Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
Episode 12 doesn’t like you or your family. This week, Ian and I talk about hot dogs, Demigods and other odds and sods.
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Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
I’m designing Synapse’s single player right now. The core gameplay is there, and it’s exciting. I’ve now got to wrap it in a structure which is accessible, compulsive, and lasting. While designing, I often think of mistakes other games make which I want to react to. I think it’ll be useful to note down a couple here, and hopefully learn a bit both through the process of writing, and what you guys have to say on the subject.
A lot has been made of how bad death is in games, and “modern” design often points in the direction of trying to remove death. I believe that this does not apply for heavily generative and score-based games. In a heavily architectured game, death is bad because it means you have to repeat things you have done successfully before – this is not fun. In a heavily generative game, death is a clean slate – another world is created for you to play in, you see new things straight away, and you have a new opportunity to succeed. We don’t want games of pinball or Spelunky to routinely go on for hours – that would almost imply that the first wedge of time you spend on each game is not meaningful. This leads to one of my core tenets as a designer:
In a highscore-based game, the risks and rewards at game start should not be exponentially smaller than those x minutes in.
This is violated all the time. Look at Tetris’ classic mode, where blocks start off falling slowly and gradually speed up. At the start the game is basically easy, but you can’t score many points. This is not interesting for the experienced player – why go through a period where your play effectively doesn’t matter to get to the real thing? As for the inexperienced players, that’s what easy mode is for.
You should be able to die in the first thirty seconds, and your likelyhood of dying shouldn’t be that much lower than it is ten minutes in. We can look at this mathematically. In games which violate the above tennet, a “great” playing time is not that much longer than the average – because most of the playing time is comparitavely meaningless.
Average Tetris playing time: 10 minutes. “Great” Tetris playing time: 13 minutes.
Average Theatre Of Magic (Pinball) playing time: 3 minutes: “Great” Time: 15 minutes.
This leads up to another tenet of mine:
In a highscore-based game, the average playing time should be low – 3 minutes is a good start.
When you start playing a highscore-based game, you want to know you could be having a “great” game soon. You want to be saying “wow I’m on FIRE today” after a minute or two, you don’t want to have to grind for ten minutes before you can even hope to sniff a good performance. I had this particular problem with Lumines, where an average game seemed to take about half an hour. A three-minute game is an easy thing to get into. A half hour game seems daunting to even start.
It seems ingrained into games designers that difficulty should ramp up over time. I call this as being outmoded in a generative context. A game should give skilled players the opportunity to do riskier things, not treat them with kid-gloves for the first x levels. If a game is different every time you play it, death is good-frustrating: it compels you to play again.
Finally:
You should only have one life in a score-based game.
Let’s look at Spelunky as a bit of a criminal of this. In Spelunky, you have health. Health is difficult to find and if you lose even one heart on the first couple of levels you’ll want to restart the game. This is bad. Pinball is also a culprit – if you lose your first ball without getting many points, you may be less motivated to play the game through. (I recently turned the number of balls per game on my pinball table down to one).
Monday, May 25th, 2009
Had quite a large number of things going on today – writing 2 proposals, chatting to artists and fixing my broken internet connection.
Really feels good that there’s a lot happening. Another episode of Village to do tomorrow and an Oxford forum for science and tech companies to attend on Wed. Synapse continues bombing along – looking forward to more art arriving and a bit of consolidation tomorrrow, all being well.
Sunday, May 24th, 2009
A great Game Mag Weaseling over at GameSetWatch talking about an issue that’s always frsutrated me when in the States – the general poor quality of the print mags over there.
Sunday, May 24th, 2009
With the news this week that the Zeebo (the lightweight console aimed at developing countries which uses the 3G cell network to always be online) is actually a modified version of the Google Android hardware and software spec, and some more info in interviews such as this, I’ve had my interest piqued. I absolutely love the idea of basing a low-cost home console on, basically, an iphone you plug into your tv. Now, it won’t have quite such an open appstore, but just think about how you go about getting games on your iPhone… and how different that experience is to the PC or XBLA. It’s simple, straightforward, cheap and disposable. In other words it’s perfect for non-gaming families who will respond to easily accessible casual games.
So why the title? Well, my own personal opinion is that onLive will turn out to be best suited to serving casual games to non-gaming familes – and it might just find the subscription-free Zeebo occupying that space in three years time.
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
A decent but busy day at Mode 7 Towers. Managed to get some work done on the temporary website while our artists and lead designer push forwards with their respective areas. Had a good test of our graphical menu system this morning, which is looking promising, and seeing some cool battles between Ian and the computer every time I look to my right.
A new iteration of the main concept image is up in the Images section and here:
We’re enjoying doing videos and hope to have another one up very soon explaining some of the basic gameplay concepts. We’ll probably be repeating similar videos once we have art in there, but these are super-early exclusive glimpses for those that like such things!
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
Just in case you needed yet ANOTHER way of following our development progress on Synapse, you can now check out our page on ModDB.
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
Ian has been working a lot on AI recently – we talked about it quite a bit on this week’s podcast but here’s a write up and a video to give you a bit more of an insight…(watch in HD for less grunge).
Perhaps the key question when working on AI for a strategic game is whether or not it needs to display human-like qualities. Do you want the sensation of a powerful, overarching agent which is pushing its pawns around in the same manner as you, or perhaps the more immersive feeling that each unit is an individual in its own right?
Mick West has a great article here about how to incorporate what he calls “intelligent mistakes” into game AI. This idea revolves around the computer knowing what makes for an interesting situation, and acting to promote this, rather than simply trying to win or lose. It will throw itself under a bus in order to add some colour.
In Frozen Synapse, we’re aiming primarily for the human element: an interesting set of ersatz players who are there whenever you want them, and who have compelling interactions with you across the playfield. The basics are in place, but soon we’ll be working on refining the system and injecting some personality.
Our AI makes a sane decision and surrounds the enemy!
AI is such a huge challenge because it is completely different for every game you do. Obviously there will be generic things like pathfinding involved, but you’re essentially writing code to interface with the uniquely baroque mess you’ve created every time.
That’s one of the reasons our AI is currently finding things a little challenging: it takes about five minutes to take a turn, where it should be taking a maximum of 30 seconds. Ian has to face the tough balancing act where, on one side, he has the intelligence factor, and on the other he has practicality. The vital crux here is: “How stupid can the computer afford to be?”
Unfortunately, intelligence matters in Synapse. If you mess up a single turn, it can have a bad effect. We can’t have the AI sending its harvester to the bottom of the map willy nilly (that’s a CnC analogy, there are no harvesters in Synapse…probably our first mistake…), it has to behave in a sane and reasonable manner. That’s quite a challenge for a computer.
I’ve always preferred games where the AI manifests itself in one of two ways. One: the state-shifts seem hidden; the AI appears to flow like a real player. Arguably, the AI in Unreal Tournament displays this quality. Two: the state-shifts are part of the game’s grammar (the patrol-ATTACK-frantic search-patrol of Deus Ex and Thief). This kind of game requires the first approach, and we’ll see how close we get to achieving that.
Personally, I’m excited to see the eventual composition of the single player toolkit. I’m really hoping we have the opportunity to put some fantastic content on top of a robust AI structure. These are pioneering times, but that’s what this is all about.
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Episode 11 bounds across meadows like rabbits, foxes and spring lambs. This week, we discuss cheating, patronage and circuses, as well as all of the usual tomfoolery you have come to – we suggest – expect.
Here is a link to Stainless Games, developers of Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers. [http://www.stainlessgames.com/home/go/].
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