in which kevin waxes zarathustran

[erf_]

In the month following the end of my last contract I've done a lot of recentering. Specifically, I've been trying to rediscover what it is I love about video games so much that I'll gladly work an engineer's hours in an artist's living conditions just for another shot at doing it for a living

Comments

[erf_]

I believe it's a matter of genre. I think one of the reason why a lot of early first-person shooter maps were so tedious was because early designers saw their maps as Parchesi boards pretending to be space stations, not architecture someone would actually have to navigate. (Hence lots of elevators, colored keycards, backtracking through foyers, elaborate 2D symmetries in the overhead map that were invisible in 3D...) But something like Advance Wars--well, that IS a board game.

Less obvious are the games that exist somewhere in the middle, like RPGs. On one hand, Diablo II. Wouldn't work at all without the boardgamey elements. Complex skill trees and forcing the player to do lots of arithmetic to make decisions are half the game, and the results of those decisions profoundly and rewardingly affect the more visceral experience of slicing things apart and blowing shit up in the other half. I used to criticize those kinds of games because five minutes at the level up screen is supposed to deliver enough enjoyment for each hour and a half of killing the same horde of zombies over and over, but some people really enjoy it, and I can respect that. Yeah, so the maps are just randomly placed tiles on the square grid, preventing any non-uniform challenge or true sense of exploration. So what? That's not the most important part of the game anyway.

On the other hand, JRPGs like Final Fantasy VII. Reviewers criticized its predecessors for creating elaborate castles and sprawling overworlds where players got frustratingly lost or didn't know where to go, so FFVII's dungeon designers built almost every non-town map out of single hallways with an entrance at one end, an exit at another, and some jump pads and ladders in between, with a high chance of a random encounter every clock tick. Maybe a fork with a treasure chest for someone with the patience to take the long way around. Each one of these maps is a little game of Snakes and Ladders. It's the Game of Life. It's got a clear objective, a set of meaningful challenges (never the same twice) that set you back if you fail, and a reward at the end. Would be a blast to play with some dice and a bunch of drunk friends at a party. But when you're sitting alone in your room with a soda and you're still wiping the tears away from Aeris's death scene, the last thing you want to do is kill the same three Bombs over and over again trying to get to the end of the next staircase. It checks off all the ticky marks for good game design, but for the wrong kind of game.

I've come to the disillusioning conclusion that the sole reason why I enjoy complex games is because I've already played so many simple ones. Gameplay elements have diminishing returns, and complex games have more gameplay elements. They don't offer more "meat on the bone," they just get me bored less quickly because they switch between a greater variety of challenges I've already mastered--and the joy of designing those challenges for someone else is diminished by the fact that I can no longer even imagine what it is like to encounter them for the first time. I don't think I can create an experience that is new to players unless it is also new to me. To me, "make a D&D dungeon for a low-HP sorcerer character that throws 3x3 AoE fireballs" is a solved problem. Generations of designers have taken it upon themselves to do that, and they've done it very well, but I for one am just so damned sick of throwing fireballs.

If I make a complex game, I want it to be one so outside the realm of typical gaming experiences that even I don't understand how to balance it. And I want it to be balanced by my testers breaking it with moments of absurd utter genius.

[retch]

Actually the random maps in Diablo are intentional and in Dave Brevik's mind incredibly important. He feels very heavily that the randomness is critical to creating that true sense of exploration. The world IS what you go and discover, not something that you can look up a map of online. That wasn't a minor part of his design, it was a crucial element. :)

Complexity is indeed a reaction to people having mastered simpler ones. Genres tend to grow in complexity over time as once you've established the language of a particular game type you can express more complex ideas within that genre and the players demand increased complexity to keep purchasing it. This can ultimately lead to the demise of a genre as complexity spirals upwards, driving off new players while retaining an ever shrinking set of genre devotees (because you always have lossage over time).

This is part of where the platform reset of Casual Games and then Social Games was useful, it allowed lower complexity games to gain a foothold amongst new cohorts of players. It is part of why games can acquire new players down at the very young end of the market too.

Good luck with your goal! It is certainly a challenging direction to try and go. Experimenting and trying to find gameplay is hard and expensive. We came up with Iron Construct that way, and there were some interesting experiments along the way. It would have been neat to see how the game could have been if we'd been able to get funding and build the whole thing out. :)

For me, I'll have fun making games I love that are elegant and fun to play, that's what I look for in my personal projects. :)

[erf_]

Elegant and fun to play is what I'm shooting for too. :] And I am frequently impressed by how even games with well understood mechanics can deliver surprises. (Orbital Defense Platforms + Heavy Carriers = mobile blockade! :D )

I understand what Dave Brevik intended to do with the random maps in Diablo, I just don't think it worked out as well as he wanted. Instead of creating a wholly new world each game, with surprises around every corner, Diablo generated a uniform soup of the same experience done eight or nine different ways. This was true of early builds of Angband, too, which Brevik names as the inspiration for Diablo.

Personally, I'm not convinced that interesting world generation--rather than just noise--is a problem that has been completely solved. The best solution I've seen is in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and that involves adding non-random, carefully designed "vaults" (sub-dungeons) to the pool of dungeon features that can be randomly generated. Which is great, as it's fantastic to unexpectedly discover a gnoll fortress or underground lake as you turn a corner in your random-noise roguelike cavern, but it sort of defeats the point of random map generation in the first place, since you can look up maps of the vaults on wikis and whatnot.

I'm looking at the casual games boom as an opportunity, myself. Ever since I was a little kid all the games I've come up with have been built around complexity. Having the chance to come up with something simple enough to sell for a dollar in the App Store, under the constraints of zero development costs, a very short timeframe, and a single-developer team, forces me to get away from that. And if I pull it off, maybe I can even recoup some of my costs.

I've been hard at work implementing some of my new ideas. It's anyone's guess how the final product will be received. And that excites me.

[retch]

Yup, the App Store was another reset, though we can see the years of burgeoning complexity there too now.

Good luck, looking forward to getting to play what you've built! :)