Rough Sea Games

Most computer game designs of recent years conspicuously neglect level design. A level designer’s job isn’t limited to level architecture and scripting — a game can benefit immensely from consistent atmosphere and psychological steering of the player. Modern level design should also be understood as a reality check for game design ideas.

Instead, many current games have filled this position inadequately or even tried to make it into a (minor) part of the game designer’s role. Ideally, the game and its scenarios should be believable and understandable, and the player’s actions should be cool and fit into the world; instead of adapting real life to achieve this, new games have introduced specialized, more or less awkward mechanisms.

In earlier games, all openable crates looked the same, and any slope that could be climbed had the same vine hanging from it. Such conventions were tolerable in the graphics of the time.

Such repeated elements aren’t welcome in today’s nearly photorealistic games, which makes levels harder to “read”. Thus, the aforementioned new mechanics:

Wolverine offers “smell-o-vision”, which highlights interactive elements and the path onward. However, this only forces us to play much of the game in false colours.

In Watchmen – The End is Nigh, a button press turns the character to face the direction in which he should next go, rather than designing the level so that the player can figure it out, or at least including a compass in the HUD.

The first clips of the new Splinter Cell show a system in which the character is shown as a ghost in the last place he was seen by the guards. Also, we can storm a room in the style of a modern action film, quickly and precisely eliminating multiple opponents that we have previously observed and marked. This will probably push the game toward an arcade feeling, because it doesn’t allow the player to know intuitively where his enemies are hunting him — it just breaks the atmosphere to show him directly. Also, storming rooms won’t feel fast-paced and cool, because it’s achievable only after a planning phase rather than simulating rapid and accurate shooting through e.g. discreet autoaim.

There are, however, counterexamples: while fleeing on the jetski in Half Life 2, for example, the level design uses the size and lighting of areas and scripted events to push us subliminally through the canals, so that we feel as if we were spontaneously choosing the right path from several alternatives. If we examine the map afterwards, though, it turns out that all of those (not so appealing looking) branches are actually dead ends. Skillful placement of eyecatchers makes the rail feel like a huge open space.

Clearly, there is much to do in the discipline of level design if the next generation of games is to offer a play experience as beautiful as its graphics…

Popularity: 68% [?]

Greg Costikyan is an idealistic game designer and critic who has been trying¹ to foster innovation in computer games since 2000. Back in 1994 he wrote a famous² game design theory essay: I Have No Words & I Must Design, with which I mostly agree… but I’m going to take a bit of it out of context and pick on it anyway. Here’s the quote:

If the game has more than one ‘resource,’ decisions suddenly become more complex[...] If I declare against the Valois, Edward Plantagenet will grant me the Duchy of Gascony, but the Pope may excommunicate me, imperilling my immortal soul.

These are not just complex decisions; these are interesting ones. Interesting decisions make for interesting games.

The resources in question have to have a game role; if ‘your immortal soul’ has no meaning, neither does excommunication[...]. Ultimately, ‘managing resources’ means managing game elements in pursuit of your goal. A ‘resource’ that has no game role has nothing to contribute to success or failure, and is ultimately void.

Costikyan is 100% right that dilemmas are interesting, but are the only interesting dilemmas game-mechanical? Well, when it comes to the current state of computer games, yes. “Hard core” players separate the game’s mechanics (e.g. the way the chess pieces move) from its “colour” (the pieces’ shapes and names) very quickly, and ignore the latter. But does it have to be this way? I say no! There are other ways to play. In a game that engages the player’s emotions — in particular a role-playing game in its true sense, in which the player strongly identifies with the character she controls – “colour” can dominate game-mechanics in the subjective play experience. Emotionally loaded decisions are interesting even if they do not affect your progress towards a goal — in fact, especially if they don’t: if the cowboy in the white hat accepted the reward for killing the bandits, he’d be a mercenary, not a hero³. Moral decisions become especially interesting if being virtuous actually makes the game harder.

The emotional impact of decisions increases if the game world reacts to them. For example, the quartermaster in Deus Ex reacts disapprovingly if the player decides to massacre all enemies in the first mission, although that is a game mechanically acceptable victory. Such reactions require a light touch to avoid becoming puerile and a lot of cleverness to avoid being very expensive (since the game developers must determine what behaviours they want to measure, how to measure them, and how to make the world react to them), but even in rudimentary form they are hugely rewarding for some players.

¹ And so far, alas, failing. In 2000, he hoped cell phone games, being cheap to make, were going to become a fountain of creativity. In fact, because potential players just see lists of titles (rather than demos or even a box blurb), licensing tie-ins or massive marketing are even more essential than in the “classic” games industry.
² “Famous” in a tiny niche of game design snobs, anyway.
³ Mercenary attitudes can be emotionally involving too, of course, but if they have no hidden heart, they get dull fast.

Popularity: 82% [?]

It’s always impressive, right after E3, to consider all the games that I could (or will) buy this year. The graphics and environment get more and more realistic, the heroes cooler and cooler. So shouldn’t that indescribable excitement — the release day fever, the “just can’t wait” trembling — have hit right about now? Well, it should have, but…

The developments of recent years provoke in me, an active gamer for a quarter century, the opposite feeling. The ever-increasing pressure to add unique selling points, better graphics, physics, etc. has decreased the willingness of the developers (or rather the publishers) to explore new directions, and in the end, they mostly produce interchangeable pablum.

Back when blocky pixels and abstract forms invited us to fill their gaps with our own stories; when we waited for minutes in a submarine off Gibraltar for the sun to set; when, after endlessly repeated runs through a level, we finally found the hidden key and with it an indescribable joy, games were primarily sparks for our imagination. Today they simply fulfill our expectations. We used to buy the key to a new world; today, a consumable product.

Today’s gamer has been squeezed into a mold of expectations. He expects games to work in certain ways; any deviations must be carefully explained in advance. Confronting the player with a task that he must solve by his own efforts, without hand-holding, is no longer allowed. Recognizing the patterns and mastering new skills was part of the attraction of earlier games. These days, games have degenerated to pure entertainment. They no longer challenge, they simply divert. This parallels the development of films, which have gone from providing a topic of conversation for post-show socializing to grabbing our attention with ninety minutes of bombast that are immediately forgotten.

Whether lack of design imagination will eventually lead games to follow another film industry trend, namely remakes, remains to be seen. Regardless, throwing away the chance to create high-quality games will certainly confirm a widespread and long-held gamer prejudice: anybody can design a game!

Popularity: 34% [?]

Using a vocabulary of only 25 words, I have written a simple random generator that generates disturbingly plausible computer game names. Here are some samples:

• Eternal Shadow
• Shattered Empires
• Star Masters
• Blood Knight
• Silent Commander
• World of Eternal Blood
• Hero of the Shattered Throne
• Silent Worlds
• Knights of Legend
• Blood Empire
• Star Wars
• Dawn Commanders
• Time Ninja
• Lost Swords
• Stellar Throne
• Heroes of Legend
• Forgotten Realm
• Time of the Unknown Master
• Legend of Legendary Legends

Except for the last one¹, these could easily be real titles — and not of embarrassing B-list products, either. What does this tell game developers? It tells us that game settings choose to live in a ghetto. It tells us that what we consider mainstream is  a sideline in other media. It reminds us that the “niche market” isn’t casual gamers, but ourselves.

…

Or maybe I’m reading too much into this and really just wanted an excuse to write that name generator.

…

Anyone up for a game of Time Ninja?

¹ Actually, since there is a real game called “Divine Divinity”, “Legend of Legendary Legends” should get greenlighted no problem.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Almost all computer games with “role-playing elements”¹ force the player to spend a lot of time on boring, non-challenging, repetitive tasks. These tasks, called grind, translate play time into in-game power. Often, they are disguised as something vaguely heroic — killing ten orcs, for example — but sometimes, especially in online multiplayer games, designers seem determined to rub new players’ faces in the fact that they are worthless nothings by sending them off to collect ten balls of lint instead. In either case, the question is “why deliberately include grind?”

The advantages for the game developers are clear:

1. Grind slows content consumption.  You can have a pretty small world and still write “50 hours of excitement”  on the package if the player has to spend ten hours in each new region walking back and forth between the lint orchards and the marketplace.²

2. In an online game whose income is based on advertising or monthly subscriptions, grind ties player success to developer income. The more powerful a player wants to become, the longer she must play — and hence, the more money she generates for the developers.

Why do the players accept this?

For one thing, grind often comes packaged in fancy visuals and perhaps a new world to explore, so it doesn’t feel like work until the novely wears off. But there’s more to it:

3. Steady progress is seductive. In real life, achievement involves hard work and often risk. Computer games offer an easy sense of accomplishment; their challenges are designed to be overcome. Grind distills this:  if you put in the time, you are guaranteed the reward, which is the way we’re taught as children that life is supposed to work.

4. Competition motivates. If there’s a chart somewhere that says that I’m better than you, I get a satisfying feeling of superiority, even if the chart only measures our respective willingness to have our time wasted.

5. People will put up with a lot of crap to feel cool. Games with grind are often designed so that increasing power means prettier equipment, fancier special effects, etc. This also explains the humiliating newbie lint-quests: increasing the coolness gap between new and experienced players increases the incentive to level up.

So grind is tempting… but it has dangers:

• Grind at the beginning of a game, before a player becomes hooked, can cause her to stop playing before “getting to the good stuff”. And if there is no “good stuff”, those who do stick it out will be very disappointed.
• Grind consumes bandwidth and server resources for online games, and these cost money, so it actually reduces profits for games with a flat monthly fee.
• Grind plagues the game designer’s conscience — or should.

Is it possible to get the good parts of grind without the bad?

I’m not sure, but I’m doing my best in our game. My approach is two-pronged:

a) Grind is optional. Our game can be played, even at a high level, in a few minutes a day. However, to satisfy those who crave grind, or who simply would like to invest more of their time, there will be special, grind-based tasks and rankings that interact only weakly with the core gameplay

b) Grind isn’t too boring. I don’t think it’s possible to make grind really interesting, because interest arises either through challenge (which would void benefit 3) or appealing content (which contradicts 1). Still, there’s a world of difference between an entertaining mini-game and just clicking a button repeatedly.

I don’t want to bore my players unless they insist. Time will tell if I can avoid it.

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¹  Unfortunately, “role-playing” in the context of computer games just means “you have a game token or tokens that becomes more powerful the longer it is used”. (back)

² And if you’re willing to  lie about the “excitement” part. (back)

Popularity: 7% [?]

How can a small developer produce enough content to keep a massively multiplayer game interesting?

Fun is not a full time job

More and more browser games want to be World of Warcraft, which, in practice, usually means that they try to suck you into spending your whole day grinding. Our game is designed to be played for about fifteen minutes per day. Why? Mostly because we expect that our players will have lives outside the game, and we don’t want to ruin them. The side benefit is that we don’t need to produce content as quickly, since players can’t burn through everything in a single insomniac sitting.

Rough Sea needs you

The MMOG content problem arises because there are more players than developers. So why not allow players to make their own content? Everyone wins: creator players get in-game rewards and the pleasure of seeing their work in the game world; consumer players get more copious and varied content.  Of course, vetting submissions is a lot of work, but we may be able to use voting, etc., to get the players partially to supervise themselves! Many web sites (eBay, flickr, facebook) and computer games (Sims, Spore, Little Big Planet) are either founded on or enriched by “user created content”, but browser games haven’t twigged yet.

Use your words

The convential wisdom is that people hate having to read while playing a computer game — it’s a visual medium, like film — and that “reading” on the web consists of skipping as much text as possible. Our game, while primarily graphical, uses text to describe special events that occur in the course of play. Are we crazy? Possibly — and if playtesting shows that reading sucks, we’ll scrap it and redesign. But since players will only see a couple of text-based events per day (and since we hope to attract literate players, not twitch monsters), we hope that these will be seen as welcome variety, not as a chore.

And what are the advantages of text?

• it’s faster to write an atmospheric text than to create the same mood with art or sound. That means we can deliver more content.
• writing requires no special software or equipment, which makes it especially suited to user created content as described above.

Left to Chance

Computer games discovered early that a computer, given the right formulae, can create a huge, complex world much faster than a human can. The procedurally generated approach isn’t suited to text, nor to our style of graphics, but it is excellent for creating spaces for people to explore.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Game design distinguishes between mechanics — the rules of the game — and content — the stuff in the game, like art, music and story. Good mechanics tend to be fairly simple, so that players can understand them, but provide enough flexibility for expressive play (consider chess and go). This often makes them cheap to implement: a clear, simple set of rules is a programmer’s dream. Good content, on the other hand, tends towards the elaborate and expensive: if you want your game to contain a city teeming with life, you’d ideally want every one of its thousands of citizens to look different, and possibly even behave uniquely. Big budget titles like content, because if you have money, it’s the safer bet: it’s hard to come up with good new mechanics, and even if you do, gamers may reject them. Content allows you to distinguish yourselves from the competition without that risk, and you can produce it pretty reliably (of course, there are brilliant and incompetent digital artists and authors, but for an average team, more time & money => cooler content).  On the other hand, Indie games tend to emphasize clever mechanics because that’s all they can afford. Also, games intended for brief play sessions, like arcade or casual games, simply don’t have enough time to show off much content, so they can and do skimp.

But there’s the rub: people associate content-light with short! If someone sends you a link to a browser game with little content, then you will almost certainly play it for only a few minutes, regardless of how brilliant its mechanic may be. If it were boxed for retail sale, you wouldn’t play it at all. There are too many games available to expect people to have the patience to let a mechanic unfold unless they are seduced by content. If chess were invented today, it would fail. A few people would play it, sure, but if only a few people played chess, it would never have reached the depth it has; the scholar’s mate might still be state of the art (unless it got nerfed in a patch).

We here at Rough Sea are making a game that is not short. It’s intended to be played in brief daily sessions, but the world and characters are persistent, so each session contributes towards larger goals. Therefore, we need content. But how will we keep up with the consuming hunger of our hoped-for hordes of fans? That’s a subject for another post.

Popularity: 7% [?]

This blog is going to be tricky. What I’d like to write is detailed discussions of the design decisions that arise in the course of developing this game. Not only does that seem most likely to interest you, the readers we someday hope to have; it would also help me organize my thoughts and steal ideas gather inspiration from your comments. However, our game is a BIG SEEKRIT, so I’ll have to come up with some way to disguise it for blog purposes. Perhaps a simple substitution code in which “artichoke” means “ship” and “umbrella” means “laser cannon”¹….

And who am I? Well, I was lead programmer for a bunch of games that you haven’t heard of. Not because they were terrible, but because they were solidly mediocre. Any why would anyone play such a game, when sitting right next to it on the shelf is a similar but superior game for the same price?

Before I entered the game industry, I used to wonder why there were so many unremarkable games. Why would anyone propose such a game? Why would anyone spend years of their lives developing it?  Bad, I could understand: bad can happen through honest incompetence, or even a really creative, fresh idea that just doesn’t pan out. Bad can be noble. But average?

I concluded that people didn’t know in advance that their game was going to be merely ok. They must have been trying for “great” and run out of money, ideas, or talent. Then I joined the biz, and it turns out that it does sometimes happen that way. More frequent, though, are projects where almost everyone involved knows from the start that the result will be pap. So why are they made? Well, some publishers believe that also-rans bring reliable profits. Many Developers are just desperate for whatever project they can get, to avoid going bankrupt, and they live from the hope that someday, they’ll get the chance to work on something that they can be proud of.

Screw someday. I am sick of working on mediocre games, and that’s why I’m here today, working on this game with these people. I probably won’t get things right the first time — even talented, experienced designers can fail, and I’ve got nothing going for me but a big mouth so far — but I will not rest until this game is worth playing. Or until I discover that I just don’t have it in me, in which case I will sink into depressed obscurity (and hey! What better place to blog from?). Either way, it will be a ride.

Want to watch?

–Rafael

¹ There are no actual laser cannon in the game, although there may be umbrellas. (back)

Popularity: 9% [?]