What if an Interactive Fiction game had a suggestion mechanic?

Say, you start typing “Look out the” and as you type, the parser gives you the most probable options to use. In this case “Look out the window” would be the only option available. Simple huh? I know it can get a little complicated, so let’s look at another example:

You start typing “look at the” and the parser, instead of showing you all the possible options it shows you the 5 most probable ones: Nail, Painting, Poodle, Hammer and Broken glass. Let’s suppose that you weren’t going to look at any of these things, so you keep writing “look at the c”. Then, the parser refreshes his suggestions to: Cobweb, Chair, Chainsaw, Cat and Controller.

See where I’m getting at? One of the most glaring faults of any IF game is the steep learning curve that brings the use of a parser. Because, at least at first, we all try to discover the limitations of the parser with wacky combinations of words or convoluted sentences, only to discover that none of it is recognized. “I don’t understand”, “What?”, “I don’t know how to “kill the clown” ” are the typical responses an IF game blurts out when someone tries to get creative with the commands.

Sure, it’s a simple idea, but think of the ramifications this mechanic might have: First and foremost, it’s going to make IF games easier to play, to get used to, to let the player explore the limits of the parser almost without having to resort to trial and error, to avoid the “I can’t do that” line. That’s the obvious part, think of the other interesting things: Now we can hint more directly at the player by manipulating the suggestions. That’s awesome and all, but I can’t stop thinking about the potential to screw with the player’s head.

You know, something like a game based around a teletubbie world where all the characters are happy and every object has a smiling face. When you start typing “look at”, you get suggestions like: Own Wasted Life, Dog’s Headless Body and Own Hemorrhaging Torso. But when the player selects one of these things, they change to words like Puppy, Flower and Sunshine. Then, at the end, it turns out that the protagonist was having a near death experience and all the objects in the happy world were actually the things around him in the hospital.

Now, why nobody has ever done something like this before? My guess is that making parsers is already hard enough to do. To integrate a suggestion system would probably make things a lot harder for the programmer and for the writer. Primarily because the nature of an IF game fundamentally changes with such an invasive mechanic. Or maybe not, I don’t know.

If you ask me, it’s worth a try.

I think everybody would agree that the RTS genre is pretty unique, particularly because of its divisive nature, you either love it or hate it. Easy to learn, impossible to master, even for the professional players. It’s a genre that lacks any kind of randomness, which results in a very strong focus on player skill, knowledge and strategy, so much so that it has been used for serious competitions with monetary prizes.

Aahhh, Starcraft. A game so well known and well regarded that it's still selling after more than ten years on the market.... well, I don't know about you, but to me that speaks a lot more about the competition than it does about the game's quality.

Anyways, I probably should get this over with: I hate RTS games. Still with me? Good, I’ll explain why later, but first I’d like to talk about the most criticized part of the RTS genre: it’s kitchen sink approach. The normal RTS player has to:

• Decide which technologies to upgrade and when.
• Decide how to manage the resource gathering.
• Decide which military units are appropriate to create at the current time. How many of each class? Should I create them now or wait till I have more resources to build a bigger army?
• Decide where and when to build every building considering its function.
• Decide which is the best strategy to explore the map. (One dude that could get easily killed, a small army that could face greater threats or a huge army that could destroy pretty much every threat but leave the base unguarded? What if you find the enemy? Do you attack to distract him or run to live another day and explore some more?)
• Decide where to defend or attack or both. And how, when and with what units.
• Decide when and how the player should try to conquer more resource mines.
• Decide how many peasants should be dedicated to cut wood  and how many to mine gold … and farm … and idle, ready to do whatever comes up (mostly constructing buildings).
• Keep track of every battle going on in the whole map.

That’s… kind of a messy list, so lets break it down into 5 main categories:

• Resource gathering and management.
• Military Strategy.
• Building Placement.
• Technology tree management.
• Population control.

I’m not that great of a multitasker, so most of the time I make most of these decisions without thinking much, going with the flow and then hoping for the best. Now, I don’t hate the RTS genre for being really demanding. It’s not my cup of tea, but that isn’t the designer’s fault. No, my problem with the genre, and why I “hate” it, is the exponential growth of resources.

So, of all the mechanics in the game there’s only one that bothers me. The problem is, it’s the driving force of every RTS: the resource gathering and how it feeds on itself, resulting in exponential growth.

“What? What are you talking about?” I hear you say. It’s easy to explain and I think an example is the best way in this case:

You and me, we both start a game of Empirecraft 3 with the same amount of resources and the same strategical positions on the map. The only difference between both of us is that you are a little bit better than I am at resource gathering. Alright? So, that small advantage you have is going to net you, let’s say, 100 more gold than me in the first 10 minutes. Not much right? Well, let’s say that you use those extra 100 to create another peasant that can help you collect gold faster than me. Now you have 500 more gold than me in 2 minutes. It’s still not that much of a difference but you spend those extra coins in more peasants, which get you more gold which get you even more peasants. See where I’m getting at? In 20 more minutes that small advantage you had at the beginning piled up to an overwhelming difference in the amount of gold we both now have. This then translates for you into a much better army than mine, with better technologies that could simply steamroll me whenever it feels like it.

That’s what I don’t like about the RTS genre: On top of being really demanding, it awards the slightest difference in skill with overwhelming victory.

Age of Empires 2! Man, this game gave so many fond memories. Like that time when I ... no. But there was that other time when I ... no. Man, I don't think I remember why it was so awesome in the first place... OH! There was that one time when I played against the AI on easy mode. How could I forget? I was like playing cat and mouse with the bot, trashing it's base, then letting it recover, so then I could beat it again. Just like my friends used to do to me when we ... *cough* yeah, maybe the game wasn't so awesome after all. For me that is. For my friends? Oh boy, they never shut up about it. Ever.

When you’ve played enough RTS games, you start to notice a pattern. The first 20 minutes are always kind of calm, with a few attacks over here and a few other ones over there, but not much in all, at least compared to what’s coming next. It’s in this stage that it’s decided who wins (that is, if there’s a sufficient enough difference in skill between players). It’s in these first 20 minutes that every player is gathering resources as fast as they can, so they don’t get steamrolled later. It’s in these 20 minutes that the game is fun for every player, that nobody complains or shouts in frustration. It’s in these 20 minutes that every player is on their own, minding their own business, trying to grow an army and defenses for the eventual war.

Then it all goes downhill. When one player discovers the true force of it’s enemies, he discovers if he’s going to win or loose. Sure, “size doesn’t matter, it’s how you use it that counts”, or in other words: strategy is king in these games, which is partly true. But ultimately it’s false in the majority of the cases. Size does matter because most of the time the difference in size is going to be huge, due to exponential growth, and no matter what’s your strategy, your fate was sealed when that one peasant got stuck for 2 minutes on his way to the gold mine.

So, at the end of the day, enjoying a RTS game depends on two things: If you are the better player or if you play just to enjoy a mutual activity with some friends (through, oh, I don’t know, maybe LAN play?).

——————————–

Alright, so, I was going to analyze games like Demigod and DoTA which change things around, but I think I’d better do it in another post.

Oh, and for the record: That extremely long caption under the Age of Empires 2 image is fiction, ya hear me? FICTION! I can play against the AI on the hardest difficulty and win, thank you very much.

In his Use Boxmen review on gamingdaily, Jazmeister wrote the following:

If you look at it like a puzzler that thinks it’s mario or sonic, it’s not a very good game, is it? And you know, it could be better, actually, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. I’ve read this same complaint all over – it relies on timing. It needs careful timing. I can’t get the timing right, I need to keep trying again. There’s this unwritten rule, seemingly, forbidding Puzzle games from demanding quick player reactions. [...] The game doesn’t need to bow to your expectations, just because you want to smoke a pipe, study the level, and get it right first try. You have to be good to do that. You have to practice.

Which is a fair statement, you know, why do people complain so much when designers mix tight timing mechanics with puzzle mechanics? Well, apart from the reason Jazmeister already gave, I can think of another big one: People can’t discard theories.

And now, your honor, exhibit A.

You see, when people play puzzle games they follow a certain pattern:

1. Think of a possible solution.
2. Test solution.
3. If solution doesn’t work, go back to step 1.

If you insert timing into the equation then the pattern becomes this:

1. Think of a possible solution.
2. Test solution.
3. If solution doesn’t work maybe it was your own fault and you should try again, go back to step 2 (If repeated N times, where N is a ridiculous number, go on to step 4).
4. Let’s discard that theory for now, go back to step 1. (If you run out of theories, go on to step 5)
5. Alright, maybe one of the solutions we discarded was actually the right one. Let’s test every single one all over again, go back to step 1.
   

Turns out that with the simple addition of timing we are screwing with the player’s head. Unless they are completely sure, they never know which of the possible approaches is the correct one, so they have to brute force it until they get the right answer. They can never discard any theory because maybe the game is just incredibly hard and the timing is so tight that only after trying 6000 times in a row they can get it right.

Furthermore, they can never discard any theory, so they will keep on testing every single one hundreds of times just in case the puzzle is incredibly hard to time right. And maybe the actual solution is the only one that they haven’t thought of already, so they were wasting their time testing the wrong solutions. So in theory this mix of mechanics has the potential to drive a person insane if the designer is feeling particularly evil. That or they might just abandon the game altogether.

Well, now that we know the big problem behind this particular type of design, how can we fix this inherent problem? or rather, how can we try to lessen it? I have a few ideas:

• Having more than one solution can’t hurt.
• Make it obvious when the wrong way to approach the problem is wrong. This may or may not involve making the timing more forgiving.
• Optional and subtle hints.

Aaaaaand I can’t think of any other generalized solution, it really depends on the types of puzzles and timing we are talking about.

I promise I won’t turn Indigo Static into a news blog, but with that said, I just have to comment on this story:

It turns out that Starcraft 2 won’t have LAN support and will replace this feature with Battle.net. Blizzard is currently trying to excuse this by talking about how awesome Battle.net is while avoiding the actual reason behind this move: filthy, dirty pirates. Well, yes, now they admit it, but it took them long enough.

Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we’re encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II.

Bullshit. You can do all those things without any internet connection. And more!

Ooooooohh, so pretty! I think I'll give it a chance ... *5 minutes later* Hey! Where's my wallet?

Yes, yes, I know, I’m talking about piracy again, but please indulge me for a second:

You see, I call this types of decisions “Screwing the consumer over, in the name of piracy”. Most DRM is such the case, but this time around the scheme chosen actually works against piracy, so it stings a little less than usual.

They are basically shoving a DRM scheme down our throats without sweetening the pill. Which is not how you are supposed to do DRM. You see, what Blizzard is actually doing is removing a feature altogether and then pretending that it can be replaced by this other, wholly different feature that, oh, by the way, requires internet connection. And it’s not a simple copyright check either, everything has to go through the internet first, like any other online match. Except everyone is right next to each other… why can’t we just use LAN cables again? Oh, right, those filthy, filthy pirates are ruining it all for everyone.

Except they are not. This is Starcraft 2 for crying out loud! They already divided the game into 3 different campaigns sold separately, which was a clear money grab, especially if they plan to price each one at 60 dollars (although to be fair, it really depends on how much content is packed in each campaign).

Anyways, the point is: It’s an uber-recognized franchise with 3 installments planned and even then they thought they needed more money? Because that’s what it is: money talk.

… oh, I get it. It’s Activision isn’t it? Their whole strategy revolves around maximizing profits, and that’s exactly what they are doing here. Even when they are clearly screwing the paying costumer to squeeze out a few more dollars.

————————-

Alright, I’m sounding a little bit too bitter about this whole subject, so let me explain: There hasn’t been one LAN party I’ve been to that had internet access. Not one. And you know why? Because it’s already a pain to set up all the connections: Cables are laying around everywhere even when 90% of us use Wi-fi. The only router on the house has to be brought to the middle of it all so it can reach to all the PCs that don’t have Wi-fi. That leaves us with no possible connection to the internet! And even then, if we could connect to the mighty series of tubes, how are we supposed to play? Where I live, a 3Mbit connection is a freaking luxury, and the common folk have 1Mbit at best. Let’s say we are 12 dudes in the same room trying to use the same internet connection at the same time… how much bandwidth do we all need in total? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it’s going to be a lag fest if the connection doesn’t go over the Megabit/sec.

Not to mention that all internet providers here tend to disconnect every once in a while. Just for fun I guess.

Needless to say, I won’t be buying Starcraft 2.

PS: I wouldn’t be surprised if the game required an internet connection every time it’s launched, effectively screwing the consumer even further for no logical reason whatsoever.

Update: Aaaand there’s already a petition. I really wonder if Blizzard will listen.

Update 2: Waaaaaiiiiit a minute. Didn’t Blizzard mention that they *might* monetize battle.net? They surely wouldn’t monetize LAN play, would they? I mean, screwing the consumers over by requiring an internet connection is one thing, but making them pay for an unnecessary service? Wow, that would be low.

Oh, and what happened to the spawn mode? You know, that feature on old Blizzard games that let’s the user “spawn” as many copies of the game as she wants, as long as it’s for local multiplayer? What happened to that philosophy? Because as I recall, it was the best word of mouth tool ever to be created.

[/rant]

Yeah, sorry about that, I’ll be returning to my happy, sarcastic self in the next post. Promise!

I'm not sure what this site was for....

After loosing a big trial, the site “The Pirate Bay” has been bought and the new owners say they’ll go legal. Wow, what a blow to piracy! I’m sure nobody would dare to follow their steps. It’s obvious that now every pirate in the entire world is going to just surrender and buy every single product/service they have illegally acquired in the last 20 years.

Alright, alright, I’ll stop the sarcasm. We all know that this move won’t stop piracy in any way, because the pirates will just find another torrent site to use. Or maybe a new P2P program will rise in popularity, who knows. What we do know is that the death of Napster didn’t stop anybody from pirating and the death of The Pirate Bay won’t either.

So… is there anything important about this situation? Maybe. You see, in the pirate business there’s only one thing worse than pirating software and that is profiting from it. For example, oh, I don’t know… maybe sites that offer pirated goods in the form of torrents while profiting from ads? There’s also street sellers offering pirated copies of music, videogames and movies, but those guys are only a problem in developing countries (China, Russia, any country in Latin America, etc).

By the way, am I the only one who sees the used games market as a legal version of The Pirate Bay? I mean, they are eerily familiar, but only one of them respects copyright laws. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should stop buying and selling used games, all I’m saying is that piracy and used games sales “damage” the developers in almost the exact same way. What can we do about it? Well…. not much. Except prosecuting the companies that openly profit from piracy, and at least that’s something.

I guess all I’m trying to say is that I’m glad The Pirate Bay is dead.

Well, that’s a little pedantic on my part, isn’t it? How it should have been? Wow dude, get over yourself. Anyways, let’s start:

In one of the latest Idlethumbs podcasts a conversation went through various random topics (they tend to do that… a lot) until it hit the subject of “How awesome a Home Alone videogame would be? So awesome, you know, with the traps and everything”. Then they went onto other completely different topics… but the idea got stuck in my head; the seed was planted.

The day afterwards I acquired a fever and spent the next 6 days in bed. It wasn’t the greatest experience of my life, I can assure you that, but I managed to grab a notebook I had laying around and proceeded to imagine how a Home Alone videogame would be and then made some quick notes about it so I wouldn’t forget.

This post is the result of that fever induced creativity exercise.

When the fever was gone I caught up with the rest of the internet and commented about this Home Alone idea to a friend of mine. He then proceeded to enlighten me: There already exists a Home Alone videogame! In fact, there are several of them for several different consoles!.

I love this movie, but I can't stop cringing when I look at this boxart. It just (*cough*) screams "for the love of god, don't buy me".

So… how good were these Home Alone videogames? I have no idea whatsoever. All I know about them comes from wikipedia and, sadly, the article doesn’t say much about the mechanics or differences between the different versions. Oh, and my friend said that the one he played when he was a kid sucked, which I kind of expected. You know, being movie game and all.

Now, the creative process fueled by fever gave me not one, but two somewhat different game designs for a Home Alone videogame. At the time I couldn’t decide which one I liked the most, but the more I thought about them the more I favored the second one. Still, the first idea has some potential behind it so I decided that it would be a waste to just erase it.

So… here they are:

The Tower Defense-y one: The game takes place inside and outside of a sideways cut of a whole house. Waves of different types of goons regularly storm the house from various entry points (mostly doors and windows). Every goon has two main characteristics: agility and conviction. The former determines how fast they move and the latter determines how much abuse they can take before they give up.

Now, there’s no avatar for the player here, so the goons in this game aren’t after Macaulay Culkin. They are after the goodies inside the house that the player places before each game begins along with the traps. Uh… what? Oh, right, I forgot to mention that part didn’t I? The player places traps and “valuables” around the house before each game starts. The valuables are the goal for the goons, the traps stop the them and the player looses once the goons have robbed the place clean.

Every trap triggers automatically and once triggered it will need a certain time to refresh and be able to stop another crook again. But some traps don’t stop some types of goons. For example, heating a doorknob doesn’t stop the tank because he doesn’t bother trying to open doors, he goes through them.

If a crook finds a valuable, they grab it and try to escape the house, but they can still trigger traps on the way out, so they may faint (due to low conviction, due to too many traps triggered) while carrying the valuable. What happens then? The valuable is dropped and now any other goon that sees it can pick it up.

———————————

The Direct Adaptation-y one: In this game, the player moves the avatar of Macaulay Culkin around a sideways cut of a house (the same view as the other design I described). A pair of goons wants to kidnap the kid, just like the movie! Am I good or what?

In this design, the two crooks have one main characteristic that can go down as they are hit by traps: Their wit. You see, in this game when a crook triggers a trap its wit decreases, making him more likely to trigger other, more obvious, traps. However, the wit of the crooks regenerates over time and most of the traps don’t refresh, they stay used. I say “most” because, for example, a very heavy weight that falls on the crooks can later, after a light push from the player, fall again because the floor was weakened.

The two crooks get inside the house by a randomly decided route (again, windows and doors mostly) and then go looking for the player. Upon sight, the goons go running at the player triggering traps or not, depending on their wit. If they don’t see the player, they’ll try to hear him. As a convenient abstraction, sound travels only 2 rooms horizontally and one floor vertically.

Since this time the player is in control of an actual avatar instead of an omnipotent house god, traps work differently. Setting them up remains the same, but triggering them is no longer automatic. This time around, Macaulay has to trigger certain traps by hand and that may mean being dangerously close to the crooks.

If the crooks don’t see or hear the player they’ll start to get frustrated, and after a certain threshold they start to trash the place. Depending on the mode the player is on, she may or may not want this to happen.

Uh? Oh, yeah, this game has different modes of play:

In the main mode, Macaulay calls the police just before the crooks are approaching the house. The goal is, naturally, to wait for the police to arrive and avoid damage  done to the house. That means that the player has to stay kind of close to the crooks but at the same time stay away from them enough to avoid kidnapping.

The secondary mode is based around trapping the crooks. So this time around you’ll want to lower their wits enough to trap them in one of the contraptions. Damage to the house doesn’t matter so much this time, though.

And the final mode is based around hiding without being noticed and  letting the crooks trash the place. And why exactly would the player want them to do that? Insurance, of course. The more damage, the more money gained. But be careful, because the crooks have an angry bar that fills the more the player taunts them and the more traps they trigger, but fades away with time.  If the angry bar hits rock bottom, they give up.

———————————

Oh my… how did this post get so long? A little bit more and I’d have to divide it into two parts and… nah, I would just start to detail the two designs a lot more and I’d end up with a 4 part game design series. How is that bad? Well, I have a metric ton of material to write about and I’m already itching to address each subject.

Before talking about attrition or how I would design a Home Alone videogame, there’s a subject that I must get out of my head first: Kind code.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me give ya a quick explanation: Nintendo has a new patent on a design that is supposed to let the casual players play hardcore games. How? Well, by letting them start at any point in the game and if that wasn’t enough then they can just watch and let some AI play the game for them (or watch a video of someone playing, I’m not sure). Basically it’s the designers saying: “Hey, you can’t get past that huge boss battle? No problem, let me do that for you… there, see? You have to use the light arrows on the eyes and then whack it with your sword until it dies. Simple!”.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii will be the first game to implement Kind Code. Why? Beats me. It's supposed to be a 4 player cooperative/vs game, kinda like Four Swords... why would it need Kind Code? Does it let you play levels that aren't unlocked yet? Because that would actually be pretty awesome (hint: leave unlocks out of my party games, ya hear that Brawl?).

As you might imagine, every single person in the blogosphere was appalled by this patent/design/feature/philosophy. “The game plays itself! What’s the point?!” is the common response. And you know what? My first thought was “… interesting, I might use that”. Then after noticing it, I was quite upset about the patent abuse but that’s a whole other issue.

After thinking about it for quite some time,  I discovered the reason behind my slight delight at the idea: I hate difficulty spikes with a passion, especially those that don’t let me enjoy the game until I get through them. So if every game had Kind Code built into them, then I could just ignore every cheap boss battle and continue to enjoy myself. You know, design mistakes are a lot more forgiveable when I can just ignore them completely or if they last for a very short time.

…. and there we hit the problem: if Kind Code is implemented into a game, then that implies that said game is badly designed and therefore needed a patch. Because that’s what it is, a patch. Kind Code is a patch that doesn’t address the core problem of designing a good, accessible game, it just patches over the issue.

Then again, there’s the other side of the coin: No matter how well the game is designed and how intuitive the controls are, someone, somewhere is going to get stuck at some point or other in the game. The more inexperienced people try to play the game, the more likely this scenario is. So in the case of Nintendo, the casual powerhouse, this scenario might happen a little too often. If they want to grab a greater portion of the average joe market then they need to design their games with those people in mind. What then? Make the next Zelda a one button game where all the enemies die after three hits? … I don’t even want to imagine the possible reaction from every single nintendo fan. So what do they do? They compromise: They can’t downgrade Zelda, but they surely can implement Kind Code as an option and satisfy both markets at once: the average joe and the zelda fan.

It’s quick, it’s dirty, it’s only patching up the core issue and it succeeds at its goal. I don’t like it, it rubs me the wrong way and I’m quite sure that I’d never use it in a Nintendo game, but I can see why they are going to implement this “feature”. It just … feels wrong.

6 days! 6 freaking days!! Can you even imagine the amount of content the internet puts out in that time? Catching up is gonna hurt. Bad.

Hello everyone! Long time no see! Feels good to be back.

Anyways, you might be wondering why I suddenly stopped posting out of the blue with no warning whatsoever. Well, you see, it’s really simple: Since thursday I had to stay in bed because of mister “40ºC fever“.
Last time I had a fever THAT high I was 7 years old and practially hallucinating whenever I closed my eyes. Now? Now I was just incredibly uncomfortable with a mild headache. Although I did have really really weird dreams, mostly about videogames. Heh.

Anyways, my next post is already partially written so I hope to get it posted here in the next few days. It’s about game design ant the movie home alone. No, really.

Oh, and I couldn’t possibly end this post without saying

I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription… is more cowbell!

So beautiful and so ugly at the same time ....

Alright, so it seems that Lucasarts has finally removed its head out of its own ass and decided to not only remake the original Monkey Island, but also make new episodic games on the franchise with the help of the fine folks at TellTale.

You know, I’m overjoyed by this news, but I also don’t particularly like the ugly art style the image above depicts. Please let it be only a concept art. Please.

Alright, can I freak out now? Yes? YES?!

*hiperventilates*

WTF??? OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!1!11!1!! Weeeeeeee!!!

*faints*

Tommy (2004 - 2009)