14 posts tagged “design”

Please, get rid of the rubber banding in your AI.

It makes no sense, it makes the player feel their wins/losses are arbitrary rather than due to skill or lack there of. A good racing AI should...drive. Yes, drive. With some specific behaviors in mind like boxing players in, stay away being technically excellent(not over or under steering) and other things relevant to the game type.  I could understand rubber banding if you have a combat aspect where the AIs will want to line themselves up with the player.

For a pure racing game where getting to the finish line first is everything? Having an AI roar past me only to slow down is terribly illogical. It's even worse if you have disparaging vehicle stats involved. If I drive a Ferrari Testarossa, I do not expect the AI to suddenly over take me in a Geo Metro. If it does, I'm taking the game out, putting it in its box, getting rid of it and telling all my friends how terrible the game is.

I haven't been very active here for a few reasons. 1) Been doing overtime. Not as crazily as some others, but I'm doing 9, 9.5 hours a day instead of my fairly steadfast 8. 2) Since I'm in Japan, I want to take advantage of the amazing self-publishing resources available. They aren't necessarily as sophisticated as Lulu in ways(no ISBN # help and it's not Print on Demand) but unlike Lulu, the process is far more affordable and friendly for individuals who want to make a high quality book in the 20 page range.

Anyways, my to-do list goes as follows. Perhaps all of you out there could help prioritize the list!

1. Beyond East & West: Nintendo as a Global Standard of Quality.
   
2. Let's Dissect! What makes Monster Hunter Freedom Unite/2nd G Fun!
3. Forced Evolution: Stories of Adapting to a Western Development Method
4. A random Japanese cultural column. I thought of this since today I took part in "mame nage" or a bean throwing ritual to ward off demons. If you want this to be about work culture and job, I could do that too.
   
5. The Level Design of Every Day Places. My local subway station as a surprise source of level design enlightenment. The use of cues, placement and some incredibly useful information.
   
6. Social Experiment with Monster Hunter. This might not come for a while since it requires me to go to a public place in my free time and see if I can get along with total strangers through a few sessions of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite.
   
7. Prattle on a random video game design topic of your choosing!
8. Something not mentioned on this list.
   

Let's say you find a really simple core loop in gameplay. Let's say, that core loop of a game goes as follows:

player goes somewhere -> enemies spawn -> player lays the smack down on the enemies until all the enemies are gone -> go back to beginning of said loop.

Keep the controls simple, the enemies plentiful and the levels busy with all kinds of interactive objects going off. Get rid of some of the archaic junk like lives and save points in favor of systems friendlier to the player that lets them keep their progress. But sheesh, getting dumped on for lack of innovation when it seems like they just want to see innovation for the sake of innovation?

Anime/Manga vs Realism.

You know, up until this current generation of consoles, getting realistic graphics was practically impossible. If you try to make something realistic and then for whatever technical reasons, have to start cutting a lot of corners like polygon counts and texture resolution and all of a sudden, what seemed quite realistic in 3D has become polygon mud.

During the 8 and 16 bit eras, stylization was mandatory. 8 bit, certainly. 16 bit, artists were certainly more ambitious as you started having still frames that looked like grainy photos but it was a stretch. I guess I should say, at 16 bit, people certainly tried.

The 32 bit era brought as many colors as the human eye is capable of recognizing. making it possible to load realistic photos and video.

Okay, enough beating around the bush with all this hardware history, it just looks better if things are stylized when technology can't deliver real. Even if technology can push more polys than the uncanny valley can shake an uncanny stick at, solid style will stand out above the crowd.

I can't quite recall where I heard it or what game it was about, but some game had a bunch of enemies chasing a character. JP Techno limitations could only show 4-5 enemies chasing, but due to creative camera angles, the player was given the illusion that a huge horde of guys was after him/her.

Of course, if they had some better tech, they could have actually shown a lot more enemies. But the creative camera angles worked. So does the technological limit really matter?

It is indeed true that manga has a lot more cultural acceptance in Japan than comics do in the US, but comic book publishers are mostly to blame for this, not American culture. There's manga for ANYONE, but comics? Not so much.

So, you have a look that's well accepted and low-tech friendly. Put two and two together and it's pretty dang obvious why stylized graphics are so in! While most home consoles and PCs have the ability to push the polygons and texture resolutions to fool people, there's still the widely popular DS and PSP. The Wii might be able to...Maybe...I suppose if developers really figure out some awesome tricks, we might get some high fidelity stuff outta a Wii but I'm not holding my breath, I don't really care either.

I suppose over in the West, you want to show off how impressive your poly-pushing techonogy is? Show off something realistic and people go ooh! wow! That's some amazing stuff there. But on the flip side, there's our friends at Pixar. Recognizable style, yes some stuff they do is amazingly realistic like the way fur moved in Monsters Inc, but even then, consider the fact that the super real Final Fantasy CG movie flopped(it was a mediocre bout of storytelling which Pixar doesn't do) but Pixar...Wow. Perhaps game developers can thank Pixar for conditioning Western audiences to appreciate stylized graphics. Anime master Hayao Miyazaki might too, as he gets a lot of praise and interest outside of Japan. And among anime, Miyazaki's art is undeniably unique.

In conclusion, style has the power to make something look amazing and great in spite of technology. It's something I wish developers would put to use more often, as the most notable Western dev to do this is Blizzard with World of Warcraft & platform scalability. Good art directors that can make every in-game object look consistent with a style are extremely important since if anything looks out of place, there goes the style.

Make use of style, it beats getting lost in the tide of realistic wanna-bes.

Japan and the West are so different! Or so everyone leads to believe, but I honestly think that the similarities are far more striking than many people make them out to be. I for one, have not changed my game design philosophies one bit. Of course, I've distilled my game design philosophy to just one sentence:

Don't make crap, make fun.

Crap is pretty universal, and so is fun. I mean, look at Nintendo. Loved by audiences worldwide, Nintendo's modus operandi is "make it fun and they will come." Actually, I should change my philosophy to don't design crap. If the programmers are being forced to use completely and utterly stinks, that can make a well designed game turn into crap to name one example. Anyways, here's what I've noticed.

Co-op Rocks!

Japanese and Westerners alike enjoy it. Everyone's rushing to add it. Plus, it can save a mediocre game plus spur some sales. "Hey Bob, I just got Mercenaries 2. We can both play it together over live and blow stuff up!" "Awesome, Jim! I'll go grab it and we can have us some good times lighting everything on fire!" Now, had this mediocre game been single player, the conversation would have likely gone like this: "Hey Bob, I just got Mercenaries 2. The AI sucks, the mission design sucks, it's pretty neat that you can blow everything all to heck and back, but eh, I can do that in other games." "Thanks for the heads up Jim, I'll skip this turkey." You can throw in Too Human among others into that conversation. Going from a crappy game to an experience you share with friends has incredible value. I've been playing crappy paper and pencil RPGs with friends for ages. Why did I keep doing it? It's my friends, I like spending time with them. Just them being there makes the whole experience enjoyable.

The major difference comes in how each side prefers to enjoy their co-op. Strangely enough, the Japanese are perfectly fine with playing co-op games with other individuals in the same room as they are. I am about to test their willingness to venture forth with strangers later this week. Namely, I will wander about the streets of Nagoya with my PSP and Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G hitting up various fast food joints to see if any random person will party with me.

As for the US, I don't know if I'd want to meet any of the people I play with over Xbox Live, PSN etc in real life. The notorious "chocolate milk" kid would probably be beaten alive if he tried to scream at people in real life like he did over the internet.

Minor considerations would need to be done for designing communication systems and all, but overall, co-op is co-op, it's fun being able to accomplish more together than you would alone.

There are a number of "features" that I'd put in the "defect" category as far as game design is concerned. Yet these things persist, driving me and I'm sure many others, crazy. These are also items that I don't see on the usual lists of this sort. Long cutscenes that have to be re-watched if you botch a boss battle, crates, add some color for the love of light, and making your game longer with lots of empty space.

Rubber Banding in Racing Games. This really kills my interest in racing games. If I do really well in the game, why not let me enjoy it? If I absolutely smoked an opponent by a whole lap or more, I'd really get quite a mental boost since I'm pretty lousy at racing games to begin with. Diminishing the pleasure in winning is just...a really bad decision.
Chances of Persistence: High. Even companies that have the resources to develop better racing game AIs use this. Perhaps some true dedicated racing games will avoid this, but for some cheap licensed tie-in, I doubt it.

Lasting Death Penalties. MMOs, I'm looking at you. Dying itself is a penalty, and then you're going to make players suffer for a long time afterward? If Super Mario Brothers halved the distance of your jump for 15 minutes after you died, you'd give up on Mario pretty quickly, wouldn't you? The player died because their opponent was too difficult for them. Now you want the player to retry the battle, with a nasty handicap? Hardly enticing to continue playing at all. I can understand an immediate death penalty. IE the reward for a certain quest diminishing due to dying. But outside of that quest? Don't have any lasting penalty.
Chances of Persistence: Medium to Low. I think there are designers who understand that people just don't have time to be saddled with long lasting penalties. The rise of casual MMOs that don't even involve combat will help drive nails into the coffin of death penalties.

No Cut Scene Controls. You just met a key NPC in the overall story of the game you're playing. Or you finally beat the final boss so a movie showing what's happening is started. But the phone rings. Or you really need to use the bathroom.
Chances of Persistence: The Xbox360 lets you  "pause" any game by hitting the guide button(the one with the big green X on it in the middle) but as for video controls in-game? Everyone talks about how they want to. But I haven't seen anyone actually taking the steps to do it.

Relative Monochromatisism. This is a step up from you usual tripe of gray, brown and gray-brown as made famous by Gears of War, Call of Duty, etc. The fire planet of all warm reds, the water planet of blues, etc. It's all built around the same color themes.
Chances of Persistence: High. JRPGs certainly seem reluctant to let this trend die.

I understand the origins of turn based games. There was an era when your PC or game console had far less memory and CPU horse power than your pocket calculator, let alone your cell phone or some Happy Meal toy with a little game embedded.

Now, consoles are super computers. At least, by the definition of a super computer while I was growing up. There's a physics lab that uses Playstation 3s. That's a lot of power to compute all manners of events simultaneously. Regardless, decisions to make games turn based are still made. Why's that?

First, what exactly do I mean by Turn Based? The flow of the game is broken up into phases the player can discern or "turns." There's of flexibility as to when turns can occur and how much happens within a turn. Chess what I'd refer to as a rigid turn based system. You and the other player each alternate. There's no way that your opponent can move twice in a row; all players get an equal number of turns throughout the game up until a winner is declared.

I remember Final Fantasy Tactics considering itself a "semi-real time" strategy game. Really, what this game does is shuffle turns about, making them depend on the in-game characters' relative speeds. If character A is twice as speedy as character B, A gets twice the number of turns as B in a given time frame.

Simplicity.
This has to be the biggest strength of making gameplay turn based. It's a sweeping generalization, which I'll break down.

 One Thing at a Time.
By definition, turn based is a sequence of well defined phases of gameplay as mentioned before. In a sequence, the next item doesn't start until the in-progress item has finished. Think of it as series vs parallel processing. The player can devote all of their attention to what goes on in this particular turn. Not to say that what will happen in the turn isn't necessarily going to be complicated, but by focusing the player on a certain phase, the game's "signal to noise ratio" goes up.

  Allows for Strategic Thinking
I did not want to paint myself into the corner by saying that Turn Based is inherently more strategic than any other play style, but a lot of turn based games I enjoy make it easier to assess information and make decisions based on the long term of the battle than a real time strategy game.

 Pace Control
The player has it. My friend's sister sticks to RPGs with turn based combat. Why? She's got 2 crazy children that could wreak havoc at the drop of a dime. Hitting a "pause" button doesn't enter her mind when junior is sticking his fingers precariously close to a wall socket. While this is a very extreme case for the benefits of a turn based system, allowing more player control of how fast the game progresses certainly has its benefits.

 Ease of Prototyping
At least, in theory, it's easier to do a paper game based off, say, Final Fantasy 7 than it would be, Star Craft. Punch some buttons to calculate who goes first then start dishing out the damage. This is more of a development related issue, as I doubt that the masses out there will go forth and create a Final Fantasy 7 board game.

So, what are the weaknesses to Turn Based gaming? Pretty much, everything I mentioned before. As in, what makes turn based gaming strong can also be spun into a weakness. I haven't had a turn based game really engage me much these days, I've been gorging myself on realtime games such as shooters and RPGs with real time combat like replaying the previously abandoned Ys Origin.

Number, not Skill Driven
This has to be my biggest qualm of a lot of turn based games. I have a reasonable set of reflexes. When a monster charges at me and I see an opening to get away, I'll go for it. However, with most turn based games, this sort of thing gets determined for me by my character's agility or some other type of statistic. There are some games that mix things up like Eternal Sonata and give you chances to block and counter attack real time while the rest of the gameplay is turn based which works.

I'll have more on this, my thoughts about turn based gaming still feel a bit disorganized for my tastes.

Job? Still looking. I did manage to score a few good leads at GDC, lost another lead(things seemed promising then I just stopped hearing from this one company.) I'm getting some game development out of my system. HUGE thanks to my friend Kyle for engineering and support. The game isn't quite playable yet but at least there's a source control system in place now.

Playing? The Japanese import of Etrian Odyssey 2(whether the game gets that name for a US release is beyond me.) I do love this quirky series of DS RPGs. They're markedly old school, but what intrigues me the most is how utterly well balanced they are. At one point or another, you are very likely to need just about every skill that the game boasts. In the first game, I actually had to stop and power level a new band of characters just to get past a very long series of battles. I had a party built to destroy opponents in a few turns but they completely lacked the ability to survive long fights. EO2 gets rid of a lot of the abilities that were "cheap" in the first game, makes a number of very useful abilities a lot easier to access. Players have a lot more freedom to tweak stats. I can now pile a bunch of points into agility for a typically slow character, allowing them to act first, etc.

Also playing through Lost Odyssey. What's with all these "Odyssey" games lately? It's...typical of a JRPG. Unfortunately, I think I've got a great big sign on my back that says "SUCKER" that only Japanese RPG companies can see. Not that I disdain Western ones(I am very impressed with Mass Effect, I might add.) I guess JRPGs are my equivalent of reading celebrity tabloid magazines. At least, very typical games like LO feel that way. There's plenty of JRPG gold that shouldn't ever be lumped with anything lesser. Or I'm just playing through it to pass the time until Tales of Vesperia or something really good comes my way.

Audio Surf. That Romanian disco track that we all know as the Numa Numa song is one heck of a stage! I've been sticking to Mono Pro(occasionally Ninja) and I still need to futz aroudn with the other play modes.

 When I get money again, I'm picking up Bully for 360. And Echochrome for PSP.

I also have a strange bout of guilt. I know a game reviewer. Said reviewer had a game that wasn't their cup of tea. However, it was mine. After much frustration of being unable to pass this one mission, I was given the controls. The mission was hard, and I failed quite a few times. Later, I checked the game's official site. It touted some game mechanics that would make the player's characters more powerful. Possibly enough so to pass the mission. If this feature is so widely touted, why wasn't the reviewer able to pull it off? They sounded like they'd never heard of the mechanic.

To be fair, I wonder how this game taught the reviewer to use this powerful mechanic. If the game did at all. Then again, I skipped the Ring tutorial in Lost Odyssey. BIG mistake, given how integral they are to game play and doing well in battles.

When I was a kid, I came up with all kinds of game ideas. Mechanics, plot twists, you name it. I started playing video games at the start of the 16 bit era in consoles. Games were pretty darn simple then.

The idea of playing through a game as the good guy first then the bad guy, only to realize the bad guy really wasn't that bad then the good guy isn't really that good probably wouldn't fit into an 8 meg cart. Now thanks to CDROM that's no longer an issue. Space is cheap.

Have a game where your objective is to chart and explore unknown territories. Document the creatures there and how they can be useful as food, domestication, whatever. Some notable changes in input devices and again, another in storage space have made this childhood pipe dream a reality.

Did I actually get to make these games? Alas, no. Or I would really like to say, not yet. Other people have independently come up with these ideas and implemented them in their own games. When I played these games as a kid, I was livid! I wanted to be the one to pioneer the idea to market, not these people!

As a designer, not all of my decisions have been good ones. I directed the engineering team to make some strong changes with a game because I thought it would work. After playing the protoype with the adjustments I ordered, I would know if I was right or wrong with certainty. This little exploratory diversion cost money. Time for engineering, art and myself working to create and polish a tangible form of the idea.

When I see ideas I dream of in other games now, I breathe a sign of relief. Compared to some of the things I've read written fellow designers, I feel like I am an alien from another planet. Most other designers talk about "fully interactive stories" and "emotionally engineering the full experience." Boy was it nice to hear someone else in the industry say they wanted players to use their imaginations. Or, they didn't really care if a game isn't realistic, as long as it's fun.

I wanted to put in some kind of power meter that depletes if an attack button is repeatedly hammered upon. Odin Sphere does something like this, and when your power meter is completely spent, your chacter sits there dizzy. The power meter did succeed in making me plan my strikes better, but I thought leaving a character open to attack standing still would be a little severe so I'll just take that into consideration when utilizing the mechanic for my own purposes. I just got to enjoy a prototype created on someone else's dime.

Usually, it's children that are considered more creative and imaginative, as the harshness of reality hasn't hammered "impossibilities" out of their heads. Still, I guess it's amusing that I didn't truly consider my ability to take an idea, break it down and pick out the pieces I like, thus -to me- making it better.

It really is pretty amusing.

It's funny how architecture and level design are merging in a way.

Video Link to lecture

A parametric building model combines a design model (geometry and data) with a behavioral model (change management). The entire building model and complete set of design documents is in an integrated database, where everything is parametric and everything is interconnected.