That's... not what I had in mind.

For those that do not know what rubber banding means in game design: It basically makes the losers go faster in racing games. I know it’s been used in other genres, but I’m going to focus on racing since it’s the genre where it is most prominent.

Now that we are all in the same page, let’s move on: The only excuse I’ve heard is that it hopefully makes races more interesting, putting constant pressure on the person that is currently winning the race. Now, the problem with this mechanic is more than obvious: it isn’t fair. If I’m winning and then suddenly get passed by a rival going at 1000mph, then I’m gonna feel more than a little bit cheated. Why is he going at such a speed? Well, because he made mistakes and was loosing, that’s why. Isn’t that the most wonderful feeling in the world? That mixture of anger, frustration, indignation and palpable hatred for all things living is surely what rainbows are made out of.

But let’s not exaggerate, let’s bring the example down to earth: Rubber banding alone isn’t going to be enough to compensate for a lack of skill, it just lets the worse racers keep up with the rest (that’s in the best case scenario, of course). Okay, that sounds not so horrible, and hey, if you are the one loosing then rubber banding is awesome. But what happens if you are the one in first place? Sure, if you don’t commit any mistakes you’ll win the race, so it isn’t impossible, but it narrows the error margin by a pretty significant amount.

Let’s say that you are the one winning, you haven’t committed any mistakes so far in the race and thanks to the rubber banding, the other competitors are somewhat close to you. In a normal race you’d have accumulated a considerable distance from everyone else, effectively rewarding you for not making any mistakes so far. But not here. There’s no reward for playing perfectly. Any mistake made nearing the end of the race might mean that you’ll lose and have to do the same race all over again.

How dare you make a mistake!

Curious isn’t it? Rubber banding punishes you for making only a few mistakes and rewards you for making many mistakes. It brings the difficulty down and up at the same time. It teaches that being in first place is undesirable. At least until the end where you must win although we just told for most of the race that winning is baaaad.

It’s a mechanic at odds with itself.

Mmmhhh, no, let’s change that to: It’s a mechanic at odds with the very concept of a racing competition.

Why the correction? Because it can actually work in any other context. That is if the goal is anything but, ending in first place. Let’s say that there are a few barrels, crates, pots and other unimaginative objects populating the race track and the winner is the one that breaks the most of these things. In that context, rubber banding actually makes sense since the designer might want the cars to stick together for most of the race.

And… that’s all I have to say about this subject. I’ve especially avoided talking about Mario Kart since the extensive use of rubber banding mixed with the fact that the loosing players get the best items combines together to form a game more resembling lottery than an actual race. The design of that game was deliberate and especially tailored to those players who are new to racing or those who are there just to have fun with other people and don’t mind random things happening all over the place.

Image taken from here.

What if we reversed the roles we play in escort missions? What  if you could play a game or section of one that had you control a character that had to be escorted? Apart from the difficulty of building the AI, I can’t think of a good reason not to implement such a sequence. Just think about it: You could be controlling an annoying little brat that makes life impossible for the “protagonist”. You could be playing as a helpless character running away from scary people and letting your guardian deal with them. You could be just a sidekick admiring how awesome your mentor is, while unconciously learning the strategies that you will be able to pull off later in battle. You could be a prisoner of a magical being, but still retain some freedom of action, enough to make his life impossible and possibly break free at some point. You could be a virgin being lead to the sacrifice chamber and your goal being killing yourself under the watching eyes of the guards.

Image taken from here.

This month’s topic on the Blogs of the Round Table is all about how denouement can be expressed as gameplay, and so, happy to oblige, here’s one idea that I had bouncing around inside my head for a few weeks:

First of all, I designed this game to be played within a flat 2D world, nevertheless it can be done in 3D, be it in first or third person perspective. I chose this simple representation of space since I want to focus on the other aspects of the design and almost completely ignore space this time around.

Anyhow, in this game you start with the verbs talk, pick up/put down, jump and run. Each one is designated to a different button and only when holding said button you’ll perform the desired verb (i.e. if you press it and then release immediately, you won’t do a thing). The only other important verb is walk, but that’s just a way of locomotion (triggered by directional keys/d-pad) that won’t change at any point.

The first part of the game would involve exploring the protagonist’s house, playing fetch with the dog and kids, getting to know them, talking to his wife, and in addition we’d have a “to do” list with: collecting firewood, washing the dog, finishing the treehouse, fishing and so on. Some of these activities would be mindless tasks to pass the time (firewood splitting), but most of them would involve at least another member of the family (washing the dog, building the treehouse, fishing, etc). Every real-time minute translates to an hour inside the game, so each day would last 24 minutes. If you don’t fish you’ll have a really small dinner at the end of the day. If you don’t get the firewood you’ll have a cold night and nobody’s going to be in such a great mood the next morning. If the dog is filthy then the wife will refuse to let him into the house and the kids won’t play with him. There’s many more situations that I could mention, but I think you get the idea by now.

After three or four days, the main villain makes his appearance. He does something to establish how evil he is and then goes off to try and take over the world. Now, he doesn’t kill anybody from your family or set any village on fire, since those motivations for revenge are getting more than a little trite by now. Nevertheless, whatever the villain did, it was personal and to add insult to injury, everybody else in the village is pretending that nothing happened.

Stealing cakes? Unless I had to spend a few hours baking every single one of them, then no, that's not a good reason for taking revenge, I need to be a at least a little more invested than that.

We say goodbye to the kids, have a talk with the wife and then respond to the call for adventure. And with that, we begin the second part of the game. In my head, this section is a platformer-brawler where you button mash your way through enemies. I think it serves the premise well since it is extremely simple and doesn’t require any kind of thinking from the player. The words “mindless violence” come to mind.

Anyway, as the player progresses through this stage, he’ll start to learn a different set of verbs: shout (stuns enemies), stab, kick and tackle. Each one of these will be assigned to the same four buttons you were using to talk, pick up/put down, jump and run. But how so? Well, the new set of verbs only requires a quick press and release of the button to execute, while the old set of verbs is used when you press and hold the button for a second.

The more you use this new set of verbs the more time you have to hold the button to trigger the old set of verbs. So, in a sense, it gets harder and harder to use the old verbs.

As expected, half a million minions populate this phase and the amount of said minions goes up the more the protagonist progresses until he reaches the final boss: the main villain himself. Now, there are a lot more things going on on this phase, but for the sake of brevity I’m going to gloss over most of them. Suffice to say, that the environments where you fight were accessible to you from the start and consist mainly of the village, the woods and the villain’s castle. Also, said environments can, and will, be affected by all the fighting. Some damage will be caused by the minions, and some damage will be caused by the protagonist (under normal circumstances that is, because it would possible to avoid any damage done to the village, woods and castle).

After all the fighting, the hero finally reaches his destination and meets the main villain. They exchange a few words but most likely our hero won’t stand for such pleasantries and begins the fight. Or in other words, if they can exchange a few words like gentlemen is up to the player. Regardless, the evil villain is destroyed and the world is safe once again. Then we get to walk all the way home, backtracking our way through the previous levels, admiring all the (most likely) ruined scenery. Finally we reach our home, safe and sound, but be careful, the protagonist doesn’t control the same way he used to.

It is curious, how all old films ended with a "the end" screen, isn't it?*

Now it gets tricky, because a little problematic question pops up: when do you end it all? This third phase, just like the first, leaves the player in complete control. Alright, that would answer the when: the designer doesn’t end it, the player does. Now the question becomes: How? How does the player end the game? By just hitting the Escape key? That’s certainly a possibility. But on the other side of the coin you could have set situations that the player can trigger voluntarily, meaning that there’s a very strict limit to what the player can do to end the game.

We are used to failing or succeeding, we always get a “you win!” screen or a “game over” one. Sure, there might be more than one “You win” screen, each one specially tailored to specific “moral” decisions the player had to make throughout the game, but that’s the only different way we’ve been approaching this problem for decades. Of course, that is if we don’t count a special interpretation of the ending of the “new” Prince of Persia **.

Mmmhhh, maybe not having an ending in linear terms is not such a bad thing. Maybe letting the player quit at any time is more than enough, provided that the gameplay available at the end of the game is proper denouement. Maybe, by doing this, we let the player decide how to end the story. Maybe the game should drive this point home in order to de-program it’s players from years and years of conditioning. Maybe even less than half the players that reach this third phase will embrace the concept, and then proceed to rant about it in ALL CAPS on some internet forum.

It’s all a big huge “maybe”, but it sure would be interesting. And I happen like interesting things.

So, with that in mind, the game’s third phase opens up once the player reaches his village. The verbs the protagonist learned to use so frequently in battle are most of the time very out of place in this peaceful phase. Going back to a normal life is going to require some getting used to, that’s for sure, and the mechanics handle this issue practically in the same way as before.

In the second phase, the protagonist could perform the new set of verbs with more ease the more he used them, and the reverse is true here in the third phase: the more the player uses his old set of verbs, the more he’ll get used to them, and the more difficult it will get to perform the new ones learned in battle.

Now, this de-learning of verbs is only a possibility, one of the many things available at this stage. True, I thought of this design with the de-learning firmly placed in my mind, but I’m not going to stop the player from hacking and slashing the whole village and then quitting because there’s nothing else to kill. I’m sure they had a good roleplaying justification for it, who am I to stop them from expressing themselves?

If the protagonist doesn’t kill or frighten his family, then the player can try and finish the work he began before the evil villain made his appearance (building the tree house, painting the house, etc). Just like the first phase, a day goes by in 24 minutes and there is a list of things to do in each day. In the first days since the protagonist came back, this list will be focused on tasks that don’t have that much interaction with the family, but with time more and more group activities will be added to the list. It’s not that his family doesn’t trust him, but they can notice that not everything is the same. Basically, they give him some breathing room to recover.

So this last part acts like a fairly open sandbox where there are some irreversible consequences to the player’s behaviour (scare too many times a person and they’ll permanently fear you). If the player then decides to quit at any point, a small cinematic would play, with credits rolling and images/narration/text retelling the story the player told throughout the game. Naturally it can be skipped. Even after seeing these credits roll, the player can always go back and continue to play this third phase for as long as he likes/feels is necessary.

And that’s about it, I’m still fleshing out this design in my head though, so I might make another post about it in the future (there’s a very small chance of that happening, but it’s still there).

\THE END/

Please visit the Round Table’s Main Hall for more entries on this month’s topic.

* This might not be true, but hey, a lot of them ended in this fashion, didn’t they?

** Apparently, Fable 2 also has an unorthodox type of ending. I’m sure there are a lot of other examples that go against the rule I just made up there. My point still stands though, most of the time we get clean cut ending cinematics and that’s it.

Curious side-note: Right after finishing this post I happen to read this article on destructoid. It expands upon most of the important topics I talk about here but with a different set of priorities. Certainly an interesting read.

Images “borrowed” from here and here.

Side-note: Alright, sorry for the mini-hiatus there, real life got in the way of my blogging. Yeah, yeah, I know what you are gonna say: “Excuses, I don’t want to hear your filthy excuses!”, “You’ve been procrastinating to hell and back, don’t lie to me.” and “I don’t love you anymore”. Well, yeah, that’s true, but hey! I’m back! I swear I’m not gonna leave you out in the cold. Again. For the fifth time in a row.

Oh, look at the word count, I’ve gotta go, see ya!

——————–

Moving on, if you’ve just started reading these series then I’d recommend that you, dear reader, start with, you know, the first part. And then continue to the second part before reading this third part. Because that’s how this series was intended to be read, in order, got that? Right.

Day 5:

Best. Projectile. Ever.

After playing (and dying) 60 times I can safely say that a princess sometimes appears in any given level. She might be buried alive which will require the use of your precious bombs and careful precision (killing her with an explosion is as easy as it sounds) or she might be just hanging out, right next to the exit door. Or she might not even show. It’s all so random you see. Sometimes you are lucky, sometimes you aren’t and I’m beginning to think that luck plays a major role in this game. I don’t know if it’s as big of a factor as skill, but I think I’ll be able to tell that once I’ve played this thing a couple hundred times.

Anyway, turns out that you can pick up princesses just like any other object… which means that  ….you can throw her too? YES! Yes you can! I mean, you don’t throw her with quite as much force as a rock (which is curious, since the rocks you can pick up should have double the weight of the princess…), but you can still throw her nonetheless. So, basically, the princess can act as a weapon.

This game is so awesome.

Also: It took me a really, REALLY long time to figure out that rescuing a princess will give you a heart if you make it to the next level. I don’t know, in retrospect, it makes total sense: she kisses you and a heart comes out…. let me say that again, a heart comes out. How’s that for a hint?

Naturally the princess, as any other living creature in this game, can be killed. I don’t know how many hits it takes, but let me tell you: falling on spikes kills in one hit and… that’s about it. Bats? Pfff, throw her at them. Snakes are troubling you? Just throw her already. Cavemans? Go ahead! Spiders? Be my guest.

Once the princess gets killed you can’t rescue her, but you can still pick up her corpse and use it as a weapon! And a shield! Wait, what? Yep, I discovered this just recently so… yeah, it took me while. As far as I can tell, it works with two things, but in the first levels you will encounter only one of these: traps. You see, when you pick up a dead (or simply unconscious) body, and an arrow hits you, the body you are carrying will take the hit for you. Be careful though, the body will go flying in the opposite direction.

After I realized this, yeah, it all made sense now. That was why sometimes I was carrying the princess, dropped to a lower level, activated a trap but didn’t get hit, instead the princess just flew away without much explanation. Often landing on spikes. But with time you get used to these random events. That is, until you discover the reason for each one of them, of course. Then you curse the random level design, but that’s a subject for another day.

Day 6:

It's incredible how little american and japanese idols have in common...

Let’s talk about something else., shall we? Oh I know, what about those yellow faces? I call them idols since that’s what they are, but hey, it’s a free internet, you can call them by whatever name you want.

Anyway, the first time I encountered one of these things, it went pretty much like this: Oooohh, shiny! I’m gonna guess that something bad is going to happen if I pick this up, but I’m gonna die anyway, so let’s grab this sucker. Ooookaaay, there’s an earthquake, that is most definitely not good in any possible way. What the…? Killed. Squashed, actually. By a GIANT ROCK that appeared out of nowhere and started chasing me at 500mph. How the hell was I supposed to know that?? … yeah, you are supposed to get killed. And then get killed again if you didn’t get it the first time.

You know, I’m beginning to think that this game is hard. Why? No reason…

Well, turns out that the rock always follows you, and outrunning it is next to impossible so the best option I could find is to climb onto something, anything. Using a rope if necessary. The good thing is that this giant rock destroys terrain like it was nothing. Sure, it slows down and eventually stops, but it’s very cool the first 30 times you see it.

Be careful though, you don’t want to destroy a shop with it. The only thing in this universe that can’t be killed by the mighty force of the giant rock is the shopkeeper, and if you trash his place he’ll chase you down and murder you, he’ll murder you to death.

Mmmmhhh, now that I think about it, the second time I grabbed the idol I successfully dodged the rock but a few seconds later started to get chased by a ghost… and got killed while trying to run away from it. It wasn’t until 60 deaths later that I figured out that the ghost appears because you are taking too long, not because you grabbed the idol or anything along those lines.

Images from here and here.

The Spelunky Journal is a series of posts where I describe my experiences with the game Spelunky and my game design thoughts that come out as a result. In the first post I described the ordeal that was the tutorial and what I’d do differently (it’s by far the weakest part of the game).

In this second post of the journal I describe my first playthroughs and muse about the very particular menu system that Spelunky uses.

Hey, that bat looks so friendly! I think I'm gonna hug ASFKJGG WHY IS HE EATING MY FACE?

Day 3:

Once you finish the tutorial, the game starts. Just like that. No coaching, no further tutorial, no nothing. This is gonna be painful, I can smell it in the air. Let’s see… yep, got killed in the first 30 seconds by a combination of a snake, a spider, another snake and that same spider. I have the nagging feeling that I still have to get used to the whip. After all, running at a snake, unleashing the whip, then failing to hit it with said whip and getting hit myself is not in any way imaginable a showcase of perfect whip proficiency.

Anyhow, after that superb demonstration of skill on my part, I got dumped into the menu screen. Said screen could be described as being organic for the sake of being organic. Instead of selecting options from a normal menu, you have to make your character walk/run/jump to doors with the appropriate labels above them and press up to enter. So you have a door that says “Start” and another door that says “Scores”. In scores you’ll see how many times you died, your best run through the game, etc etc. To quit the game you press the Escape key to see the pause menu and then hit the F10 key (I wish I was kidding) …. or you could just climb the rope to the right and exit by normal means.

Now, rewinding back to the whole organic thing: It’s cute, and thankfully not many games stick to this philosophy of keeping everything into the game world, because otherwise I’d be sick of it. You know, it’s great game design that you can play with your character in a safe enviroment to learn the controls whenever you feel like it. Just walking and jumping around is fun, therefore the menu is fun. But after a thousand times, it gets a little old and I start to yearn for a retry key.

Day 4:

Alright, played a little and died pathetically each time but I think I’m getting used to it. I’m practically discovering new things and/or mechanics on each playthrough, and considering that each one lasts about a minute, I’d say that’s impressive. For example: There are cavemans that will run at you whenever they see you. They tend to run off cliffs and sometimes jump in the spot for no reason whatsoever. Spiders begin always upside-down hanging from a ceiling, and they won’t drop until you are exactly below them. The bats however will drop and start to fly around when you come near them, no matter the angle.

After 5 or 6 times, I finally reached the exit door at the bottom of the level. Although I have to say I was able to do this only because the level was particularly easy, but hey, a victory is a victory.

I’m greeted with a screen showing how many things I killed, the time it took me to finish the level and how much gold I acquired (4000/4000…  is it 4k out of a possible 4k? I doubt it, I didn’t get all the gold that was laying around.)

Anyway, the second level starts and at my left there’s something very peculiar. It seems like a shop and indeed, it is. An old bald guy greets me and invites me to buy something. Hey, don’t mind if I do! The items seem to be laying around and I can pick them up, whenever I do, the shopkeep starts following me, saying how much it costs. To buy, press  “P” he says, which strikes me as odd at first. I never liked having one key for only one verb, especially in situations like these where said verb won’t be used often, but then I reason that using the X key for buying might be convenient, but a lot more prone to accidents. Alright, I pick up the yellow… thingy, press P, let’s see what this is. Ooohhh, it’s a cape! I start jumping and whipping in the air to see if it does anything weird. At the third jump, the shopkeeper pulls out a shotgun and proceeds to shoot at me repeatedly in the face (where else?).

Alright, I admit that was hilarious, but I died man! I lost all the progress I made =(

I’m guessing that I accidentally whipped him and that’s why he shot me, but still, it was an accident! I swear!

Hello and welcome to another series of posts. I’ll be playing a very particular game on a daily basis, describing my experience with it, and analyzing the mechanics and overall game design that I’m able to observe as my understanding of the game grows larger with time. Sometimes I’ll focus on certain design choices, sometimes I’ll just tell you all what happened to my poor red-nosed character, and other times I’ll just make non-sequiturs because I had nothing to write.

I’ve already done this sort of thing before with the Nikopol demo, the pilot of Frayed Knights and the excruciating installation process of the Ceville demo, but here we are, a few months later with a new interesting game on our hands, so let’s get started:

As you might have guessed by the name of this series, Spelunky is the game that I’ll be playing in the next few weeks. It’s a game developed by Derek Yu and is based around procedurally generated levels where you are a spelunker in search of spelunky. Or in plain english: you are a copy of Indiana Jones and your mission is to advance to the next level while rescuing women, collecting gold and fighting nazis mean animals.

Day 1:

Ooohhh, pixely! The music is pleasant enough, although it is kind of repetitive. I guess that’s due to this game being nostalgia-based, what with the chiptune music and pixely graphics. Alright, tutorial level: signs populate the level explaining everything in text… which strikes me as unimaginative, but oh well, not everybody is Valve after all. Let’s see… jumping, crouching, picking up gold bars, whipping, opening chests, everything seems pretty standard. The controls feel kind of awkward but I guess this is the result of having to work with a keyboard rather than a standard controller. You know, the keyboard is not exactly a piece of hardware specifically designed for gaming. Anyhow, I just got killed by the first enemy. In the tutorial. No, I’m not that lame, I was supposed to hit a bat* with a rock but since this is the very first time I’ve EVER thrown anything in the game, I missed badly. This game is laaaame. Let’s see, I have to do the tutorial level all over again. What else can I do? Mmmmhhh, can I pick up the opened chest? Why, yes I can! … and I can throw it too! This game is awesome! I better quit on a high note, or otherwise I won’t play it again.

* the flying kind.

This game has a metric ton to talk about. Let's see, in this screenshot alone I can see a HUGE spider, a smaller spider ("only" the size of a human), a caveman, a pot, an idol, gold stuck in the walls, stairs and... well, that's pretty much it. Not counting the HUD that is.

Day 2:

I learned how to effectively kill that damned bat. It’s just a matter of trial and error until you learn the exact angle at which you throw things. After that, I’m stuck. I used one of the two ropes I had in order to advance a little more and get to a dead end. I tried going back but I wasted the other rope I had and now I can’t go back to the starting area. Oh well, I reset the tutorial aaaaand no, there wasn’t anything of importance in the starting area. Sure, there was some treasure I had left behind before but I’m quite sure that a door isn’t going to magically open for me once I have X amount of treasure. This isn’t one of those games. What’s this? A crate I didn’t notice that had two bombs inside that I could pick up? And the sign explicitly telling me about said crate? … alright, my fault, I’m an idiot. I guess I have to blow this wall over here, I guess that bombs destroy walls and I guess that the tutorial continues or ends on the other side of this wall. That’s a whole lot of guesses there, ya know? Let’s see, arm bomb aaaand place it! OH GOD OH GOD I SAID PLACE NOT THROW, RUN YOU STUPID CHARACTER, RUN. Phew, that almost killed me. Alright, it seems that I can’t just place bombs, I throw them. With great force. And they bounce back against walls. Into my face.

Moving on, I take my distance, throw my last bomb, it bounces back slightly, explodes and… victory! The wall of death was obliterated! Now I walk to the other room while making an obscene gesture to the previously omnipotent wall. Huh, there’s a hole in the form of an entrance here. I guess if I press up I will… yes, that was the exit and I just finished the tutorial. Hooray! Thank goodness I was already used to entering doors by pressing up. I wonder what would a normal person do? Flail around until they die from something totally unexpected? Probably.

Design lesson of the day: I wouldn’t have been so lost if I could see that the exit was at the other side of the wall, therefore rendering the explanation for “explode this wall” pointless. It’s the very worst example of showing, not telling that I’ve experienced in recent memory: Don’t tell me what to do at every step of the way, just tell me what’s my objective and where it might be and make it so that reaching said objective is only possible by doing the very things you want me to do. Sure, you have to put some kind of textual hints every once in a while (for controls mostly), but please when we are talking about a game this hard you have to respect your audience players a little more. We should be learning about the mechanics through play and observation rather than plain text.

Side-note:

I have somewhat of a no bullsh*t policy here, so I feel that I should probably mention that I’ve been playing Spelunky for the past two weeks and already have 18 “days” worth of material. In other words, the “days” separation I’m using here is not literal days, they are topics that have popped up in my mind or experiences I had. Though, these experiences and thoughts did happen in this order.

The funny thing is, I haven’t finished the game yet and have died 350 times already. I’m guessing that I’ve already passed the midway point but I base this only on circumstancial clues (like how many “shortcut doors” can fit in one screen (answer: three  (that is, in one screen, later it might add another room for shortcuts, and that would mean that I’m less than a third of the way through the game (anyway, aren’t nested parentheses awesome?)))).

Ducks. The umbrella-bear's number one nemesis. Known for their umbrella flipping skills and their uncanny ability to fly in a straight perfectly horizontal line.

Today’s procrastination is a spectacularly cute flash game called Sunny Day. Basically you, the player, control an anthropomorphic child bear with an umbrella. It’s a side-view platformer where the player can … you know what? Let me put it like this: It’s the most peppy game you’ll ever play today. That, and it has extremely simple controls but manages to do more with those than you may think is possible. Still, if that doesn’t float your boat then don’t play it. It’s not like I’m shoving it down your throat or something. Just sayin’.

My highscore is 227 cars in one flight and 317830 points overall. It’s a real shame that this game doesn’t have a leaderboard shared with friends over a service like facebook.

Then again, I wonder how this game would feel like if it had no scoring mechanic and slower incoming birds and cars. A no challenge mode basically. A relaxed gameplay would certainly suit the relaxed visual and relaxed music, me thinks.

There’s a really big post coming up, I swear, but first I just have to dedicate a post to this:

The atmosphere, the cartoony proportions, the lighting, it’s all there, perfectly rendered in glorious 3D! And you know what’s the best part? The guy that made this is going to release it as a mod.

Excuse me, I think I have something in my eye.

Oh my… Witcher, what have they done to you?

Hilariously bad dialogue and voice-acting? Repetitive Combat? “Quick Time Events” and “innovation” used in the same sentence????

This is too much dude! I mean, sure, it’s only an alpha build and it may or may not be a leaked video, but the overall tone and game design I’m able to extrapolate from that trailer is extremely underwhelming.

But hey, look! Pretty graphics and physics! This game is gonna be so awesome! I can’t wait to upgrade my PC just to play it and then be underwhelmed with the latest in graphic technology!

[/sarcasm and pure black acid from the depths of hell]

Now, seriously, that trailer positively killed any interest I might have had in the game.

Then again, it will probably have cards with boobs so I might buy it (I’m kidding, KIDDING).

Since September 4th I’ve been trying to write a post for this month’s Blogs of the Round Table. At first, I thought about discussing why Chris Crawford said that artistic expression through videogames is mostly limited to space (the part that starts at the 4:33 mark). Which after some reasoning was true to some extent, but such thinking got me nowhere. Then I just looked at our medium and tried to identify the inherent limits that it may present. Basically, I arrived at something like “we are only constrained by our screen and our speakers”, which is frankly anything but a revelation. Thinking about space in broad terms got me nowhere, so here, let’s approach the issue from another angle, let’s try to answer a simpler question: How many game design ideas can I come up with that deal directly with space? That number turned out to be 7.

[/end of post]

So, yeah, this post is about me throwing ideas out in the open. Well, rather than “ideas” I’d call them “gameplay vignettes”. Please enjoy. Or not, that’s entirely up to you.

• An interpretation of how the creation of ideas work: The screen is filled with different nodes, each representing a theme in particular. Ideas are created when mixing and matching this different concepts to form something new (new nodes). The distance between two nodes is proportional to the difficulty of connecting these two themes together. The more creative the person is, the bigger is their maximum distance to relate themes.
• An interactive fiction where the main character can’t move or look at anything. The only method to learn about his surroundings is through conversation with a character.
• A blind protagonist: Third person camera. Everything in the gameworld is rendered in black and white, but only the things that are at 3 foots or less from the protagonist can be seen on the screen as black silhouettes. If it isn’t clear enough: here I’m trying to convey how blind people perceive space, or at least how I perceive space when I have my eyes closed.
• Third person camera, ground completely flat, seemingly infinite space. But the moment the player walks, she’ll notice that her footprints are repeated in the ground ad infinitum (there’s only 100 square foots of real terrain). This is just a visual idea, but a powerful one if done correctly and in the right moment. Maybe moving crates/blocks around to get to the exit? Running at incredible speeds to then use a ramp and land in an impossibly high exit door? Maybe you would just draw complicated patterns in the middle of the air, dancing, letting movement flow and create a ballet with millions of backup dancers doing the same. Mmmhhh, dancing with yourself… that reminds me of something (“paint it red” to be precise).
• A giant chess/checkers game that is played by itself (or by other players). It’s all played through the night, with only the lights of shots being fired illuminating the battlefield. The ride of the Valkyries playing in the background. Here, the player is controlling a small group of characters that are trying to avoid being squashed by the moving pieces.
• Third person camera (wow, that’s a shocker). The world deforms around the avatar of the player whenever she walks. When she tries to move in one direction, the world stretches at the sides and the things that appeared in front of the camera start to look like they are getting closer. The more the world deforms the more force the avatar has to do to keep moving until she eventually stops (rubber band like). If the player let’s go of the controls at any time, the world snaps back into position, making it look like the avatar never moved from the spot.
• A camera system for third person games: Let the camera go through the geometry, and everything that obscures the camera get’s turned semi-transparent. The concept is easy, the implementation is actually really hard. So much so that nobody has ever done it 100% free of graphical glitches yet. Still, it’s a neat solution to camera control problems, although for tight space it will probably eliminate the sense of claustrophobia, which depending on the intent of the game designer, this might be a good or bad thing.

I did have to discard some of the ideas that popped into my mind, mostly because of lack of interest. For the most part they were ideas that had already been done and that I couldn’t add anything interesting to them.

Ideas such as:

• Circular spaces (see Aether, Psychonauts and Mario Galaxy)
• Switching between spaces (see Shift, Super Paper Mario and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past)
• Changes in gravity/perspective (see everything from Loco Roco to Symphony of the Night  to VVVVVV)
• Space customization (see Love, Sim City and any tycoon or sim game ever made)

Of course, some games even combine two of these ideas, such as Super Paper Mario being a game about switching bewteen spaces by changing perspective, but still, I couldn’t think about anything of substance to do with these 4 concepts. That is, for now. If can come up with even more gameplay vignettes I’ll be sure to add them here.

Please visit the Round Table’s Main Hall for more entries on this month’s topic.