Posts published during October, 2010

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October 31, 2010

The Tutor System

A typical narrative structure in games is to have an opening cinematic as a prologue, a tutorial, another cinematic that establishes the setting and character, then you trade off telling story and having the player play levels. If your narrative branches, those branches are actually contained within the narrative itself, simply having you pick a “narrative track” at defined points. The big answer to this has been to have story bits, disconnected portions of story that the player discovers, or doesn’t, at their own pace. In between the two is Bioware’s solution of larger but totally required story bits that the player can take in any order.

And then there’s my brainchild.

The Tutor System.


Constructing The Narrative

You begin by laying down a large arc, we’ll call this the ideal scenario. Then we design the game without any attached story, then we test the game without any attached story and have the testers send us back replays. From these we take the players that performed the most optimally and write the story of their play through using the ideal scenario as context. We take those that failed and start searching them for common points of failure, we then write stories where the players failings are commented on as the failings of the main character, and sympathetic characters give advice for how to come back from there. Then we go back through our scenarios and find milestones that are common to all or nearly all players, these milestones become testing points where we place in scripted events. If the player has performed well to this point, they are given a reward and a greater responsibility, for instance they may be awarded with a new colony that needs to be saved from a desperate shortage. If on the other hand, the player has failed to perform to the ideal then they are given an easier scenario to handle but one that won’t reward them nearly as well, the player is given some free ships their clan scored in the colony’s foreclosure sale. This creates a new story line, that of the ideal ideal, a player who has met the ideal conditions at every point.

Pros

It’s a game. No really the story itself is a telling of how the player played the game, meaning the story and the game are always in near perfect agreement.

We already keep track of these statistics, how else can we have achievements for walking 2 miles?

All the writing is done after the game is already done, meaning we can be inclusive and get the community in on fleshing out the writing.

Writing can be done one or two paragraphs at a time, we really don’t need or even want a novel at the various points.

You can pace your writing so that it fits the game, being laconic when the player is busy and being long winded when the player isn’t moving very quickly.

It can be relatively personal, since you know what it takes to come up with certain statistical combinations, you can talk more or less directly to the player about what their options are.

Finding holes and improvements in your narrative becomes part of your bug reporting process.

It never really ends.

This is a great system for Strategy Games and RPGs.

This creates a situation where writers will be learning how to write for games, not how to adapt novel and movie story lines to games. There will be a need for structures that match how a player interacts with the game, and supports those interactions.

Cons

All the writing is done after the game is already done, so you are never going to get your writing done early. Also patching the game may break your entire story.

Lots of writing…. lots and lots and lots and lots and lots…

We rarely store that much data right now, there’s a big difference between storing a single score variable and some semblance of that score’s history.

Voice actors, if you have any, will either hate you for calling them every couple of weeks or love you for giving them permanent employment.

There won’t always be a story, since scenarios you haven’t had people actually play yet won’t have any checks built into them.

You’re going to have to spend a massive amount of time sorting and “reading” play throughs, and that’s not going to scale well.

It never really ends.

It can be more difficult to keep the story cohesive with itself, especially since the writer can’t really force the player to follow a script.

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Social Games 360

So it’s been a while, I haven’t read too many major fluff ups between social games creators and indie game creators in the last week or so. So here is my take on social games, my full 360 degree take, the games, the people, the zeitgeist.

!. Have I played Farmville!?

No I haven’t played Farmville.  I checked out what I could of the Agency’s marketing game until it fatally bugged out on me, and I played a bit on one of Metaplace’s releases named something to the effect of My Vineyard. Oh and a tiny bit of Vampire Wars. The big thing these games hammered home to me though is how NOT NEW this genre is. It’s a slight variation on the themes of browser based MMOs and web games  to better take advantage of flash and the social networks they’re built on. Not to say those changes aren’t significant, but they aren’t an opaque existence which I must wholly dive myself through in order to understand. In fact, having existed on several social networks they’re a fairly transparent lot.

(Web Games are of course an evolution of door games, keeping the relatively asynchronous portions while muds took the other branch and focused more on how they could be with more synchronous connections. Door games were an evolution of mainframe games where everyone had to be physically at the same machine at some point in the day, making them an obvious starting point for games where all the players would connect to the same machine just now over a network. So contrary to hype, social games aren’t the newest multi-player computer game genre EVER, they’re actually a relatively minor evolution on the oldest multi-player computer game genre ever.)

@. Dear Other Developers, This is Why People Find Them Fun

Take a second and think of your favorite PC game. Now ask yourself, at it’s core what are you actually physically doing while playing that game. For most new games that can be summed up as “clicking at a point on a screen”, for fpses it’s “pressing buttons and moving the mouse while clicking at the right time”, for older games it was “pressing buttons on the keyboard or 10-key”. Whatever we might delude ourselves into thinking these basic actions are actually kind of fun in and of themselves, even ye olde hardcore gamers  and developers, though you may not remember it now, had a point in your life when you just hit buttons to see what would happen next. Hell, the Diablo 2 ‘Cow Level’ was designed specifically because players tended to click on damn near everything. This is still an important point of game creation, make it juicy.

That’s not all it takes, otherwise the casual gaming revolution would have come so much faster for everything that isn’t solitaire. The difference is not in all the psychobabble inducing game mechanics though, those are just a second order to the metrics they use, and the metrics aren’t the answer either. The most important part is exactly the same as why gamers have been meeting up at QuakeCon, and made PAX the wild success it has been, bringing it up in casual conversation later. That’s the whole secret, it’s something to talk about. It’s so that you can thank a family member for sending you that sheep when you were having a shitty day, so that you have an excuse to friend that exceptionally hot potential love interest sitting next to you on the bus. It’s a part of your life, and all of their lives, and so all told something that helps to make you part of their lives.

Not fired up by that… me either. Still, as far as I can tell that’s how it is whether I much give a damn or not.

#. It’s Not an indictment

Saying that social games tend to be simple, is not really an indictment of them. The only way that the major social games can get the kinds of numbers they do is by NOT being a major part of people’s lives. All of these discussions though are dominated by people for whom gaming is a major part of their life, either their gamers who take their gaming seriously enough to define themselves by it, or developers for whom it’s a matter of basic employment. For most of the people playing Farmville and Mafia Wars, it’s a completely throw away decision, I have a couple minutes to spare, do I spend them on Farmville or Solitaire… decisions… For the most part though, it should be a throw away decision. Gaming for most people should be a distraction, something entertaining and away from their otherwise very busy and high functioning lives, not a life sentence.

Even amongst developers some of these games should be given fair credit, simple is hard. Being able to think of something that is simple and simply fun is one of the hardest things you can do. We WANT to make things overly complicated, to add just one more… feature, and resisting that urge and making something simple and tight is extremely difficult.

$. Zynga is Not Indie

Having said all of that, it’s gotten really annoying. It may be true that Zynga is not funded by one of the major publishers, but that doesn’t make them part of the indie games movement. Even if the word technically fits, it doesn’t matter because the movement is not tied to the pedantic definition of the word. That’s also part of why a shortened or slang version of the word is used rather than a dictionary word. Just not being published isn’t what it’s about, you can’t be part of a movement by default. Indie is about not wanting to be beholden to publishers, to their way of doing things and their priorities. Zynga is the EPITOMY of their priorities. They are about wringing money from customers no matter the methods, and placing financial gain above any desire to make good games. Even on the outside issues they are opposite, the use of player metrics as a concept of a game’s worth does nothing to address problems of local peaks, and their clone everyone else strategy is antithetical to the creativity first games-as-art ideals. Don’t even get me started on where they don’t fit with games-for-change.

I get how that can come across as elitist, but that’s just too damn bad. People have been making games on their own for forever, it only became a movement because some of those people decided that just ignoring the problems wasn’t enough they needed to be fixed. Trying to say that people who have done jack all to fix those problems, people who have embraced the very core of those problems, are the best of the movement is insulting… VERY FUCKING INSULTING! Want me to stop bitching about Zynga, okay, it’s real fucking easy, STOP TELLING ME TO BE THEM! STOP TELLING ME I SHOULD WANT TO BE PART OF THEM! STOP TELLING ME THAT I SHOULD HAVE ANY GOD DAMN MOTHER FUCKING THING TO DO WITH THEM… AT ALL! God fucking shit but that does get me frothing. I’m not really all that annoyed with Zynga’s existence, obviously some of the things they did are completely unethical and I don’t like that, but the mere mention of their name didn’t used to send me into a frothing rage. It’s their god damn apologists that are driving me nuts. I think a lot of indie devs out there had much the same view, not us so not something to care about, but then there was this whole thing about how we should be them… and that… well I’m ending this topic here before I turn into the hulk.

%. Social Games Don’t Have to Be Farmville

One of the web games I played back in the day was Neveron. If you compared it to the last web game I’d played before it, it was like night and day… like comparing some silly soccer minigame with Football Manager 2010. There isn’t anything inherent to social games that says they can’t be deeper and more complicated, and I’m sure if I spent lots of times playing all the social games I could get my hands on I’d find some that already are like that. The problem is, if you’re entire sorting functions for viewing them are by popularity and by date added, then there really isn’t any way to separate out those niches and see what they have to offer. By definition then, the most findable games are the most popular, the rest is always going to sit at the bottom. Also as I pointed out recently, 5 people’s 5th favorite is always more popular than 2 people’s most favorite. Getting anywhere near the top of a list where the highest end are in the tens of millions means designing for an audience in the millions at least, which makes for a certain amount of unnecessary homogeneity and designing to be lots of people’s less favorites. Now obviously this is mostly about Facebook, but as they are the big name for the moment, it’s their rules that you’re really going to be playing by in the end.

You can still use word of mouth, obviously, but the simple fact is that, if you’re going to design those more complicated games, Facebook is a poor portal to open on. Combine that with the fact that most times it’s the only portal you can really open on and I think it starts to become fairly obvious why we aren’t being bombarded by news of crazy new social games.

^. Wrapping it up.

And there you have it, social games are not Jesus Christ, nor Lucifer. They aren’t out to steal your lunch… and they won’t on accident either. It’s good that we have more selection, more job opportunities, and more design opportunities, they are not going to single handedly save the industry from itself though. If you are a designer who has decided to stick to more traditional venues, you haven’t made an irrevocable mistake that will result in drowning under a new tide ushered in by social games. If you’ve decided to make social games, it’s okay, we’re not going to burn you at the stake, really. (At least I’m not…) Neither group has some monopoly on rightness though, and neither group should really be as insulting to the other as they have been.

Maybe this is just me since I can’t pull up any corroborating posts at the moment… but to an extent, throughout the volleys back and forth I’ve always felt like there was some intent in every post to force people into the discussion. Those kind of hyperbolic, “not with me, well then you are just a(n) (unethical bastard/dinosaur in a tar pit) and are completely and unequivocally wrong. Your silence is merely proof of how right I am.” I don’t know about anyone else, but even if I don’t feel particularly strongly about something, seeing that attitude makes it hard for me resist blasting them into a new dimension for sheer arrogance.

P.S. I still think vapid is a perfect descriptor, it should only be insulting though if you think they aren’t supposed to be.

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October 28, 2010

#77

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October 26, 2010

#76

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October 22, 2010

Rankings

“The number one item on the list is not necessarily anybody’s favorite. What might be number 8 on a Metallica fan’s list may appear at number 9 on a Slayer fan’s list and number 4 on a Pink fan’s list. But if you just give a point for making it into someone’s top ten, then Metallica, Slayer and Pink each have 1 while our theoretical artist has 3.”

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October 16, 2010

Necromancress


Done with photo reference.

http://soagcure.psychochild.org/files/2010/10/necromancressref.png

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Customers, Marketing, Thoughts, Pants.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the pure first day hype machine, but I’d like to give a good argument here as to why. There is such a thing as a wrong customer.

Roughly speaking we can divide customers into three groups. Positive growth customers, neutral growth customers and negative growth customers. It’s important that we use the term growth here, since while their effects are real and definite, they aren’t going to be entries in the income or expense columns. As you can probably guess, positive growth customers are people who give you good word of mouth, but it’s not limited to that. Positive growth customers are also more likely to buy expansions and dlc, or to replace lost games by buying them. In general, though, a positive growth customer is someone who has converted to your gospel and will directly influence an increase in future sales.

We can skip neutral growth customers, as I think they’re fairly self explanatory. The last group is the negative growth customer. They spread poor word of mouth, are more likely to sell a game used, and may turn to piracy if they ever have a need to replace medium lost or given away. Even though they are as much a paying customer as the others, they will soon have cost your company more than they paid in. Unfortunately their costs are invisible and their presence is hidden in the income side of your balance sheet.

I’ve already ran in to some disagreement on this, but by and large I don’t think negative growth customers have flawed personalities or anything like that. Mostly, I believe it’s that they either self-identify as your core audience even though they aren’t, or have been convinced by your marketing that they are part of your target audience even though they weren’t. Oft times, it’s a feeling of betrayal that motivates them to action.

MMOs are especially open to these influences. Unlike many other types of games, the success of an MMO is hinged on it’s long term prospects rather than it’s first week sales, this leads to there being a much more obvious and dramatic curve to follow. The two most famous examples I can think of are WAR and SWG. WAR was the butt of an especially overblown hype campaign, leading them to open with almost a million players, a million over-excited, over-sold players. When the opening wound up being less than perfect, not only did they drop to 300k within the first few months, revealing many of those to be negative growth customers, even among those that remained there was a large segment of negative growth customers. The game is still around, but all signs point to their not having truly recovered from the damage yet.

SWG, on the hand, hand a strong start with plenty of positive growth customers and excellent prospects. Eventually though, came a series of game changing patches culminating in the infamous combat upgrade(CU). What really sent SWG down to life support for the next few years though was not the changes to game mechanics, it was that they essentially turned entire communities of positive growth customers into negative growth customers. The sales and revenue lost, indirectly, to the CU are probably enough to make George Lucas cry, but they’ll never appear on any balance sheet or book keeping. Going back to WAR, they’ve probably lost more money from their marketing campaign than from any design flaws actually present in the game.

The good news for the amateur marketer is that while you may not be able to build good metrics for positive and negative customer populations, it’s still fairly easy to determine a general zeitgeist for your game. How are your reviews generally fairing, how are you sounding in the blog o sphere, do posts about your game generally open a wellspring of bile and hatred, compare that with what your actual customer growth statistics are saying and you should have a general idea where you’re headed. Also pay attention to what message your marketing is sending, if you’re seeing a sudden decrease in growth a while after a major campaign, it may be that your campaign is giving people false impressions of your game.

Finally while negative growth customers are bad, they also aren’t walking crisis that all need to be fixed. Some of the largest games on the market have insane numbers of negative growth customers, but they are completely overshadowed by the cumulative force of the positive growth customers.

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October 14, 2010

Political: It’s Funny Not Rambly

“If only George Washington were around to lead us…”
“You rang!?”
“Oh, thank god, it’s George Washington.”
“Yes, I’m here, now what is going on?”
“You’ve got to help us Mr. Washington, these liberal progressives are planning a revolution!”
“So you want me to lead their army?”
“Uhh, no…”
“Oh so you want me to do stump speeches, drum up some recruits.”
“Not exactly…”
“Well I could go be an ambassador to the French, I have good friends there!”
“The French!? No, no no, they’re the bad guys!”
“Did the French invade our country since I’ve been gone!”
“Uhh, not that I’m aware of…”
“Actually, since it’s several centuries there must have been great strides in political and economic thinking. I hardly dare imagine how much beyond the system we set up you’ve advanced! Oh if only Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Franklin were here, I should think they would hardly bear to be absent from the halls of your great universities for even a second!”
“You know, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea…”

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October 12, 2010

A piece of concept art.

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October 8, 2010

Game Design Quickie: Demon’s Bluff

Pieces:

Chess Board

2x miniatures in the form of an archdemon, a small tab on the front has 10 written on it.

2x miniatures of an imp with a small tab on the back with 1 written on it.
2x miniatures of an imp with a small tab on the back with 2 written on it.
2x miniatures of an imp with a small tab on the back with 4 written on it.
2x miniatures of an imp with a small tab on the back with 8 written on it.

All imp miniatures are identical except for the number on their tab.

The goal of the game, like chess, is to capture the opponents archdemon. The archdemon is capable of moving 2 spaces, up, down, left, right. The imps are capable of moving 3 spaces up, down, left, right, forwards diagonal.

Units are captured by moving an attacking piece onto a defending piece. If the score of the attacker is equal to or higher than that of the defender the piece is captured. If a forward facing piece has a score lower than the defender the attack is simply ineffective. If the piece has a rear facing number then any piece it attacks is automatically considered captured unless the opponent decides to “call your bluff.” If the piece attacking was too low to capture the piece it is captured instead. If the piece attacking was high enough to capture the defender, then the piece is removed from play and the value of the attacker is subtracted from the archdemon’s score. If an imp piece is being captured by the archdemon, the player may bluff and declare the piece too large to be captured. If an attacker calls a defender’s bluff, then if the piece could have been captured it will, if it was too large to capture though, the difference in score will be subtracted from the archdemon’s score. If an archdemon’s score falls to 0 it is automatically considred captured.

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