Initial Doodles

I've recruited (OK, more like persuaded) the very talented Damian Buzugbe to work on the game.

Damian is a concept artist who has been in the industry since time began... or at least, longer than I have. Most notably he was the lead character artist on the Fable games. Check out his blog: Here.

So here are some extremely early doodles of our game's protagonist - an attempt to capture the form of a middle eastern refugee but in a more abstract and more fantastical style.

early concept

Prototype tile system

This is a Unity prototype of a dynamic world that's the center of a small game I'm currently working on. I'm now porting the project to UE4 which should be pretty fast, but in the meantime I thought I'd share.

This system provides an open world experience while allowing us to tell a very linear story and have it not feel forced. The player can walk in any direction they choose, but once certain conditions are met the next chunk of world that instantiates will contain the characters or setting for the next beat of the story. If you turn and walk the other way you'll find it appearing in front of you again. The story is, in part, about unavoidable events in a person's life and I think the gameplay mirrors this nicely. You seem to have choice, but in actual fact what happens to you is already predetermined.

Here a system of slots arranged in a hexagonal grid maintains the pieces that you walk on, and can choose to instantiate a special tile from a queue if the conditions are met.

Ignore my awful designer / programmer art and the hideous Unity default character.

Porting the project to UE4

My god UE4 is fantastic. The level of thought that's gone into the system is phenomenal.

After having played around with it for a short while and done some prototyping for our current project, I've decided to switch my side project over from Unity.

One of the main reasons for this, apart from how easy it is to use, is that we now have an animator on board! Very exciting, and UE4 has far superior animation systems.

I'll start posting videos of the game very soon - I've re-worked the core system to support some pretty cool stuff in our little dynamic, procedural world which I'm looking forward to unveiling!

Playing with curves

Ok so I think this is pretty cool. I also think this is one of THE ways you should create core mechanics.

Simply - I'm creating a jump in a game, but this is so important to get right. A good jump is a little bit of positive feedback every time you hit the button. It can be addictive and genuinely fun. A bad jump makes you feel like you're fighting against the controls. In fact most people don't notice when a jump is good or bad, they just like one game and not the other and they don't know why. This stuff is important.

So this is how I'm doing it -

I'm using this easing function generator to create and tune the appropriate curve and then converting the function into C# and plugging it into my code. This is the initial result using a standard curve, it's not right yet but it already feels like it's on the way.

Next I need to gut that site's (very kindly freely available) code and create a solution that will give me more control over the curve and allow live editing

A Case For Violence

Ok so first I want to start by saying that I am thoroughly bored with violent games. This all came from trying to think about something that could truly replace it. But why is violence so popular in games?

So here's a couple of theories.

1. Violence is easy to program. It's far easier to program some bullets and health than it is to program complex interactions. Artificial intelligence too is much simpler when all it has to do is run around and shoot at the player. Kind of a dull point though this one, and there are always ways around technical problems.

2. Violence provides players with something to master. You see my first thought when thinking about replacing violence was something like an adventure game in which you try and find, say, a long lost sibling. You could build an entire game around this and there could be a myriad of challenges along the way involving meeting and talking to new characters mainly - but the mastery would be missing. That one core skill you practice again and again and are ultimately tested on. You could build a game without it, but something would definitely be lost.

So let's just replace it with something - for the sake of argument let's change the story. You're a tennis pro searching the land to become the ultimate player. You travel in search of new challengers. But the problem with this is that it doesn't provide the bite sized challenges that violent games do - you'd be limited to less, more meaningful encounters because a game of tennis takes a significant amount of time.

Violence is actually very well suited to a medium in which progression is so key. Bite-sized encounters hone your skill ready for the ultimate test at the end. Also from a more abstract design point of view, violence works nicely to clear the path of the blocking challenger once you've bested them, allowing you to continue on.

There is a lot that you get for free with a violent game mechanic - it fits games very well. In fact even in the real world you'd be hard pressed to find something that allows small meaningful rounds of challenge better than fighting does. I'll keep thinking though..

...perhaps a game about a wondering debater in a world full of the opinionated...

Perhaps not...

Ultimately I think the answer is to simply come up with some activity and an excuse for why everyone challenges you at it, like Pokemon. Surely though there must be a more elegant solution...

New Theme! AARGH!

My new theme seems to have deleted all of the line-breaks from my previous posts leaving them as one enormous paragraph. I'll fix it soon.

A good way to die

"Be good at our game or we'll make it less fun for you" should not be a design mantra. That's why I dislike the harsh death penalty in the latest Zelda game, A Link Between Worlds, that ultimately sees you having to re-tread vast portions of the game to re-try what it was that beat you in the first place. Ultimately the penalty for death is time - fail and you lose 20 minutes. This is harsh indeed, not to mention tedious. This poses an interesting design question though - how do you create a meaningfully harsh death mechanic that doesn't take away from player enjoyment?

Many indie games have harsher death mechanics, but quick restarts and shallow gameplay mean you are dropped back into the game doing exactly what you were doing before you died. Super Hexagon or Hotline Miami for example. The other archetype is the game that challenges you to get to its end. FTL or Hoplite both do this - death is harsh, you have to restart the game, but games don't last long, so again, this is not so punishing, in fact it's a formula that has existed since the advent of the arcade cabinet. As long as the game is consistently fun, then the repetition is not tedious and death is not too punishing. The real trick is implementing a good death mechanic in a longer, story-based game.

So here's a proposal - one possible answer lies in your absence from the world. When you die, the world keeps running rather than resetting and the penalty comes from not being there to help. This would work well if, for example, you have squadmates who die permanently, or in multiplayer - We don't specifically punish you by docking your score or character progression, or by making you repeat a section, in fact you're technically getting a second try, but things escalate more while you're away so it's a scramble to get back into the action, and if done right this should be fun rather than a chore. The penalty is not what happens to you, but what happens to everything else while you're gone, and if you design the game right this all just happens naturally and in an emergent way. All you have to do is create systems that fight each other or tick over without you.

I recently managed to add this concept to a game relatively late in its development - although it's not always possible to make changes to the core game later in the process, we compensated by placing elements in the world that the enemy tries to attack. When they're destroyed they're gone for good - die and you're re-spotted away from them leaving them vulnerable until you return. This is an imperfect solution, but it did add a nice meta-game for the more advanced players - can you complete the game with all of these elements in-tact? It had a nice knock-on effect of letting better players choose a more challenging game.

Brothers - Opinion

I played this game a while back but have only recently felt compelled to write this review because of how much people seem to like it, and how much that irritates me. It was described to me as 'brilliant and brave' but I found it to be disappointing and quite predictable in its plot and structure. It has the air, not of something beautifully crafted by an old-hand, but of cack-handedness and cliché. It feels like the work of an incompetent storyteller retreating into a new medium, not for the new opportunities it offers, but for the sake of diminished competition. There are some positives - the environments are nice looking and there is very little repetition of game mechanics. There is a tendency among game designers to stick to a rigidly limited amount of gameplay elements for the sake of readability, but in doing so you deprive the player of experimentation - a cornerstone of the medium. Besides, all of the puzzle elements in this game are tied together by a common language - physics. You pull, push lean and swing. None of this has to be taught because we are already familiar with these actions from real life. I very much enjoyed playing a game where each experience is a new one.

Unfortunately the rest of the game is a let down. The mechanics never deliver on the promise made by it existing as a game, although in fairness, it does try - the bond between characters is meant to be forged by your actions - puzzles that require both brothers to complete. However you never identify with one character due to the disconnect created by you having to control both, and likewise you never form a bond with either as neither are truly external to you as the player. This leaves the story in an awkward place where it feels separate from the gameplay as it plays out in cutscenes in which you lose control - creating distance. The core mechanic too where you control one boy with each stick never stops being confusing and its only saving grace is that the game is short enough for you to persevere despite it.

Also noticeably jarring is the poor execution of the ending - throughout the game you solve challenges as part of a pair - surely the most elegant way of showing loss would be to come across more challenges subsequent to the death of one brother and find yourself unable to complete them, forcing you then to take a longer, harder road. Instead you're bolstered on by the dead boy's memory and are able to complete tasks with one that before required two. Rather than emphasising a point, they design a solution to bypass it, a solution to the very punchline that they have built up to until this point. A bizarre choice.

Remember Me

In Remember Me there is a shining gem of a game, worn dull by an outdated world structure, cliched themes and a combat system that just falls short of brilliance. It should though be commended for its portrayal of a well-realised, non sexualised female lead. Let me first say that I enjoyed playing this game more than I have enjoyed any in a long time. For all its flaws I felt its strengths far outweighed its weaknesses. It is one of the most inviting worlds I’ve ever experienced in a game. It’s also worth saying that I’m only ever this critical of things I love, because I want them to be perfect. This annoys my friends as I appear to have more of a problem with the films, games and books we like than the ones we dislike, but it’s only because I’m interested enough to obsess over the details.

I’ll try and keep this spoiler free.

There are several problems that I have with the narrative, some missed opportunities I think would have been really great, and there are also a wealth of small gripes like poor voice acting, (though the main cast is excellent). It’s not really worth focusing on these as they’re easily ignored, but I do wish they’d made more of certain story themes - Nilin’s amnesia for example would have been a great opportunity for her to be manipulated by people claiming they were old friends.

The combat system has some fundamental flaws and later unlocks make it pointless to ever use initial combos, as you get no bonuses for finishing them. The bigger sin though is that although you can continue your combos between enemies, if the one you’re fighting dies you lose the progress. It almost feels like a bug.

I also find the inclusion of the mutant ‘Leapers’ disappointing. Must all games include a mutant or zombie of some sort? They come with Gollum-like voices and it all feels a bit silly.

My main problem with Remember Me though, is that like a lot of older games it’s a slice of a world I wish I could explore fully. You play in closed off environments, bookended by cutscenes and mission cards. You have access to abilities that are only available to you a few times throughout the game and only at certain points. It feels like a teaser for something much bigger, a vertical slice. You do not feel like a free agent.

One such example is your ability to enter someone’s memories and alter them, changing what they do in the real world. However these only happen at set points making you feel a loss of agency. It’s a shame they couldn’t have built a system where you could steal anyone’s memories, gaining you access to a variety of places around the world, some insignificant, some vital to the story. It would not have been able to be as complex as the current implementation, but I would rather have an ability that I could use at any time, anywhere, than one that I wasn’t truly free to use.

It’s these things that make it feel outdated. I want to be free to explore the world I’m in, after all, along with interactivity, exploration is one of the fundamental differences that games have from other art-forms. Gameplay too is our way of touching the worlds we play in. If we’re shown that a character has an ability we are not free to use, it only distances that character from us.

Nilin is supposed to be a Memory Hunter, someone who operates above neo-paris, a detective who steals peoples memories in order to unlock the city. It’s just a shame that we were simply told that story, rather than living it ourselves.

[gallery]

Digital sightseeing in Remember Me. I have to admit this one almost passed me by due to the slightly disappointing reviews, but I’m very glad I played it. It’s set in a meticulously and beautifully crafted world. It also made me realise that this is what I love in a game - being taken away to another place. Escapism. Interesting how the rest of my current design team differs. I think my creative director has similar sensibilities, but the other two designers play games for very different reasons. One likes create characters who are very different from themselves and who they then rollplay, while the other is fascinated by numbers, statistics, odds and probability.

Unfinished

I wrote this before he died. I was going to re-phrase this, but I think I’ll just leave it as it is. It’s unfinished, and there’s a bit of a mess towards the end, but perhaps that’s rather apt. 

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Iain M Banks is dying. This actually hit me in a more profound way than I thought it would. I’m not the kind of person who gets upset about the deaths of people I don’t know. I was surprised by my own reaction to the news, but then I started to realise that he has been one of, if not the biggest source of creative inspiration in my life since I was a child. 

I was always drawing robots when I was little, and making things out of pieces of cut up cardboard. I’d watched StarTrek before, and Star Wars, and I knew I liked these things in some way but I never considered them as part of a genre. When I first started to read his science fiction books I was amazed at the seriousness of them, the sexiness. They are written like adult novels, there are no ray-guns or spandex-clad barbarellas. I began to think about these things more and more. I watched Ghost in the Shell, I looked at the concept artwork for Metal Gear Solid. There is a style here that I want to be part of, I want to contribute to. Good stories told about incredible things, or just stories told in interesting worlds. Often this is a genre that allows a great deal of philosophical reflection as it can be so rich in metaphors. Science fiction releases you of so many restrictions imposed upon you by other genres, especially in Games, which I now make for a living. 

So much of my imagination is plagiarised from the ideas in his books. Actually so much of so many things are plagiarised from his books. The ‘halo’ from Halo for example…

When I was younger, before I went to film school, one of my often daydreamed ambitions was to make one of his books into a film. There are so few good sci-fi films. I always imagined the letter I would write to try and convince him to let me do this, and to justify why I would do the material justice like no-one else could. 

As I’ve got older I’ve grown my own worlds inside my head, and I no longer want to simply tell the stories of others in a different form. But still, these worlds wouldn’t exist without his writing and I still wanted to ask him for his permission to include some homage in my work. It’s an odd, very selfish feeling to realise that I will never achieve this; one of my earliest ambitions. 

If you read one thing from his volume of sci-fi work, read the short story ‘The State of the Art’ from the book of the same name. 

I read it once on a family holiday in Turkey, and then again lying next to my friend in central park in NYC, with him too hungover to move. It’s about our world as seen through the eyes of others, but there are no UFO’s or aliens in the traditional sense. You follow a woman as she walks around European cities, contemplating humanity. 

rewrite - 
traditional science fiction ideas with genuine people and a more realistic view of the future that satirically criticises current western culture. moulding the spiralling, inky-abstract grasps for something more lucid that began to form in my head when I was young. 
his ideas - 
Stories that begin and end at opposite times and meet in the middle.
ships within ships, endlessly and intricately tattooing each other, recursing into… something

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I never knew him, but it makes me sad.

From the internal blog. Thanks guys. Idiots...

Failing the Bechdel test

The Bechdel Test:

  1. [The film / game] has to have at least two [named] women in it
  2. Who talk to each other
  3. About something besides a man

It’s amazing how few films and games pass this simple test, even things that you think would, like most Wes Anderson films for example, usually fail on point 2. There are definitely occasions where this isn’t a sign of anything, plenty of trashy films starring female characters would pass, but could barely be described as woman-friendly story telling. 

Games have always been a chief culprit of negative gender stereotypes, but we already knew that, and much as I would claim to be a feminist I don’t actually care about this at all. If people want to play through a teenage power fantasy full of half-naked girls, fine. I won’t play it, but I don’t care that it exists either.

What bothers me is the lack of women and female-centric story in media that we perceive to be mature. How often have you watched a scene, especially in a game, where two women talk to each other in a room? Just that. Honestly I struggle to think of a mainstream example where this happens. 

We seem to have a short-circuit that just stops us from creating female characters unless there’s a specific reason to. take a film like Ratatouille. How many chefs are there in the restaurant where the film takes place? Quite a few. And how many are female? One, the love interest. Many of the characters in these films or games could be female, there is absolutely no need for them all to be men. If they are, they are the exceptions. Lara croft is a woman in a world of men, Colette from Ratatouille is, again, in a man’s world. Yes in Monsters Inc the only women are a simpering receptionist, a little girl in need of protection and a woman who, for all intents and purposes, works in HR. But this seemingly more extreme gender-stereotyping is more obvious and more easily addressed. It is the subtler and far deeper problem that bothers me the most, one that I wasn’t even aware of until I really started thinking about point number 2 on the Bechdel Test.

It’s not a question of making more women-oriented stories, or getting rid of adolescent sex objects, it’s far simpler - why aren’t more of our characters women? 

Super Hexagon

I have been addicted to this little game for a number of reasons. Chiefly that it looks great, sounds great and only takes up to a minute per-playthrough, which is perfect for an iPhone game. I read somewhere that Terry Cavanagh gave a talk at GameCity and that it revealed a host of interesting things that the game is doing without you noticing. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the talk online, but knowing this made me notice a number of things.

First of all the speed of the difficulty settings do not affect the speed at which the player moves, so from the very beginning you are learning the skills you need to play the game at its hardest setting.

The game also appears procedurally generated, but it isn’t. It has set sections that play randomly. Either that or the whole thing is in order, but you are started at a random point along this path every time you replay. I thought this was especially clever, because it means that you get an equal amount of practice at every section and you go from barely being able to complete a third of a level to completing the whole thing very quickly. This really ties in well with the music, which re-starts every time you fail. Hearing a longer section of the track becomes huge positive reinforcement.

I’d still love to see that talk, so if anyone has it, let me know!

Proteus

This morning we lost connection with the servers at Disney, so I used the time to play Proteus. Wow! What a lovely little game. I only managed to play it for 20 minutes but it wasn’t what I was expecting. You wonder around a little island filled with ambient, abstract sound and then you find a story unfolding around you. There is a lot more atmosphere here than in many AAA titles - a testament to the rejection of industry standards that the indie movement represents.

This is also very much the kind of game I’m interested in building at the moment. Or one of the types at least; Small sandbox worlds that have a very limited population of things in them, but those things are fully realised, and the worlds although small, are also perfect because of this. Too many games are packed with many things that aren’t particularly interesting. I find the idea of worlds with a few well developed elements in much more appealing. Telling the story of a changing world, or simply telling a story around the player is something games are really brilliant at doing. Experiencing this story is also something that simply can’t be done in any other art-form.

EDIT - I have now finished it, and although visually striking I was disappointed to find that there is in fact no emergent storyline, and no real point to the thing at all. There is no hint to any kind of meaning however abstractly sign-posted. Shame. 

Working on our game this weekend. Despite the fact that we’ve been doing this on and off for close to a year now, I reckon we must each have only put maybe 6-8 hours of work into this thing, work’s just been that hectic! Also integrated the AngryAnt behave library into the project for the AI which is a lot of fun. The plan is to make the game just a lovely thing to interact with before we make any kind of winning conditions.

Finally getting round to it

For the last couple of months I’ve been working for the ex-Blackrock guys over in Brighton at their new studio Gobo games and have been enjoying learning lots of new stuff there (along with a lot of homemade food made in their big open plan kitchen). All good stuff, but the personal projects have fallen by the wayside a little.

Anyway I’ve finally got around to playing around with the Unity API and have been finding it a total joy to use. Everything is so easy! So I’ve decided to make just one game that is pure gameplay to get to know the package. It’s going to be a little multiplayer tower defence game - specifically so me and a friend of mine have something to play at the same time with just one iPad. It will be the last project I do with absolutely no artistic value whatsoever, but it’s still quite fun.

So far I’ve coded a hybrid navigation mesh / spacial partitioning system for the AI to use and to optimise collision detection. After making the first generic AI framework it’s a real joy to be building this from the ground up without having to keep working out how to achieve the next step. It’s also really nice to have the requirements of the whole thing in mind so you can just do exactly what needs to be done and no more.

Generalisation

People are very good at making assumptions about objects they have never encountered before and instantly knowing how to use them.

The illusion of this can be achieved with AI by having the objects themselves specify how they can be used, and what they can be used for. Agents can then search their immediate surroundings for objects that fit a certain criteria and use them accordingly. This is a useful tool if you want to be able to easily add things to the world that the AI will instantly be able to understand.

In a more open-world game, objects could be used to fulfil basic needs, creating a more lifelike, generic NPC. Then, these same objects could also be used as weapons, however useless they may be - each one describing how much damage done when thrown, or when used as a melee weapon. 

The purpose of all this would be to create a game where anything could be picked up and used, or used for defence in a pinch. I believe a system where a few simple actions exist that can be used on anything would help decrease a feeling of limitation in a game, and increase the ability to experiment and explore. This type of system is also a natural match for the polymorphic nature of many object-oriented programming languages. 

It’s also a step in the direction of more interesting, generic open-world AI that may or may not fight you depending on the circumstances and would create nice situations where attacking a random passer-by may see them grab a nearby common object for defence. 

Additionally too many open world games see mindless characters wonder about when it would be relatively simple to give them just a few basic desires and sleep patterns. It would be refreshing to have a game city that gets busy at lunchtime, quiet at night and so on. These two things combined could make a world come alive in a way that has not been achieved particularly well to date.

As far as the demo goes this won’t be incredibly visible as everything is a weapon and all the agents are in a permanent combat state. However it will result in a more modular weapon description, in which each weapon describes the appropriate movement when being used; for example charging with a short-range weapon or hanging back with a long range one. This would also exist in common objects when they get created. Hopefully once the multiplayer demo is completed, work can start on a game with AI that does more than try to shoot you.