I've played more than my fair share of starship combat games, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about cinematic action combat INNNN SPAAAAACE.
Specifically, let's talk about Star Trek Online's strength: their starship combat. While I wouldn't say it's actually superb, it is at least more fun than any other MMORPG's starship combat.
The big strength of their starship combat is the exposed angles system. You have four shield quadrants that take damage separately, and you also have arcs of fire which are distinct depending on the weapon. The result is that you're constantly jockeying to angle your ship so that your intact shields take the brunt of the enemy fire, but also so that your weapon arcs can fire on the enemy. This can get quite hectic depending on the cycle rates of your weapons, how many enemies you're facing, and how fast your turn rate is compared to their speed.
Of course, the topological challenges of trying to put your ship in the right place are only part of the fun. The other half are the long-cooldown/one-use special abilities - usually granted by officers. This isn't like a shmup where your bombs are there to get you out of a tight jam: your officer abilities are part of your core gambit. You go into the middle of the enemy fleet knowing that your engineer can do a shield overcharge and keep you relatively unharmed. You knock down an enemy's facing shield knowing that you can fire an overcharged torpedo down that gap for massive damage.
I was thinking about it. What if we were to build a similar game, but with a bit of my design preferences instead of what they went with?
First off, the vertical maneuvering seems halfhearted. If it was actually part of the gameplay, you'd have dorsal and ventral shields so it could be made part of the orientation play. I think that adding dorsal and ventral shields would complicate things, so what I'll aim for is more like Star Control - a 2D system. The camera will be full 3D, but the space combat happens on a 2D plane. This also allows players to keep a sharper eye on complex tactical situations such as fleet battles, and allows us to overlay arcs on that 2D base plane so you can clearly see who is in what arcs.
This camera/play leaves us with two options: a faster play (like Star Control) or a slower, more tactical play. For cinematic's sake, let's go with the slower play. What's the slower play?
Well, the angle play needs to be more ponderous and predictable. So what we'll do is we'll make it so that your engines have two settings: driving forward very fast without being able to turn much, and not driving forward much at all, but able to turn fast. Switching between the modes leaves you with the worst of both for five or so seconds.
This means that your maneuvering is significantly "heavier" without actually making it any slower. In fact, we can make it feel more fast-paced than STO's movement, even though for our purposes it is tactically "slower", because you can only really adjust position or angle, not both. It also leads to some ships preferring a "torpedo dive" and others preferring to stick and shoot.
The other half is, of course, the shooting. In this I'd propose using the mouse to click on the part of the map you want to fire on. Your fire angles are clearly displayed, so you just click on a ship within one of those firing angles, and you'll fire all those weapons at it. Maybe left-click for one weapon type and right-click for the other.
Rather than have distinct regen cycles, I would propose that you can hold down the mouse key to perform sustained fire - whether this means a continuous beam of energy or a long slew of torpedoes. However, sustained fire will quickly shake, heat, or drain that weapon, meaning it gets weaker or less accurate the longer you fire the shot... and takes longer to recover to full afterwards. So it's always a tradeoff - do you prefer lots of little stings? Is it time to go in with a barrage? Are you close enough that the lower accuracy will be okay?
This allows starship captains to have more control over the timing of their weapons - instead of a simple counter where you're wasting time if you aren't firing them every three seconds, this lets captains choose to hold their fire in the heat of battle and gain a benefit: better/longer firepower when they need it.
Now, about those crew.
The heart of any cinematic starship battle system is, in my opinion, how you work the crew in. Human faces are critical. Even in STO, you never see them... even though in Star Trek OFFline, every battle is at least half faces. Here's my suggestion:
Every crew member generates a tactical option at a specific rate, depending on level, specialty, stats, and exhaustion. This rate is never very fast - at fastest, you're looking at 30 seconds. Once a crewmember has generated a tactical option, they are ready to use it, and will recover exhaustion slowly if you wait. Using the tactical option, of course, creates loads more exhaustion.
When you tap a crewmember (presumably linked to the number keys), you are telling them to take their tactical option. They are clear about what they can do up-front, so you always know what tactical option they've generated. When a tactical option enters play, the battle freezes (or slows to a crawl) while the top half of the screen is replaced with a view of that ship's captain telling that specific crew member what to do - it's maybe five seconds at longest.
IE, I tap my navigator. The screen pops up with me saying "Sulu, microjump behind the Defiant, let's end this."
During the time the cut scene is playing, other ships may trigger their own tactical options. This isn't first-come first-served - out of everyone who taps a tactical option during the scene, the one with the highest priority (closest to target ship) will happen.
So if you see my cutscene playing, you can counter by, say, tapping your weapons officer. "Mzikk, they're coming in for a taste, give them the full course!" This means that my cutscene on the top half of the screen is shunted to the bottom-left, and your cutscene takes the top screen... but the tapping could continue, each time squeezing the original cutscenes down.
"The Enterprise is walking into a trap. Put us between them." Same kind of maneuver, but because the cutscene makes the tactical situation transparent, the system adapts it to be better aimed.
When the cutscene chain finishes, there is a quick few seconds of automation while the involved ships perform their various maneuvers (each only takes a few seconds, and often happen simultaneously). Then battle resumes.
Another key element is that you can tap different crew at the same time. For example, if I tap Mr. Sulu and command him to get behind the Defiant, before that cutscene is up I can tap my weapon's guy and the cutscene continues, cutting to me turning slightly and saying "Then, Lt., give us a full salvo right up his backside!"
At no point is the battle actually removed from the screen - it occupies the lower-right quadrant at all times.
Anyway, I think it sounds like it'd be fun!
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Scary No-Monster Game
Thinking about scary games without monsters in them.
I think my current idea is for a 2D game rather than a 3D game - 3D models, sure, but a 2D playing field. The reason for that is because I want to radically change the scope of the game.
In most games, the areas are scaled-up versions of real life. This is because realistically-sized rooms and hallways feel cramped and are difficult to maneuver in. Even in horror games with cramped environments, such as Dead Space, it's still all scaled up.
I got to thinking: how could you scale it down? How could you make a game where the interiors are actually more cramped than real life?
Well, the easiest thing to do is get rid of the 3D and make it 2D. That lets players see the whole environment around their character and, in turn, lets them understand the layout of the room even if it is cramped. Since we're not using monsters, we don't need to hide monsters off-camera. No loss there. It also gives us an additional bonus: it lets the players be aware of their character's full body in a very precise way. An over-the-shoulder 3D view makes it difficult to determine your exact center of balance, the exact position of your feet, the exact range across the gap.
This is important because what we're doing with this game is making the "platforming" into "slithering". The jumping is rarely needed and kinda dangerous.
I'm thinking of kind of a "slurpy" control, something that feels more like controlling a blob of slime than a person. So you'd just hold your mouse above her head, and your character would smoothly grab opportunities to ascend - starting with the desk and moving easily on into the air gap above the room. Shloop, you're in the air gap. Keep moving, though, because the weak plastic grate that holds the ceiling tiles will steadily buckle under your weight.
The movement should feel easy and "clingy". For example, if there's a pipe across a gap, you can just hover your mouse over the pipe and she'll grab it and shimmy easily along - the low gravity helps. If there's a mostly-closed bulkhead, sweep your mouse beneath and she'll slither beneath.
This isn't to say there are no challenges. There are loads. For example, what if there's a gap beyond the bulkhead and a ledge on the far side of the gap?
Well, you have a few options. One is to just try to slither across the gap - she'll gamely reach across for the ledge and, hey, if she can reach it before her center of mass is over the pit, no problem!
Another is to pull her upright on the gap side of the door and then have her jump. Jumping is accomplished by right-clicking. When you release the click, she jumps towards wherever the mouse point is. This is important to master, because it happens on release instead of click. This is critical because if you move your mouse over to the ledge and then right click, she'll already be reaching for the location and falling into the pit. So you right click on her as she clings to the door, then drag to the ledge, look at the traced path, and let go if you think it'll work out.
Challenges of timing exist, too, and the right-click jump is important for them as well - because it's a dash if there's no jumping to do. So there's a steam vent? Right click on her, drag past the steam vent, then wait until the vent stops steaming and release. It's also important for building up speed: if there's a big gap just past the steam vent, you'll want to right click AGAIN on the far side of that hole before she finishes decelerating from her dash. If she decelerates, she'll just do a standing jump instead of a dashing jump.
You can see where some challenge is beginning to arise. However, this takes place in a complex world that you're trying to escape and/or repair. We haven't even mentioned the left click yet. The left click grips (if held) or interacts/obtains (if clicked) or drops (if clicking on yourself while carrying something).
For example, if you find a broom, you can grab it by clicking. Now you'll cart it around. By holding the left click, you can stop in your tracks and, just like with the right click, you can move the mouse without moving the character. It does, however, move the broom! So you can poke around at whatever you can reach, or jam it into a crevice so you can walk across it, or whatever. By right-clicking while holding the left button, you'll fling the thing you're holding at the target, allowing you to do some long-range interactions or just royally jam it in. Tapping left-click on yourself will drop the broom.
Alternately, there's a cord whipping by. Left click and hold to grab it and get taken for a ride. There's a console nearby. Left click to use it, or left hold to hack it. There's a door. Left click to open it, or left and hold to press up against it and listen.
There are many topological challenges here. Your body is not made of goo - it has a size. So you might find a gap too small to fit your body through, but large enough for your hands. What can you do with it? Well, you can interact with things on the far side. You can throw things through. You can push a broom through and whack at things on the far side.
More complexly, there will be "tight" gaps. These are gaps you can get most of the way through, but then your butt (or toolbelt, whatever) gets stuck. You can only get through by then dashing, and the result is that you karoom into the space beyond in a predictable but uncontrollable manner.
It's not just topological challenges. The starship is a starship, and therefore has many complex things happening. You can run into areas where there is no air, areas where surfaces are burning hot, exposed steam venting, electrical shorts, even areas which have drifted apart due to the damage. But, in turn, you can use the devices of the starship to help you - consoles to open doors or activate machines, controls to let you use cranes, screens to let you seal areas, redirect power, restore airflow, seal hull breaches, cut off fuel... The big idea is that the player can build ships and then try to escape or salvage them when things go south. The devices in each kind of module are an important part of how it will interact with the disaster.
But no monsters.
I think my current idea is for a 2D game rather than a 3D game - 3D models, sure, but a 2D playing field. The reason for that is because I want to radically change the scope of the game.
In most games, the areas are scaled-up versions of real life. This is because realistically-sized rooms and hallways feel cramped and are difficult to maneuver in. Even in horror games with cramped environments, such as Dead Space, it's still all scaled up.
I got to thinking: how could you scale it down? How could you make a game where the interiors are actually more cramped than real life?
Well, the easiest thing to do is get rid of the 3D and make it 2D. That lets players see the whole environment around their character and, in turn, lets them understand the layout of the room even if it is cramped. Since we're not using monsters, we don't need to hide monsters off-camera. No loss there. It also gives us an additional bonus: it lets the players be aware of their character's full body in a very precise way. An over-the-shoulder 3D view makes it difficult to determine your exact center of balance, the exact position of your feet, the exact range across the gap.
This is important because what we're doing with this game is making the "platforming" into "slithering". The jumping is rarely needed and kinda dangerous.
I'm thinking of kind of a "slurpy" control, something that feels more like controlling a blob of slime than a person. So you'd just hold your mouse above her head, and your character would smoothly grab opportunities to ascend - starting with the desk and moving easily on into the air gap above the room. Shloop, you're in the air gap. Keep moving, though, because the weak plastic grate that holds the ceiling tiles will steadily buckle under your weight.
The movement should feel easy and "clingy". For example, if there's a pipe across a gap, you can just hover your mouse over the pipe and she'll grab it and shimmy easily along - the low gravity helps. If there's a mostly-closed bulkhead, sweep your mouse beneath and she'll slither beneath.
This isn't to say there are no challenges. There are loads. For example, what if there's a gap beyond the bulkhead and a ledge on the far side of the gap?
Well, you have a few options. One is to just try to slither across the gap - she'll gamely reach across for the ledge and, hey, if she can reach it before her center of mass is over the pit, no problem!
Another is to pull her upright on the gap side of the door and then have her jump. Jumping is accomplished by right-clicking. When you release the click, she jumps towards wherever the mouse point is. This is important to master, because it happens on release instead of click. This is critical because if you move your mouse over to the ledge and then right click, she'll already be reaching for the location and falling into the pit. So you right click on her as she clings to the door, then drag to the ledge, look at the traced path, and let go if you think it'll work out.
Challenges of timing exist, too, and the right-click jump is important for them as well - because it's a dash if there's no jumping to do. So there's a steam vent? Right click on her, drag past the steam vent, then wait until the vent stops steaming and release. It's also important for building up speed: if there's a big gap just past the steam vent, you'll want to right click AGAIN on the far side of that hole before she finishes decelerating from her dash. If she decelerates, she'll just do a standing jump instead of a dashing jump.
You can see where some challenge is beginning to arise. However, this takes place in a complex world that you're trying to escape and/or repair. We haven't even mentioned the left click yet. The left click grips (if held) or interacts/obtains (if clicked) or drops (if clicking on yourself while carrying something).
For example, if you find a broom, you can grab it by clicking. Now you'll cart it around. By holding the left click, you can stop in your tracks and, just like with the right click, you can move the mouse without moving the character. It does, however, move the broom! So you can poke around at whatever you can reach, or jam it into a crevice so you can walk across it, or whatever. By right-clicking while holding the left button, you'll fling the thing you're holding at the target, allowing you to do some long-range interactions or just royally jam it in. Tapping left-click on yourself will drop the broom.
Alternately, there's a cord whipping by. Left click and hold to grab it and get taken for a ride. There's a console nearby. Left click to use it, or left hold to hack it. There's a door. Left click to open it, or left and hold to press up against it and listen.
There are many topological challenges here. Your body is not made of goo - it has a size. So you might find a gap too small to fit your body through, but large enough for your hands. What can you do with it? Well, you can interact with things on the far side. You can throw things through. You can push a broom through and whack at things on the far side.
More complexly, there will be "tight" gaps. These are gaps you can get most of the way through, but then your butt (or toolbelt, whatever) gets stuck. You can only get through by then dashing, and the result is that you karoom into the space beyond in a predictable but uncontrollable manner.
It's not just topological challenges. The starship is a starship, and therefore has many complex things happening. You can run into areas where there is no air, areas where surfaces are burning hot, exposed steam venting, electrical shorts, even areas which have drifted apart due to the damage. But, in turn, you can use the devices of the starship to help you - consoles to open doors or activate machines, controls to let you use cranes, screens to let you seal areas, redirect power, restore airflow, seal hull breaches, cut off fuel... The big idea is that the player can build ships and then try to escape or salvage them when things go south. The devices in each kind of module are an important part of how it will interact with the disaster.
But no monsters.
New Era Brawler Combat
I was thinking about beat-em-up games a bit.
Classic-style beat-em-ups are rare these days, limited to only retro games like Scott Pilgrim's beat-em-up or Castle Crashers. Castle Crashers is also arguable due to some unusually shoot-em-uppy mechanics. Speaking of which, there are still some shoot-em-ups, but that's a different genre. Not talking about Alien Hominid, here. Talkin' bout Streets of Rage.
By and large, classic beat-em-ups have been disbanded in favor of new mass melee combat systems. This is largely as a result of moving to 3D, where the beat-em-up is quite difficult to do properly. So designers adapted.
A few decided to dumb down the distance control and amp up the timing control, because navigation and NPC movement in 3D space was always a little bit less transparent and predictable. The big example of this is God Hand: distance control is still important, but it's clear that the big focus of the game is on timing. Timing your chains so that your disengage lets you avoid the next enemy. Deciding whether to knock back, combo, stun, taunt... it's all about controlling or responding to the rate at which the various enemies will approach you. It worked well, but its not a genre because nobody else ever did it again. Because people are stupid. But I would call it a "timing fighter" if it did have a genre.
Most 3D combat games drifted towards ranged attacks, because the camera is good at looking in the same general direction as the PC. So there were an abundance of shooters, yes, but also a growing abundance of "ranged melee" games, or as I call them, "crowd control" games. Some people would call them "spectacle fighters" - I dunno, I almost think that should be reserved for games where you mostly press X to tear off an enemy's head with a fifteen-second animation. Either way, in these games you're a "melee" fighter, but your "melee" weapons reach ten, fifteen feet. The idea is to keep the enemies under control while you whittle down their health. Examples: every 3rd person brawler you've ever played. Devil May Cry, Prince of Persia, God of War...
Again, because navigation in those games isn't as crisp and it's harder to remain aware of where all the enemies are, the developers decided to focus on a different aspect. The timing fighter largely ditched distance control in favor of timing, but the crowd control fighter doubled down on distance control and simply gave it a different mechanic so that it was less about movement.
However, these two methods are not the only options. As 3D marched on, our control over both the camera and the enemies grew. Now we have a new breed: the New Era Brawler, or what I would more explicitly call a "chain brawler".
The sterling example of this is the recent Batman games, such as Arkham City.
The core of these games is the idea that you CAN see all the enemies you're fighting. Even though it's 3D, there's never going to be anyone attacking from "off screen" unless something's gone very wrong. This means that the core problem with 3D brawlers - the limited camera - is largely waived.
Unfortunately, you can't easily go back to the original brawler mechanics, because they were all about understanding attack vectors. In 3D space, attack vectors are a lot more complicated due to the concept of "heading". Enemies are no longer simply facing left or right, but are now facing any which way they please, which makes it difficult to really slip them well. The "up-down" part of the brawler navigation is gone, and in its place is a very complicated second horizontal axis. So you can't just use the original brawler mechanics.
Instead, they focus on timing, similar to God Hand. But God Hand had a close camera and featured very precise and delicate close combat based around it. The long camera we use to get all our enemies on the screen makes it difficult to read the timing of individual enemies. So, um... PUT A GIANT BLINKING THING OVER THEIR HEAD!
Obviously, the giant blinking thing makes each individual enemy a lot simpler to time against. So instead of doing much fighting against single enemies, you tangle with a single enemy only briefly. They are like lego pieces and the combat is made of many of them, rather than each enemy being a challenge on its own.
Hence the name "chain fighter".
Anyone who's played Arkham City knows how these fighters play out: your position does't really matter much at all. In fact, your movement only matters in that it allows you to attack a specific enemy by pushing the stick towards them. Every combat is a combination of chaining attacks and counters. You can pound a specific target, or split your combos up between targets - but either way, you need to be sure you're not in the middle of a combo when an enemy starts flashing its timing warning. You need to be available to press the counter button - or use a combo that moves you out of that person's range, perhaps.
That's the heart of the combat. The offensive combos are actually the big way to control your spacing, because most enemies only attack when they're withing a specific range. By pounding on the enemies in one direction, enemies in the other direction are left out of position and unable to attack. But don't get cocky, ranged attackers exist. Similarly, you can just stand around and wait to counter the enemies, but you'll never finish anybody off that way...
There are other elements to the combat, of course. Grenades, glide-in attacks, and ranged attacks of your own, for example. But those aren't the heart of the combat, they're just spice and some glue to tie the combat to the stealth elements.
The chain brawler is kind of fun... but I think it's nascent. I think it's still in its clumsy baby phase, like Double Dragon was a clumsy beat-em-up compared to the D&D beat-em-ups. The big problem I have with the current iterations is that they feel a little herky-jerk.
In the original beat-em-ups, there was a lot of the same features - choosing whether to knock back or if you had enough time for a combo or whether you could pull off a good crowd-control move. That part is very similar. But it was tied together with a simple and effective maneuvering system where you briefly jockeyed for ideal range while shifting lanes to limit enemy attack options. You largely controlled the enemies by moving out of their range, both within a lane and between lanes.
The new system has replaced that with a countering system, where you largely control enemies by countering effectively. Sure, just like the original beat-em-ups you can control them at least partially by attacking and there are annoying enemies that can't be controlled easily using the primary method. But, at its heart, maneuver-to-control was replaced by counter-to-control. This is, at least as implemented, a weaker solution.
The biggest reason it's weaker is because it doesn't allow you to "pre-control". It's all reactive control. With maneuvering, you'd change lanes and move towards another enemy. This would give you time to attack your target enemy while the other enemy counter-maneuvers to close in on your lane and position. But with countering, you don't really have that option. You can do this somewhat against melee enemies by simply chaining your assault away from them, but ranged enemies have no concept of lane and pretty much attack as they please.
This lack of a pre-control system means you have to constantly react, wait on your enemies. It also means they have to have unrealistically rare attack patterns rather than realistic assaults.
But there are some options for adding pre-control back in.
One option is to add in stun attacks as a much more central theme. Whether we're talking about throws, leap-overs, leg-stabs, or flicking pennies at people, if you can pre-control them by stun-attacking, that's something that can free you up to launch a serious combo without interference. Don't equate this to Lollipop Chainsaw: that also had a stun vs real attack system, but for a completely different purpose.
Another option is to add in much more powerful terrain features. This can be a bit touchy with the camera, unfortunately, but by adding in simple opaque terrain you can allow the player to pre-control ranged attackers by simply taking the fight to the other side of the wall. This adds in the original maneuvering flavor, except that now instead of controlling range, you're controlling cover.
Another option is to make enemies opaque. Right now the standard approach is that ranged attackers can fire through their allies without any difficulty. If they won't take a shot unless they're sure they won't hit an ally, you can use the melee combatants to control the medium- and long-range combatants - again, through maneuvering.
Another option is to make the counters disable the enemy for a long time - five, ten seconds. This means that you wait to counter, but then have freedom to fight within that window afterwards.
In all cases, maneuvering would be done less by actually walking around and more by attacks and attack chains which move you. You wouldn't simply maneuver so that the melee enemies were between you and the ranged enemies: you'd perform a driving punch chain that cuts through five of them and leaves you on the other side.
Anyway, I like brawlers, and it's fun to think about the evolution of the genre.
Classic-style beat-em-ups are rare these days, limited to only retro games like Scott Pilgrim's beat-em-up or Castle Crashers. Castle Crashers is also arguable due to some unusually shoot-em-uppy mechanics. Speaking of which, there are still some shoot-em-ups, but that's a different genre. Not talking about Alien Hominid, here. Talkin' bout Streets of Rage.
By and large, classic beat-em-ups have been disbanded in favor of new mass melee combat systems. This is largely as a result of moving to 3D, where the beat-em-up is quite difficult to do properly. So designers adapted.
A few decided to dumb down the distance control and amp up the timing control, because navigation and NPC movement in 3D space was always a little bit less transparent and predictable. The big example of this is God Hand: distance control is still important, but it's clear that the big focus of the game is on timing. Timing your chains so that your disengage lets you avoid the next enemy. Deciding whether to knock back, combo, stun, taunt... it's all about controlling or responding to the rate at which the various enemies will approach you. It worked well, but its not a genre because nobody else ever did it again. Because people are stupid. But I would call it a "timing fighter" if it did have a genre.
Most 3D combat games drifted towards ranged attacks, because the camera is good at looking in the same general direction as the PC. So there were an abundance of shooters, yes, but also a growing abundance of "ranged melee" games, or as I call them, "crowd control" games. Some people would call them "spectacle fighters" - I dunno, I almost think that should be reserved for games where you mostly press X to tear off an enemy's head with a fifteen-second animation. Either way, in these games you're a "melee" fighter, but your "melee" weapons reach ten, fifteen feet. The idea is to keep the enemies under control while you whittle down their health. Examples: every 3rd person brawler you've ever played. Devil May Cry, Prince of Persia, God of War...
Again, because navigation in those games isn't as crisp and it's harder to remain aware of where all the enemies are, the developers decided to focus on a different aspect. The timing fighter largely ditched distance control in favor of timing, but the crowd control fighter doubled down on distance control and simply gave it a different mechanic so that it was less about movement.
However, these two methods are not the only options. As 3D marched on, our control over both the camera and the enemies grew. Now we have a new breed: the New Era Brawler, or what I would more explicitly call a "chain brawler".
The sterling example of this is the recent Batman games, such as Arkham City.
The core of these games is the idea that you CAN see all the enemies you're fighting. Even though it's 3D, there's never going to be anyone attacking from "off screen" unless something's gone very wrong. This means that the core problem with 3D brawlers - the limited camera - is largely waived.
Unfortunately, you can't easily go back to the original brawler mechanics, because they were all about understanding attack vectors. In 3D space, attack vectors are a lot more complicated due to the concept of "heading". Enemies are no longer simply facing left or right, but are now facing any which way they please, which makes it difficult to really slip them well. The "up-down" part of the brawler navigation is gone, and in its place is a very complicated second horizontal axis. So you can't just use the original brawler mechanics.
Instead, they focus on timing, similar to God Hand. But God Hand had a close camera and featured very precise and delicate close combat based around it. The long camera we use to get all our enemies on the screen makes it difficult to read the timing of individual enemies. So, um... PUT A GIANT BLINKING THING OVER THEIR HEAD!
Obviously, the giant blinking thing makes each individual enemy a lot simpler to time against. So instead of doing much fighting against single enemies, you tangle with a single enemy only briefly. They are like lego pieces and the combat is made of many of them, rather than each enemy being a challenge on its own.
Hence the name "chain fighter".
Anyone who's played Arkham City knows how these fighters play out: your position does't really matter much at all. In fact, your movement only matters in that it allows you to attack a specific enemy by pushing the stick towards them. Every combat is a combination of chaining attacks and counters. You can pound a specific target, or split your combos up between targets - but either way, you need to be sure you're not in the middle of a combo when an enemy starts flashing its timing warning. You need to be available to press the counter button - or use a combo that moves you out of that person's range, perhaps.
That's the heart of the combat. The offensive combos are actually the big way to control your spacing, because most enemies only attack when they're withing a specific range. By pounding on the enemies in one direction, enemies in the other direction are left out of position and unable to attack. But don't get cocky, ranged attackers exist. Similarly, you can just stand around and wait to counter the enemies, but you'll never finish anybody off that way...
There are other elements to the combat, of course. Grenades, glide-in attacks, and ranged attacks of your own, for example. But those aren't the heart of the combat, they're just spice and some glue to tie the combat to the stealth elements.
The chain brawler is kind of fun... but I think it's nascent. I think it's still in its clumsy baby phase, like Double Dragon was a clumsy beat-em-up compared to the D&D beat-em-ups. The big problem I have with the current iterations is that they feel a little herky-jerk.
In the original beat-em-ups, there was a lot of the same features - choosing whether to knock back or if you had enough time for a combo or whether you could pull off a good crowd-control move. That part is very similar. But it was tied together with a simple and effective maneuvering system where you briefly jockeyed for ideal range while shifting lanes to limit enemy attack options. You largely controlled the enemies by moving out of their range, both within a lane and between lanes.
The new system has replaced that with a countering system, where you largely control enemies by countering effectively. Sure, just like the original beat-em-ups you can control them at least partially by attacking and there are annoying enemies that can't be controlled easily using the primary method. But, at its heart, maneuver-to-control was replaced by counter-to-control. This is, at least as implemented, a weaker solution.
The biggest reason it's weaker is because it doesn't allow you to "pre-control". It's all reactive control. With maneuvering, you'd change lanes and move towards another enemy. This would give you time to attack your target enemy while the other enemy counter-maneuvers to close in on your lane and position. But with countering, you don't really have that option. You can do this somewhat against melee enemies by simply chaining your assault away from them, but ranged enemies have no concept of lane and pretty much attack as they please.
This lack of a pre-control system means you have to constantly react, wait on your enemies. It also means they have to have unrealistically rare attack patterns rather than realistic assaults.
But there are some options for adding pre-control back in.
One option is to add in stun attacks as a much more central theme. Whether we're talking about throws, leap-overs, leg-stabs, or flicking pennies at people, if you can pre-control them by stun-attacking, that's something that can free you up to launch a serious combo without interference. Don't equate this to Lollipop Chainsaw: that also had a stun vs real attack system, but for a completely different purpose.
Another option is to add in much more powerful terrain features. This can be a bit touchy with the camera, unfortunately, but by adding in simple opaque terrain you can allow the player to pre-control ranged attackers by simply taking the fight to the other side of the wall. This adds in the original maneuvering flavor, except that now instead of controlling range, you're controlling cover.
Another option is to make enemies opaque. Right now the standard approach is that ranged attackers can fire through their allies without any difficulty. If they won't take a shot unless they're sure they won't hit an ally, you can use the melee combatants to control the medium- and long-range combatants - again, through maneuvering.
Another option is to make the counters disable the enemy for a long time - five, ten seconds. This means that you wait to counter, but then have freedom to fight within that window afterwards.
In all cases, maneuvering would be done less by actually walking around and more by attacks and attack chains which move you. You wouldn't simply maneuver so that the melee enemies were between you and the ranged enemies: you'd perform a driving punch chain that cuts through five of them and leaves you on the other side.
Anyway, I like brawlers, and it's fun to think about the evolution of the genre.
Monday, June 24, 2013
Design Talk: Poison Pawns
So I recently came up with an idea for a game I call "Poison Pawns". It's a computer game intended to showcase the avatar creation system, so it's got lots of people and not much action.
In the game you (and everyone else) are particularly corrupt intergalactic senators, and the point of the game is to gain control over various places and factions in a shared game universe.
Vying for control works with you and at least one other senator (maybe a player, maybe an AI) getting together for a short game. This can be live or highly asynchronous, depending on the specifics.
Pregame, there are 30 or so "cards" on the table arranged in rows. Each row is a different kind of thing: a plot, person/people, place, or thing/faction. You take turns picking cards until everyone has a specific number - around 7 or 8. The cards don't vanish: they are just marked with the face of the player than chose them.
After selection is done, each player turns cards into scenarios. Plot cards are defined with a number of slots, and players simply fill those slots in. So you might have chosen the plot "Person X rigs election for place/faction Y to get person Z elected as president". Then you might fill it in: "Bill rigs the election on Newplanet to get Suzy elected president". While you can only use plots you chose, you can fill them in with any card on the table, even if someone else chose it.
If you play that scenario and the game ends with it intact, then whoever chose Suzy would end up with control of Newplanet, and the steady trickle of wealth and power it produces. The president's stats do matter, augmenting that.
The game proceeds backwards in time, each player having the option to play a plot of their own and change the context of all the plots that followed.
For example, if you take control of Newplanet, I might then play the scenario "George fines and over-regulates the shipping industry". This nets me a lump cash payoff and also significantly degrades the economy of Newplanet, perhaps even taking it into the red. (Not all assets are positive, and landing someone with a bad asset can be a victory in itself.)
On the other hand, maybe I don't want you to control Newplanet. So I play "George implements reforms across Newplanet". Alone, this plot actually improves Newplanet slightly. However, it automatically works to counter any subsequent plot with competing interests. So George catches Bill's attempt to rig the election, removing Bill from play and canceling that plot. This only works if George's interests aren't compromised. If George is owned by you, or if I had assigned Suzy to implement reforms, then the election rigging would go ahead just fine, because those characters would be okay with it.
If you saw that I might do this and wanted to control Newplanet, you might have picked the "Person X has a price..." plot early in the selection system, and then tried to guess who I would use. This plot changes someone's allegiance, but it costs money depending on their stats and whether they are neutral or aligned with someone. Since you have to choose ahead of time who you are going to bribe, this can be difficult to use. Normally, you'd use it to cement the allegiance of your most important character. However, if I felt confident that you'd use either George, Suzy, or Bill to spearhead the reforms, I could set it up so that two of them are participating in my election plot and the third is covered by this plot as insurance.
All of this leads to a system where you know exactly what plots each player can use and the people, factions, and places they'll want to score with. It's a complex system of predicting what the enemy predicts you'll predict...
The game takes place in a shared universe, but once claimed assets remain "locked" to their new owners for a certain amount of time. Perhaps a week. During that week, other players may pay their own level in coin to sign up for the battle over it. Up to four players may get involved, at which point the list closes. At the time the asset elapses, those players show up and play. If players aren't available, unless it's set to asynchronous mode, they just don't get to participate and are out the entry fee.
The requirement for players to pay their own level in coin means that it's not profitable for players to target weaker assets. If Newplanet is a tremendously valuable property, maybe level 200 players will jump at the chance to pay a billion tons of platinum to compete for it. But if Newplanet is just some rural planet worth almost nothing, they'd lose out even if they dominated. Players have the level of their highest-level asset, as well: so if Newplanet is rank 200, then whoever owns it will automatically have a minimum level of 200. If that's too high and they can't afford to pay billion tons of platinum all the time, they might cede Newplanet or just not show up at the reclaiming battle (which they get to enter for free).
Since the game is intended to show off the avatar system, your avatars and clothes are a big focus. The galactic senate is a very fashionable place, and senators always spring for the rejuv treatments... and, of course, you could just stick to your own little senate quarters and spend all your time dressing outrageously and inviting people over for parties.
Anyway, that's the design of "Poison Pawns".
In the game you (and everyone else) are particularly corrupt intergalactic senators, and the point of the game is to gain control over various places and factions in a shared game universe.
Vying for control works with you and at least one other senator (maybe a player, maybe an AI) getting together for a short game. This can be live or highly asynchronous, depending on the specifics.
Pregame, there are 30 or so "cards" on the table arranged in rows. Each row is a different kind of thing: a plot, person/people, place, or thing/faction. You take turns picking cards until everyone has a specific number - around 7 or 8. The cards don't vanish: they are just marked with the face of the player than chose them.
After selection is done, each player turns cards into scenarios. Plot cards are defined with a number of slots, and players simply fill those slots in. So you might have chosen the plot "Person X rigs election for place/faction Y to get person Z elected as president". Then you might fill it in: "Bill rigs the election on Newplanet to get Suzy elected president". While you can only use plots you chose, you can fill them in with any card on the table, even if someone else chose it.
If you play that scenario and the game ends with it intact, then whoever chose Suzy would end up with control of Newplanet, and the steady trickle of wealth and power it produces. The president's stats do matter, augmenting that.
The game proceeds backwards in time, each player having the option to play a plot of their own and change the context of all the plots that followed.
For example, if you take control of Newplanet, I might then play the scenario "George fines and over-regulates the shipping industry". This nets me a lump cash payoff and also significantly degrades the economy of Newplanet, perhaps even taking it into the red. (Not all assets are positive, and landing someone with a bad asset can be a victory in itself.)
On the other hand, maybe I don't want you to control Newplanet. So I play "George implements reforms across Newplanet". Alone, this plot actually improves Newplanet slightly. However, it automatically works to counter any subsequent plot with competing interests. So George catches Bill's attempt to rig the election, removing Bill from play and canceling that plot. This only works if George's interests aren't compromised. If George is owned by you, or if I had assigned Suzy to implement reforms, then the election rigging would go ahead just fine, because those characters would be okay with it.
If you saw that I might do this and wanted to control Newplanet, you might have picked the "Person X has a price..." plot early in the selection system, and then tried to guess who I would use. This plot changes someone's allegiance, but it costs money depending on their stats and whether they are neutral or aligned with someone. Since you have to choose ahead of time who you are going to bribe, this can be difficult to use. Normally, you'd use it to cement the allegiance of your most important character. However, if I felt confident that you'd use either George, Suzy, or Bill to spearhead the reforms, I could set it up so that two of them are participating in my election plot and the third is covered by this plot as insurance.
All of this leads to a system where you know exactly what plots each player can use and the people, factions, and places they'll want to score with. It's a complex system of predicting what the enemy predicts you'll predict...
The game takes place in a shared universe, but once claimed assets remain "locked" to their new owners for a certain amount of time. Perhaps a week. During that week, other players may pay their own level in coin to sign up for the battle over it. Up to four players may get involved, at which point the list closes. At the time the asset elapses, those players show up and play. If players aren't available, unless it's set to asynchronous mode, they just don't get to participate and are out the entry fee.
The requirement for players to pay their own level in coin means that it's not profitable for players to target weaker assets. If Newplanet is a tremendously valuable property, maybe level 200 players will jump at the chance to pay a billion tons of platinum to compete for it. But if Newplanet is just some rural planet worth almost nothing, they'd lose out even if they dominated. Players have the level of their highest-level asset, as well: so if Newplanet is rank 200, then whoever owns it will automatically have a minimum level of 200. If that's too high and they can't afford to pay billion tons of platinum all the time, they might cede Newplanet or just not show up at the reclaiming battle (which they get to enter for free).
Since the game is intended to show off the avatar system, your avatars and clothes are a big focus. The galactic senate is a very fashionable place, and senators always spring for the rejuv treatments... and, of course, you could just stick to your own little senate quarters and spend all your time dressing outrageously and inviting people over for parties.
Anyway, that's the design of "Poison Pawns".
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Quest for Epic Loot first reactions
So, I was selected for a beta key for The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, the newest game from Ubisoft. I've been slow on playing it for two reasons. First, it involves Uplay, which makes my skin crawl. Second, even though the game doesn't look particularly complex, it eats my graphics card and there is a worry of it overheating and causing my computer to hard-crash, something that I normally only have to worry about with cut-rate games from the early 2000s that don't understand the concept of a frame rate.
Oh, dear, I've started bitching already. That's, um... that's kind of the sort of review it's going to be. Sorry.
I actually don't think I can put much of the blame on the Ubisoftians for the things I don't like about this game. It's clear that what they've created is simply something that isn't aimed at me. In fact, it's aimed at all the things that piss me off. It's essentially casualified Diablo III mixed with Farmville.
My first real annoyance is that their cash shop is pretty much fucking your ear from the first screen. I'm not kidding: the character select screen is two generic white guys, or a third generic white guy for cash. And every loading screen comes pre-equipped with an ad and a shortcut key for their cash shop. And their preloader/patcher contains ads for their cash shop. Before the game even begins, you've been subjected to three screens demanding money. And, of course, nearly every other screen in the game also informs you that you could be spending money to just win this shit without slogging through the treadmill.
I guess maybe that's the way of things these days, but it gives the whole thing a cheap and chintzy feel. I would only be moderately annoyed by it except for one detail: THIS IS A CLOSED BETA. It's a closed beta, and their cash shop is already demanding your coin. Moreover, beta testers don't get any kind of cash shop bonus so they can beta test the cash shop stuff... it's just so... grasping.
The second major problem with the game is one I've already alluded to. You get to pick one of two generic white guys or buy a third generic white guy, at which point a generic white guy narrates a story and then another generic white guy sells you castle and takes you through a tutorial. The first non-generic-non-white guy you meet is a goblin.
The whole game is deeply uncreative and anchored in super-safe vanilla fantasies. There are no women, no black people, no children - just endless rows of white guys killing safely and cheerfully inhuman monsters such as chickens, skeletons, and goblins renamed to something so you won't call them out for complete uncreativity.
Some of the monster designs are kind of fun at times, but even they feel super generic because they take place within the scaffold of the game's battle system... which is super generic.
It's a bit like Diablo if you really dumbed it down. The skill system is painfully bland, the "stats" are more or less nonexistent... gear pours in, but there's not really any deciding to do, it cheerfully tells you which piece of armor is the best and expects that you'll just equip optimally constantly.
The fighting is a bit like Diablo in that you click to move, click to shoot, click to use special powers... but the tactics involved in a game of Diablo are completely muted. You can tell the instant the game starts that it's going to mute the tactics, because the camera is about four feet above your head. You can't see enough terrain to use the terrain. The archer's range is approximately nine feet, with the total view range maybe being 12.
It's not completely brainless, but it is very casual. And, of course, loot piles up and you grab it. The dungeons might get creative later, I don't know, but in the beginning they are strictly one-room encounters where there's some arbitrary combination of traps and enemies and you just deal with it strictly inside that one room. The Diablo equivalent of Call of Duty's regenerate-between-every-skirmish design.
Your castle serves as a modular home base, but there's not as much depth to it as you might hope. Most of your base serves to host generic shops that you have to place - not sure why. There's absolutely nothing interesting or significant about how you can place them or use them. You might as well just hop down to a shopping district.
You can build a variety of modules for making money or fighting off adventurers, which is where the game starts to feel like a Farmville clone. Of course, whenever you buy anything, it reminds you that you could be buying it using real money instead of gold... and after you've bought it, it builds nice and slow so as to prod you to pay some real money to have it skip the construction delay.
There may be some complexity to the base building, I don't know. I haven't gotten far enough into it to be sure. But I would be a bit surprised, because there's really no creativity or complexity anywhere else in the game.
But... here's the thing: I think it'll do fine. It's exactly the sort of bland, repackaged casual garbage I've come to expect from casual games, but dolled up in a package of ADVENTURING! So I expect a large number of people will be happy to sink their teeth into this dolled-up casual game and pretend they are eating meat instead of chugging soda.
"It's not a casual game! It's got a preloader and doesn't run in the browser and has 3D graphics!"
Well, it's too casual for my taste.
We need more base construction games, but this seems to distract the player with shiny baubles and mirrors rather than offering actual play. It's doubly poisoned by its omnipresent cash shop.
Theoretically, it could radically pick up in the later game. That really seems kind of unlikely, but even if it's true, the first few hours are full of predictable blandness and a very loud cash shop.
Oh, dear, I've started bitching already. That's, um... that's kind of the sort of review it's going to be. Sorry.
I actually don't think I can put much of the blame on the Ubisoftians for the things I don't like about this game. It's clear that what they've created is simply something that isn't aimed at me. In fact, it's aimed at all the things that piss me off. It's essentially casualified Diablo III mixed with Farmville.
My first real annoyance is that their cash shop is pretty much fucking your ear from the first screen. I'm not kidding: the character select screen is two generic white guys, or a third generic white guy for cash. And every loading screen comes pre-equipped with an ad and a shortcut key for their cash shop. And their preloader/patcher contains ads for their cash shop. Before the game even begins, you've been subjected to three screens demanding money. And, of course, nearly every other screen in the game also informs you that you could be spending money to just win this shit without slogging through the treadmill.
I guess maybe that's the way of things these days, but it gives the whole thing a cheap and chintzy feel. I would only be moderately annoyed by it except for one detail: THIS IS A CLOSED BETA. It's a closed beta, and their cash shop is already demanding your coin. Moreover, beta testers don't get any kind of cash shop bonus so they can beta test the cash shop stuff... it's just so... grasping.
The second major problem with the game is one I've already alluded to. You get to pick one of two generic white guys or buy a third generic white guy, at which point a generic white guy narrates a story and then another generic white guy sells you castle and takes you through a tutorial. The first non-generic-non-white guy you meet is a goblin.
The whole game is deeply uncreative and anchored in super-safe vanilla fantasies. There are no women, no black people, no children - just endless rows of white guys killing safely and cheerfully inhuman monsters such as chickens, skeletons, and goblins renamed to something so you won't call them out for complete uncreativity.
Some of the monster designs are kind of fun at times, but even they feel super generic because they take place within the scaffold of the game's battle system... which is super generic.
It's a bit like Diablo if you really dumbed it down. The skill system is painfully bland, the "stats" are more or less nonexistent... gear pours in, but there's not really any deciding to do, it cheerfully tells you which piece of armor is the best and expects that you'll just equip optimally constantly.
The fighting is a bit like Diablo in that you click to move, click to shoot, click to use special powers... but the tactics involved in a game of Diablo are completely muted. You can tell the instant the game starts that it's going to mute the tactics, because the camera is about four feet above your head. You can't see enough terrain to use the terrain. The archer's range is approximately nine feet, with the total view range maybe being 12.
It's not completely brainless, but it is very casual. And, of course, loot piles up and you grab it. The dungeons might get creative later, I don't know, but in the beginning they are strictly one-room encounters where there's some arbitrary combination of traps and enemies and you just deal with it strictly inside that one room. The Diablo equivalent of Call of Duty's regenerate-between-every-skirmish design.
Your castle serves as a modular home base, but there's not as much depth to it as you might hope. Most of your base serves to host generic shops that you have to place - not sure why. There's absolutely nothing interesting or significant about how you can place them or use them. You might as well just hop down to a shopping district.
You can build a variety of modules for making money or fighting off adventurers, which is where the game starts to feel like a Farmville clone. Of course, whenever you buy anything, it reminds you that you could be buying it using real money instead of gold... and after you've bought it, it builds nice and slow so as to prod you to pay some real money to have it skip the construction delay.
There may be some complexity to the base building, I don't know. I haven't gotten far enough into it to be sure. But I would be a bit surprised, because there's really no creativity or complexity anywhere else in the game.
But... here's the thing: I think it'll do fine. It's exactly the sort of bland, repackaged casual garbage I've come to expect from casual games, but dolled up in a package of ADVENTURING! So I expect a large number of people will be happy to sink their teeth into this dolled-up casual game and pretend they are eating meat instead of chugging soda.
"It's not a casual game! It's got a preloader and doesn't run in the browser and has 3D graphics!"
Well, it's too casual for my taste.
We need more base construction games, but this seems to distract the player with shiny baubles and mirrors rather than offering actual play. It's doubly poisoned by its omnipresent cash shop.
Theoretically, it could radically pick up in the later game. That really seems kind of unlikely, but even if it's true, the first few hours are full of predictable blandness and a very loud cash shop.
The Spore Challenge
So, today's thought experiment: How can you make the game Spore fun?
If you've played Spore, you've probably already thought about it. Very cool content creation tools yet to be matched by anyone, but no gameplay. None. The designs don't matter, the game phases have no complexity and almost no meaningful play. It wasn't even made into a casual game: it was made into a non-game.
So the question is: how do you make Spore fun?
I can see why they removed making the designs matter, as the freeform design makes it a really concentrated skill challenge. Not only would players poor at design have a rough time of it, but also any player that didn't want to spend a week tweaking their character design would come out worse than the "standard". Similarly, there is both a learning curve and a strict optimal set of designs when things like complex gaits are involved.
When you stop and think it through, you can clearly see that free design is a very high-skill kind of play. While I would love that, it would make your first playthrough of the game your worst, which is generally a bad idea.
What solutions can you come up with?
My solution is to make it more like real evolution. That is, once you make a change, you can't ever change back. All you can do is keep building off the choice you made.
For example, you start off as a simple worm-like water creature with a spine and a mouth. You can, if you like, turn one of your vertebrae into joint-bearing vertebrae, and you can steadily refine that into fins, arms, legs, wings, whatever you like. But you can't revert it back to a raw vertebrae, or move that formation to a new vertebrae.
Of course, you can extensively reshape everything within those constraints.
There are many things you might want to assign to a vertebrae. Ribbed chambers are useful, but they do strictly limit the size of the organs within. Pouch chambers are great if you want room to grow, but there's no structural support or armor. Leaving the vertebrae raw could be useful down the line: you'll never manifest a full set of arms out of nothing, but you can start the painstaking process later if you decide you need more arms.
The opposite happens, too: you can wither away the limbs or chambers you've specialized into until you can't even see them (although generally you'd just reduce them to structural vestiges rather than spend the evo points to completely diminish them). While they no longer have the function they would have had, the vertebrae is freed to maneuver as if it were raw and no real energy is wasted on generating them. And, of course, later you can evolve them back into existence step by step by step...
The same kind of sequence series thing works in terms of neural setup - evolving sensory organs and cogitation in the same way you'd evolve limbs and chambers. Organs, too, within the chambers...
All in all, this setup should make designing easy to get into right at the beginning, and let you grow into the more complex designing features iteration by iteration, never having to spend too long designing at any one time.
This one's just a simple setup, but it could theoretically possible to be a lot more complex and free while you do this. But it'd take a long time to explain, so this'll work for now.
Does it sound fun? What would you do?
If you've played Spore, you've probably already thought about it. Very cool content creation tools yet to be matched by anyone, but no gameplay. None. The designs don't matter, the game phases have no complexity and almost no meaningful play. It wasn't even made into a casual game: it was made into a non-game.
So the question is: how do you make Spore fun?
I can see why they removed making the designs matter, as the freeform design makes it a really concentrated skill challenge. Not only would players poor at design have a rough time of it, but also any player that didn't want to spend a week tweaking their character design would come out worse than the "standard". Similarly, there is both a learning curve and a strict optimal set of designs when things like complex gaits are involved.
When you stop and think it through, you can clearly see that free design is a very high-skill kind of play. While I would love that, it would make your first playthrough of the game your worst, which is generally a bad idea.
What solutions can you come up with?
My solution is to make it more like real evolution. That is, once you make a change, you can't ever change back. All you can do is keep building off the choice you made.
For example, you start off as a simple worm-like water creature with a spine and a mouth. You can, if you like, turn one of your vertebrae into joint-bearing vertebrae, and you can steadily refine that into fins, arms, legs, wings, whatever you like. But you can't revert it back to a raw vertebrae, or move that formation to a new vertebrae.
Of course, you can extensively reshape everything within those constraints.
There are many things you might want to assign to a vertebrae. Ribbed chambers are useful, but they do strictly limit the size of the organs within. Pouch chambers are great if you want room to grow, but there's no structural support or armor. Leaving the vertebrae raw could be useful down the line: you'll never manifest a full set of arms out of nothing, but you can start the painstaking process later if you decide you need more arms.
The opposite happens, too: you can wither away the limbs or chambers you've specialized into until you can't even see them (although generally you'd just reduce them to structural vestiges rather than spend the evo points to completely diminish them). While they no longer have the function they would have had, the vertebrae is freed to maneuver as if it were raw and no real energy is wasted on generating them. And, of course, later you can evolve them back into existence step by step by step...
The same kind of sequence series thing works in terms of neural setup - evolving sensory organs and cogitation in the same way you'd evolve limbs and chambers. Organs, too, within the chambers...
All in all, this setup should make designing easy to get into right at the beginning, and let you grow into the more complex designing features iteration by iteration, never having to spend too long designing at any one time.
This one's just a simple setup, but it could theoretically possible to be a lot more complex and free while you do this. But it'd take a long time to explain, so this'll work for now.
Does it sound fun? What would you do?
Friday, June 21, 2013
Disjoints as Art
So, every kind of medium has certain kinds of disjoints in it. The way it presents the viewer with its contents varies from default human experience in some way. Most mediums make good use of those, and it is what sets that medium apart in terms of how it conveys messages.
That sounds complicated and intangible, but it's pretty easy to understand when I give examples.
In a TV show, the camera angle is constantly changing, the scenes are constantly moving from place to place, person to person. Obviously, this is not something that happens in our daily lives: we don't suddenly teleport across the room, or have our head tossed into the sky for a crane shot. But we aren't usually confused by the camera and scene changes - we stitch it together seamlessly in our head. That's because there's a language to it, a complex set of rules and expectations that let us put together the pieces flawlessly. However, the language doesn't exist to hide the camerawork: it exists to free the camerawork. Camerawork is a very important part of TV shows, and using your camera wisely allows you to present the audience with extremely nuanced information. Long establishing shots, closeups of someone's face as a single tear rolls down their eye, a newspaper tumbling past a desolate street, or even just the work-a-day camera flicking to make it clear who's talking in a conversation.
TV shows take advantage of their disjoints to give the audience an experience unique to video. The point isn't to take "realistic" shots that are all at eye height and never cut. The point is to use the camera as best you can, and the language has evolved to allow us to do that.
On the other hand, in a book the author frequently takes it upon themselves to tell you what characters are thinking or feeling, or throw in phrases that establish the background and history of a situation in one or two sentences. "...And there was Jayne, standing under a street light, holding the same damn rifle he held ten years ago on the smuggler's moon..."
Giving the audience insight into things they couldn't possibly have insight into is a powerful tool which sets books apart from other mediums. We've got a language of meta-writing to allow for it: we have lots of shorthand, best-practices, invisible padding words (like "said"), and so on. These all allow writers to quickly leverage the disjoint inherent in text and tell the audience things.
But books sometimes try to use movie conventions, and movies try to use book conventions. This almost always ends up shitty. Remember the original Dune movie? All those actors whispering all the time, all that narration? That's what happened in the book, but in the book it was completely transparent, because in the medium of a book is suitable to say things about what characters know or think.
In games, we more or less inherit all our stuff from other mediums. AAA games tend to inherit from movies, with cutscenes and static progression. Indie games tend to inherit from comics, with moment-chunk dialogues and the ability to flip to whatever "page" you want after you've gotten through it once.
But like the original Dune movie, both methods end up feeling heavy-handed and clumsy.
Like the early change from just filming plays to actually filming movies, it's time for games to stop being interactive movies (or comics) and start being games.
The question is: what kinds of features go games have, as a medium, that can be used to set games apart?
Well, in all the other mediums, the things that they can leverage are also the weaknesses that keep them from being ideal. You have to tell the audience everything in books... but in turn you can tell them ANYTHING. The audience is stuck looking through your camera in a TV show, unable to move their head or shift their attention... but in turn you can move their head and shift their attention in any way you want. The audience is forced to assemble a narrative from standalone moments in comics... but in turn you can make those standalone moments stretch and contain things no real moment could ever contain.
What do games offer?
Well, games offer a level of control over our actions inside that game world. Unlike passive mediums, we have control. However, beneath that is the weakness that the game worlds are limited. Some are very limited - in Tetris, your control is limited to moving a brick slightly. The limits of the world we interact with are our disjoint, our weakness.
And our strength.
Our world has to be built out of concrete interactions... but in turn we can make those concrete interactions contain more meaning (or way different meaning) than the same actions would in real life.
For example, one of the emergent things you could do in Halo was grenade-launching your Warthog using sticky bombs. How high could you launch it? How long could you keep it aloft? While the interaction is pointless - the Warthog suffers no damage, no points are gained - the constraints that the world put around the situation gave the situation value. An action which was objectively valueless from every conceivable angle became a fun fad because the way the world was assembled.
This is just one small example. Every game contains these kinds of situations. The values in the world are constructed not just out of context imported from the real world, but also from context internal to the game. Obviously, this is possible in every medium, just as you can say what someone is thinking within a movie, or describe the details of someone's facial expressions in a book. But games are the best at it, because games allow players to rapidly explore and construct context as a core part of their experience.
In most games, the context is limited to skill challenges. We appreciate combos, trick jumps, speed-runs, and high scores because we know how hard they are to achieve. Similarly, we prize glitches and bugs because we understand how unusual they are and how difficult they are to uncover. Games are entering a more social era in no small part because skill challenges like these are best when someone else can stare in awe.
However, with that in mind, let's think about how we can leverage this kind of rapid, fine-grained contextual construction in other ways.
...
I DON'T KNOW SOMEONE TELL ME. MY BRAIN HURTS.
That sounds complicated and intangible, but it's pretty easy to understand when I give examples.
In a TV show, the camera angle is constantly changing, the scenes are constantly moving from place to place, person to person. Obviously, this is not something that happens in our daily lives: we don't suddenly teleport across the room, or have our head tossed into the sky for a crane shot. But we aren't usually confused by the camera and scene changes - we stitch it together seamlessly in our head. That's because there's a language to it, a complex set of rules and expectations that let us put together the pieces flawlessly. However, the language doesn't exist to hide the camerawork: it exists to free the camerawork. Camerawork is a very important part of TV shows, and using your camera wisely allows you to present the audience with extremely nuanced information. Long establishing shots, closeups of someone's face as a single tear rolls down their eye, a newspaper tumbling past a desolate street, or even just the work-a-day camera flicking to make it clear who's talking in a conversation.
TV shows take advantage of their disjoints to give the audience an experience unique to video. The point isn't to take "realistic" shots that are all at eye height and never cut. The point is to use the camera as best you can, and the language has evolved to allow us to do that.
On the other hand, in a book the author frequently takes it upon themselves to tell you what characters are thinking or feeling, or throw in phrases that establish the background and history of a situation in one or two sentences. "...And there was Jayne, standing under a street light, holding the same damn rifle he held ten years ago on the smuggler's moon..."
Giving the audience insight into things they couldn't possibly have insight into is a powerful tool which sets books apart from other mediums. We've got a language of meta-writing to allow for it: we have lots of shorthand, best-practices, invisible padding words (like "said"), and so on. These all allow writers to quickly leverage the disjoint inherent in text and tell the audience things.
But books sometimes try to use movie conventions, and movies try to use book conventions. This almost always ends up shitty. Remember the original Dune movie? All those actors whispering all the time, all that narration? That's what happened in the book, but in the book it was completely transparent, because in the medium of a book is suitable to say things about what characters know or think.
In games, we more or less inherit all our stuff from other mediums. AAA games tend to inherit from movies, with cutscenes and static progression. Indie games tend to inherit from comics, with moment-chunk dialogues and the ability to flip to whatever "page" you want after you've gotten through it once.
But like the original Dune movie, both methods end up feeling heavy-handed and clumsy.
Like the early change from just filming plays to actually filming movies, it's time for games to stop being interactive movies (or comics) and start being games.
The question is: what kinds of features go games have, as a medium, that can be used to set games apart?
Well, in all the other mediums, the things that they can leverage are also the weaknesses that keep them from being ideal. You have to tell the audience everything in books... but in turn you can tell them ANYTHING. The audience is stuck looking through your camera in a TV show, unable to move their head or shift their attention... but in turn you can move their head and shift their attention in any way you want. The audience is forced to assemble a narrative from standalone moments in comics... but in turn you can make those standalone moments stretch and contain things no real moment could ever contain.
What do games offer?
Well, games offer a level of control over our actions inside that game world. Unlike passive mediums, we have control. However, beneath that is the weakness that the game worlds are limited. Some are very limited - in Tetris, your control is limited to moving a brick slightly. The limits of the world we interact with are our disjoint, our weakness.
And our strength.
Our world has to be built out of concrete interactions... but in turn we can make those concrete interactions contain more meaning (or way different meaning) than the same actions would in real life.
For example, one of the emergent things you could do in Halo was grenade-launching your Warthog using sticky bombs. How high could you launch it? How long could you keep it aloft? While the interaction is pointless - the Warthog suffers no damage, no points are gained - the constraints that the world put around the situation gave the situation value. An action which was objectively valueless from every conceivable angle became a fun fad because the way the world was assembled.
This is just one small example. Every game contains these kinds of situations. The values in the world are constructed not just out of context imported from the real world, but also from context internal to the game. Obviously, this is possible in every medium, just as you can say what someone is thinking within a movie, or describe the details of someone's facial expressions in a book. But games are the best at it, because games allow players to rapidly explore and construct context as a core part of their experience.
In most games, the context is limited to skill challenges. We appreciate combos, trick jumps, speed-runs, and high scores because we know how hard they are to achieve. Similarly, we prize glitches and bugs because we understand how unusual they are and how difficult they are to uncover. Games are entering a more social era in no small part because skill challenges like these are best when someone else can stare in awe.
However, with that in mind, let's think about how we can leverage this kind of rapid, fine-grained contextual construction in other ways.
...
I DON'T KNOW SOMEONE TELL ME. MY BRAIN HURTS.
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