I strained my arm a bit reaching into the barrel of the large pulse laser to polish the exposed optics inside, outside Dulcman finally pulled up in his clunky old truck. I pulled my arm out, swishing the cloth around the opening, a dab of polish along the edge of the barrel would keep burned particulates from building up as the weapon was fired, extending it’s life in the field.

“Imagine that, one Clan War relic polishing another.” Dulcman said as he walked into the shade of the barn.
“That’s how you make it to relic, by looking out for each other. Anyways, you got my munitions?”
“It’s all there, brought the crane truck to help with loading. I can back it on in and get to work whenever you’re ready. By the way, where is the lbx going?”
“Right here,” I motioned to an open port under the laser.

For the next few hours we worked in relative silence, only talking to hammer out some detail of the fitting or coordinate things needing the both of us. The sun sat low on the horizon where it filtered in through the warps in the wood at the back of the barn by the time we had finished the fitting and polishing. We’d sat down on a bench that was handy, wiping away the sweat and drinking some god awful nutritional liquid packets, when Dulcman finally reached into his coat and pulled out a packet papers.

“It’s not as much as I’d like, but theres some names and contact info in there along with some decent surveillance. Looks like our revolutionaries are well armed and well funded, but not recovering well from the battle. They’ve got a battalion of mechs, which in itself is pretty nuts for a backwater like this, I’m smelling some heavy Liao funding here. Their most dangerous group is Company Delta, one assault mech per lance, with one mostly heavy lance and two mostly medium lances. The other two companies are all lights and a couple mediums. Looks like nobody trusted these jokers with any clan tech, so their assaults are fairly standard Marauders. Ton for ton, you’ll probably be the most dangerous thing on the battlefield, definitely the best mechwarrior on it. Of course, the army didn’t go down without a fight so some of their units are out of commission at the moment. Doubt they’re having an easy time finding anyone willing to deliver replacement parts either.”
“My only objective is to free the Duchess, this should be plenty to keep ‘em busy.”
“I figured as much, but it may not be that simple. If you’ve been watching the news then you know Marik’s been cock blocking planet gov’s attempts to increase security funding. Truth is, they’ve given us up as too much trouble for our level of independence. They’re refusing to send support troops unless we agree to a finish the annexing process immediately, even the jokers in the capital aren’t stupid enough to just agree to that. You may be the only thing resembling a military once this is done so don’t expect to just walk away.”
“If that winds up the case I’ll figure something out. So who am I looking at here?”
“John Rafkin, came in during the construction boom and bought himself a small dropship and a commercial pilot’s license. With the boom over the work for smaller ships dried up, all went to the big guys who could run multiple jobs at once. He’s a gambler too looking at a small fortune in debt so it shouldn’t be too hard to get the ship itself if you don’t want to work with him. Next is Billie Moser, she’s got a raven with a working beagle due to some research initiative or some shit. Anyways, research fell through but the Raven stayed behind. Figured you’re looking at hit and run tactics to start with, in which case the beagle is probably your best shot for coming back alive. After that are a few standard issue lowlifes who stand something to loose if the power shifts. I wouldn’t trust ‘em too far, but you’re going to need some boots on the ground if you’re really gonna get this done.”
“Thanks Dulce.”
“Yeah well the information wasn’t free, but Raffard paid for it when I called him to set up the deal. Guess he still feels he owes you something. Theres a message in there for you at the bottom of the stack.” He got up to walk back to his truck in the waning daylight, turning around one last time, “don’t go and get yourself killed. I’ve buried enough customers in this business, would hate to bury a friend.” A few moments later the truck was fading into the horizon, leaving me alone with the ‘mech, and the papers. I separated out the note and stuffed in my pocket, I’d read it later, right now I had homework to do.

I eat breakfast. I put a kettle on, go out and take care of the animals. Gene rips, all of them, need some special care, but the milk is good and the breeding brings me in enough to live off of. Come back in and have my morning tea while starting on todays book. I stop reading long enough to grab some lunch and turn on the ComStar broadcast, I see her giving some speech, it’s enough for me. Do some errands, fix some broken posts, work on getting this old hover car back into working shape, that sort of thing. Then I go to sleep, and let the cycle start again. Days go by, then months, and somewhere along the line it became years. She was still on the broadcast, that hover car still didn’t work, and I still hadn’t forgotten or disappeared. Should have known, though, nothing lasts forever.

“We’re receiving reports from the planet’s southern continent more regularly now, they are confirming that Duchess Regina Enkel has been taken into custody at the city of New Dunkirk by members of the Veban Revolutionary Order. The VRO is claiming that their goal is for control of the planet to be relinquished to House Liao.”

I picked up the com receiver and punched in Dulcman’s number.
“Dulcie here, what can I do fer you.”
“Dulce, I need a full armament. LRM20s, some of those S-SRMs you’ve got stashed away, gauss rifle ammo, oh and an lbx-ac 5 if you’ve got it.”
“Ho ho, guess you been watching the news. Don’t know how you knew about my stash, but for you, it’s all on the table. Now about my price…”
“You know where to charge it, they still owe me a few. By the way, it’s worth double if you can get it out here and loaded before nightfall.”
“Be there within the hour, always a pleasure.”
There was more that I’d need so I went back to my room, into that closet I never used and opened that box I never open. The nano helmet was dusty, forgotten, but a few diagnostic button presses proved it was still functioning like new. The gun next to it came apart easy enough as I swabbed it back into shape. No sense letting some dust get me killed. Finally I walked out to the barn, listening to the rippers groan and bleat to no one in particular. Opening the transformer box revealed a small and unassuming switch next to the main circuit breakers which I pressed in and held for twenty seconds. Mechanical buzzing and whirring filled the air and the ground shook as the floor parted in the center of the barn. Achingly slowly, the frame rose out of the ground and up into position, the doors closing underneath it, finally falling with an immense metal on metal ring to rest both feet on the ground.

I look up, appreciating the simple beauty of the frame, the sleek curves and the angry mix of red and yellow paint in a digital camouflage formation. The Mad Cat merely looked out the door of the barn into open space. Conserving energy for the fight to come, I thought, then walked over and started filling a bucket of water, like I said, no sense letting the dust get me killed.

I think Canabalt is probably the best example I could give of what a game, at it’s core, really is.

We take a player, give them a quick context to orient themselves as to what we’re wanting them to do. Then we force them forward towards arbitrary barriers that can be overcome with a test of skill. Give the player a long term choice, in this case hit box to slow down or jump over box to keep speeding up. Use only as much simulation as you need and keep a clear and easily understood score count. And one final bit that isn’t required but that I think is something we’ve really lost, make failure not only inevitable, but the only possible outcome.

I noticed in one of the blogs that I followed the other day that someone bandied about a statement that seemed utterly absurd as soon as I saw it. “This is a game, you shouldn’t be forced to do [stuff the main discussion is about].” The problem is, not only should game designers force you to do stuff, it’s literally a core tenant of game design. In fact if I were asked what separates a game from a puzzle it would be that the game is forcing the player to come to a solution, while the puzzle doesn’t especially care if it’s solved or not. Sure we’ve gone to great lengths to find ways to hide, or beautify the fact that we’re forcing the player forward, and we’ve gone from being a lot less push them forward to more pull them forward. That hasn’t invalidated the fact that we’re dragging the player along somehow.

Of course the barriers we’re dragging them towards are basically arbitrary, but that’s not really such a bad situation. There has been a lot of focus recently on making the barriers into an elegant curve, easy to hard, but I don’t especially subscribe to that methodology. We’re not trying to find some optimum method of learning for learning’s sake. Our goal is to deal with the player’s psychology, and how they feel about their own abilities. Sometimes you need to put them in front of a barrier that is much higher than they “should” be able to overcome according to the curve. If they CAN succeed then they know that they’ve really grown and have new limits, if they can’t succeed then they actually get some useful information on what their limits really are. Likewise running into something easy, especially if it’s something they struggled against before, can help them see just how far they’ve grown and gain some appreciation for the obstacles they’ve faced. Just like a narrative, we’re not attracted to an abstract act structure, we’re attracted to a character’s story, our very memory works in stories. In order to keep people coming back to your game, the goal is not to make every minute fun, it’s to make the story they remember one of personal growth and enjoyment. Also a good thing Canabalt specifically does well is to make a situation where success is a combination of skill and luck. This means that after any given run, you can reason that it may be possible to go even further if you just got lucky, however it also allows how far you have gotten to matter since it really did take skill to get out that far at all.

It’s important though that these arbitrary barriers are testing a skill. It has to be something we can get better at, and something with a clearly defined success and failure case. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop mostly requires good timing, and in the case of Canabalt they specifically removed other concerns from the table. You cannot use buttons to change the vector of the jump, or power up for super long jumps, or jump off the screen, any of that stuff. Timing is the only bit they allow you to control and the only bit they test for. On top of this they add the sole bit of long term planning, speed, so that it takes much longer to feel bored or to train yourself to the point where you are reflexively capable of overcoming any challenge.

I could keep talking for a while about simulation, but really the part that I most want to address is that last bit, the untenable scenario. We see plenty of survival modes, but personally I’ve always thought that simply measuring time the player stayed alive was somewhat redundant. The player knows how long they lasted, not in minutes and seconds, but comparatively, next to previous lives. Also a simple time mechanic means that the player is always facing the same situation and being scored the same whether they are always pushing as hard as they can or simply drawing everything out. A scored survival mode, where time is deemphasized and score is counted is much more satisfying as it’s an ever growing challenge, but worth getting better at every stage of. Also, we’ve moved from the nintendo hard paradigm and unfortunately we lost something very valuable with it… that losing is okay. It’s fine to not hit the end and get the super cool ending, just get as far as you can then challenge it again. It’s an ethic of personal growth, rather than the more common practice of waiting for someone to hand you “Achievements”. I’ve never personally liked achievements, it’s just someone else who knows nothing about you giving you a pat on the head for doing something they like. There are things which I find trivially simple which for others around me would be major achievements, and vice versa, how anyone without any personal knowledge of you could have any idea what would be an achievement for you to accomplish simply boggles my mind. But then, there is a reason why I’m indie.

There’s a fine line that has to be walked when writing about something you’re already working on. Several studies have shown that talking about a goal, tends to release much the same rush as actually completing the goal, making you less likely to slog through the work in the middle. Nonetheless, I feel I really do need to post here to talk through some stuff.

So, officers began as a more general mental question about representing the importance of mid-level officers in an army. After hashing some stuff out I came to the conclusion that simply hiding the main army behind the officers and only allowing the player to interact at the officer level would best accomplish this. So I went out and built a little one click toy that made officers fight each other in a very abstract mathematical way.

While I was doing that I realized that it was built with an assumption of symmetry, that one officer would fight one enemy, etc… The toy didn’t have any way of handling asymmetrical armies. This got me thinking about what I really wanted out of this game, was I content to be a pure strategy game, or would there need to be tactical simulations? If there were tactical simulations would I really want the player to be in control? So I went out and read, a few different sites, looking for some inspiration on the issue. What was really important? Could Strategy be worked apart from tactics, and if it could, would that still communicate the main idea, the importance of officers in making things work on the ground? Well, I happened upon wikipedia’s page describing the double-envelopment, and it became rather clear to me, I needed a tactical simulation. However, just giving full control to the player is also out of the question, there is no point if the officers just become the unit the player moves instead of the traditional unit.

Haven’t started the tactical coding yet, still haven’t got all the details worked out yet, but I’m confident I’m going in that direction…

Anyways, I finished another toy representing castles which are going to be managed by the player. That’s helped me firm up some thoughts I’d been playing around with on that end as well. I guess that’s really all I have to say for now.

Click for larger image.

Usually this would be a bit of a teaser about the character in the illustration, but this week I actually want to talk about something a lot less art related.

Roughly 4 years ago I started writing on the new defunct GAX social network, at the time I wrote about the things that mattered to me, comic book creation, writing, game design and MMOs. All these years later I’m starting to realize that one of those things is no longer all that important in my life. One of those things no longer matters to me. As surprising as it was to me to realize it, the simple truth I no longer care about MMOs.

It’s been a long slow road, but over time I’ve simply come to see that MMOs can never be what I want from them, professionally or personally. On a professional level, they simply take too much to produce and I’d rather find a line of work where I can work alone as much as possible. Not that I hate working with others, I just don’t want to lead and I don’t want to follow. On top of that, I prefer to have a defined done state for my projects and simply stop working on them at that point, I may never get that realistically, but I’ll definitely never get it from an MMO. As I’ve had more time spent behind the curtain, I’ve also learned what kinds of things I do fairly well and what will always be just that much harder for me. I want to play to my strengths, at least for now, and very few of those are in MMO related areas. Finally as much as I would like it to be otherwise, I am no longer captivated by the game play MMOs, any of them.

I’m sure that my return to the genre isn’t impossible, but given the state it is in and the state I can foresee it being in for the next half decade or so, it is no longer a place for me.