Good Games, Bad Design – Episode 1: What’s at Stake

  • Reading time:4 mins read

by [name redacted]

There are two basic ways that video games communicate ideas — through the actions allowed the player, and through the environment on which the player may act. The player’s every action changes the player’s immediate relationship with the environment, which in turn shapes the player’s potential for action. Let’s say you shoot an asteroid. Although the immediate obstacle is gone, now you’ve several smaller rocks to deal with, moving faster, in different trajectories.

The more you do, and the more feedback the game gives you, the more you adapt your behavior. When an action results in success or a reward, you tend to repeat it. When you get an unpleasant result, you tend to avoid repeating yourself.

A successful game environment does four things:

  1. it teaches about the player’s relationship with the environment;
  2. in doing so, it directs and focuses the player’s behavior;
  3. generally it obscures this manipulation from the player; and so
  4. through the invoked behavior it evokes in the player a certain mood or mindset.

If the player doesn’t know why he picks the routes and actions he does, yet in picking those routes and actions he comes to adopt the intended perspective, you have successfully communicated. Think of all the moments in Half-Life 2 where you think you’re being clever under pressure, and you’re actually choosing the only possible path — or how The Legend of Zelda keeps you on-track by making the woods scary and dangerous, so that you will tend to leave them until you’re stronger and more experienced.

Is level design everything? Only if your game has something to say. If you’re retreading old ground, and you expect the audience knows the routine, then you can toss them any old nonsense. Of course then few of the player’s actions will have real consequence, so the game will feel unresponsive and dull. Still, maybe if you add some flashy features or cutscenes you can distract the player for a while. If you’re afraid of putting people off, you can patronize them with elaborate tutorials.

There’s no fooling the outsiders, though. If your game fails to communicate on its own merits, then no one besides the fans will bother with it. And even within that audience the conversation will narrow and turn from big, nourishing ideas to minutiae — as if the differences between one leveling system and the next really matter in themselves. This heads-down view leads us away from meaningful representation, and toward thoughtless copying and repetition, abstracted and regimented genres, fractured markets, and eventually a whole medium that is impenetrable to outside eyes.

As in any human endeavor, sloppy or thoughtless design is perhaps more the rule than the exception. And that’s fair enough, when that design is a part of a lousy game that no one is likely to take seriously. More worrisome are the otherwise good, solid games that a student of design may well look to for inspiration. Games don’t have much of a critical history; their culture treats anything “good” as model of perfection that everything new should strive to imitate down to the pixel. It’s hard to break out of that mindset, and to look at design in terms of problems and solutions.

A solution, of course, only makes sense in context. In a game, each mechanism serves to illustrate to the player some concept, or to solve a logistical problem in the game’s premise. Anything that serves neither of these purposes is extraneous — and the key to communication is if you don’t need it, cut it out. It is in this spirit that some case models may be illustrative.

( Continue reading at Game Career Guide )

Explore the Collective Consciousness with Farbs’ Playpen

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Rom Check Fail developer Farbs has unleashed on us all the Web-based communal adventure game creation game, Playpen.

The game presents you with a blocky point-and-click adventure interface; as you click around and explore, you will find your choices leading you down increasingly eccentric avenues — until suddenly you hit the edge of the world. Say you click on a path leading to a fountain, but there is no target page to the click. You are then dumped into a simple image editor, where you can paint the scene yourself and designate however many links you like, to however many other pages.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Mobility (Tangent)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The last few days I’ve been playing through old Castlevania games – first Harmony of Dissonance, then Simon’s Quest, then Castlevania. Now I’m working on Aria of Sorrow.

The structure to Simon’s Quest – I’d never noticed before, as the game is so obtuse in directing the player around; if you know what you’re doing, the game has some genius level design, both within the mansions and in the overworld. The game is always directing you where you need to go next, and unless you’re a dunderhead and fight the obvious clues the game goes by very quickly, and rather elegantly. The only catch is in how well the game obscures some of its “keys” – the crystals and Dracula’s Heart, in particular.

The elegance here shows up Dracula’s Curse all the more. I should really finish cursing that game out. So to speak. I wonder if anyone would be interested in publishing my manifesto.

Rainbow Six’s Upton Talks Landscaping Game Worlds

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

The final session of the final day of last week’s GDC 2007 was a cross-disciplinary take on level design. Brian Upton, a senior designer for SCEA and the lead designer for Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, called on theme park design, landscaping, and city planning as parallels for level design, explaining that they all work under the same principles.

The main concern with all of these disciplines is human psychology – an understanding of how people orient themselves within, organize, and think about the space around them. Since theme park designers, landscapists, and city planners have been doing their job a heck of a lot longer than game designers, Upton suggested looking to these older fields not only for technique but for terminology with which we might describe and define level design.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Ubisoft’s Adam Thiery Talks Camera Theory

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [name redacted]

Adam Thiery, a designer for Ubisoft Montreal, gave a short talk today on interactive cinematography. His basic point was that game cinematography is player-driven. Simple it may sound; real application is always trickier. One of the big sticking points is that camerawork, being player-driven, is limited by current understanding of game design and player psychology.

A modern camera knows when to change state, explained Thiery. In Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, when the player is pressed against a wall, the standard tracking camera shifts from a behind-the-character perspective to show the player character left-of-center, and focus the player’s attention to the right, around the given barrier.

Thiery said that a good game camera is a matter of functionality, rather than cinematography – yet given that, it pays to consider the visual composition within each camera state. The reason is that any action a player takes is generally guided by what he has been shown to do.

The original Half-Life takes places in a disorienting sci-fi setting; to drive the player forward, it uses huge stripes painted on the walls, like a trail of breadcrumbs or an arrow. Though this is an artificial and somewhat clumsy application, that same principle applies to any 2D screen composition.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Touch Survival Kids

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Lost in Blue feels a lot like Zelda 1. Same sense of constant danger, being stranded somewhere to fend for yourself. In Zelda the danger is mostly from monsters and things. Can’t explore too far or they’ll kill you. Have to work your way up. In Lost in Blue, the dangers are hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. I’m just gradually building myself up to explore further and further inland. I keep finding miraculous things like an empty glass bottle, washed up on shore, that lets me carry water with me. And long sticks, that I can fashion into spears. And logs, that I might be able to build something with eventually.

It’s a lot like the treasures in Zelda, which you just sort of find, and which mostly seem special because they’re something you found, that might help you, rather than because they’re the key that unlocks the next door that lets you go forward (as in the later games). Though they might have that effect, It’s not that direct.

I’m surprised the game doesn’t make more use of the touchscreen — even in the menus. Strange to have to actually press the start button when it says “PRESS START”. And it’s weird that you can’t just dump stuff on the floor of your cave. It’s not like the twigs would go anywhere. I can see a certain limit, like after a certain point the girl complaining that, what with her unable to see (you step on her glasses near the beginning), she’s liable to trip if you clutter the place any more.

I found raspberries!

Castlevania is… there. It is what it is. It’s another Castlevania. A pretty good one. I think my save file getting corrupted just soured me on everything. It was my own fault. I think I turned the system off while it was saving.

The first part of the game is wonderful. Then it gets boring. Then more boring. Then more boring. Then it gets better, then better, then more boring, then a little better. You actually aren’t ever in The Castle, as such. Though when you’re on the fringes of this mess of a hideout, things are much more well-defined. The level design is just really good in the first two sections of the game. And it looks interesting and has great music. The two towers are great. The best clocktower ever. And there are some great touches. In between, though…

The whole middle section is just monsters on shelves, that you cut through to get to the next room. It’s weird, because there are such good parts on either end. It’s like the level designers fell asleep for half the game. Maybe they just left the whole middle section open, figuring “we’ve got the outlines; we’ll fill the rest in later.” Then deadline approached, and they just went and scribbled in every middle square as quickly as they could. That the map is so well-conceived overall seems to support this impression.

I got disenchanted somewhere around the ballroom, and I don’t think I ever quite recovered. A shame, considering how much good there is here.

Devils in the Details

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

All right, so Lament of Innocence wasn’t so hot; the next game would be the real clincher. Lament did have a good engine. And Leon controlled just right. There just wasn’t much to do with him, was all.

So what does Igarashi have to show this time? As it turns out, not much — yet. As of E3, Curse of Darkness strongly resembles its predecessor: another 3D Castlevania that feels nice to play, but has the level structure of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That in itself would be fine; Castlevania began as an action game, and it worked then. What is worrisome is that Igarashi wants to make this game nonlinear.