Mark‘s been porting Run! Jump! Forever! – the procedurally generated platformer – to iPhone! Check out the latest progress!
Run Forever! Jumpfinity! on iPhone!
February 8th, 2010
Woody Allen on Creating
February 6th, 2010From http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/woody-allen-/3/
Woody Allen: My level of confidence is always high, but it’s unmerited confidence. It’s unearned confidence. I never do any homework whatsoever. I don’t even know in the morning sometimes what scene I’m going to be shooting later that day. I’ve given it no attention, no thought. I just go to the set, and they give me the stuff that I’m going to shoot, and then I start to look around and figure out what to do and how to do it. So I feel complete confidence, but that doesn’t mean that I should. I really do kind of flounder around. I’m not exactly sure what I want-I know more what I don’t want. I know if somebody performs badly or if something is going to be too heavy-handed or stupid. But what I really want out of the thing, I find out as we go. Sometimes the actor does something and I think, “Hey, that’s great. That’s much different than I envisioned-and much better. This is a good way to go.”
Sometimes I think game design is like this – especially when its a one-person project. Make something and let yourself be surprised at what you get. And this quote rules:
Woody Allen: There is an inexplicable delight in the act of creating. In the sense that if a guy paints a canvas… You know, I’ve done this sometimes where I’ve gone and bought a lot of paints and just for the fun of it had an orgy of painting. I mean, I can’t paint at all.
Mapping Player Types to Left 4 Dead Characters
January 5th, 2010Justin Keverne has a fun blog post up which maps the characters of Left 4 Dead to Bartle’s classic MUD player types.
Hidden Objectives as a Game Design Element
January 5th, 2010Solium Infernum, Vic Davis’ recent conquer=hell strategy game has a victory path in which players draw and complete secret objective cards to generating prestige (victory points). These secret objectives are goals known only to one player that gives a reward when achieved.
Solium Infernum raises the paranoia level with secret objectives.
Hidden objectives can add another layer to multiplayer games. Instead of each player knowing the goals of other players, players have to guess. This can lead to metagames and strategies such as bluffing, mimicking, and backstabbing. As such, hidden objectives tend to increase the tension and paranoia for players in the game.
Chess is a really boring game to me: I’m fairly bad at planning chess strategies that go beyond a few turns. I tend to get overwhelmed by the amount of possibilities and end up just picking moves. Chess with hidden objectives though sounds awesome. Each player draws a hidden objective cards at the start of the game. First player to achieve their goal wins. Some possible goals: kill enemy knights, don’t lose pawns, put king in check for 3 turns in a row, etc. When a player achieves one of their goals they reveal it and earn a point. Most points wins when the game ends. This is way more appealing to me, because the tension provided by the hidden objectives and the strategy elements of choosing which objectives to go after first captivates me.
Hidden objectives have some levers that can be modified to create a specific experience: their difficulties can be changed, their rewards can be modified, their number can be increased or decreased, and the conditions for their revealing can be changed.
Can you think of examples of games with hidden objectives?
And if anyone wants to do some play-by-email Solium Infernum, let me know!
Emergent Narrative and Frenemy Detectives
January 3rd, 2010After listening to Tom Chick’s and Jason Lutes’ podcast on emergent narrative, I was inspired to make a game to try it out on my own. Since I had just seen the new Sherlock Holmes, I ended up creating a detective card game called Frenemy Detectives.
It works like this. Each player builds a deck of 30 cards. These cards represent the skills, backgrounds, possessions, and actions of their detective. A mystery deck is also built of 30 random mystery cards and 1 villain card and shuffled.
The Broken Window mystery card
During the game players can either draw a card from their detective deck into their hand (to power up) or flip over a card from the mystery deck (a risk, but with good rewards). Each mystery card has challenge numbers on it. Challenges can be social, physical, or investigative. The player that revealed the mystery card can play cards from his or her hand to satisfy the challenge numbers.
For example, if the broken window mystery card revealed – a level one investigative challenge, the player could flip their physics skill (providing one investigative skill) to satisfy the challenge. The next player counter-clockwise may then respond by either playing a different investigative skill (one-upping) the first player or play an action card (to double cross for instance).
The last player to play a card in the challenge gets the success effect of the mystery card if the challenge is won. If the challenge is lost all players who played cards get the effect of the failure line of the mystery card.
The goal of the game is to defeat the villain (a mystery card somewhere in the deck). Only the player that plays the last card in the defeat of the villain (thus getting credit for solving the crime) wins the game.
Frenemy Detectives After Action Report
After a few failed games with some tweaking of the mechanics, I played the first completed game of Frenemy Detectives last night. The game went pretty smoothly with some funny emergent narratives arising. An early one was when my frenemy failed a “Dagger in the Dark” mystery card thus getting stabbed in the back, followed by drawing a “Bloody Dagger” mystery card, apparently deciding to check the weapon in a failed attempt on her life for clues. Another funny one was failing a “Library” mystery card, having the result of having to discard a card, forcing her to discard a “Sherlock Holmes Anthology” – apparently an overdue book!
The villain in the encounter was Cthulhu, and was revealed late in the game (about 5 cards from the bottom of the deck). When we first encountered my character, a coward, threw a smoke bomb, thus getting out of the fight without consequences. My rival got hit with the consequences which contained the chance of adding a “Secret Villain” card to her hand. This card allowed her to win the game when we faced Cthulhu again at the bottom of the deck. By playing the “Secret Villain” card, the player that plays it wins if the other players lose the villain encounter.
I need to add some more cards to the game, but I plan on posting a card list and complete rules at some point in the future.
Choices Must Be Meaningful
December 19th, 2009Choices Must Be Meaningful is rule one of my series on choice in game design.
When games allow players to make choices, each choice must provide distinct gameplay options for the player.
Let’s explore some ways choices can effect the gameplay experience.
Choices can let players navigate multiple content paths
If players can choose between level A and level B, they are more likely to replay the game to see the option they skipped. Also, by varying the difficulty of the two levels, frustration can be avoided if players get stuck on one of the paths.
Choices can impact story
Interactive storytelling is a thorny subject. While games can provide multiple paths of story progression for the player, they often do this in a way that seems like a facade. Sometimes only cut-scenes are modified. I contend that this is not enough. All gameplay choices should effect the gameplay itself. Here’s an example from Dragon Age:
If you choose to start the game as a mage, you play as a wizard who has just completed his training. One of your friends, Jowan, is not so lucky and tells you that the wizard circle is going to make him Tranquil (basically turn him into a robot). He’s planning an escape, but needs your help to destroy a sample of his blood held in the tower phylactery so that the wizards will not be able to track him down.
At this point you have a choice: You can either help him out or reveal his plan to the chief enchanter. I (being a trusting person) decided to help him out. This leads to a dungeon crawl. After destroying his blood sample, Jowan and the player are caught by the authorities. Jowan reveals that he is actually a blood mage (an outlawed form of magic). The player gets chewed out and then sent to join the gray wardens.
Dragon Age: Origins
My brother (being a duplicitous tattle-tale) told the chief enchanter about Jowan’s plan. The result: he had to accompany Jowan through the dungeon, to keep watch over him. Even the cut-scene afterwards was basically the same! He still got chewed out, but the chief enchanter eventually stood up for him.
My point is: while seeming to give the player a choice in Dragon Age, this choice is utterly hollow. A more impacting option would be to make the player confront Jowan directly.
Choices can offer different risk/reward balances
Allowing players to choose different paths with known different risk/reward profiles allows divergent strategies to be pursued by the player.
One game that gets this right is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. In Dungeon Crawl the player must explore different dungeon branches to either collect runes that allow the player to pursue the Orb of Zot, the game’s MacGuffin, or get various rewards that make life easier for the player.
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup
Finding the right order for going through the branches allows the player to formulate a dungeon descent strategy, and also make tactical decisions based on the rewards the player has found so far. For example if the player has no poison resistance the difficulty of the swamp, a branch that contains the first rune most players go for, is increased. This may lead players to first attempt to battle through the orcish mines, a somewhat difficult area, in order to seek out some source of poison resistance.
There are probably more methods in which choices can be made meaningful in games. Can you think of any? Next time I’ll be exploring why the outcomes of choices should be obvious.
Announcing Robotistry
December 16th, 2009M
y next game is called Robotistry. Robotistry is a game where players build robots from decks of robot parts and battle to control resource points. It will support a wide variety of strategies and deck builds for games that range from 15 minutes to an hour. Robotistry will also enable some exciting hot-seat multiplayer action.
I don’t want to post too much about it since it’s still in the early stages, but I should have a playable prototype in less than a month.
Interesting Post On Narrative and Moral Choices in Games
December 16th, 2009Taekwan Kim has an interesting post on moral choices that effect game narratives over here.
Three Rules of Choice In Game Design
December 14th, 2009Overview
Allowing players to make choices when playing video games adds to replayability and player involvement. However, the ways that game designers implement choices range in quality. In some games choices are shallow, unimportant, and ultimately boring or distracting. In others choices are character (or player) defining, captivating, and rewarding. I’ve been thinking about three rules that make choices in video games crunchy and delicious.
In AI War, player choices are incredibly important at the strategic level.
The Rules
The following are three non-exclusive rules of including awesome choices in videogames
- Choices must be meaningful
- Outcomes must be obvious
- Wrong options must be prohibited
I will explore these rules over the next few entries.
Do any of you feel I’m missing any key rules? Am I wrong?
Your homework for this post is to play AI War by Arcen Games.
December Boston Game Development Meetup
December 11th, 2009Show off your games! Find people to help you out! Talk about your game ideas!
We’ll meet at the Au Bon Pan in Central Square on Dec. 19 at 1:00 PM.