This medium is still maturing away from the purely technical games design (racing games, RTS, sports simulations etc), away from the cliched, pulpy, teenage male wish fulfilment stories (FPS, pretty much any Japanese RPG) and it has a long way to go. This isn't helped by videogames having a combination of a high barrier of entry and corporate control of the "product".

Games we all know of, like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, Killer7 and No More Heroes, Rez and Amplitude are triumphs of more than one "USP" or unique visual style (arguably unlike Okami, beautiful though it is). They are the result of a purity of a singular vision from Fumito Ueda, Goichi Suda (aka SUDA-51), and Tetsuya Mizuguchi respectively. Yes, they all work with a development team, but their investment in the game is more than simply creating a design document then sharing it on the company intranet with a comment "Make this!". These are all games which could never have been made by committee. They needed individuals with creative talent across many disciplines to direct them from inception to Gold Master.

These are the lucky few who have three things:
1) The artistic talent to create such works of art
2) The production ability and people skills to be the "director" of the project and make sure everyone is working towards their vision
3) The corporate backing to be allowed to do something so individual

In the current risk-averse climate it is exceptionally rare that a game developer/publisher gives a single person the confidence (and then the money) to produce such works.

I'm sure there are designers out there who can create works like these. Problem is they are currently rotting away inside development studios, gradually being worn down by the need to "fit" the game to focus testing, demographic analyses, ignorant marketing demands and ridiculous feature requests that they have cried out all their talent, now content to fill in blank "Concept Approval Document" templates with the features they know the board will sign off on with the least amount of hassle.

How can this change? Essentially, the creative side needs to be almost completely divorced from the business side of the industry. Yes, the publisher still controls the money and release schedule and has a say if they think things are going off the rails, but they need to trust the individual to deliver their vision.

How can this come about?
1) We need publishers willing to take risks on talent. Not IP or the worth of the development studio, but artists. There needs to be someone on the board who has a knack of spotting good creatives (because they are creatives themselves) and has the vision to see what the game will look and play like. Someone who understands the creative process and is willing to let those they know have talent make great works and learn to market the results properly. As long as the process of signing games is based purely on product to fill schedules to satisfying the shareholders and the limited focus of what these people know how to sell, we will never see the nurturing of any new talent.

2) Alternatively (and less realistically it has to be said) Angel investors or wealthy mentors could provide backing for those videogame artists whose work they admire. Traditional art history is as old as human history and is an easily recognisable form of artistic expression. Movies are over 100 years old and such arrangements have been commonplace for lower budget films for many years. However videogames are still seen as "entertainment product" meaning most people rarely venture beyond their preconceptions of the medium to start investing money in it.

3) Lower the barrier of entry to the industry. With the millions devoted to crowd-pleasing, competitive graphics the risk has to be small for the publisher, and so the generic flourishes. Cheaper development means bigger risks can be taken. And if anyone baulks at that suggestion saying "My artistic vision cannot be limited by money!" then you are not a true artist. A good artist can be wildly creative with the most limited of palettes, and the analogy follows into videogames.

Things are slowly changing on consoles with things like Wii Ware and the XBOX and PS3 stores where the development costs are less and potential exposure very high. On the PC there are still active MOD communities (although not so much nowadays), Microsoft's XNA Game Studio, several low-cost game engine/studio solutions (such as 3D Game Studio, Torque Game Engine, and Unity) and the simple fact that anyone can learn a programming language, graphics package or try and team up with some like-minded individuals to create their art.

And that's it really. Not complicated, just unlikely :)

Relevant links:
Fumito Ueda talks at Nordic Game Conference 2008

Just a wee update - something to bear in mind for your string table.

For those unsure what a string table is, essentially it's an excel spreadsheet file that contains all the text strings used in your game in all languages. The game then accesses this in real-time as required - pulling out the strings it needs to display on screen.

Now for us English-speaking devs it's tempting to re-use the same text for different contexts, after all it's the same word/phrase in English. But unfortunately for us, English is one of the laziest/most flexible languages that exists. So while we can use exactly the same word in different places and the meaning can be intimated from the surrounding words or screen layout, in many foreign languages this isn't the case.

In my QA experience this is one of the most common and time-consuming issues discovered during language testing (along with shortening over-long strings). A case in point is the current title I'm working on:

In English in this title there are three places in the front end where the word "Completed" is used:

1) Preceded by a "tick" icon to denote that a game area has been finished
2) Followed by a colon and then a percentage figure to denote how much of an area has been finished
3) Followed by a variable that denotes how many minigames were played in a game session

In the string table there is only one entry for the text "Completed", and this one line has been used for all three occurrences above.

However in locations 1) and 2) the single line translation does not make sense in context, particularly in Italian and Spanish. The solution was to add a new line to the string table with a different translation for these two locations.

Now in the grand scheme of things, not a huge issue as it was picked up during the pre-arranged language testing phase anyway. However it's worth bearing in mind that while English is flexible enough to be abused in such a way, other languages cannot be assumed to be.

The lesson: always use a separate line for each individual piece of text in the game, even if in English it appears to be the same context. You'll probably get away with screen titles/discreet names, but for everything else best be safe.
Yes, text translations are paid for by the line, but language testers are paid for by the hour and are particularly expensive - so you'll be saving yourself money in the long term.

I can't wait for Team Fortress 2. Not just because Team Fortress Classic was the first (and only) game I played online in a clan (team FuS ftw!) and not just because it was superbly balanced (when various exploits were fixed). But mostly because it was simple to play.

Now I also played Battlefield 1942 online and at work. That and the Desert Combat mod. Superb, simple, shooting fun (yet with nuances of combat and control) that encouraged you to work as teams to capture objectives.
Then I tried the demo of Battlefield 2 and I didn't have a clue what the hell was going on. The HUD was filled with so many boxes, bits of text, arrows, indecipherable symbols on the map and indecipherable symbols floating in front of my eyes it looked like an explosion in a sprite factory. Not to mention the constant barrage of audio clips warning me about various things, as well as those activated by teammates. Also the ramp-up in graphical detail had made it a factor of 10 harder to spot where enemies were. They now nicely blended into the backgrounds.
Needless to say I didn't buy the full game.

Same issue with Quake/Wolfenstein and the new Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The originals were good fun with simple objectives and clean visuals. Playing the ET demo I was constantly bombarded with new 'missions' and new 'objectives' while I had to sit and study the HUD to work out which of the half dozen or so bars was my health! Add into that the ramp-up in visual detail making it ... you get the idea.

Increased depth in games shouldn't mean increased complexity for the player. Adding specific objectives for classes, multiple objectives for all players and so on is great. But it has to be done so that the player isn't overwhelmed by information. Naturally, new maps will take time to learn, but I remember when when you could download a new multiplayer map and you'd instantly know where and what your objectives were, even though you didn't know the layout itself. The key idea here is to only ever show what's relevant to the player at that moment in time. For example if they are standing right next to Objective 1, they are not going to need that massive arrow + text string 'Objective 1' hovering in their field of view are they? If they are a medic and a friend is needing healing, do you really need a huge, detail obscuring icon on the mini-map PLUS a huge icon hovering in the game world too? Especially at the same time as a main objective is being attacked by the enemy (cue mini-map icon, game world icon+text, audio cue) and a sub-objective or team created weapon installation is being attacked too (cue mini-map icon, game world icon_text, audio cue).

As for visual detail hindering enemy identification, well this is something utterly crucial and basic to gameplay, yet is always forgotten in the rush to create gorgeous surroundings and beautifully detailed characters. My love for the Unreal Tournament series has been fast dwindling specifically because of this. You're playing a game where one of the main goals is spotting and killing enemies. In a fast-paced shooter, the player needs to be able to do this quickly and easily.
Now I played Operation: Flashpoint online for years, and that is as hardcore as they come. You would often be killed by someone over 1km away. Hiding in a forest. Superb multiplayer game, and the reason I didn't mind being killed by an enemy I couldn't see was because the game was intended to play like that. The gameplay was slower paced, more realistic and involved having to scan the horizon for enemies before making your move.

But in something like ET:QW, that's not how it should be. It's a run-and-gun FPS with tanks and a big stompey robot. I don't want to be killed by an enemy who is only standing 20m away yet is invisible to me because the colour/pattern/detail of their armour makes it impossible for me to distinguish them from the colour/pattern/detail of the ground/wall/foliage/vehicle.
Also, the fact that better technology has allowed for larger game maps and longer line-of-sight doesn't appear to have been taken into consideration with these types of games. Fast, shootey FPS + big outdoors levels + masses of visual detail = not fun.

In a developer article about Team Fortress 2 I read that the characters were designed deliberately such that each class type was immediately distinguishable from it's silhouette alone. That combined with the clean graphical style, smaller levels and simple objectives should = fun.

Can't wait. I'll be the soldier in defence handing you your arse.

Like 2/3 of PC or XBOX 360 owners, I'm playing BioShock at the moment. I'm not going to review it or anything, other than to say I'm having fantastic fun apart from the occasional and rather severe System Shock 2 flashbacks.

However, one thing I spotted during play made me stop and think about realism in games and how much it enhances by its presence or detracts by its absence. It was only a little thing: I was trying to pick up a round of pistol ammunition I came across and was told I couldn't carry any more of that type. My question was, "Why?"

Does my clothing have spaces specific to certain types of ammunition? Would I receive an electric shock punishment if I tried to put a machine gun clip into that empty linen crevice where I currently have no anti-personnel pistol rounds (again)?

Or is there some invisible Rapture Ammunition Clerk tapping me on the shoulder every time I try to sneak an extra pack of shotgun shells into a spare pocket? "I'm sorry sir, your current ammunition licence only permits you to having a maximum of fourty-eight of those on your person at one time."

And it all wasn't helped by the fact that minutes later I was perfectly able to pick up and store "somewhere" a flamethrower the size of my arm.

BioShock may do many new/improved things but it has gone for the very "old-school" mechanic of the single man army, able to carry eight different weapons at once. Most first-person shooters in recent memory have gone for the limited, or 'realistic' inventory where you can only have, for example, a sidearm, possibly a knife too, handful of grenades and at most two main weapons. To pick up a new weapon you have to drop one of your current ones. This makes weapon choice not simply what the player feels like using at the time, but an active decision ahead of the battle.
Having said that, even when able to hold every weapon in the game, players will still only use a certain few favourites. I know I do*. The limited inventory just deliberately forces the choosing of the favourites.
In BioShock it just seems a strange juxtaposition of the 'realistic' unlocking of plasmid slots by genetically engineering yourself, the mature story and incredibly well-designed environments versus the thought of having eight weapons (plus a camera) hidden away in every fold of your clothing. Which is then itself juxtaposed against the enforced ammunition 'limits'.

The root cause of this strangeness I think is to do with the removal of an inventory. Specifically System Shock 2's inventory. In SS2 you had a grid divided into squares and each item you picked up filled up a certain number of grid spaces. For example, one grenade took up one square, the shotgun took up three. It was immediately clear to the player that size = space and it was a perfect balance between having the realistic limitation of 'sidearm+two main weapons' or the "classic" way of carrying everything at once. If the player wanted to carry every weapon in the game, they could, but only as long as they found all the strength upgrades (which unlocked more squares) and dropped pretty much all else. A large part of the game was the managing of the inventory so you could carry what you wanted.

As for BioShock, I surmise it was taken out to make the game more accessible to a larger section of the gameplaying public. Perhaps it was deemed too fiddly for newer console gamers to handle (SS2 remember only came out on PC**), or perhaps a distraction away from the main game - "Why am I fiddling around arranging bandages in my jumper when I'm supposed to be finding Ryan?". Whatever the case, I'd love to find out the actual reason from the developers.

In conclusion, 'unrealism' in terms of what a human being can physically do or (in this case) carry doesn't in itself detract from a fantastic game, but does ruin the internal consistancy of the world if it has been carefully constructed to be realistic. A 'B-Movie' game like Duke Nukem can have the avatar carrying 100+kilos of weaponry without causing me to bat an eyelid, but when a meticulously devised scenario like BioShock uses the same mechanic, it unnerves me slightly.

Anyway, I'm off to find myself a Big Daddy to kill, but I just can't seem to pick up that extra pack of shells as I've already got twenty-four. Room for another tape message though...


*Pistol (anti-personnel) and Crossbow (steel bolt) for headshot fun + the Machine Gun when they get in my face. Loads of them? Flamethrower time :)

**Not that I'm saying console gamers are less intelligent, have less patience, blah blah etc. but fiddling around with an inventory screen is admittedly quite geeky and might be a touch too abstract for the larger audience to grasp. Shame, it was almost a fun mini-game in itself in SS2, that directly affected gameplay. Kind of like the pipemania puzzles in BioShock ... hmm.

The player moves carefully through the undergrowth, but there seem to be no enemies nearby. Suddenly the sky lights up a ghastly green as a bright globule of light pierces the evening sky. A sound like a thousand horses screaming shreds their ears as the object leaves a sickly yellow trail across the stars. Then a distant explosion and flash of light behind a hill and it's over.
Text appears on screen: "Investigate the strange object that has crashed."
Text appears in the player's list of objectives: "Investigate the strange object that has crashed."
Icon appears on the player's mini-map which, on mouse over, shows text: "Crashed object".
Player character says: "Hmm, wonder what that thing was. Maybe I should go check it out."
Radio message plays: "Go take a look at that crashed object, it might be a new enemy weapon and if not it may be useful for us."
An NPC the player meets shouts: "Hey, did you see that thing in the sky? It crashed not far from here. Maybe you should take a look."
Player says: "AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH! I KNOW ALREADY!"

For a large group of gamers, part of the joy of playing a game is in the discovery. Discovery of hidden areas and cool stuff. Discovery of the story. Discovery of what they must do to progress. The freedom to explore and to find things out for themselves is the hook.

OK, so as a designer maybe you really, really must have the player go to a specific location at a specific time to progress the game. Are you sure? Fair enough then. But you don't have to indulge in the perhaps somewhat exaggerated version of events at the top of this piece to get the player to comply. Humans by their nature are curious beasts, so make them WANT to go there. Make them feel like they're discovering what to do instead of ticking off a list of predefined actions in order to reach the end game sequence.

For example, in your survival horror game you need the player to go back into a previously visited room to find a hidden doll, only to meet a ghost or some other horror. Yes, you could have the player mutter "Maybe I should go back to the Grandmother's bedroom..." but that's far too deliberate. It gives the player no joy in completing the objective. "Wow, I've made the game continue. Yay me." Better to have the player find a letter to a family member lamenting Granny's habit of hoarding the kid's dolls. The player then gets to use some basic deductive reasoning. But even better to have the player, whilst walking along the bedroom corridor, suddenly hear the crackling recorded voice of a talking doll. Now they're crapping themselves. They've found the doll by the sounds of it, but it definitely wasn't them who pulled the cord.

In the final example above, the player hasn't been told to go to a certain place, yet by using a single sound asset and perhaps some "tension" music in the background you draw them towards where you need them to go.

Naturally some games require explicit objectives to be given, notably military simulations, and some genres suit this method of delivery. However we should be encouraging the player to engage with our games by inviting them in, not dictating to them. We've been making games for well over 30 years. We should have some grip of the potential of the medium by now.

The First Carnival of Game Production over at Gameproducer.net has been published, with eight articles being picked, including one of mine!

Go have a look, the other articles are:

How one man made an MMO: an interview with Gene Endrody.

Interview with Georgina Bensley, Creator of Cute Knight.

Automating Build and Test Systems.

How many polygons in a piece of string?

Multithreaded Game Scripting with Stackless Python

Wii design elements: Wii’ve Been Played!

The 10 reasons you will never finish your game.

Been evaluating a game recently and it really makes you realise how important the little things are. Also makes you realise that it is almost impossible to think of everything in one go - don't think the first draft of a design doc is going to be the one, you'll be adding/updating minor things for months.

The "little thing" in question was a combat control. While playing you fire with the mouse buttons (most characters have two weapons, one assigned to each mouse button) but you also have context sensitive actions. Think along the lines of Shenmue's Quick Time Events, and Resident Evil 4's actions, but in first person. In this case, one action is a melee attack when an enemy comes right up into your face. It was discovered that you can't trigger the melee attack while still holding down the weapon fire button.

"So stop firing!" you cry. Yes, but if you do that there is a slight delay. Actually there are two: one is the 'end firing' animation time and the second is the 'start melee animation' time up until you actually smack the enemy. Both only add up to 1 second at most, but when you stop firing it gives the enemy time to attack you - and these enemies are pretty vicious close up with several chained slashing attacks.

Solution? Well there are several:
1. Allow the context-sensitive 'melee attack' button press to interrupt weeapon firing if you hit it while the "trigger" is still held down. This would make sense as this mirrors closely what the player intends to do anyway - give a quick punch/pistol-whip to make the enemy back off slightly, then immediately resume firing.
2. Reduce the 'end firing' and 'start melee animation' times so that the player has less chance of taking damage when they stop firing and before they do the melee.
3. Increase the enemy 'recover from being hit with bullets' time - to reduce their window of opportunity to attack you. Careful though - this will affect distant enemies too and could make ranged combat easier than intended.
4. Reduce enemy melee attack strength/frequency/speed to counter this. Big global change because of one control issue though, and could consequently make melee combat too easy.
5. Remove the 'melee attack' context-sensitive option. Does it do the job it's intended for? Is it any fun? If in doubt, chop it out!

And all because a single button press doesn't stop another action from happening. Always the little things :)

From one of my favourite blogs at GameProducer.net. They're holding a Carniveal of game production where you can enter your blog articles on anything related to game production/design etc. See the link below for more details.
Haven't a clue what this is all about to be honest, but it sounds interesting, so I'm just going with it :)

EDIT: Hmm, well the code I pasted below here didn't work at all :( so instead, here's a direct link to BlogCarnival where you can find out more.

There is no element that goes into creating a game that is so dependant on the people doing it as level design. Yes the programmers have to make the game work as you intend it to: movement systems, combat systems, AI etc but you play the prototype versions to make sure things are going as you intended, and can tweak that as needs be. If you want a distinct style of art for the game then as long as you have an art lead who understands your vision and can implement it and can take constructive criticism then you're safe.

But when it comes to creating the physical game levels the level designers are possibly the only people on the team whose individual skills will be so utterly evident to the player. So if you have someone whose levels are consistantly poorly made, show no imagination and are dull to play then what do you do? Lose them and spread the work around everyone else? That tends to be what happens (if the boss is brave/good enough) but then the others on the team become stretched and overall quality can suffer. Ideally you would keep them on, but make sure someone was keeping an eye on their work. Possibly even have the other level designers responsible for "finishing" their levels while the person does the basic blocking in and learns how to do better layouts.

They are such important people as you can have the most incredible game design ideas, the most amazing story and characters, but if the game levels are boring then it is the ultimate definition of a missed opportunity.

Me? I'm a bit of a control freak, and knowing how vital level design is I can't help but have my hands full into that side as well. I typically come up with level designs and concepts for the games I design anyhow as I can picture and play the entire game in my head, so it all comes together that way.

What brought this rant on? Finished Painkiller today (I know :) I'm catching up on some old purchases) - superb fun game overall, but with one of the worst opening levels I have ever played. Probably fits the design brief perfectly, but zero thought has gone into the layout and no imagination into the visualisation of it. Almost put me off the game entirely.

However you celebrate this time of year, have a good one! :D

If there is one book on games design or games theory you must read it is "A Theory of Fun for games design" by Raph Koster.

I got the final one from Amazon last week (sorry) and read it in one sitting. Incredibly well-written, covering all sorts of topics from sociology to psychology as it applies to games. As I was reading, lightbulbs were going off in my head, and I could feel neurones making connections for ideas that should have been obvious to me.

The complete opposite of a dry textbook, this is fun and relevant and you owe it to yourself to read it!

Only you won't get it from Amazon at the moment... :S

Saves in games can be a thorny issue. If implemented well, no-one notices them. If implemented badly or even (forbid!) incorrectly then the whole internet explodes in your face. And not in a pleasant way.
I'm not going to get into specific examples of games with bad save mechanisms or badly designed save mechanisms - just want to give a brief overview of the situation facing designers.

There is often a dilemma between using save points or allowing the user to save whenever they choose. Traditionally, console titles have either saved automatically when a level or mission/objective has been completed, or those titles with longer levels have used fixed save/autosave points strategically placed throughout the game. The "save anywhere" mechanism on the other hand has been mostly the preserve of PC games.

The use of these methods was primarily because console games tended to be shorter, with discreet levels while PC games were more complex with levels and missions taking longer to complete and/or having multiple objectives.

The issues facing designers now are:
1. Gaming demographic getting older - with less spare "gaming" time they demand the ability to save anywhere (or at least more frequent autosaving) as they have no time to play through whole sections of the game again.
2. Console games are getting larger - as processing power/storage space/know-how increases so does the physical size of the game levels. Small levels don't cut it any more. Larger levels need more content so they don't appear as vast empty open spaces. This often involves more combat travelling between locations, adding sub-quests etc. This directly relates to point 1.
3. PC games are becoming more console-like - more titles are being developed as multi-format and as such are often designed for the lowest common denominator (being the formats that will shift the most units). Often the save mechanism is retained cross-platform, so more PC games have autosaves or fixed save points only.
4. Console games are becoming more PC-like - conversely, with the increasing power of consoles there are more games which would originally have been PC-only titles that are now multi-format, so are more complex - Oblivion for example.

When people complain about "broken saving" in games, they tend to fall into two camps:

1. Avid PC gamers who discover their latest purchase doesn't allow them to save anywhere - "How dare the designer force me to save only when they deem me able to! I spit on them!".
2. Gamers who discover their latest purchase suffers from such carelessly placed save points that they are either forced to replay whole 10 minute+ sections of the game to get back to where they died/failed or now have a "dead" save which loads them up with 3 health, 2 bullets and no possible way of defeating the salivating beasts ahead that just killed them.

Point 1. is completely a designer's call, whatever rabid PC fans may think. There may or may not be the opportunity in the PC version to add in quicksaving. And if there is it's totally up to the designer to choose whether they implement it or not. The vocal minority who literally vomit their vitriolic opinions from behind the safety of their own monitor and demand a patch to "fix the broken saving" shouldn't sway you. It's your game. If you can justify the use of saving points, can justify not having a quicksave mechanism and the placement doesn't frustrate the user, then go for it.
When the save placement does frustrate the user, then you've just fallen foul of point 2. SERIOUSLY think about where you are putting those save points. Get some fresh eyes to play through the game - note where they keep failing, keep replaying parts of the level and adjust game difficulty and save placement accordingly. If you get this right, then you've at least got some ammunition against those in point 1.

It's often impossible to predict whether a set of variables (player max health, highest available weapon level damage etc.) at a specific point in a game mission will be enough to get past a certain obstacle. As the lead designer these figures are abstract and are often your "best guess" at scenarios that you can't really test until you have a prototype at best, an alpha level at worst (depending on your company dev procedure). The level designers get too close very quickly and can easily beat their own missions without effort.

So how can you accurately assess whether a game is too hard at a specific point. Obviously you need fresh eyes to do this (first pass of QA is very useful, then playtesting with different people later on), but I've developed a rough rule of thumb. Assuming that you will want a sine-wave of difficulty throughout a level, and that boss fights are intended be a tougher challenge - if the player is dying at a particular point more than twice the number of times they have previously died in the level then the difficulty is too hard.

The same applies to non-death also e.g. if the player has dropped to less than 20% health on two previous occasions for no more than 30 seconds a piece before finding a health pickup but then at the spike area they are ultra-cautiously fighting enemies for longer than a minute as their health is picked of to single figures then either enemy numbers/placement or health pickup placement needs to be looked at in that area.

Just want to plug a great little game that does something quite different to anything else I've played.

In Chibi-Robo on the GameCube you play the little robot of the title and it's your goal to make the family who have just bought you happy. The dad is obsessed with a cartoon character and spends money without thinking. The daughter wears a frog hat and doesn't talk properly. The mum is trying to cope with her dysfunctional husband and daughter while trying to balance the bills. Oh, and the toys come alive at night.
Into this mix you appear and you will be cleaning doggy footprints with a toothbrush, rescuing frogs from bedrooms and spending time in the kitchen letting the mother offload her problems onto you over a cup of tea.

There are many neat little design touches - such as your battery life, which goes up as you increase the family "happiness", which then allows you to wander further into the house. Then there are the pieces of equipment you gather and the various costumes which allow you to talk to other characters and further unlock game areas.

It could easily feel repetitive, but the characters, presentation, breadth of tasks, the way the tasks deliberately connect to the story, the day/night variation in gameplay and the fact you can "buy" different lengths of time for the day/night cycle make it very varied.

And amazingly I'm playing a game where the aim isn't to kill everything! What a refreshing change.

One of my pet design hates is when a game deliberately punishes you, either for doing well or for something as innocent as picking up some health.

The main focus of this particular rant is the FPS games Doom and Serious Sam, although the same basic mechanism is seen in many other genres.

You'll know the situation I mean - you're going through a level in either of the above games and see a health pickup or a nice weapon lying there. You're low on both health and ammo and think "Great! Finally a chance to stock up and get back into the fight." You trot over, pick up the item then suddenly enemies spawn around you. You use your new found weapon and health to fight them off and when they are finally down, your health and ammo are back to where they started. A bit further on is another set of pickups...

Doom (in all it's incarnations) and Serious Sam are by far the worst offenders here. If it only happened a few times in the whole game it would be a shock "Surprise!" to the player and a set of memorable events. When it starts to happen a couple of times in every level then it starts to become less of a surprise and merely becomes annoying. When this "punishment" method is used so often it becomes the main characteristic of the gameplay then it transcends annoying and in my opinion becomes farcical.

Trying to keep the player on the edge of their nerves, where every encounter could prove deadly is a great way to add atmosphere if done correctly. Other games (such as Half-Life 2 if we're keeping the FPS slant) can ratchet up the tension, string you along on low health and ammo by use of clever level design and enemy placement. Simply spewing enemies out of the ether when the player wants to rest and heal up is very poor, cheap game design.

I'm concerned about our videogame heritage.

There are dedicated centres whose role it is to preserve works of art, film, literature, important buildings and artefacts. But for videogames the situation is similar to times gone by where only avid independant "collectors" are gathering, catalogueing and preserving games and hardware.

There are already problems where old computer data on ancient hard drives and unsupported portable formats has been lost or is costing hundreds of thousands of pounds to retrieve. What happens when all those battery saves on SNES and Megadrive cartridges go? Will anyone have the know-how and equipment to replace the part? What about old gaming hardware? There must be few spare parts for those floating around and even fewer people who could custom make new components.

Websites like the Game Innovation Database are starting to document the development of recognisable game design features and tracking their progress through time and formats, but what of the games themselves? I am greatly looking forward to the Nintendo Virtual Console on the Wii, with downloadable classic games, but electronic versions of these games can only take preservation so far. How much of a contribution to the art world would be lost if the only versions of the old masters paintings left in existance were copies or photographs?

I hope someone starts a proper collection soon, because I know I don't have the money!

Ernest Adams has another in his irregular on-going series: "Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!" up on GamaSutra.

I do enjoy RPGs, and I've played a good mix of Western and Japanese over the years. But the two things that puts me off most JRPGs are the "Random Battle" mechanic and the turn-based battling.

The first RPG I ever played was Secret of Mana on the SNES. This was an "action RPG" where you could see the monsters wandering around the landscape and had full, real-time control over the battle. The next RPG I played was Final Fantasy III and I utterly hated it. This was a random encounter, turn-based RPG and I found the random element totally intrusive. I found myself on edge the whole time: "Am I going to make it the 10 metres to that town to allow my battered party to rest and heal up or is there going to be a "ker-ching" random battle 1 metre before home that will wipe everyone out? Ooh, the tension." Also, the turn-based battle element was for me just too abstract to invest myself in, and I stopped playing very quickly. While I can see why it's used as a game mechanic I just can't seem to get past my complete personal dislike of it.

This continued on the Dreamcast when I bought Grandia 2 and Skies of Arcadia. Grandia 2 had a similar style to SoM where monsters were visible wandering around and you could choose to avoid them or fight them. It also had one of the best battle systems I've ever played with. It was real-time but with with "cool down" periods for each characters attacks that weren't fixed to turns and a very simple but excellent positional strategy element that wasn't grid-based. Skies of Arcadia on the other hand was a typical random battle, turn-based RPG and once again, despite the superb visual design and story, I just couldn't get on with it.

So, why do some people swear by random battles and turn-based fighting? What is it about this that makes you want to play it? Despite being involved in the games industry for almost 8 years now in QA and Design I simply cannot see how this is in any way fun. I know for certain I have trouble relating the often highly involved and emotional characters and stories in these games to the incongruous, completely mechanical fighting system. They appear to be two different games that met in a car crash. Compare this to action RPGs where your involvement in the characters and story (walking around towns, talking to people etc.) is perfectly matched by your involvement with the characters in battle. The underlying number-crunching is the same, but the presentation couldn't be more different.

Manuals nowadays are (with few exceptions) rubbish and are symptomatic of how so many people are getting game design wrong.

There are three main problems I have with manuals:

1. Insert tab A into slot B then...

I do realise that when it comes to games that are naturally more complex, such as RPGs, Strategy or Simulation titles that it's useful to have a reference for commands and what certain icons mean. But when a simple 3D platform action game needs a page to describe the controls for the MENU SCREENS little alarm bells should start tinkling. A list of in-game controls is fine, but if you need a section titled "Moving your character" maybe, just maybe your control system is unintuitive? A list of HUD icons is also fine, but as with the controls, when you find yourself reading several lines about each one then you have badly designed icons. The point of an icon is that it shouldn't require any description - it should be immediately apparent what it represents. So few people think properly about icons it infuriates me.


2. Yes, but what is it I'm actually playing...

Most manuals I read are purely technical guides to the functionality of the game and tell you nothing about the game bar the obligatory first page, two-paragraph space-filler "story piece" written by some junior staff member because no-one else wanted to do it.

In-game cinematics either through FMV or scripted scenes using the game engine to tell the story are now the norm. Which is all good, and helps player immersion in your game world. But you want to keep it to a minimum otherwise it interrupts the play experience. Also, many cutscenes are pointless and so badly written that you cry baby tears when you think of all the chocolate you could have bought with the money saved by not making them. Wouldn't it be great to have some backstory, some extra detail on the characters you meet and the places you go ... oh, I dunno, maybe written down somewhere?

The same even goes for character abilities, special moves and so on - these often appear as a list of the button-presses required to activate them. But why do you need this? Is it because you want the player to know how to do all the moves in the game or is it really because it isn't naturally apparent how to pull them off? Is it really because they are just arbitrary "special moves" you included for design and balancing reasons and don't relate to the game characters in any meaningful way that could be conveyed in the game itself?


3. Waste of paper

You shouldn't need one anyway. You think I've just contradicted everything I've already written above? Not really - think about it ;)

Another great interview! Warren Spector courtesy of Eurogamer:

Part 1.
Part 2.

Found a great "Fahrenheit" ("Indigo Prophecy" in the USA) post-mortem on GamaSutra written by it's creator David Cage. Some very interesting points raised - definitely worth a read.

Oh, and if you're not signed up to GamaSutra you should be! :)

Inside the games industry I feel there is far too much focus on Unique Selling Points (USP). So much so that a lot of larger developers and publishers require a game design to have at least one USP before they will consider signing-off the money.

The fact that there are very few truly unique ideas left immediately causes problems if you as a designer are made to go down this route. Also, is an idea still unique if it's been used in a different genre already? Is it not actually unique at all, but a combination of other ideas from similar games or an extension of an existing one? Depends what your managers/the board consider "unique", which varies.

How many games have had a USP crowbarred in just to satisfy the requirements of another department? Has this helped the sales of the game? Has it made the game better or worse for it's inclusion? Or has it had no appreciable effect? In the end was the programmer/artist/designer time worth the money invested in it, just to get an extra bullet point on the press release?

The only thing that this benefits 100% is the marketing department. It is their "hook" on which to hang the advertising of the game and nothing more. Yes, it's different if a designer comes up with a game idea that includes something unique purely through the design or even the game itself is based around a unique concept. It's when games are forced to have a USP seemingly just to have one that bothers me. Here's a test try thinking of one moment in all the videogames you've played when you've thought "I've never seen that feature in a game before and the game is all the better for it!" I doubt you'll get into double-figures, and how many hundred games are released every year? Do we, as the buying public, really care about USPs? Would you deliberately NOT buy a game if it didn't have any USPs?

Personally I would happily play videogames for the rest of my life that had absolutely no unique features in them at all. It's not something I care about when looking to buy a game, I'm more interested in the actual gameplay and/or story. For example if every Zelda game released from today had the same control method, combat method, inventory design but all with a different story, new characters and events I would die a happy man.

Surely we are now beyond the early days of cinema, where each new film was sold on the new "thing" that the film-makers had included - "In this one, two cars come towards the camera at the same time, while the camera MOVES!". We should start stretching ourselves not technically but artistically. We have the ability to do this now and I'd much rather see money go towards a decent scriptwriter and concept art to create a visually rich story than assigned to a programmer and artist to make sure that the contractually required USP goes in to make someone else's life easier.

Introduction to this blog, information about me and some pertinent links.
theworm.   more »