPG, and we're cramming it all into the fight.
There's lots of rules solutions for that, and it's largely a matter of what your fighting is. If you're doing a boxing game, you might use things like stamina, dizziness, leg-intactness... if you were doing a mystical kung-fu game, you might have things like chi and broken bones and righteousness. Of course, adding in the teamwork capabilities can make it even more complex.
However, all of that work only gets us halfway to our goal, because we still don't give the players any opportunity to role play. It's just a statistical game right now.
That's the secret behind an adventure RPG, and why they work so well. They pretend to give you all these rules, but in reality what they give you is a distraction to drive you to role play. The rules are really just there as an impetus to allow you to exist in the world. Similarly, the role play is often expressed not in theatrical monologues, but in the ordinary decisions you make between fights. To run or stick. To infiltrate or invade. To plan or wing it. To spend or hoard. Much of the role playing happens without the players even realizing they are role playing. Being "in character" is nice, sure, but there's a lot of meat to the actions you take even when you are not talking as your character.
If you look at a fighting manga or anime, you can see that there is a lot of opportunity for role play. The characters are all quite expressive. However, much of the focus is on their internal activities. Their emotions, basically. This is the opposite of an adventure RPG, where the expression is represented via interactions with the world. In the end, a combat manga's fighter character throws a punch. This isn't a different interaction than the thousands of punches he's thrown before. But it is very different because of the expressiveness and dedication that the fighter showed in the panels beforehand.
To reflect this, it's going to be necessary to make a world that the players can express themselves in. The world probably can't be the fight proper. While they can certainly express themselves in how they fight, there's not enough flexibility to match the variety of things players can freely do while on an adventure. We have to create a world where the players can freely do that level of expressive play.
Basically, we need to make the PCs' emotions into a world.
I don't mean literally. I simply mean that the team's emotional environment needs to be something that the players can interact with freely.
My thinking is a relatively simple token-based system is probably the answer. For example, you might have "friendship tokens" or similar which you can give out as you prefer. If an ally is punched by Master Wong the Iron Fist, you gain as much chi as the tokens held by that ally. You can rearrange your tokens, but not instantly - it's a slow process both in and out of combat.
However, that's still a bit too basic. There needs to be more freedom to create "engines" and "judgments", neither of which are really supported by that simple token system.
So another rule I recommend is the "double or nothing" rule. When you give someone a friendship token, it comes with a due date. If they don't do something in-game to validate your friendship by that time, both you and they lose a friendship token, representing a widening distance and feeling of alienation. But if they do validate it, both of you freely gain another token of the other person's, adding to their token total and making everything more potent.
Each token you add comes with this kind of due date, and you can't add another token until the previous one's been resolved (validated or canceled). However, each token you add has stricter and stricter validation requirements. The first token can be validated with a slight smile. But the seventh token requires a truly epic moment. Moreover, as you get into the 3-token range, you have to start to cement the kind of relationship you two have, and if the validations are of the wrong relationship category, there's no growth (but also no penalty). You can only have one of each kind of relationship...
That probably works well enough outside of combat, but it doesn't allow for in-combat shenanigans. For that, I would say that each player can use the friendship tokens on an ally to judge that ally's enemy, creating "enemy" tokens on them which will give them a bonus against that enemy. Like friendship tokens, enemy tokens react to resolution and are of a specific relationship type. Unlike friendship tokens, an enemy's "resolution" will cause continuous growth rather than a one-shot growth. If you hate an enemy's cheating sleaziness and put an enemy token on him, then every time he cheats that enemy token gets added again.
This doesn't generally get out of control, because enemy tokens must be spent (removed from play) in order to do special moves. Friendship tokens are similar for healing/support moves, although the expense is temporary and they recover at the end of combat.
I think this might be enough... but there is one more thing to discuss. Noncombat.
Between combats, combat manga and anime follow a very specific kind of formula. If you can cement this formula into a playable system, you can probably tap the players' internalized responses in the same way that encountering goblins taps their adventure instincts.
1) Hijinks
Intercharacter hijinks are very common in action manga, establishing relationships between the characters and also helping to establish the rules of the world. This is also a great way to allow player characters to have strong personality characteristics and express them freely. The nature of hijinks will vary depending on the setting - a high-school basketball game might have an arc about the school play, while a gritty monster-smashing brawler might have hijinks about the big eater having to rustle up some food. While some hijinks are simple one-offs, many of them are small, relatively unimportant arcs that hold together for long periods, giving the players a lot of stability in developing their characters and relationships.
2) Training
There are a bunch of different kinds of training. Physical/mental training to improve stats, learning a secret move from a new master, suddenly getting insight as to a new technique from a hijink, researching a specific enemy to find a weakness, training the other team members, going on a training vacation, receiving a new secret weapon from engineering, training in secret... training is a good way to regulate how quickly the players can change their character, and also can serve to tie them very closely to the world if you are careful about it.
3) Casual Color
Casual color is often overlooked. This is the routine stuff. In a normal RPG, this would be deciding what inn to stay at, determining how many rations to take, trying to get a good price on the +1 sword you want to sell, mapping out a path to the next destination. You need to provide similar "bread" for this game. There are a lot of different options, but in essence most of them have personal condition at the heart of them. Being a top-flight fighter involves constant maintenance and tradeoffs for your body to keep it operating at peak... and those tradeoffs get even more complex if you want to change your style out.
4) Plot and Inspiration
Plot should be obvious, but it's a bit different in a fighting game. The overarching plot threads could be the same, but their presentation is completely different. In an adventure RPG, the plot is a reason for the players to care. In a fighting RPG, the plot is a reason for the characters to care. Therefore, plot points should be presented as inspiration to fight and train, which is a completely different focus than a standard RPG story.
Some plot elements are strongly interactive. For example, searching for a hidden master, choosing which of the four enemy kings to fight next, aligning yourself with a given faction. Things like following someone around at night could be considered plot, but are actually hijinks - a major difference between a fighting game and an adventure game.
However, many plot elements aren't very interactive, and serve solely to get the character to want to fight. Seeing your next enemy dominate someone you looked up to. Finding that monsters burned out the town. Someone getting sick and needing to earn money to pay for hospital care. A friend going rogue and turning to forbidden techniques... these are things you can't directly interact with. Instead, you train up such that when the moment for resolution comes, you're ready.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on fighting RPGs.
The core "problem" with this approach is that the fighting is highlighted to the extent that the adventure part suffers. Unlike an adventure RPG, the noncombat sections aren't really adventurous. It's rare for them to be about discovering what's over the next hill, or finding a hidden treasure, or saving a village. Instead, they use a variety of soap-opera interpersonal tactics combined with high stakes and emotional training sequences.
My question is: can you put that into your tabletop RPG instead of the adventure hooks?
One core piece is the fighting mechanics themselves. You can't use the same mechanistic approach other RPGs use, because the fights serve a much larger role. In a normal RPG, the fights are obstacles, and the character development/role playing usually happens outside of combat, during an adventure sequence. But in a combat game, much of the role playing and representation need to happen during the fight. Inside the fight.
Similarly, in an adventure RPG fighting is an obstacle is to wear the player characters down. Fights serve other purposes, too - pacing, foreshadowing, drama, plenty of other purposes... but the core mechanics are about attrition. It's pretty rare for combat to actually be life or death in an adventure RPG: most encounters are going to go the players' way, it's just a matter of how many resources they burn. And, of course, between combat they will often take actions to reduce the difficulty of the next fight - bar the doors, burn down the fortress, cast a sleep spell, whatever.
Fighting games can't do that. Or, rather, they have to do it DURING combat, somehow.
So the combat needs to be radically expanded.
The fundamental change is that combat needs to have pacing changes similar to the pacing changes you'd get from a dungeon crawl. Clashes followed by short reprieves. Times when you dominate, times when they dominate. Moments when you might be able to steal a few seconds to recover the feeling in your stinging fists - or would it be better to rush in so he doesn't have time to catch his breath?
There are a lot of possible mechanics to allow for that kind of clashing, but because simple is generally best, I think I would use a very basic "clash and away" system. Every clash lasts a certain number of rounds, then you get an "away" period where you recover, tag out, shuffle for position, or even just cut the away time short to try and get an edge in the first round of the clash.
The damage system would need to be adapted to have all the complexity of the normal RPG's full attrition system. That is, things like consumable items, powers, mana points, and health all need to be rolled into the combat system. Of course, they don't have to have the same justification or color - we just need the statistical backbone. So you would use up some resources during the clash, and try to damage the enemy not just in terms of health, but trying to deplete his resources or foil his resource-consuming attacks. It needs to be a battle of attrition, because that's the actual play of an RPG, and we're cramming it all into the fight.
There's lots of rules solutions for that, and it's largely a matter of what your fighting is. If you're doing a boxing game, you might use things like stamina, dizziness, leg-intactness... if you were doing a mystical kung-fu game, you might have things like chi and broken bones and righteousness. Of course, adding in the teamwork capabilities can make it even more complex.
However, all of that work only gets us halfway to our goal, because we still don't give the players any opportunity to role play. It's just a statistical game right now.
That's the secret behind an adventure RPG, and why they work so well. They pretend to give you all these rules, but in reality what they give you is a distraction to drive you to role play. The rules are really just there as an impetus to allow you to exist in the world. Similarly, the role play is often expressed not in theatrical monologues, but in the ordinary decisions you make between fights. To run or stick. To infiltrate or invade. To plan or wing it. To spend or hoard. Much of the role playing happens without the players even realizing they are role playing. Being "in character" is nice, sure, but there's a lot of meat to the actions you take even when you are not talking as your character.
If you look at a fighting manga or anime, you can see that there is a lot of opportunity for role play. The characters are all quite expressive. However, much of the focus is on their internal activities. Their emotions, basically. This is the opposite of an adventure RPG, where the expression is represented via interactions with the world. In the end, a combat manga's fighter character throws a punch. This isn't a different interaction than the thousands of punches he's thrown before. But it is very different because of the expressiveness and dedication that the fighter showed in the panels beforehand.
To reflect this, it's going to be necessary to make a world that the players can express themselves in. The world probably can't be the fight proper. While they can certainly express themselves in how they fight, there's not enough flexibility to match the variety of things players can freely do while on an adventure. We have to create a world where the players can freely do that level of expressive play.
Basically, we need to make the PCs' emotions into a world.
I don't mean literally. I simply mean that the team's emotional environment needs to be something that the players can interact with freely.
My thinking is a relatively simple token-based system is probably the answer. For example, you might have "friendship tokens" or similar which you can give out as you prefer. If an ally is punched by Master Wong the Iron Fist, you gain as much chi as the tokens held by that ally. You can rearrange your tokens, but not instantly - it's a slow process both in and out of combat.
However, that's still a bit too basic. There needs to be more freedom to create "engines" and "judgments", neither of which are really supported by that simple token system.
So another rule I recommend is the "double or nothing" rule. When you give someone a friendship token, it comes with a due date. If they don't do something in-game to validate your friendship by that time, both you and they lose a friendship token, representing a widening distance and feeling of alienation. But if they do validate it, both of you freely gain another token of the other person's, adding to their token total and making everything more potent.
Each token you add comes with this kind of due date, and you can't add another token until the previous one's been resolved (validated or canceled). However, each token you add has stricter and stricter validation requirements. The first token can be validated with a slight smile. But the seventh token requires a truly epic moment. Moreover, as you get into the 3-token range, you have to start to cement the kind of relationship you two have, and if the validations are of the wrong relationship category, there's no growth (but also no penalty). You can only have one of each kind of relationship...
That probably works well enough outside of combat, but it doesn't allow for in-combat shenanigans. For that, I would say that each player can use the friendship tokens on an ally to judge that ally's enemy, creating "enemy" tokens on them which will give them a bonus against that enemy. Like friendship tokens, enemy tokens react to resolution and are of a specific relationship type. Unlike friendship tokens, an enemy's "resolution" will cause continuous growth rather than a one-shot growth. If you hate an enemy's cheating sleaziness and put an enemy token on him, then every time he cheats that enemy token gets added again.
This doesn't generally get out of control, because enemy tokens must be spent (removed from play) in order to do special moves. Friendship tokens are similar for healing/support moves, although the expense is temporary and they recover at the end of combat.
I think this might be enough... but there is one more thing to discuss. Noncombat.
Between combats, combat manga and anime follow a very specific kind of formula. If you can cement this formula into a playable system, you can probably tap the players' internalized responses in the same way that encountering goblins taps their adventure instincts.
1) Hijinks
Intercharacter hijinks are very common in action manga, establishing relationships between the characters and also helping to establish the rules of the world. This is also a great way to allow player characters to have strong personality characteristics and express them freely. The nature of hijinks will vary depending on the setting - a high-school basketball game might have an arc about the school play, while a gritty monster-smashing brawler might have hijinks about the big eater having to rustle up some food. While some hijinks are simple one-offs, many of them are small, relatively unimportant arcs that hold together for long periods, giving the players a lot of stability in developing their characters and relationships.
2) Training
There are a bunch of different kinds of training. Physical/mental training to improve stats, learning a secret move from a new master, suddenly getting insight as to a new technique from a hijink, researching a specific enemy to find a weakness, training the other team members, going on a training vacation, receiving a new secret weapon from engineering, training in secret... training is a good way to regulate how quickly the players can change their character, and also can serve to tie them very closely to the world if you are careful about it.
3) Casual Color
Casual color is often overlooked. This is the routine stuff. In a normal RPG, this would be deciding what inn to stay at, determining how many rations to take, trying to get a good price on the +1 sword you want to sell, mapping out a path to the next destination. You need to provide similar "bread" for this game. There are a lot of different options, but in essence most of them have personal condition at the heart of them. Being a top-flight fighter involves constant maintenance and tradeoffs for your body to keep it operating at peak... and those tradeoffs get even more complex if you want to change your style out.
4) Plot and Inspiration
Plot should be obvious, but it's a bit different in a fighting game. The overarching plot threads could be the same, but their presentation is completely different. In an adventure RPG, the plot is a reason for the players to care. In a fighting RPG, the plot is a reason for the characters to care. Therefore, plot points should be presented as inspiration to fight and train, which is a completely different focus than a standard RPG story.
Some plot elements are strongly interactive. For example, searching for a hidden master, choosing which of the four enemy kings to fight next, aligning yourself with a given faction. Things like following someone around at night could be considered plot, but are actually hijinks - a major difference between a fighting game and an adventure game.
However, many plot elements aren't very interactive, and serve solely to get the character to want to fight. Seeing your next enemy dominate someone you looked up to. Finding that monsters burned out the town. Someone getting sick and needing to earn money to pay for hospital care. A friend going rogue and turning to forbidden techniques... these are things you can't directly interact with. Instead, you train up such that when the moment for resolution comes, you're ready.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on fighting RPGs.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Layered Construction
All this talk about rocket stages! Okay, that's done. But let's continue talking about the fundamental gameplay concept behind them: the idea that different functional gameplay elements must be stacked in the same shared space.
This is a great concept, because it's basically Tetris gone off the deep end. When building something, you not only have to build something that functions like you need it to, but you also need to consider the requirements of the next functional piece, providing good anchors and spatial arrangement for that!
Let's consider a classic game idea: you are building a city (or a space base, or a secret lab, or a dungeon, whatever).
Classically, these games operate by building everything in the same basic plane (rarely, with some 3D elements). While you certainly do build the facility in stages as you progress, each of the stages is normally simply attached somewhere in the base. At advanced levels of play there will be a lot of preplanning for optimal final base arrangement, but in general these games can be played "expansively": just staple the next pieces on wherever you can. At very worst, delete a misplaced early piece and then reconfigure a bit.
I'd like to think about how to combine this with the concept of stacking in shared space.
For example, let's say there's a game about a futuristic city. As you build the city, you literally build on top of the existing layer. So your first layer gradually gets covered up as you build a second layer, and so on. However, the lower layers don't vanish: they still operate, albeit in a dark and economically depressed manner.
If you want to build a giant supermall, you'll need to build it right on top of a bunch of tram stations for deliveries (and people too poor to fly space-cars). In order to build tram stations, you need to build them on top of power stations. And so on.
You can make it much more complex. For example, tram stations might cut across several layers, rising and falling to deliver locals to various heights. Landing bays for space-cars might require two layer deep substructures for safety reasons. A giant spire of a building could easily cross a dozen layers. Airflow and weather in the lower layers could be a concern which grows and changes as you stack more layers down on top.
It's a simple enough concept, with a lot of room for whatever complexity you want to add.
We could also go a route with shifting, adaptive layers. For example, let's say this is a game about ghosts coming from dreamers, and you run a sleep clinic specifically to deal with such things.
So you're responsible for arranging all the rooms in the clinic, placing the patients, and creating their daily schedules (including where they can spend their time off and so on). In turn, the dreamscape is manufactured around their bedrooms and their moods created by their day. In the dreamscape you can build another facility to work with the dream-avatars of the patients and protect them from dream-monsters - including those that may emerge from their avatars, or the avatars themselves.
You can stack this N deep, as you like. The treatment in the dream world may involve how they migrate around the dream facility you created, and that may in turn create an "unconsciousscape" or something where you can build another facility to treat all of humankind simultaneously...
Anyway, the key complication to this approach is that the foundations are mutable. If you change where a patient sleeps, or if you introduce a particularly obnoxious thing to their daily lives, the dreamscape foundation will change, and the facility you built there will also be altered - perhaps some buildings lose power, or partially collapse.
Both of these game designs are relatively straightfoward, but they seem like they would be interesting.
This is a great concept, because it's basically Tetris gone off the deep end. When building something, you not only have to build something that functions like you need it to, but you also need to consider the requirements of the next functional piece, providing good anchors and spatial arrangement for that!
Let's consider a classic game idea: you are building a city (or a space base, or a secret lab, or a dungeon, whatever).
Classically, these games operate by building everything in the same basic plane (rarely, with some 3D elements). While you certainly do build the facility in stages as you progress, each of the stages is normally simply attached somewhere in the base. At advanced levels of play there will be a lot of preplanning for optimal final base arrangement, but in general these games can be played "expansively": just staple the next pieces on wherever you can. At very worst, delete a misplaced early piece and then reconfigure a bit.
I'd like to think about how to combine this with the concept of stacking in shared space.
For example, let's say there's a game about a futuristic city. As you build the city, you literally build on top of the existing layer. So your first layer gradually gets covered up as you build a second layer, and so on. However, the lower layers don't vanish: they still operate, albeit in a dark and economically depressed manner.
If you want to build a giant supermall, you'll need to build it right on top of a bunch of tram stations for deliveries (and people too poor to fly space-cars). In order to build tram stations, you need to build them on top of power stations. And so on.
You can make it much more complex. For example, tram stations might cut across several layers, rising and falling to deliver locals to various heights. Landing bays for space-cars might require two layer deep substructures for safety reasons. A giant spire of a building could easily cross a dozen layers. Airflow and weather in the lower layers could be a concern which grows and changes as you stack more layers down on top.
It's a simple enough concept, with a lot of room for whatever complexity you want to add.
We could also go a route with shifting, adaptive layers. For example, let's say this is a game about ghosts coming from dreamers, and you run a sleep clinic specifically to deal with such things.
So you're responsible for arranging all the rooms in the clinic, placing the patients, and creating their daily schedules (including where they can spend their time off and so on). In turn, the dreamscape is manufactured around their bedrooms and their moods created by their day. In the dreamscape you can build another facility to work with the dream-avatars of the patients and protect them from dream-monsters - including those that may emerge from their avatars, or the avatars themselves.
You can stack this N deep, as you like. The treatment in the dream world may involve how they migrate around the dream facility you created, and that may in turn create an "unconsciousscape" or something where you can build another facility to treat all of humankind simultaneously...
Anyway, the key complication to this approach is that the foundations are mutable. If you change where a patient sleeps, or if you introduce a particularly obnoxious thing to their daily lives, the dreamscape foundation will change, and the facility you built there will also be altered - perhaps some buildings lose power, or partially collapse.
Both of these game designs are relatively straightfoward, but they seem like they would be interesting.
Recovering Operational Stuff: The Game
For the past few days I've been talking about stages (rocket stages) as gameplay. Today I wanted to talk about stages that continue to operate.
A big problem with Kerbal's "rocket stage design" philosophy is that each stage tends to be kind of fire-and-forget. There is some interaction between the phases, mostly in terms of physical dependencies, but nearly all the effort is simply to get the payload to the destination. Nearly all of the stages are disposable.
But the most interesting things are done when you have stages that are complex. Launch a space station hub which drops a lander that has a skyhook... that's when things get interesting. A lot of stages that have complex, ongoing functions.
So let's forget the harsh physics sim and focus on the idea of having a system where you create stages that continue to do stuff. For example, if you want to mine the moon, you have an orbital base which drops the mining facility which has a heavy lift shuttle to bring the payload back to the base...
The key here is how to make the physicality of the stages matter to each other. If it's all just standardized docking modules and dropping stuff, then we end up with a cargo-box situation where it doesn't matter what the space station is dropping. Just use the same space station regardless of what we're dropping. No! We want it to matter. But how?
Let's make our game a sort of Battlestar Galactica thing, where you're on the run and you can only stop for a few weeks at any given resting point. When you drop a mining facility, you're going to want most of that stuff back before you leave, stowed away securely for the rigors of warp travel. You might leave some scaffolding and concrete behind, sure, but those mining lasers and solar panels are too valuable to ditch. So every stage you launch, you plan to bring the vast majority of it back and reconnect it.
Now the physicality of the design matters, because not only do you have to drop it, you also have to resecure it, and in a way that is safe for warp travel.
I'm picturing something like a giant space donut with a bunch of big "patches" on the outside. Those patches are places you can construct your ships, and the places you'll want to reattach them to. Of course, the ships you create are often very complex, multi-stage objects, since they do have to operate in complex environments at interplanetary ranges. You could launch your fuel station and your mining facility separately, but it probably makes more sense to combine them into a single ship and return the facility to the fuel station rather than trekking them both back to the hub with independent microwarp drives.
Also, you have to choose how much to leave behind. The mining facility has a few very high-value modules - laser drills, for example. Perhaps you just want to reclaim those, so you load them and the crew onto the ore shuttle and leave behind the majority of the facility framework. On the other hand, infrastructure struts aren't free either - maybe you really do want to recover the majority of the facility. Perhaps even to the point of recollapsing inflatable hab units and deconstituting concrete back into powder for reuse. It depends on gravity and time, I suppose. And how much work you feel like doing to set it all back up again at the next respite.
I also like the idea of very adaptive physical objects. The space station unfolds when it reaches orbit. The shuttle has "wings" of plasma to help lift it, but it needs to be careful not to cut the space station. The facility can "self destruct" and pack itself into a box for cargo lifting. Even habitable modules might migrate around a facility shift-by-shift to keep the workers all perfectly rested and happy...
The big thing here is the recovery of each stage. This makes it critical for stages to be able to re-dock with each other, or be dismantled into easily-carried parts. Either way, it's clear that the physics of the game will have to be a lot more forgiving than Kerbal's. In fact, the piloting and docking is probably done automatically, with you simply choosing destinations and directing crew as to what to build or change when something needs building or changing.
This automation will allow you to steadily build up your capabilities such that even on a short respite you could deploy hundreds of mining ships to strip a star system bare in just a few weeks. Of course, the final goal is to fill the donut hole with an intergalactic drive and leave to find a green planet in some other galaxy... but who will manage to gather the rare resources and manufacture the delicate components that need to be manufactured at the bottom of a planet's gravity well?
A big problem with Kerbal's "rocket stage design" philosophy is that each stage tends to be kind of fire-and-forget. There is some interaction between the phases, mostly in terms of physical dependencies, but nearly all the effort is simply to get the payload to the destination. Nearly all of the stages are disposable.
But the most interesting things are done when you have stages that are complex. Launch a space station hub which drops a lander that has a skyhook... that's when things get interesting. A lot of stages that have complex, ongoing functions.
So let's forget the harsh physics sim and focus on the idea of having a system where you create stages that continue to do stuff. For example, if you want to mine the moon, you have an orbital base which drops the mining facility which has a heavy lift shuttle to bring the payload back to the base...
The key here is how to make the physicality of the stages matter to each other. If it's all just standardized docking modules and dropping stuff, then we end up with a cargo-box situation where it doesn't matter what the space station is dropping. Just use the same space station regardless of what we're dropping. No! We want it to matter. But how?
Let's make our game a sort of Battlestar Galactica thing, where you're on the run and you can only stop for a few weeks at any given resting point. When you drop a mining facility, you're going to want most of that stuff back before you leave, stowed away securely for the rigors of warp travel. You might leave some scaffolding and concrete behind, sure, but those mining lasers and solar panels are too valuable to ditch. So every stage you launch, you plan to bring the vast majority of it back and reconnect it.
Now the physicality of the design matters, because not only do you have to drop it, you also have to resecure it, and in a way that is safe for warp travel.
I'm picturing something like a giant space donut with a bunch of big "patches" on the outside. Those patches are places you can construct your ships, and the places you'll want to reattach them to. Of course, the ships you create are often very complex, multi-stage objects, since they do have to operate in complex environments at interplanetary ranges. You could launch your fuel station and your mining facility separately, but it probably makes more sense to combine them into a single ship and return the facility to the fuel station rather than trekking them both back to the hub with independent microwarp drives.
Also, you have to choose how much to leave behind. The mining facility has a few very high-value modules - laser drills, for example. Perhaps you just want to reclaim those, so you load them and the crew onto the ore shuttle and leave behind the majority of the facility framework. On the other hand, infrastructure struts aren't free either - maybe you really do want to recover the majority of the facility. Perhaps even to the point of recollapsing inflatable hab units and deconstituting concrete back into powder for reuse. It depends on gravity and time, I suppose. And how much work you feel like doing to set it all back up again at the next respite.
I also like the idea of very adaptive physical objects. The space station unfolds when it reaches orbit. The shuttle has "wings" of plasma to help lift it, but it needs to be careful not to cut the space station. The facility can "self destruct" and pack itself into a box for cargo lifting. Even habitable modules might migrate around a facility shift-by-shift to keep the workers all perfectly rested and happy...
The big thing here is the recovery of each stage. This makes it critical for stages to be able to re-dock with each other, or be dismantled into easily-carried parts. Either way, it's clear that the physics of the game will have to be a lot more forgiving than Kerbal's. In fact, the piloting and docking is probably done automatically, with you simply choosing destinations and directing crew as to what to build or change when something needs building or changing.
This automation will allow you to steadily build up your capabilities such that even on a short respite you could deploy hundreds of mining ships to strip a star system bare in just a few weeks. Of course, the final goal is to fill the donut hole with an intergalactic drive and leave to find a green planet in some other galaxy... but who will manage to gather the rare resources and manufacture the delicate components that need to be manufactured at the bottom of a planet's gravity well?
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Design with Stage Constraints
Yesterday I talked about stage-based design - stages as in rockets, not as in levels. Read that first, if you like, because this builds on it.
When it comes to building stages, a big part of the fun is the constraints that are put on the construction. In Kerbal, there are four major constraints.
1) Rockets fire downward. Since the primary engines fire downward, there's a very strong limit as to vertical construction. You can't put an engine above another engine and fire them both, because the top engine will destroy the bottom engine.
2) Fuel tanks are heavy and get emptied out. This means that you'll optimally want to shed those heavy fuel tanks the instant they dry up - which means many of your stages are arranged specifically to dump empty tanks safely and quickly.
3) The physics of the rocket restrict how you can build it. Wobble, shear, and strain will rip your rocket apart if you build it clumsily. Unfortunately, in Kerbal this can be fixed by just using struts to staple everything together firmly, so it's not as much of an issue.
4) The tradeoff between vertical and horizontal. You can put a lot of things in a vertical line - especially fuel tanks - but that can get difficult when you want to add more complex devices and behaviors. However, horizontal construction interferes with the line of the other vertical segments, and also creates a lot of wobble - at least until you realize the wobble is broken.
These constraints create a wonderful environment where you can build easily, but the restrictions grow organically as you get bigger. The constraints are all about tradeoffs rather than restrictions, and are therefore a lot more flexible and expressive than a game where you have five hardpoints and you slot in three weapons and a shield. Moreover, the constraints are specifically polished such that they interact with building in stages: you can drop large chunks of your creation as you go along, which means the remainder has a new profile and new performance characteristics.
In my early tests for the "sea and sky" game I talked about yesterday, one thing I ran into was the overly simplistic construction system I created. It's worth considering whether a system with some more constraints could be made more interesting.
Unlike space travel, fuel isn't the biggest concern in the sea and sky game. I think that hull is. Each kind of medium - flight, sea, subaquatic - has a different kind of hull with different characteristics. While the different kinds of hulls can survive the different kinds of mediums, they are definitely a burden, adding weight and drag.
It makes sense that, instead of jettisoning fuel tanks, you'd have to jettison hulls. When you want to go from air to submarine, you need to land the blimp on the surface and then just get rid of the blimp part, leave you with a submarine. Of course, the blimp would have to be big enough to carry the submarine, but that's the joy of the stages approach, isn't it? Each stage must be larger than the last.
However, that theory is all well and good, but how do you make it interesting physically? How do you give the player the clay and push him with tradeoffs?
Well, it's got to be in how the hulls connect up and orient, doesn't it?
It's tempting to simply make each hull contain the next hull, like Russian nesting dolls. But that runs into the same problem as the cargo boxes: there's no tight relationship between the stages. It's just cargo-carrying: they don't share the same physics space. So we want our hulls to exist in the same physics space all the time.
Which means we really don't have any option: the hulls have to all be exterior, at least partially.
The question is: do we arrange the hulls into a single hull, or do we have them separated into distinct hulls which are connected - or, perhaps, both?
Well, distinct hulls is problematic for two reasons. One is physics: both the drag and the physics simulation would be annoying to deal with. Another problem is mirroring: radial mirroring is good, but in our case we would be using x-axis mirroring, which has far more limitations. Either way, due to the way that mirroring works, unless you want multiple final stages it's the earlier stages that have to be on the outside, and that would result in extremely complicated structures. The only realistic way to do it would be to not mirror hulls at all, which would limit us more or less to vertical stacking - not how I want to do it.
Anyway, I think that distinct hulls are a possibility, but I think they should be considered advanced. I'm much more interested in having all the hulls in one line, and then blasting off the back every time you want to activate the next section.
The concern here is that every hull has to therefore be acceptable in every medium. If you have a submarine that launches a ship that launches a jet, then your submarine-ship-jet first stage needs to be able to move around underwater. As long as we understand that, we can simply make our hulls work okay like that. The concern for construction is how to protect or hide away the not-yet-required extensions that only work in a specific medium. Do your plane stage wings have sealed jets on them, or perhaps they are folded away inside and only unfold on the surface. Maybe your surface ship hull actually has turbines operating underneath during the submarine stage, since they are going to be submarine engines even while you're on the surface. How can you optimize? How much fun can you design in?
My thought is that each piece of the hull would be smaller than the next, and therefore be partly nestled within its parent. The ship hull's rear 30% is embedded in the submarine hull. The airplane hull is half embedded in the ship hull. This overlap not only keeps the structural integrity of the hull overall, but also shelters the rear area of the child hull such that delicate and medium-specific equipment can be put there.
I think this design fills a lot of my requirements, especially in terms of how each hull is always partially exposed. How well you can use that exposure, and prevent it from screwing up your other stages is the question. Can your hull fit a fold-out wing section internally? Should you expand it until it can? But then you'll need a larger parent hull... oh, and now you need a jet hull with four substages, meaning that the nose is too long and you've got a difficult time with your wings set so far back... maybe you should use an X-mirror external hull attachment for wings a bit further up as well?
Hm. I think it sounds fun.
When it comes to building stages, a big part of the fun is the constraints that are put on the construction. In Kerbal, there are four major constraints.
1) Rockets fire downward. Since the primary engines fire downward, there's a very strong limit as to vertical construction. You can't put an engine above another engine and fire them both, because the top engine will destroy the bottom engine.
2) Fuel tanks are heavy and get emptied out. This means that you'll optimally want to shed those heavy fuel tanks the instant they dry up - which means many of your stages are arranged specifically to dump empty tanks safely and quickly.
3) The physics of the rocket restrict how you can build it. Wobble, shear, and strain will rip your rocket apart if you build it clumsily. Unfortunately, in Kerbal this can be fixed by just using struts to staple everything together firmly, so it's not as much of an issue.
4) The tradeoff between vertical and horizontal. You can put a lot of things in a vertical line - especially fuel tanks - but that can get difficult when you want to add more complex devices and behaviors. However, horizontal construction interferes with the line of the other vertical segments, and also creates a lot of wobble - at least until you realize the wobble is broken.
These constraints create a wonderful environment where you can build easily, but the restrictions grow organically as you get bigger. The constraints are all about tradeoffs rather than restrictions, and are therefore a lot more flexible and expressive than a game where you have five hardpoints and you slot in three weapons and a shield. Moreover, the constraints are specifically polished such that they interact with building in stages: you can drop large chunks of your creation as you go along, which means the remainder has a new profile and new performance characteristics.
In my early tests for the "sea and sky" game I talked about yesterday, one thing I ran into was the overly simplistic construction system I created. It's worth considering whether a system with some more constraints could be made more interesting.
Unlike space travel, fuel isn't the biggest concern in the sea and sky game. I think that hull is. Each kind of medium - flight, sea, subaquatic - has a different kind of hull with different characteristics. While the different kinds of hulls can survive the different kinds of mediums, they are definitely a burden, adding weight and drag.
It makes sense that, instead of jettisoning fuel tanks, you'd have to jettison hulls. When you want to go from air to submarine, you need to land the blimp on the surface and then just get rid of the blimp part, leave you with a submarine. Of course, the blimp would have to be big enough to carry the submarine, but that's the joy of the stages approach, isn't it? Each stage must be larger than the last.
However, that theory is all well and good, but how do you make it interesting physically? How do you give the player the clay and push him with tradeoffs?
Well, it's got to be in how the hulls connect up and orient, doesn't it?
It's tempting to simply make each hull contain the next hull, like Russian nesting dolls. But that runs into the same problem as the cargo boxes: there's no tight relationship between the stages. It's just cargo-carrying: they don't share the same physics space. So we want our hulls to exist in the same physics space all the time.
Which means we really don't have any option: the hulls have to all be exterior, at least partially.
The question is: do we arrange the hulls into a single hull, or do we have them separated into distinct hulls which are connected - or, perhaps, both?
Well, distinct hulls is problematic for two reasons. One is physics: both the drag and the physics simulation would be annoying to deal with. Another problem is mirroring: radial mirroring is good, but in our case we would be using x-axis mirroring, which has far more limitations. Either way, due to the way that mirroring works, unless you want multiple final stages it's the earlier stages that have to be on the outside, and that would result in extremely complicated structures. The only realistic way to do it would be to not mirror hulls at all, which would limit us more or less to vertical stacking - not how I want to do it.
Anyway, I think that distinct hulls are a possibility, but I think they should be considered advanced. I'm much more interested in having all the hulls in one line, and then blasting off the back every time you want to activate the next section.
The concern here is that every hull has to therefore be acceptable in every medium. If you have a submarine that launches a ship that launches a jet, then your submarine-ship-jet first stage needs to be able to move around underwater. As long as we understand that, we can simply make our hulls work okay like that. The concern for construction is how to protect or hide away the not-yet-required extensions that only work in a specific medium. Do your plane stage wings have sealed jets on them, or perhaps they are folded away inside and only unfold on the surface. Maybe your surface ship hull actually has turbines operating underneath during the submarine stage, since they are going to be submarine engines even while you're on the surface. How can you optimize? How much fun can you design in?
My thought is that each piece of the hull would be smaller than the next, and therefore be partly nestled within its parent. The ship hull's rear 30% is embedded in the submarine hull. The airplane hull is half embedded in the ship hull. This overlap not only keeps the structural integrity of the hull overall, but also shelters the rear area of the child hull such that delicate and medium-specific equipment can be put there.
I think this design fills a lot of my requirements, especially in terms of how each hull is always partially exposed. How well you can use that exposure, and prevent it from screwing up your other stages is the question. Can your hull fit a fold-out wing section internally? Should you expand it until it can? But then you'll need a larger parent hull... oh, and now you need a jet hull with four substages, meaning that the nose is too long and you've got a difficult time with your wings set so far back... maybe you should use an X-mirror external hull attachment for wings a bit further up as well?
Hm. I think it sounds fun.
Monday, July 29, 2013
Staged!
So, recently my big interest has been with stages - by which I mean Kerbal-style stages, where you discard each stage in turn as the next phase of your mission progresses. So, not stages as in "levels", but stages as in "constructs which perform a task and then are discarded".
Well, I've done a lot of testing and some prototyping and I've come up with some interesting discoveries about the concept that maybe you'd like to listen to. Well, I hope so, since that's the rest of this essay.
The first thing I tried was a simple "cargo bay" system. So you could design a vehicle and land it somewhere, at which point you would simply build a base out of the components you brought with you. Concrete, inflatable habs, prefab rooms, solar panels, just stick 'em together however you want.
In terms of resource constraints, it's actually pretty interesting. But in terms of the vehicular gameplay, it's actually really dull, because there's no interaction between the later stages and the earlier stages. You're literally just shipping a box full of stuff. If you want a different kind of base, you just ship a box that has different stuff in it... but the vehicle doesn't care. It's just a box.
Moreover, if you are going for deeply nested stages (3+ stages), you end up with a string of boxes, and you use each box to build a transport section for the next box... and again, nobody cares whats in the box for the next stage. No interaction.
I was thinking about ways to make the stages more interesting. There are, as far as I can tell, two ways to make the stages more interactive. One: make the components required by the next stage affect this stage. Two: recycle components used by this stage for the next stage.
For example, let's say you're building a space station. Instead of discarding the final rocket stage, why not use it? Send some crew in to scrub it down and weld in some room partitions and, viola, you have a nice, spacious science module! Yes, unrealistic, but we're talking about how to make stages more interesting.
In the other direction: you can't simply assemble a moon base out of component buildings, because they all need to be connected to the same framework of power, life support, and walkable tunnels. So you pack in all the inflatable habs and solar panels you want to use, yeah, but you also have to take a massive "+" shaped framework along. How do you make it work out? Maybe you make it fold into a kind of stool-shaped shape and attach rockets to the "legs". When it comes time to deorbit and land on the moon, you unkink those legs and land politely in the proper formation. Then you can attach the habs and solar panels and stuff to it. Maybe some work is needed on the joints to make it all properly connect up after all that folding and unfolding.
And, hey, yeah, you ditched that deorbit rocket on the way down, but it's good metal that you could use. Go out and find where it landed, drag it back to base. You can always use another large, heavyweight building, even if it requires weeks of astronaut-labor to clean it up and put in doors and stuff.
Basically, my thought is that it's really difficult to create strong, complex structures off-planet. So while a lot of the stuff you'll want to use is basically just packed up in a box and shipped around, the big core elements that hold the stage together need to be carted around more or less intact, aside from some minimal joints and reassembly requirements.
The joy of this approach lies in the N-stage situation, rather than the 2-stage situation.
Right now, we're talking rockets. Let's switch over to a different kind of game world.
This game world is on the sea, and the primary objective is to populate the various islands and set up subaquatic bases. So our major means of transport are submarines, ships, and aircraft. To push for as many medium changes as possible, there are teleport rings hidden in various places at the bottom of the ocean. When you go through, you appear in the air very far away. Of course, you can also go into the airside teleport ring and come out at the bottom of the ocean.
As such, we'll spend a lot of the early game just using ships and populating islands, with light aircraft for scouting. But as we get further along, we start to need to transition. A ship that carries a submarine. A submarine that carries a plane. A plane that carries a ship. Well, maybe not a plane, but an air-lift vehicle of some variety.
Each stage is disposable, but there's a lot of overlap. Unlike a rocket, fuel is not an overwhelming primary resource. Certainly fuel is important, but the medium switch is the primary mechanic here, and therefore the concern is all the pieces you needed to make the old vehicle work are now working against you in the new vehicle. That big hull you used to offset water and carry a heavy load is now either annoyingly heavy (for lifting into the sky) or continues to displace water annoyingly (when attempting to sink). The jet engines you flew with are now submersed, and a massive drag...
So there would be a lot of fun details to work with. Do you discard the wings when you suddenly find yourself underwater, or do you seal off those engines and open up the sub engines next to them, or maybe there's a whole upper stage containing wings and balloons that gets discarded. So... do you separate into sections? Seal and deal? Break off flanges? How much can you reuse? Do you deal with a crappy middle stage because you need a component from the first stage for the third stage?
Of course, this is all made more interesting by the ability of the crew to modify the vehicle (and resulting facility) with whatever you have in cargo. Maybe you go through an air portal and pop in under the sea... but instead of jettisoning the jet engines, you send a crew out to detach and stow them, and then attach turbines to that spot instead. Is your cargo bay arranged to allow that? Is the undersea condition okay for that kind of activity?
These are the thoughts I've been having. Stages.
I've also been thinking of stages in other kinds of games. For example, in a Shadowrun game, maybe you have several "stages" to your op, featuring decking, rigging, magical scouting and perimeter-establishing, crashing through the front gates in giant trucks, then breaking into the perimeter using an intrusion team so you can do a bit more decking and spirit-calling.
Instead of thinking of a Shadowrun run as a combat mission where you shoot everything, you could think about it in terms of constructing the mission out of stages. And just like with Kerbal, the stages can be built by you out of the components and tasks you think will help best with your mission.
And, like I've done, you can have complex relations between stages. Maybe the initial rigging you used to spy on the enemy and transport your heavy server farm to the location isn't simply discarded! Maybe it has a server-farm retrieval stage later on, and perhaps even supports a later stage by repurposing the spy drones. Perhaps even on the fly, as things go south.
Doesn't that sound interesting?
Well, I've done a lot of testing and some prototyping and I've come up with some interesting discoveries about the concept that maybe you'd like to listen to. Well, I hope so, since that's the rest of this essay.
The first thing I tried was a simple "cargo bay" system. So you could design a vehicle and land it somewhere, at which point you would simply build a base out of the components you brought with you. Concrete, inflatable habs, prefab rooms, solar panels, just stick 'em together however you want.
In terms of resource constraints, it's actually pretty interesting. But in terms of the vehicular gameplay, it's actually really dull, because there's no interaction between the later stages and the earlier stages. You're literally just shipping a box full of stuff. If you want a different kind of base, you just ship a box that has different stuff in it... but the vehicle doesn't care. It's just a box.
Moreover, if you are going for deeply nested stages (3+ stages), you end up with a string of boxes, and you use each box to build a transport section for the next box... and again, nobody cares whats in the box for the next stage. No interaction.
I was thinking about ways to make the stages more interesting. There are, as far as I can tell, two ways to make the stages more interactive. One: make the components required by the next stage affect this stage. Two: recycle components used by this stage for the next stage.
For example, let's say you're building a space station. Instead of discarding the final rocket stage, why not use it? Send some crew in to scrub it down and weld in some room partitions and, viola, you have a nice, spacious science module! Yes, unrealistic, but we're talking about how to make stages more interesting.
In the other direction: you can't simply assemble a moon base out of component buildings, because they all need to be connected to the same framework of power, life support, and walkable tunnels. So you pack in all the inflatable habs and solar panels you want to use, yeah, but you also have to take a massive "+" shaped framework along. How do you make it work out? Maybe you make it fold into a kind of stool-shaped shape and attach rockets to the "legs". When it comes time to deorbit and land on the moon, you unkink those legs and land politely in the proper formation. Then you can attach the habs and solar panels and stuff to it. Maybe some work is needed on the joints to make it all properly connect up after all that folding and unfolding.
And, hey, yeah, you ditched that deorbit rocket on the way down, but it's good metal that you could use. Go out and find where it landed, drag it back to base. You can always use another large, heavyweight building, even if it requires weeks of astronaut-labor to clean it up and put in doors and stuff.
Basically, my thought is that it's really difficult to create strong, complex structures off-planet. So while a lot of the stuff you'll want to use is basically just packed up in a box and shipped around, the big core elements that hold the stage together need to be carted around more or less intact, aside from some minimal joints and reassembly requirements.
The joy of this approach lies in the N-stage situation, rather than the 2-stage situation.
Right now, we're talking rockets. Let's switch over to a different kind of game world.
This game world is on the sea, and the primary objective is to populate the various islands and set up subaquatic bases. So our major means of transport are submarines, ships, and aircraft. To push for as many medium changes as possible, there are teleport rings hidden in various places at the bottom of the ocean. When you go through, you appear in the air very far away. Of course, you can also go into the airside teleport ring and come out at the bottom of the ocean.
As such, we'll spend a lot of the early game just using ships and populating islands, with light aircraft for scouting. But as we get further along, we start to need to transition. A ship that carries a submarine. A submarine that carries a plane. A plane that carries a ship. Well, maybe not a plane, but an air-lift vehicle of some variety.
Each stage is disposable, but there's a lot of overlap. Unlike a rocket, fuel is not an overwhelming primary resource. Certainly fuel is important, but the medium switch is the primary mechanic here, and therefore the concern is all the pieces you needed to make the old vehicle work are now working against you in the new vehicle. That big hull you used to offset water and carry a heavy load is now either annoyingly heavy (for lifting into the sky) or continues to displace water annoyingly (when attempting to sink). The jet engines you flew with are now submersed, and a massive drag...
So there would be a lot of fun details to work with. Do you discard the wings when you suddenly find yourself underwater, or do you seal off those engines and open up the sub engines next to them, or maybe there's a whole upper stage containing wings and balloons that gets discarded. So... do you separate into sections? Seal and deal? Break off flanges? How much can you reuse? Do you deal with a crappy middle stage because you need a component from the first stage for the third stage?
Of course, this is all made more interesting by the ability of the crew to modify the vehicle (and resulting facility) with whatever you have in cargo. Maybe you go through an air portal and pop in under the sea... but instead of jettisoning the jet engines, you send a crew out to detach and stow them, and then attach turbines to that spot instead. Is your cargo bay arranged to allow that? Is the undersea condition okay for that kind of activity?
These are the thoughts I've been having. Stages.
I've also been thinking of stages in other kinds of games. For example, in a Shadowrun game, maybe you have several "stages" to your op, featuring decking, rigging, magical scouting and perimeter-establishing, crashing through the front gates in giant trucks, then breaking into the perimeter using an intrusion team so you can do a bit more decking and spirit-calling.
Instead of thinking of a Shadowrun run as a combat mission where you shoot everything, you could think about it in terms of constructing the mission out of stages. And just like with Kerbal, the stages can be built by you out of the components and tasks you think will help best with your mission.
And, like I've done, you can have complex relations between stages. Maybe the initial rigging you used to spy on the enemy and transport your heavy server farm to the location isn't simply discarded! Maybe it has a server-farm retrieval stage later on, and perhaps even supports a later stage by repurposing the spy drones. Perhaps even on the fly, as things go south.
Doesn't that sound interesting?
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Crossover RPGs
So, I was playing "Project X Zone", which is Capcom's massive crossover strategy RPG.
It's really weird to see a strategy RPG that's based around crossovers - it doesn't really work as well as a tournament fighter like Street Fighter vs Everything for two big reasons.
The first is that the plot has to be excessively contrived and convoluted to bring everyone together. It's like "oh, look, the first four hours of the game are every character just randomly happening to gather in the same places!" In a tournament fighter, there's no need for that. Not only do you not have to bother to explain, even if you choose to, you only have to explain a few people coming together, not dozens.
The other big problem is drowning. Project X Zone is a strategy RPG with dozens of units. So many units that I am literally unable to keep track of them all. The worst part is? Those units aren't characters. They're pairs or triplets of characters.
Drowning...
Of course, I recognize most of the characters. But even though I recognize the characters, there's no feeling of connection to them because they play such a teeny tiny role due to the sheer number of them, and because they all have more or less identical capabilities. Well, aside from their out-of-combat abilities, which can be used from anywhere to anywhere, so it doesn't matter where they are or who they are fighting.
That isn't to say the game is boring. Sure, the plot is stupid and the cut scenes are bogged down by the requirement to allow dozens of characters to get a line in. Sure, all the units only differ by having a small amount of range difference or getting their advanced techniques one or two levels earlier or later... but it's actually a pretty interesting game when you get past the incredibly dull, easy first four hours.
However, when it comes to crossover RPGs, I really think these sorts of things have it backwards. Why try to include every character in a balanced way? It just annoys people who want to care about specific characters only to find you keep intruding with some other ones.
For example, I can't stand the one-strap rich girl from this game. She's one of the characters I don't know, but she's the centerpiece of the game. She's got the hoopty powers and the villains are after her, specifically. Everyone else is basically just along for the ride. She's not really an interesting character, either, so I have a hard time even caring about her in the slightest. Just let me team up Chun Li with Dante and cut my way through everything with them.
Yeah. Instead of limiting me and forcing me to accept all the characters, why not do it like a fighter? Let me choose who I want my main character to be. Then take me through a bunch of stock encounters which are only different by what my character mumbles at the beginning and end. Just like a fighter.
Except, unlike a fighter, I don't fight everyone in every encounter. Instead, I gain and/or lose party members and take on a battle map.
Lower the amount of time the game takes - maybe it only takes 3 hours to get through a character's "story". So what? It's very replayable. Now that I've gone through as Megaman, I'll try again as Jill. Maybe on a harder setting.
Why poison the game by cramming everything into one session? Just let it be sleek and fast. Give it replayability so that I may revel in each character in turn.
...
This is only recommended for big crossover games, though. If your characters are all new to me, I won't have any real preferences and should probably be taken through a more rigidly defined story so I can be introduced to them and made to care.
It's really weird to see a strategy RPG that's based around crossovers - it doesn't really work as well as a tournament fighter like Street Fighter vs Everything for two big reasons.
The first is that the plot has to be excessively contrived and convoluted to bring everyone together. It's like "oh, look, the first four hours of the game are every character just randomly happening to gather in the same places!" In a tournament fighter, there's no need for that. Not only do you not have to bother to explain, even if you choose to, you only have to explain a few people coming together, not dozens.
The other big problem is drowning. Project X Zone is a strategy RPG with dozens of units. So many units that I am literally unable to keep track of them all. The worst part is? Those units aren't characters. They're pairs or triplets of characters.
Drowning...
Of course, I recognize most of the characters. But even though I recognize the characters, there's no feeling of connection to them because they play such a teeny tiny role due to the sheer number of them, and because they all have more or less identical capabilities. Well, aside from their out-of-combat abilities, which can be used from anywhere to anywhere, so it doesn't matter where they are or who they are fighting.
That isn't to say the game is boring. Sure, the plot is stupid and the cut scenes are bogged down by the requirement to allow dozens of characters to get a line in. Sure, all the units only differ by having a small amount of range difference or getting their advanced techniques one or two levels earlier or later... but it's actually a pretty interesting game when you get past the incredibly dull, easy first four hours.
However, when it comes to crossover RPGs, I really think these sorts of things have it backwards. Why try to include every character in a balanced way? It just annoys people who want to care about specific characters only to find you keep intruding with some other ones.
For example, I can't stand the one-strap rich girl from this game. She's one of the characters I don't know, but she's the centerpiece of the game. She's got the hoopty powers and the villains are after her, specifically. Everyone else is basically just along for the ride. She's not really an interesting character, either, so I have a hard time even caring about her in the slightest. Just let me team up Chun Li with Dante and cut my way through everything with them.
Yeah. Instead of limiting me and forcing me to accept all the characters, why not do it like a fighter? Let me choose who I want my main character to be. Then take me through a bunch of stock encounters which are only different by what my character mumbles at the beginning and end. Just like a fighter.
Except, unlike a fighter, I don't fight everyone in every encounter. Instead, I gain and/or lose party members and take on a battle map.
Lower the amount of time the game takes - maybe it only takes 3 hours to get through a character's "story". So what? It's very replayable. Now that I've gone through as Megaman, I'll try again as Jill. Maybe on a harder setting.
Why poison the game by cramming everything into one session? Just let it be sleek and fast. Give it replayability so that I may revel in each character in turn.
...
This is only recommended for big crossover games, though. If your characters are all new to me, I won't have any real preferences and should probably be taken through a more rigidly defined story so I can be introduced to them and made to care.
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