Eluminarts Blog: Game design and game development

Does episodic content mean shorter games?

Laralyn McWilliams — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 16:38:00 +0000

It turns out you can indicate in your game database which games you've finished along with a rating. I started making a pass through my games last night, and realized that I hardly ever finish a game these days. A lot of that has to do with my (lack of) time, but it made me think about "episodic" games, which are starting to appear here and there.

I can consume television pretty easily, in bite-sized chunks over a period of months, and that's really analogous to games once you add a DVR into the equation. Most games today let you save pretty frequently (there's a subject for a whole different blog: save points!), so why don't I consume games the same way I consume television?

Part of it comes from the periodic and predictable nature of a television episode. I know when I sit down to watch LOST that an hour later, I'll be done with that episode. When you sit down to play a (story-driven) game, you have no idea when the current storyline will be resolved. It might be at the end of this level or at the end of the game... but you have no concept of how far you have to go even to the end of the level. I believe that makes it easier to put the controller down and sometimes to never come back to finish.

I believe another factor is conflict resolution. While both games and TV episodes focus on long-term story goals and short-term cliff-hangers, resolution of a cliff-hanger in a game never has the sense of completion you get from a single television episode, unless it's the game's final conflict.

It would be really interesting to model game content more on television content, even for non-episodic games. You could break your main story arc into 20+ story arcs of no more than an hour, each with a satisfying ending. Players would feel more successful, because they were "winning" more frequently, and at the same time they might play longer sessions, because they understand how long they need to play in order to reach that conclusion.

I'll be applying that to quest/goal design in my current project, and I'll post an update once we have some focus tests to see how it feels for players.

What do a talking raccoon and an armored dwarf have in common?

Laralyn McWilliams — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 02:32:00 +0000

I updated the games list to include some of my console titles. Well, Gamecube, Xbox and PS2 games, at least... I'll get to the handheld titles later this week.

I've been choosing a game at random every few days for a mini-review, and today's game is The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for PS2. Two Towers was one of the best movie-licensed games to come out in several years, bolstered by clips from the first two films, and voice work from the original actors. What really made Two Towers stand out, though, was a very high level of polish. Characters, environments, and particle effects all looked outstanding, especially compared to other PS2 titles at the time.

While making the Over the Hedge game at Edge of Reality, we spent some time with Two Towers and the sequel, Return of the King, to see how they handled level design, camera issues, and same-screen multiplayer. OTH had a similar gameplay style, and we had some design/time limitations that required a spline-based camera (rather than full right stick camera control). We chose to look at Lord of the Rings partly because our lead artist (Billy Sullivan) had worked on it and recommended it as an example, but mostly because it's a great example of path-constrained melee gameplay with a spline-based camera.

Much to our surprise, when we really pushed Two Towers, we could get characters off-screen or run past large groups of enemies without fighting them. It was especially evident in multiplayer, where the camera couldn't always handle two players trying to run to opposite ends of a fixed space. We'd assumed these problems had been solved elegantly in Two Towers because we all had enjoyed the game when it came out and didn't remember any issues with it.

That experience showed me that Two Towers had another great element of quality--it sets player expectations and leads you along so well that you usually play the game exactly the way the designers intended. Communicating to players what you want them to do in a way that feels natural (or, even better, like the player figured it out on his own) is a key element to great games, and Two Towers did it so well that a group of game developers who usually try to "game" systems and break them had instead experienced the game the way most players do.

If you haven't played the Two Towers or Return of the King, you can pick them up pretty cheaply. They're great fun, and they feature two-player, same screen co-op, which is a rare find these days.

Do we needlessly innovate?

Laralyn McWilliams — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 03:50:00 +0000

At a conference recently, there was some discussion about innovation, and it was an interesting contrast. On the one hand, you have media and game developers talking about lack of innovation in today's games. On the other hand, project managers and executives at the conference talked about innovation where it's not needed, and the cost to the project and sometimes to the game itself.

It's an interesting debate. There's a fine line between innovation that improves the game or moves a genre forward, and innovation simply for the sake of trying something new--even if there are existing systems or techniques that would serve the game well.

I remembered the discussion at the conference while I played Painkiller this weekend.

I came across it while building my game list, and remembered how much I enjoyed playing it, although I had gotten distracted and never finished it. Painkiller doesn't innovate in the slightest. OK, to be fair, there are a few new elements with the weapons (like shooting a grenade with a stake to make a rocket), and fighting giant bosses felt pretty fresh. But for the most part, Painkiller takes established FPS genre conventions and reuses them in a way that's fun and interesting.

It's been a long time since we've had a simple FPS game. While game developers continue to try to innovate by adding squad commands, tactics, vehicles, specialized weapons, and other complications, people who want to play a fun game where they just shoot stuff get left behind. I believe the market is ripe for a solid, fun FPS that's simple to play, especially if it has a good license behind it.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Laralyn McWilliams — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 18:48:00 +0000

I have fond memories of choose your own adventure books, and it turns out I'm not alone. There's a great site called Gamebooks that hosts descriptions and images from choose your own adventure books.

I have a very small collection of these at home (if you can call books you bought as a kid just because you liked them a collection). I'm going to start scouring used book stores around town to turn this into a bona fide hobby.

My favorite choose your own adventure books were definitely the Sorcery! books from Steve Jackson.

The series had a great storyline with several separate paths in each book. It felt more like a game than a book--it even required dice (although there were dice rolls printed on the pages for dice-less readers).

There's a lot more story in those game books than in most games today. There's also a prevailing attitude that reading in a game is bad. An interesting thread on Quarter to Three started off as a discussion of Oblivion (the next game in the Elder Scrolls series) and ended up as a debate on whether there should be books you can read in crpgs.

I'm not about to start arguing the point here, but it seems like there is an audience out there that thinks reading has a place in games. I may not get to make games for that audience right now, but I definitely consider myself a part of it.

A few thoughts on Condemned

Laralyn McWilliams — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 19:08:00 +0000

I played Condemned for a few minutes last night, then watched Charlie play for an hour or so. It's an interesting game, with great graphics.

It's also a twisty maze of corridors, all alike. At first, it didn't seem to be an issue. Then Charlie passed a door that required a sledgehammer to break down... and he didn't have a sledgehammer.

He picked up the sledgehammer about 10 minutes later, and had to find his way back to that door. It turns out the levels in Condemned (at least the ones we have seen so far) are fairly linear, but you still feel lost.

There's more to giving players clear direction than making sure they physically can't get lost. Part of the satisfaction in solving puzzles is understanding what you did to solve them. Even if players can navigate to a location without understanding where they're going, they will never shake that moment where they pick up the sledgehammer, look around at the dry wall and insulation all around them, and say, "Crap. I'll never find my way back to that door."

Perhaps the ending has not yet been written

Laralyn McWilliams — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 16:30:00 +0000

When I talked about missing Presto and The Journeyman Project games, I mentioned Myst, and the announcement that Myst V is the last game in the series. You can view that news as the final nail in the adventure game coffin, a sign that times have changed. You can also take it as a sign that for people who create worlds, ten years is a long time to stay in one place.

Myst was the first game I played on CD-ROM. I'd spent years creating worlds in stories, paper game systems, and even in rough text adventures on my computer. My first five minutes with Myst blew all my work away.

The Miller brothers didn't just create a world--they brought that world to life. As I explored, I heard waves lap against the dock, and butterflies flitted past my face. It motivated me--drove me--to build my own skills, to find a way to bring my worlds to life. Today I make games for a living because of the first five minutes I spent with Myst.

So now I find myself reading announcements about the last Myst project. After Riven, which many consider the best game in the series, Robyn Miller left Cyan and the Myst universe behind. It's as if he said, "I wanted to make this world, and I've made it. Now I'm done." It took a few more years and two more games (Uru and now Myst V) for Rand Miller to arrive at the same point: he's ready for something new.

In an interview, Rand said:

Our new project is called Latus - a completely new type of interactive entertainment that mixes linear storytelling and interactive 3D in a way that has never been done before. It's hard to describe. It feels like a new kind of genre.

In another blog, I asked "Who will use interactivity to tell us stories?"

One answer to that question is that I'm working on it... but it sounds like Cyan is working on it as well. When Myst V becomes available later this year, a door will be closing, but somewhere, quietly, a window will open into a new world.

Innovation in games

Laralyn McWilliams — Fri, 27 May 2005 15:56:00 +0000

Each year, the games on display at E3 bring attention from the media. E3 isn't the best place to show quirky, innovative games, or titles that require brain rather than brawn. It's noisy, crowded, hot, and rushed, and if you want to get attention, you put your loudest, most violent title front and center.

So it's inevitable, among the flood of articles raving about the hot titles coming in the next several years, we also get some complaints. For the past few years, a lot of the complaints have been more about lack of originality and lack of "maturity" rather than the previous hot topic, violence. For example:

John Dvorak returned to the theme of innovate or die, saying most of today's games lack imagination and are too difficult to play.

The Gamer Manifesto ranted about a long list of issues, including lack of originality, lack of games for "alternate" demographics like women or people over 40, extreme levels of difficulty, and the prevalence of flash over substance.

Even a CBS News article covering E3 only touched on the hit titles, spending more time discussing the game industry's immaturity.

Well, I'm here to say we have plenty of innovation, and plenty of variety! Look at some of the games that have come out recently or are still on the way:

Doom 3 marks the return of a classic FPS license.

No, wait. That last one was from Area 51. It's completely different from Doom 3--you're fighting strange monsters on a military base here on earth, in the present day, rather than on Mars in the future.

Prey was originally announced in 1995 then put on hold in 1998. To everyone's surprise, it showed up again at this year's E3, resurrected with the Doom 3 engine.

Speaking of old titles, the Quake universe is back with Quake 4.

Other highly anticipated titles include Hellgate, Gears of War, Pariah, Huxley, and Stalker.

See? Plenty of innovation. And as far as maturity goes, it doesn't get more mature than dark, dingy hallways where macho armored heroes shoot chain guns at evil monsters, right? Right!

Next blog: giving new legs to over-used licenses by making the heroes more angry.

New shots from another innovative title: Alpha Pri...

Laralyn McWilliams — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 21:54:00 +0000

New shots from another innovative title: Alpha Prime!

Alpha Prime may have a lot going for it. I like sci fi games, and I like first person shooters. But does it have to look pretty much just like everything else? Why would I want to buy this game if I already have two or three of the other games it superficially resembles?

So much for new year's resolutions

Laralyn McWilliams — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:46:00 +0000

One of my resolutions this year was to update my blog more frequently. Here it is, January 20, and I'm finally posting. That doesn't bode well, despite my good intentions.

Charlie and I picked up an Xbox 360 last night, after a long hunt online and in stores. So far, we've tried Dead or Alive 4 and King Kong. DOA4 is fun and fast-paced, and Kong looks great although I didn't play that far into it. We also got Condemned and Call of Duty 2. I'll post mini-reviews of all of them once I've had a chance to play them more.

(Yes, that's also part of the resolution.)

One of the things I wanted to post about this week is how much I enjoy the alpha and beta period (before I got distracted by the 360). It's my favorite part of the development cycle. You have every feature and asset you're going to get, and it's all about sprinting to the finish line on time with the best game possible... without driving fellow team members to kill each other.

I admit it: bugs fascinate me, especially when they're within my own work. That doesn't happen that often now, not because my work is perfect, but because I'm mostly managerial. But I admit it: I'm even fascinated with other people's bugs, especially the weird ones. So you were carrying a statue and the AI character was attacking a mole, and you threw him the statue right as the mole and a turret hit him simultaneously, and he ended up running around with a statue for a head? Excellent!

We had one bug on a previous project that playing a certain mini-game on a dance pad leads players to fall down and hurt themselves. It was set to 100% reproducability. Can we get a video repro of that, please?

Games list online

Laralyn McWilliams — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 04:04:00 +0000

We recently moved to San Diego, where I'm now working for Sony Online Entertainment. I finally figured out how to store (and later be able to find) all of my game CDs, and in the process, I found Game Collector, which streamlines cataloging collections of games. I've exported the list and now I'm hosting it here, on my blog.

I'm planning to post comments, notes, memories and mini-reviews of games in my collection a couple times a week, choosing the game of the day at random.

Today, the coin toss brought up Jewels of the Oracle.

Jewels was one of the first "Myst-like" games to hit the market. I put "Myst-like" in quotes because unlike games like Timelapse (and Shadows, the first game I worked on), Jewels isn't really a Myst clone. Sure, it has pre-rendered graphics, but there's no sense of story or characters in Jewels: it is a pure puzzle game. The puzzles were genuinely interesting and challenging. I missed having a story, and I definitely missed exploring an environment, which was always my favorite part of playing Myst.

There were a couple sequels to Jewels, but I suspect each one sold a bit less than the one before it. Myst-clones were becoming more popular, and many had sharper graphics and greater interactivity than the Jewels games. If you enjoy puzzles, it's worth trying to find a used copy.

If you manage to track down a copy, here are some hints and solutions to the puzzles.

Zarf (aka Andrew Plotkin) occasionally writes reviews of games, typically adventure games (or games with strong adventure elements, since true adventure games can be pretty few and far between today). This insightful review of Jewels was the first posted to his website, Zarfhome.

Mini-review of Oblivion

Laralyn McWilliams — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 23:47:00 +0000

Here's to following through on New Year's resolutions, even in mid-June!

I've been playing a lot of Oblivion, and it's far too large to cover the whole game in a mini-review, so I'll focus on playing as a stealth character. The stealth system in Oblivion is a huge improvement on the stealth gameplay in Morrowind. Light and shadow play a much bigger role, and an icon on your targeting reticule makes it clear when you are (or aren't) concealed.

A successful attack while you are concealed does a significantly higher amount of damage. Stealth melee attacks generally do more damage than ranged attacks, which is a good reflection of the risk involved (it's a lot more difficult to get in melee range while remaining hidden).

In addition, the two main stealth-related quest lines (Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood) have rich and varied quests that prove to be among the most interesting in the game with unique and really interesting rewards.

Despite all of the positive elements that make playing a stealth character much more rewarding in Oblivion than it was in Morrowind, there is a downside. Stealth is the only one of the main three paths (warrior, stealth, or mage) that requires you to have elements from the other two paths. Late in the game, my character's skills were sharp enough that she could get several ranged attacks in against enemies before they spotted her, and two or three attacks usually killed even the strongest enemy.

Early in the game, though, after one ranged attack, the enemy turned and immediately spotted my character, then rushed her (along with all of his enemy buddies). Sometimes I could back-pedal while frantically shooting, but usually the enemy closed range and I had to resort to melee or magical attacks. If you create a pure stealth character, that means you can be pretty much screwed, unless you choose to sink points early in the game into stats that don't actually represent the direction you'd like to take your character (such as Destruction spells or Blade).

This has the effect of delaying development of your stealth skills, which keeps them less useful as you continue to play the game. The more you play, the more you gain levels and the harder the enemies get, and the more you end up relying on magic and melee rather than stealth in order to survive. The need for alternate (non-stealth) attacks and defense makes it hard to build your stealth character to the point that he can rely mostly on stealth for his survival.

As a result, many less experienced players who might enjoy playing a stealthy character are likely to get killed repeatedly and either give up on the character or give up on Oblivion. A potential solution would be to ramp enemy stealth detection along with the level of the enemy. Let low level players get several stealth shots off against enemies near their own level before they get spotted, the way higher level players can. This not only lets them improve and invest in their stealth skills more easily, but it also makes stealth something that is more immediately rewarding and fun.

I've had a lot going on lately, not that it's an e...

Laralyn McWilliams — Fri, 19 May 2006 15:28:00 +0000

I've had a lot going on lately, not that it's an excuse for never updating my blog. So much for New Year's resolutions!

Apparently my Xbox 360 is blogging even when I'm not.

It's easier to plan for a hundred things you'll never do...

Laralyn McWilliams — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 18:16:00 +0000

...than to start on the one thing that really matters to you.

The Journeyman Project

Laralyn McWilliams — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 15:55:00 +0000

Presto was one of my favorite companies. They went out of business several years ago. The same temperature shift that put American adventure games into hibernation caused the companies that make them to adapt or become extinct.

The first game on CD I ever played was Myst. I was making multimedia on a Mac Quadra (back in the days of Macromind Director version 2.0), and the guy in the cube next to me worked on graphic design. We had an external CD-ROM drive we shared (must have weighed 10 pounds), and he brought in Myst one day. It changed my life--it's why I'm making games today.

But this blog isn't about Myst--it's about The Journeyman Project. It was the first CD game I ever bought, for my first color Mac that had my first CD drive at home. TJP was a contemporary to Myst, and in many ways it was a better game, albeit less experimental.

It featured full-motion video characters in a 3D rendered world, puzzles interwoven into your surroundings, and a strong sci-fi story.

I even remember Presto's logo bumper: animated, interesting, and lush with sound and music. They sold CDs of music for multimedia on the side. I bought those, too.

Presto released two sequels: Buried in Time and Legacy of Time. With each, they pushed their technology forward, increased the quality of the video, and brought more depth to the story and the world.

They also introduced a humorous sidekick, Arthur, who commented on the world around him, giving the player information that was useful and often hilarious.

I miss The Journeyman Project, and I miss Presto. They didn't just let us interact, and they didn't just show us pretty pictures--they took us to another world and they told us a story.

As we look ahead to Myst 5, which rumor pegs as the last Myst game for Cyan, who's going to pick up the pieces?

Who will use interactivity to tell us stories?

Two great tastes that taste great together

Laralyn McWilliams — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:11:00 +0000

As I compare games and books and movies and television, I've started wondering whether we've lost connection with the power of words. For me, it's really two questions: have people stopped reading, and should people have to read when they play a game? Right now, I'm thinking about the second question.

Games used to be 100% text. As processors grew in complexity and power, graphics became more and more important. Today, having great graphics in a game is one of the top selling points, and games that place less emphasis on graphics usually suffer from lower sales. I don't think it's any kind of symbol of the decline in human intellect--it's a part of the natural broadening of the game market from the "nerd" audience which was more likely to have many readers, to the mass market population which is more likely to have many television watchers.

It's like the old ads for Reese's peanut butter cups:

Two people run from either side of the screen, one holding a candy bar and the other a glass jar of peanut butter. They collide.

"You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!"

"No, you got your peanut butter in my chocolate!"

For the most part, playing a game isn't really about reading: it's about interacting with a world or a system of rules. Sometimes text plays a part in delivering information, but it doesn't play much of a part in interaction. We had over 5000 lines of spoken dialog in Full Spectrum Warrior, for example, and Everquest 2 has full spoken dialog for all of its characters. That's a great trend--reading what a character speaks takes you out of the immersion.

So, since I've said all of that, there's no room for text in games, right? Not in the traditional sense, but what if you looked at text and pictures and interactivity in another way? What if you weren't asking game players to read--you were asking readers to interact?

The Reese's commercial ended with each person tasting the concoction made by accident, and smiling. The tag line: Two great tastes that taste great together.

Hey! You got your text in my game! No, you got your game in my text!