Feb
02
2010

The Character of Mass Effect 2

[Warning: Mass Effect 2 spoilers that run the gamut of the game's narrative lay ahead. There is also a paragraph near the end of the piece which references ending spoilers from Uncharted 2.]

Mass Effect 2 is a strange game. It’s the most divergent sequel I’ve played in years. Its differences from its predecessors are so profound as to make Gamasutra’s ever-insightful Chris Remo classify the game as a “surprising genre experiment.” I’m, personally, still somewhat unresolved as to the effectiveness of the ludic changes made between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2; however, this piece is not about that.

Anyone that’s talked to me at length before knows my opinion on science-fiction and fantasy: they’re genres filled primarily with insidious nonsense. That’s not to say all science-fiction and fantasy is bad, just that most of the works in those genres, in particular, seem to miss the mark by miles when telling an affecting story. Science-fiction gets obsessed with telling stories about clever science-inspired plot lines about future technology or dangerous evolutions of modern technology. Fantasy gets lost in crazy magic and imaginative worlds. These are two genres which seem to have a large overlap with the gaming industry due to the “typical” game developers’ inspiration in works like Star Trek, Star Wars, Aliens, and so on. Games, like many other forms of media, when paying homage to their thematic and tonal influences, often seem to miss out on what made those original genre pieces so great: the characters which inhabited them.

There is almost no better analogy for the importance of character to a competent science-fiction-inspired narrative than Star Wars. I’m not, personally, an enormous fan of this particular franchise, but it is without a doubt an important cultural work. Well. Part of it. The original trilogy is a classic in science fiction and pop culture. The more recent prequel trilogy, however, is a laughable set of films amongst critics, fans, and seemingly within pop culture at large. The original trilogy has its epic science-fiction (science-fantasy, really) tale about good and evil, but that tale is seen from the perspective of, roughly, six-eight characters. These characters drive the movie. When we think back on The Empire Strikes Back, we don’t think about any given plot line, we think about that climactic moment when Darth Vadar reveals the ultimate plot twist with the line: “Luke, I am your father.” And drama. Comparatively, the prequel Star Wars trilogy, best analyzed in this hilarious yet poignant seventy-minute review, used characters as little more than set piece to carry along a weighty plot. The most memorable aspect of these movies is. Uh. Maybe that music that played at the end of the first one.

I have no desire to really analyze an enormous genre or even cultural icons like Darth Vadar or Luke Skywalker; there are, really, endless comparisons to be made. Recently, the popularity of the Harry Potter series is notable for its complete rejuvenation in the public’s interest in fantasy. It’s not because J.K. Rowling created a clever alternate universe (though, that’s certainly not insubstantial), it’s that she created this clever alternate universe that we, as readers, experience through the believable eyes of Harry Potter, a kid who grew up in a cupboard.

Story succeeds through character drama and moves forward as a result of character motivations.

I’ve talked about my personal crusade against needlessly epic scale in the past, and although I mention Mass Effect as an example of the epic, the game did something great: its driving force was character motivation to hunt down and bring Saren to justice. It was a very personal motivator throughout a game that insisted on getting to its imminent galactic disaster plot line. The Saren character was always just one step ahead of Shepard in Mass Effect, always committing some vile act or snatching up an important part of the grand puzzle. It was a refreshing change from most games. It was personal.

Mass Effect 2 takes that personal motivator out of the narrative equation and replaces the looming evil, ancient threat with a new looming, evil not-so-ancient threat. Instead of wrestling with the Alliance throughout the game, you’re constantly bashing heads with the will of the secret, shadowy organization who is funding your whole project. Essentially, the overarching plot is the same thing as the original Mass Effect with some new names. And some guy called “The Illusive Man” which, really now, how did that get past a brainstorm session?

What Mass Effect 2 does well, in concept anyway, is adopt the formula of a typical heist movie: we know the end goal upfront, but we need all of the players in order to have any hope of achieving it. With this in mind, Shepard 2.0 ventures off in the galaxy to find some friends — some new, some old. It’s a clever idea for a game, and I enjoyed it. In concept.

One of Bioware’s hooks has always been that the player has a somewhat customizable protagonist and that he fills his party with some scripted, crafted characters. This has the aim of being a somewhat dynamic, unpredictable play-through a very scripted, well-crafted world. In most of Bioware’s games, this tenet has worked out very well. I keep the characters I like with me and hear their witty, entertaining, or enlightening banter as I go through the game and when/if I play through the game again, I can use new characters and have a slightly-altered gameplay experience. Mass Effect 2 uses the characters that fill Shepard’s party as a means to provide that emotional weight that the core storyline lacks. Presumably, through the acquisition of these characters, the player is drawn into the world and the motivations of those that inhabit it.

There are two primary faults with this method of exploring and utilizing character motivations as they relate to the core plot. The first of which being the structure of the typical character acquisition ‘quest.’ In most cases, the player does not actually meet the character he’s adding to his ranks until the last third or very end of a quest. This means that the quest is occupied almost entirely by blatantly-secondary characters and the banter of the characters in the player’s party. It’s hard to have much of a vested interest in any of the secondary characters. Not only do they come across as guest stars in an episode of a television program (this seems intentional), but they’re almost universally one-dimensional (this seems unintentional). Any character with a dilemma magically will find a resolution in the magical Paragon/Renegade words of Commander Shepard. That is, of course, unless that dilemma resolution requires some arbitrary quest to be completed — but it’s hard to fault an RPG for adhering to the trapping of its own genre.

All of this results in each quest being largely dead air. We get our setup, our known resolution, and everything in between is more or less just filler towards our ultimate goal. Since parties are player-defined, none of the characters with Shepard throughout the quest have any vested interest in its on-goings other than the rare one-liner or even more rare banter between the two non-Shepard characters. So, these characters definitely do not carry the plot alone in these segments. And since most of the quest is build-up to the eventual discovery of the key character, that character’s relevance to the over-arching plot isn’t explored until the quest’s completion. This results in each quest feeling like narrative busy-work. A filler episode that doesn’t do much (if anything) to advance the overarching plot.

The second problem with exploring character motivations is with Mass Effect 2’s actual filler episodes: the loyalty quest. Every party member in the game has a unique loyalty quest that the player must undertake in order to gain that character’s “loyalty” (alternate costume and locked ability). These quests are tangential to the main quest and are also not necessary to complete in order to advance the narrative. They’re simply little vignettes meant to flesh out the secondary details of the primary characters. The issue with these segments? They expose everything that’s missing from the core plot line. As improved as Shepard’s character is in Mass Effect 2, he is still primarily a way to project the player’s will into a fictional proxy. The game is dependent on the likes of Garrus, Tali, Miranda, et al to carry the emotional weight of the game’s story.

During the loyalty missions, the player has that mission’s character forced into his party for the duration of this quest. This means that throughout the quest, that character is a chatty little fella who wants to remark on everything seen, everything done, and interject into every single conversation. For the twenty-thirty minutes that these quests typically last, that character is an actual person. The loyalty quests all follow a very predictable structure: character problem on ship, Shepard embarking on quest, character detailing the best place in an area to start the quest, conversation with key secondary character, Shepard is transported to that quests “level,” the player fights through a few hallways, a wrench is thrown in the mix, a boss or hard enemy encounter is fought in a big open room, and there is a resolution where the subject of the loyalty quest must make a hard decision. Every single loyalty quest follows this loose structure (with two exceptions, but the narrative structural pieces remain in their place). And, yet, I had the most investment in these quests because someone in my party had a vested interest in the outcome. Seeing sweet, adorable Tali slowly fall apart as she discovers that her father was doing some nasty experiments was heartbreaking. See the cold, logic-driven Mordin discover the effects that his Genophage had on the Krogan people come to a harsh realization? Brilliant.

Choosing whether or not to let Garrus take his revenge on the subject of his loyalty quest was the hardest decision I had to make in Mass Effect 2. There wasn’t an “I win” Paragon/Renegade action for me to take which magically resolved the entire scenario (unlike the final brilliant choice in Tali’s quest, which was utterly ruined by the “I win” button on the conversation wheel). I actually took a few minutes to think about what course of action would have the best effect on Garrus, one of the characters in Mass Effect 2 I really liked. I eventually decided that Garrus assassinating this man would bite him in the ass, so I stuck through the entire scenario and, eventually, it was revealed that the man Garrus blamed for the death of his squad wasn’t as at-fault as he wanted to believe. It was a predictable turn, but the way the scene is set-up is tense, complicated, and dramatic and the game didn’t ruin that situation just because my Shepard was a goody-goody Paragon.

When these loyalty quests where finished, I returned to the primary narrative line with all of my buddies backing me up. As I did the final quest, I felt the very generic lines of dialogue spoken by the various characters I selected to fill various roles. I thought to myself as I watched the ending play out: any character I selected to fill this role would have said an equally concise one-liner that got the exact same point across. This ending which is supposed to play out as this epic experience unique to me, the player, instead actually reads like a very carefully-drafted script where any character I select to play Role A will utter this line of dialogue as voiced by actor C. I think back to Uncharted 2 where I saw an ending play out with Drake and Elena where Elena was near-death, and watching Drake’s intimate, personal reaction to it. It’s not a reaction he would have had to anyone other than Elena in that universe. No other swapped-in character could have elicited the same emotions, not even the other love interest in the game. It’s said that Uncharted 2 is a very scripted, carefully-crafted experience and, as such, can get away with evoking emotions like that in a non-interactive cut scene.

Mass Effect 2 has the same goals in the ending I experienced (where two squad members died), it just does not succeed. The goal is to personalize an experience through player choices throughout a very large, deep game experience, but if that personalization yields inferior drama, what is gained? Maybe Mass Effect 2 is simply one step towards a time in the future when developers have the production bandwidth necessary to fully explore every possible scenario that a player may put a given character in. That is a problem that seems to open all sorts of rabbit holes, though. If Mass Effect 2’s goal is to be a convincing character drama along the lines of some films, the abdication of authorship in favor of what are admittedly fairly minimal player effect on major plot points throughout the game, then maybe its goals are somewhat at odds.

When I finished Mass Effect 2, I did not feel that my relationships with characters had an impact, but I know that I was impacted by the stiffness of what felt like interchangeable character drama throughout the game’s finale.

By Trent Polack | Posted in Game Design | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments
Jan
15
2010

Bayonetta

Bayonetta is a game where the left-shoulder button, on the Xbox 360 controller, has Bayonetta striking a pose and saying:


“Do you want to touch me?

Bayonetta comes from Platinum Games, a studio formed from remnants of Clover Studio. Bayonetta is preceded by Platinum Games’ first release, MadWorld for the Wii, out in early 2009 (a day before my birthday, even). Having never played any of Clover’s games, MadWorld was my only real experience with either Clover or Platinum Games’ works and, as such, my expectations for Bayonetta going in were rock bottom. MadWorld was a vile, repetitive, and thoroughly unenjoyable game for any play session lasting beyond five-to-ten minutes. In my mind, Bayonetta’s sole hope was the direction of Hideki Kamiya, whose fingerprints are all over numerous major Capcom titles since the late nineties. Heralded as a spiritual successor to Capcom’s Devil May Cry series, Bayonetta received an abundance of pre-release attention and a fair amount of hype as the next great Japanese action game. As an additional strike towards Bayonetta, Devil May Cry was a series I found consistently uninteresting and unenjoyable and, especially true of Devil May Cry 3 and 4 (games which Kamiya did not play a role) which failed to live up to any aspect of the far superior 3D ‘reboot’ of Team Ninja’s Ninja Gaiden series.

This is my long-winded and historically informative way of saying that, going into Bayonetta, I knew with false, presumptuous certainty that the game would not live up to my favorite action game of this console generation, Ninja Gaiden 2. This would not stop me from buying Bayonetta without so much as a single clue as to how the game played. I’m a very optimistic consumer muppet.

Bayonetta is one of the few games in the last few years that I instantly knew was brilliant. It’s a game uniformly centered on a single mechanical concept and Platinum Games designed it to support that concept in every aspect of the game. Bayonetta is a game about flow. Gameplay segments are divided into verses which are filled with snappy J-Pop soundtrack, and a protagonist whose last line before the player receives control for the first time: “As long as there’s music, I’ll keep on dancing.” Every verse is an encounter (either combat, natural disaster evasion, or on-rails vehicle segment), and the time spent traveling from verse-to-verse is minimal. From this point on, if there’s not a cut scene playing, the player is constantly involved in some task. At the end of chapters, players take part in a shooting gallery for additional items/currency. Players remain active even during loading screens, where a slick combo list responds to player input to show what combos the player can execute from any given button press onward.

Combat is paced appropriately for the energetic J-Pop background tracks which accompanies it. The emphasis is placed on combos and the stringing of combos together. Bayonetta has an expansive move list across all modes of combat for all experience levels. Button mashing works well enough, but it’s very likely that players will quickly move beyond it due solely to a simple and reliable set of core input styles. The game is quick to instruct players as to the fact that one attack button defines one type/power/speed of move (punches/hand guns or other equipped weapon), another defines another type/power/speed (kicks/leg guns), and another is always the use of guns.

No matter what combination of hands and leg attacks, the player always feels like the buttons he/she presses will yield some sort of combo. Likewise, a slight delay between any two button presses will always allow for a slightly different combo than one where those two buttons are pressed sequentially. The difference between a new player and an experienced player is familiarity with combos and the timing and what combos chain well into others for maximum verse rank/score.

Combat effectiveness in Bayonetta is more about movement and dodging than the memorization of combos. A well-timed dodge will activate “witch time,” which is a state of action in which the world and its entities slow down but the player moves and acts at standard speed. Dodging is mapped to the right-trigger button and is not the very strictly timed-out trade-off as counter maneuvers in games like Ninja Gaiden or Assassin’s Creed; numerous dodges can be strung together with ease and the timing for an effective dodge is forgiving. Whether a dodge is successful or not is more about whether or not Witch Time is activated; merely avoiding damage is, often, the sole result of a poorly-timed dodge.

Getting damaged is the result of making no attempt to react to an enemy’s attacks or, for certain enemies (namely fire enemies), attacking with close-quarters attacks outside of Witch Time. Bayonetta is not one to annoyingly punish players during active combat. A side effect of this is that, often, there is very rarely a time in the game where dodging does not help the player. The worst the game does is to momentarily take control away from the player after four unsuccessful dodge attempts.

Beyond the basic modes of combat, namely the punches, kicks, and guns attached to all primary four limbs, Bayonetta also allows for a host of play style customization via arm/leg weaponry and three optional accessories. For my first play-through of the game, I largely stuck to the aforementioned standard weapons and used my alternate equipment slot to hold a sword (which behaved strikingly and pleasingly similar to Ninja Gaiden’s Dragon Sword). When I started my Hard play-through, however, I wanted to mix things up a bit. I used a whip for my arm/hand slot and my standard pistols for my leg slots in my first equipment slot and a sword and fire/ice claw boots (which can, alternatively, be used as fire/ice claw gloves). While the specialized techniques I purchased all had unique, but similar feeling attacks across all of these forms of weaponry, the feel and flow of combat was dramatically altered. It’s truly remarkable how much work Platinum Games put into each of these weapons and their effects on standard combat and further demonstrates their commitment towards allowing players to flow through the game in a style which personally suits them. During my normal play-through and now just a brief bit into my hard play-through, I have yet to come across a combat encounter which truly demanded that I use a specific weapon type.

Bayonetta’s boss enemies are a somewhat refreshing inclusion in the genre in that, in almost every case, defeating a boss does not rely on contrived executions of actions that are overly reliant on pattern recognition. It’s very apparent what players have to do in order to efficiently tackle a boss, but in most cases the process of attacking and damaging a boss was done using standard combos and attacks. There are exceptions to this where Bayonetta has access to a more powerful arsenal of attacks which constantly employ the Wicked Weave (powerful, hair-based attacks) or run a gauntlet up to an enemy’s weak point, but these are the exception. Where the game goes wrong is in the Japanese design habit of tasking players with defeating all of these boss enemies again later in the game. Never has there been a game in existence where the re-use of boss enemies from earlier in the game strung together as a late-game challenge felt like anything other than a cheap means of extending gameplay. This technique is used, in theory, to allow the player to feel like he/she has gotten to the point of a skill where taking on these once-feared foes is now trivial, but these psychological benefits do not outweigh the tackiness necessary to actually design such late-game encounters. Nor does a player’s presence at the end of the game necessarily imply that the player ever either enjoyed the boss battle the first time around or, in the worst case, revisit frustration in a particularly nasty boss battle (which Bayonetta does almost entirely avoid in its boss encounters).

One gripe I continually revisit when playing these third-person Japanese-designed action games is the evolution of encounters as players make their way through the game. With Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry, and, although to a far lesser extent than either of those titles, Bayonetta I always feel like the early game encounters are generally more fun than those in the mid-to-late game. If a game’s combat system is enjoyable, needlessly complicating encounters with overly gimmicky/pattern-based enemies amidst unnecessarily “clever” level designs is showing a lack of faith in one’s own game design. If an encounter is fun for, say, thirty seconds, why throw as unnecessary complications into the mix? Fighting ninjas in Ninja Gaiden 1 and 2 was always more enjoyable than fighting crazy demons much like fighting the Covenant in the Halo games was always more enjoyable than fighting the Flood. Bayonetta doesn’t succumb to any major late-game missteps in the same way as these game but, rather, for a lengthy portion of gameplay around the 70% completion mark, tosses a series of boss battles and vehicle segments at the player for the sake of pacing and “variety.” These segments were, surprisingly, never “bad,” but they were unnecessary deviations from gameplay that I by no means wanted a respite from in this game; however, on the plus side, these segments never violated the pacing and gameplay flow.

Where Bayonetta truly breaks down is when it severs its excellent gameplay flow and pacing with unnecessary, poorly-placed, and surprisingly lengthy cut scenes. The story is at best entertaining and sometimes cute, but more often it is incredibly repetitive and slow with the information it provides players. There were numerous times where the cinematic director wants to remind players that Bayonetta is a cool, sexy, and incredibly talented protagonist who can execute insanely well-timed combat maneuvers with ease. In order to achieve this goal, the player watched scenes which extends upwards of one to two minutes straight where Bayonetta does nothing but kill enemies in cool/sexy ways. While this worked stylistically in the introductory cut scene, it quickly becomes grating as its quantity exceeds one cut scene. These could be forgiven, though, if the game didn’t pair such scenes with plot scenes which continually touched on the same three or four plot points over and over again. The insanity and quirkiness of the Bayonetta plot is endearing and well-fitting the universe and tone of the game, but the gameplay does not only disallow such gruelingly lengthy cut scenes but also discourages breaks in game flow in general.

Much has been made of the hyper-sexualized image and form of Bayonetta. Platinum Games is unabashed in their glorification of the female forms they have constructed. As far as I’m concerned, the prominence of the primarily-naked and suggestive Bayonetta imagery throughout the game does nothing if not support everything Platinum Games has constructed. Bayonetta is clearly a game designed by a male development team, but at no point do I feel that it was chauvinistic or demeaning. If anything, Bayonetta is a game which feels like it was developed by a team who is comfortable with the sexuality present in the game and in using that as a driving for for their protagonist rather than a marketing team. Platinum Games understands that their leading lady is as fictional and fantastical as the universe she exists within. For more along these lines, read: “Her Sex is a Weapon”, “Bayonetta”, and “If You Run Out of Ammo You Can Have Mine”.

I’m planning now to revisit Bayonetta a playthrough or two down the line when I have a more full grasp of the game’s various modes of combat and the items which the game didn’t seem to fully intend me to possess on my initial play-through. For now, Bayonetta is a one-of-a-kind action game with a superb execution of its paramount design tenet of fluidity.

By Trent Polack | Posted in General | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments
Dec
20
2009

Doubt

Because I have deep-seeded mental issues and sometimes am prone to crazy bouts of productivity, I made a new video game (click to play!):

Much like Balance, Doubt was done in under a week using Unity and an entirely particle-driven visual aesthetic. Since the last couple of games I’ve worked on (Magnetic Butterfly and Balance) were somewhat passive in their mechanics and heavily based on physics and movement, I wanted to do a game that allowed for somewhat more active play. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for shooters (both to make and play), but I knew that I didn’t want to make a straight-up shooter. My goal with these week-long projects is to experiment and, along those lines, I wanted to try something slightly different. So was born the ring-based movement mechanism and the “sticky” bullets.

Something I felt worked very well with Balance, from the perspective of someone who knew everything about the game and the influences anyway, was the thematic and inspirational influences in the core gameplay and game flow. For me, Balance worked out as a means of telling a short story through gameplay. What I’m still not entirely sure about is what other people took from the game (if anything), so going on to the next project I wanted to try something a bit more commonly understood. Originally, I wanted to do something more holiday-themed (which is where this image came from), but nothing came out of my gameplay sketches. Then, for whatever reason, the concept of ‘doubt’ entered my head and everything else fell in place shortly thereafter.

My favorite aspect of Balance was the evolution of the game’s aesthetic and the effectiveness of the final result both as an atmospheric and purely visual quality of the game. The particle system-heavy visual style was something that was incredibly enjoyable for me to work on and mess around with and, on top of that, it was an incredibly quick way to get good results in the game (and tweaking them was even easier). Beyond all those points, though, it seems that the biggest benefit of this visual style is the “ink blot” approach to graphic style and design; it allows the game to have dynamic, readily identifiable components that create a very interpretive overall composition. Potentially, what I read from Balance and Doubt is completely different from what someone else may read from it despite so many common atmospheric elements. I’m planning on doing at least two or three more projects in the future which attempt to take the visual style further (and in somewhat different directions).

One thing which has always worked out incredibly well for me is constantly getting friends and colleagues to play-test early builds of the games I work on. Magnetic Butterfly would have been a far, far, far worse game if I didn’t constantly get people’s thoughts on player movement and interaction. Balance’s play-tests also led to a vastly improved movement design. Feedback to Doubt, though, led to two huge changes to the initial design. One of which is that in previous builds, player’s bullets would stick indefinitely to the pegs surrounding the cloud and then a player would have to “detonate” them with a separate interaction. The theory of this was that it would allow players to setup large combo chains which could yield big points and more damage to the doubt cloud. I could never figure out a good risk/reward for this system, though, and the additional button press felt awkward. When a colleague pointed this out, I had a partial epiphany that led to the player only shooting shots that, once stuck to a peg, were on a definite timer before their eventual explosion. Any further pegs that were stuck were dependent on the timer of that first bullet to get a real combo going. While still not entirely ideal (as there’s no reason not to be constantly shooting now), this was a definite step in the right direction for the game.

And, similar to Balance, all builds of Doubt up until the second to last one shared a common misstep (that I still failed to properly remedy): the full width of mechanics which make up the game are still largely non-apparent. Play-testers of Doubt were often confused as to what exactly was “good” to do and what was “bad.” Somewhat hackishly, my response to this was to add floating point notifiers that appeared on-screen whenever an action was executed which resulted in a change of score. Much to my surprise, this actually seems to have worked out pretty well.

Overall, Doubt was a fun project to work on, but I think Balance turned out much better. When I started Doubt, I didn’t have the same focus and clear intent as far as my gameplay and thematic goals when I started and, despite finding them eventually, I think that lack of clarity hurt. I also don’t feel that Doubt is all that deep or fun; there’s no real “strategy” to form. It’s very possible to just hold down left/right and the fire button and end up with a decent score. The one-button game with completely random potentially movement areas somehow required more attention and care to play than the one with full player agency. Still, it was a lot of fun to work on and the one-week limitation worked out well.

Also, thanks for all the feedback and support regarding Balance; it’s incredibly appreciated and all your awesome feedback has given me a lot of insight into what to do (and what to avoid) in the future. And let’s give a big high-five to Josh Sutphin for yet another set of rad music!

By Trent Polack | Posted in Game Design, Gaming | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments
Dec
13
2009

Balance

So my new game is done. Click the image to play:

This was kind of a strange project for me for a few reasons, not least of which being that I actually got it done in a timely manner. When I finished Magnetic Butterfly, I noted that the game took me about six-seven months to finish despite only taking about a month of active development, so it was nice to actually finish Balance in a timely fashion. I also believe that the short development time helped me focus in on translating the initial emotion/inspiration for the game into the final game without losing a lot in between. One of the down sides to the rapid development is that I’m fairly certain the scripts which make up the project are readable only by me, which is okay, and probably ludicrously inefficient, which isn’t as okay. That said, much like when I was working on Asplode!, I seem to be much more productive and creative with what I do when I treat the writing of game logic as the equivalent of a sketch.

The two primary constraints I had for this project were that the game had to use only a single button for input and that I had to adhere to the thematic inspiration for the project with no mechanics which worked against it. When I decided to do a one button-game, that included the constraint that I was also not going to allow movement support of any kind. It would have been easy to make a game, or even this game, work with, technically, one-button input and mouse scrolling or something, but that seemed like it would be cheating. To work the game’s theme into the mechanics and the one-button constraint then, I decided to severely limit a player’s agency in the game. The player cannot move of his own volition, he can only rely on any number of other entities in the game world to guide motion. This logic ended in the “attraction” mechanic that the game is based on and while the spawning of the pegs in the game world is random, players are not completely without agency to, roughly, guide their movement through the game world.

Ironing out the attraction logic was, without a doubt, the most difficult part of the project. The peg spawning is random, and that’s intentional and desirable (from my perspective), but the player should always have a rough idea of what will happen when he starts attracting to pegs. This was easy enough to smooth over when I had it so that the player could only attract to one peg at a time, but not only did that not feel right or interesting but it didn’t support the theme. Adding logic so that the player could, potentially, be attracting to every peg in the scene almost instantly felt like the right move both as a design and aesthetic consideration. Some early play-tests from friends, however, found the movement at this point in the project completely frustrating. One testimonial went: “this game is monumentally frustrating. I think I hate you for it. you should seriously be punched in the junk.”

That reaction made me revisit the movement mechanics of the game one more time (about four or five hours before the game was “done”). Initially, all of the pegs the player was attached to had “strengths” and these were modulated by their distance from the player. The issue was that the strengths varied so wildly and the distance modulation was so progressive that it was possible for the furthest peg to have the most pull. When I revisited this logic, I reduced the range of strengths (which now only vary by +/-0.1 units as opposed to +/-1.0) and also made the closest peg have a clear domination over any of the secondary ones (its strength is increased by 75% and the secondary have their strengths reduced by 50%). This change, alone, made the movement mechanics far smoother.

The biggest failure of Balance is the concept of the player’s “energy,” and it’s either an issue of an unnecessary mechanic (which is arguable) or simply being a poorly-communicated one (which is a fact). A player has an energy value in the range of [0,1], starting at 1.0 when the game starts, and that value is constantly decaying. The player is gaining energy whenever he is attracting to pegs or takes hearts. When a player is at full energy and is still gaining energy, that’s when the score goes up. If the player is at low energy (and the white ball is at its darkest) and continues to lose energy, the score goes down. I thought about ways to better communicate this mechanic, but it would have necessitated additional visual complexity as either another in-world effect (which would have muddied up the aesthetic) or a HUD element (which I absolutely did not want). I decided to leave it in the game for the release, as I think it has some promise, it’s just broken in its current state.

More than anything else, I think Balance helped me solidify what I think will be my game “style” for a couple more projects. This project my first real attempt at “expressing myself” through a game and either for that reason or the hyper-abbreviated development cycle, it was a lot a fun.

By Trent Polack | Posted in General | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments
Dec
06
2009

Meta

The video game designer has an idea. It sprung out of a song on his iPhone as he was walking to a greasy burger joint. And for that one moment, the entirety of the game was perfect in his mind’s eye. Just that one moment.

Precious minutes later, as he picks through a bag filled with small, greasy french fries, he tries to piece together the pieces left from that initial moment. He takes a single fry, one far too small to even be worthy of dipping in ketchup and moves it through a series of nearby fries. As a visual reference, it’s lacking. The runt fry is eaten.

As the designer walks back home, he attempts to flesh out the image in his head. It’s a game about about attraction, balance, and love. He knows he doesn’t have the time, interest, nor artistry necessary to make these ideas have a one-to-one correspondence with the sources of the idea. Not that it matters, he thinks, that relationship should remain as loose as possible. His style, if it can be called that, allows for and encourages as abstract a representation as necessary. He refines an earlier thought: not attraction, he thinks, but physical attraction. He realizes that clarifies nothing. If he still had the fry, he would move along a straight path until its proximity to another fry caused it to curve in that direction.

When he gets home, he finds his laptop to try and make his fifteen minute old idea into a game. After the software update. While the update downloads and installs, he sets up a music playlist solely containing songs from the band that was his inspiration. He sets it on repeat. If he knew which specific song in the list of names was the one that triggered this whole endeavor, he would set that on a one-song repeat, but that was effort.

Software update finished. Erm. Now to get the patch to the software update. A response to an important message in one of the designer’s inboxes might as well be written now.

Forty minutes later and utilizing Version 2.6.1f3 of his development tool, the designer places a sphere in the middle of empty gray space. He’s unsure whether or not the sphere is the actual protagonist, if it can be called as such, or simply a placeholder. No matter, though, the collision shape will, well, should be valid throughout. He sets up an orthographic camera because, fundamentally, he assumes 3D would take away any of the character to the ideally minimalist aesthetic. The style, if it can be called that, supports this choice. Realizing his deskcouch lacks proper warmth, a blanket is added to the work area. And headphones. Tinny laptop speakers do no good for anyone focusing on something.

The designer, now comfortable and set to work, sets to work. He takes a drink of the nearby pop that he doesn’t remember ever getting. It’s warm. And flat. And now empty. He sets aside his workstation, if it can be called so, to replace the pop.

Sitting back down, re-blanketing, re-positioning the headphones, and picking the laptop up off the floor, the designer looks at the sphere in the middle of gray 3D space. He feels this is a good spot to save the project and scene and does so under an appropriately vague name in a folder amongst five other similarly-named unfinished projects. Looking back at the scene, he figures he needs to establish some world boundaries. He tosses in four planes in the scene where he thinks, approximately, the view boundaries are. He tries to setup mesh renderers so he can validate this in-world, but, well, orthographic view. And planes. “Balls,” he says aloud. His cat, sleeping nearby, opens his eyes and looks in his owner’s direction. The cat remains unmoving, yawns, and closes his eyes.

“Well,” he says aloud still, “this’ll do for now, I’ll just–” the nearby phone rings.

Ten minutes later; blanket, headphones, and laptop, re-oriented. Pop empty again. “Fuck it,” the designer says, grabbing a nearby Xbox controller, “Instant Netflix it is.”

Two hours later. He picks up the laptop from the floor, opens it up, and sees the sphere, still sitting in the gray void with plane collision meshes surrounding it on four sides. Knock on the door.

The designer walks opens the door to the apartment, aspects of his workplace strewn about the living room. The sun outside has set. The designer looks at the laptop sitting open on the couch, the screen darkened after an hour of inactivity. The cat walked to the door to greet the designer. The cat rolls around the ground around one of the designer’s cast-aside running shoes.

“God dammit,” he says.

A run, a shower, dinner, errands, and two or three hours later, the designer sits back down on the couch. He puts fifteen minutes of research into various functions for the development tool. The phone nearby buzzes, any associated sound muffled by the over-sized headphones the designer has on. The designer picks up the cold phone and sees a text from a friend asking if the designer saw the ‘amazing’ episode of a show from earlier in the week.

Looking the show up online to watch, the designer finds it. It’s a double-length episode.

An hour and a half later, the designer closes the internet browser he used to watch the show. The development tool takes focus. The designer looks at the white sphere sitting amidst the gray 3D void, nothing else in the scene other than planar collision meshes.

He opens up a text editor and starts writing.

By Trent Polack | Posted in Game Design | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments
Dec
03
2009

We’re All New

“Now I know this is all new to ya, but remember something, we’re all new. This is not an ancient industry. This whole place here is built around speed. Start the story, start the chase. I get bored easy,” Mack Sennett said as he walked around an editing room in 1915.

“How much you reckon Mack? Couple yards of Mabel?” Roland Totheroh asked, referring to a few seconds of film with film star Mabel Normand tied to a train track that could be spliced into the reel to replace a few seconds of the ruined scene that was filmed earlier.

“Hmm, yeah. Nah, make it three,” Mack responded. Turning back to a young Charlie Chaplin, Mack elaborated on his earlier statement, “But don’t go thinking we sacrifice quality. I never make more than two motion pictures a week, but I’ll spend up to a thousand dollars on each of ‘em if I have to.”

By Trent Polack | Posted in General | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments
Nov
27
2009

Awakened in Africa

I awake and find myself in an abandoned armory. All I can hear is the sound of a fly buzzing through the air. Occasionally, some other unidentifiable animals create a serene soundscape of yelps and caws in the background. Despite the complete lack of windows or portholes in the weapon dealer’s hut, I get the feeling that it’s sometime in the early morning.

In an attempt to determine what I’m supposed to be doing, I bring out my journal. According to its pages, I am tasked with going to a chemical dump and finding a recipe for Agent Yellow. According to my notes, Agent Yellow is a military-grade defoliant and the other faction, who I’m pretty sure was the source for my last mission, is sitting on a huge supply at this chemical dump. So that’s that then.

Putting my journal away, I open up my map to try and re-orient myself. I can only assume this is what amnesia feels like. My map says I’m at Mike’s Bar. I figure I’ll go to the actual bar and catch up with old friends. Opening the door back to the outside world, I see a big white supply truck parked right outside. It’s got an absolutely massive gun mounted atop it. I think this is mine. Even if it’s not. Also it’s the middle of the night. So much for intuition.

Every movement I take is confusing. Basic walking is simple enough. Jumping too. I’m clearly still in tune with what it takes to both aim and fire my gun as well. As I attempt to switch my weapon, though, I find myself throwing a grenade. A grenade right into the back of my supply truck. My old supply truck now, I guess. I keep trying to get my pistol out, failing miserably every time. One time I even noticed that I was crouching. Then it hit me and, by hit me, I mean I reached the end of the combinatorial line and only had a few impulses left which would get me what I wanted. Success. I have my silenced pistol in hand now as I walk to the bar.

Along the way I shoot a lawn chair.

When I enter the bar, I notice the fly that in the armory must have followed me in. An old guy at the bar looks at me, and leans on the bar in an apparent attempt to feign disinterest. He says “Here comes trouble” when I approach him and has a grin on his face. He seems incapable of saying anything else once we’re face-to-face, though, so I assume we had some awkward relationship in the past. A twenty-something at a nearby table asks me “What are you doing out here, man?” when I walk by. That’s apparently as far as he wants to take the conversation as well. A blonde guy near the door doesn’t even care for an introduction and just stands there, checking out the old guy at the bar. I feel the urge to break the ice between the two. This bar’s dead.

Leaving the bar I accidentally threw a Molotov Cocktail instead of switching back to my AK-47. It, unfortunately, landed on a blue jeep near the bar. I hope this was blondie’s. I notice that my white supply truck is still there in one piece; I get in, the engine turns over, and drive as quick as possible out of the growing fire by the jeep. Quickly opening my map, I see I’m only about a five minute drive out from the chemical dump. I put the map away and get going. Thirty seconds pass and I take the map back out because I’m lost. Oh. Okay. There. Got it. Map goes away again. Okay, fuck it. This thing stays out.

Is it wrong of me to wish this thing had a radio? The creaking I’m hearing from this bridge as I drive over it is somewhat terrifying.

My map says I’m near Cock Fights. That sounds awesome. Wait, what, why am I being shot at. Oh. There’s apparently a patrol near the Cock Fights. I suppose that makes sense. Keep the cocks in check. Feverishly, I put my already-damaged supply truck in reverse and go as far away as I ca–I hit a tree. I jump out of my truck (from the right door as apparently I hit something on the left side as well) and make a run for it oh god dammit I just threw another grenade. Amnesia is rough. Hiding behind a nearby rock, I wait for the sound of the voice of one of my assailants to get a bit closer… And, there. It took half a clip, but he’s down. I sit still for a few seconds and see one of his comrades running out to look at his downed body and, bam, he joins him. Well. He would if I could aim. Now that I have three of them shooting at me at once, I fall back a bit.

Unfortunately, I fell back too far. As I attempted to take out the other guards I managed to burn through both of the clips of ammunition for my AK-47. Swapping to my silenced pistol, I realize the futility of being an amnesiac who jumps right back into the fight as if however many months have passed won’t affect a thing. Crouching down to the ground, I move through the grass in a serpentine fashion just as I have been taught. I notice a two-door white car as I walk past and just as I make a mental note of its location, I see a slumped over body leaning against it. I don’t remember shooting this guy.

My screen turns red. How have I been shot? I’ve been all sneaky-like. Looking around, I see the body slumped against the car was not a dead body, but someone who had been injured and was taking cover. He holds his pistol weakly in the air as he lets a few more rounds off in the direction of my face. I’m hit once more. I throw a grenade — this time it’s intentional — and run for cover. Now he’s dead. Oh. The car. So is the car. Frick.

I know there’s at least one other guy still in the area. I have a mental count going. Plus I hear him talking to himself. I think I can sneak up on oh my god it’s a grenade and this time I didn’t throw it. And I’m still near the near-wreckage of this car. I run for cover, away from the guard, and scrape by with just a few injuries. I have the cat-like reflexes of a cat. A cat recovering from amnesia. I stick a syringe in myself to make the pain go away and then switch back to my weapon HOW MANY TIMES CAN I ACCIDENTALLY THROW A GRENADE. Or in this case another Molotov Cocktail. My bodily impulses need to get in check. Also my sneaking ground is now on fire. Time to take this fight to the guy who started it. And there he is. I drop my pistol’s entire magazine into his face. And… He’s still standing. I reload and fire off eight more rounds in rapid succession. Still standing. I say screw it and run up closer, aim for his head — because it’s personal at this point and because my pride can only take so many misses — and he goes down like a drunken narcoleptic.

Looking around, I lost my supply truck. The car I planned on taking is only a burned-out husk. My sneaking area is on fire. There are three dead bodies. I’m down a health syrette. And I have no ammo. There are also neither cocks nor cock fights occurring at this location.

Oh, this is apparently an ammunition-heavy outpost, though. So scratch that bit.

As I’m walking to the chemical dump, I notice my diamond finder 2000 blinking. I follow its signal to a nearby, thankfully abandoned, shack. I whip out my machete without lighting anything on fire, break down the door, and open the briefcase that I only hope isn’t some poor soul’s life savings. One measly diamond. So I’m sure if that was the case he just recently started saving. I’m providing him with an incentive to find a better stash, really. I slash a few more things with my machete because it restores some small amount of self-esteem given that I just blew up two cars and almost died at the hands of three poorly-trained guards. I also run in sprints and do neat little slides which make me think of fonder days.

I see an unmarked guard post near the Claes Products chemical dump that I momentarily contemplate seizing for the sake of cryptographical completeness. I then have a flashback about the rigorous battle I just completed and think better of it. Maybe some other time, I say. Well. A little look won’t hurt. I ascend a nearby hill and take out my spyglass and have a gander at the guard post. I see angry guy with gun. Two angry guys with guns. Three– oh, they have ammunition. I don’t need any of that. I mark that on my map and skidattle.

Except apparently I chose the one direction in which they have a sniper looking at. This can’t be a real thing right now. I run through the forest towards the chemical dump with my machete, in the hopes that this sniper has ADD. He doesn’t. He somehow has the only direct line of vision into this small little valley entrance to the chemical dump. I turn around, try to find him, and eventually see a small sliver of a man in the distance. Armed only with my silenced pistol, as I don’t want to alert the whole guard post to my location, I line up the shot and…

I die. This is an actual thing that’s happening. Oh. Wait. I’m not dead. I open my eyes and low and behold: a beautiful woman! She’s helping me! This is totally the best icebreaker. I’d talk but the only thing I can think to say is “Hey, I like your face” so I keep it in. She gets me to my feet, instructs me to check my wound, and fires off a few rounds at the sniper to give me some breathing room to do so. I like this lady. By the time I inject a syrette into my wound, she’s gone. And I make a mad sprint towards the chemical dump.

It’s a very wide-open space. Scoping out the terrain with my spyglass, my only real option is a sprint towards a nearby wood pile and then take out the only guard I can see quickly and quietly. Chances of success: slim.

I make the mad dash to the wood pile easily enough. I pull out my silenced pistol and creep a bit closer to the guard. He’s walking towards me, so I line up the shot. Holy crap I actually took him down. Go me. As I crawl towards the body to get some ammo, I discover that there was a second guard nearby whose clothes helped him blend in with a tree. I duck behind cover and hope he just thinks his friend is sleeping. He stood over the corpse a second too long and I took him out in one shot. I now assume that before I lost my memory I was pretty much the consummate badass. Crawling a bit closer to the big warehouse, I notice another guard who is almost completely invisible in the darkness. He was dispatched with as much ease as his two compatriots.

Moving forward, I crawl along the side of the building look for an entrance. I hear at least two guards chatting it up inside. I eventually find a small torn hole in the fencing which is just big enough for me to crawl through. It’s also right next to a giant explosive barrel. And a nearby guard. Fantastic. If I was a smart person, I would not do what I’m about to do. I take out the guard in the warehouse with my silenced pistol, hoping it doesn’t draw an abundance of attention in the next ten seconds. I slip into the warehouse prepared to be sighted by a group of guards and… nothing. I look up to the second floor railing and see nothing. I then hear a group of guards outside talking:

“Do you hear that?”
“Yeah, are they attacking?”
“I don’t think so. I think it’s just one guy.”
“I–”

I killed that guy.

His friend ran for cover, so I made my way to the back of the warehouse. Unfortunately, another guard discovered the corpse of the first guy that I dispatched in the area. Just as I turned around, he tossed a grenade my way. I run, evade the blast, switch to my AK-47, and empty a clip through the smoke. Unsurprisingly, I fail. I then see a muzzle blast from the enemy as the smoke clears, aim at it, burst fire, and kill him. I run up to the second-floor railing in the warehouse as three more enemies close in from me at the front entrance. I try to throw a grenade and realize, unfortunately, that they’re all gone for some strange reason. I see a crate filled with grenade supplies in the distance, though. I drop two magazines taking out two of the three enemies closing in on me. With only fourteen rounds remaining, I turn around to drop down to the ground and see, oh hey, I see a brief of diamonds. I grab it, because money is important, and then run out of the warehouse to a nearby hut (grabbing the grenade supply in the process).

I also find some ammunition and syrettes in the hut. And, uh, a folder? I grab it and I feel like my objective is complete. Now I just have to make it back to blondie at the bar who I now discover is the source of my mission. There’s a jeep nearby that somehow managed to make it through the skirmish that I grab and drive out in style. I hit a few trees and ran into a river, but I made it out of those A-OK. No problem. The engine is smoking but that’s a feature.

Since I took the same route back to the bar as I came, I knew to avoid the cock fights. I hug a nearby wall as I drive speeding by and WHAT WHY is my malaria striking now. Really? I take a quick pill and realize that not only is the cock fight guard post restacked with enemies, but they heard my not-so-incognito jeep. This time, though, I’m not screwing around. I man the mounted gun and just relieve the guards of their posts. Done and done. I do a quick repair job on my jeep’s engine and we’re good to go.

The rest of the drive back to the bar was surprisingly uneventful. When I walk into the bar, blondie says “The bitch is back” which I guess is a thing. He then promptly asks if I found “it.” I hand him the folder, and I guess his name is Paul, and he tells me “Holy crap this is great!” And that’s it. No diamonds or anything. My reputation increases, which is all well and good exept I can’t buy new weapons on reputation alone. Thanks a lot Paul. Dick. I knew you were no good. I should have gotten the old man to take you out. Why do you even want a recipe for Agent Yellow anyway? I should just kill you now. I won’t. But I should.

And because a simple mission for some blonde guy in a bar yields such interesting, dynamic gameplay that compels me to write about it in ways that I simply don’t for most games, Far Cry 2 is my Game of the Decade.

By Trent Polack | Posted in Game Design, Gaming | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments