Purple Anchor

The Cool Button

2012-01-26T18:03:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about a recent idea of games I like to call the "cool button". I first noticed this when I talked about the "Drive" system from the BlazBlue series. The idea is for the designer to provide for the player an easy instant way to do something impactful and visually interesting. In BlazBlue this manifests as a character specific mechanic being associated with the D button. As I talked about before, this mechanic can vary in complexity and depth per character, but because it's universal it means that new players can immediately jump into any character and see something exciting.

I've noticed that other games do this to varying degrees, and it usually manifests as a unique mechanic to the game. For example, the special ability button in Borderlands or the Adrenaline Skill in Guild Wars 2 to provide a few non-fighting game examples. In both of these examples, the "cool button" provides a fun way to provide a powerful, but simple to use tool for the player. Press button, receive awesome.

When I look back on some of the arcade games I played when I was younger, I notice that even some of these old games used this mechanic as well. Bomb attacks in Aero Fighters or the Mutant Power in the X-Men Arcade game are good examples of this. These examples are slightly more limited however owning to the pay per play nature of arcade games. However, when used in arcade games I feel that the cool button is actually more effective than usual, as it allows passerbys to see the cool effect and get interested in the game. In fact it may simply be that this mechanic was developed for this reason (though I don't have any proof to back this up).

As an added note, these examples also show that the cool effect does not have to be homogenous. In fact the variation in each of these examples is part of what makes it possible for these games to have additional replay value as the players experiment with different characters.

I think that in order for this type of pattern to be the most effective it must follow some guidelines:

1. The execution must have minimal complexity. (Ideally one button!)

2. The mechanic should be introduced early

3. There should be a high visual impact

4. Variation can exist in what the cool button does.

Now, none of these rules say that the cool button needs to lack complexity. In fact in the examples cited earlier all of the cool mechanics have a lot of depth to them that can eventually be discovered. However its important as an introduction for new players to make them simple to understand. Additionally, these rules don't include placing limitations on the number of times the cool button can be used. I feel that this mechanic is more effective when it's unlimited as in the case of BlazBlue (since it allows for more early experimentation) but in other systems that use resources (such as the limited number of bombs in Aero Fighters) I feel it can still be effective.

The context of this pattern however limits the situations where it can be applied, and to what degrees it can be applied. There are some games which simply don't benefit from putting this kind of mechanic in. A game like Portal for example gets its appeal through the puzzle solving and innovation or the mechanic rather than simply having some big flashy thing that happens when you press a single button. Having a single button which shot a nuke at the turrets would simply kill a lot of the fun of the game.

-----------

Pattern: The Cool Button

Problem: Game needs quick appeal and pop for demonstration purposes.

Context: A game with a defining, compelling, and interesting mechanic that can be expressed as a single button press. This mechanic should have gameplay depth but doesn't have to.

Solution: Bind the game mechanic to a single button.

Example: Blazblue Drive System

Anti-Pattern: Binding many different mechanics to different buttons. Or binding core functionality to multiple button presses.

This blog has moved

2010-04-28T00:57:00.001-07:00

This blog is now located at http://purpleanchor.blogspot.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://purpleanchor.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

Game Design and Cooking

2010-02-25T00:32:00.000-08:00

I started thinking today about how I could describe game design to people in a simple way. It seems to me sometimes that the intricacies of this industry are difficult to comprehend and that results in a lot of misconceptions about how this job works and the effort and knowledge that is required to get things to go well. When I was growing up and wanted to get into the game industry I had a lot of these misconceptions about what goes into a good game. I don't think that I'm fully there yet, but I think that I have found a decent way of explaining how it works to others.

Video game design is like cooking.

It sounds a little weird at first but I think it's something that most people can relate to. First of all both of these professions involve a lot of creativity on the part of the designer/cook. Both professions can seem deceptively simple on the outside, but have deep intricacies that take time to learn. They also both rely a lot on the subjective opinions of their customers to be successful, and as a result, both of them need to have a good degree of understanding when it comes to the "tastes" of their patrons. Finally, and I want to emphasize this part, being able to consume and enjoy the product does not inherently make one an expert on it.

Knowing what tastes good is not the same as being able to cook something that tastes good. Similarly, knowing what in a game is fun, is not the same as knowing what makes a fun game.

I'm a little worried that last sentence came off as a bit arrogant, so I'll clarify that I'm not saying that game players or their opinions are unimportant. Far from it, as I think it's imperative for a game designer to take feedback from the players of his game as well as his peers in order to improve his skills. However, I think that often times the feedback that a game designer receives from players and beta testers is highly skewed and cannot be taken at face value. What I am trying to get at here, is that the feedback from players is something that needs to be tempered by the game designer's own opinions and thoughts.

To get back to the cooking analogy, let's compare a game to a full course meal. The designer does his best and tries to prepare a meal/game which is balanced in flavor, nutrition and texture. He then asks the customer what he thinks could be improved.

The customer tells him, "I really liked the chocolate cake that I had for desert! Chocolate is really delicious, I think you should make the other dishes more like the cake and put in more chocolate. That would make them taste better."

This is difficult advice for the cook to follow. In his mind he realizes that putting chocolate in the salad or the mashed potatoes is a bad idea and wouldn't really help the dishes very much. Beyond that he also knows that if he were to feed someone a full course of chocolate dishes that they would very quickly tire of the flavor and the impact of his later dishes would be lessened. The customer may have eaten the food of a lot of famous cooks from around the world and knows what he likes and what he doesn't like. He might even think that he can make something that delicious by combining a lot of the dishes that he's seen before. But this isn't what makes a good meal and the cook knows it! So how can he use this seemingly useless comment?

The first step is to examine the origins of it. Why did the customer focus on the chocolate? Is it because the other dishes had too much salt and not enough sugar? Perhaps the other dishes were too bland and the sharp taste of the chocolate cake stood out more than the others. Was the dish that the customer had before the cake particularly good for complementing the flavor of the chocolate? All of this can come from simply analyzing the question in a little more detail, and there's a lot of lines of thought that can come from it. The cook also needs to be able to ask better questions as well. Perhaps the chocolate answer wasn't useful at all, maybe he should have specified that he wanted to know what the customer thought of the texture of the food, or if he felt bloated after eating it. Being able to realize what questions to ask next time is important as well.

From there it's a matter of exercising his expertise to craft a better dish for next time.

This is where the designer/cook has to put his own thoughts into the matter. As the creator, he's in the best position to know which of these threads to follow in order to improve. Perhaps when he was tasting the soup earlier he also thought it was a little bland. Or maybe he realizes that if he cooks the chicken a little less that the retained water will cause it to be less salty. He could even discover that cooking with a different type of oil produces the flavor that was lacking. There's room for improvement even from such a narrow response, the trick is being able to find it. This mentality and capacity for analysis is something that I think a game designer absolutely has to have in order to be able to improve.

And the end result will be something that both creator and customer can enjoy.

-----

Extra Note #1: Also like cooking, sometimes ingredients that don't seem like they would go well together end up forming an unexpectedly good combination. Perhaps combining the chocolate with the chicken will get the cook the mole poblano flavor that he has been looking for. Combining disparate elements from game genres that don't necessarily go together will sometimes get you something unexpectedly delicious. (Though sometimes it gets you an inedible mess.)

Extra Note #2: There's a saying that bacon goes with any dish. I imagine there may be a game design convention that fulfills a similar role, but I haven't discovered it yet.

The Intention of Design

2009-11-26T23:05:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. It's been a while since my last post, my new job is pretty busy, and pretty awesome. Here's something I've been writing up in the meantime:

-----

This is a topic that came up when a friend told me the story of a City of Heroes character named "Twixt" and another story about an Everquest character known as "Fansy the Famous Bard". This eventually led me to another article about how David and Goliath works in real life.

The gist of these two stories was that the player's of these characters became the most hated people on their servers... and they did it all by playing by the rules that the designers developed. It brings up some interesting questions about the goals of designers versus the goals of the players, and how even when the two goals sometimes match up, things still don't go quite right.

For reference, here are the articles

Twixt (City of Heroes)

Fansy the Famous Bard (Everquest)

How David Beats Goliath

...

...

...

Now that you've read them (you did read them right?) let's break each part down.

Twixt, the Outcast
The Twixt case involves a player (specifically a university professor) who noticed that players in a certain server of City of Heroes/Villains did not tend to PvP in the designated PvP zones. Instead the players preferred to chat with the people the game designers intended to be their enemies while fighting NPCs that happened to be in the zone as well. The professor in this case decided to go against social convention and play by the designer's rules.

He PvPed villains. And he did it really well. So well in fact that for breaking this particular social agreement between the players, that he ended up being ostracized by both camps. The whole time, by following the game rules.

Now it should be obvious that this would happen. If someone breaks a social convention that is established and followed by many people he will likely draw a lot of their ire. What makes the case of Twixt so interesting was that what he was doing was EXACTLY what the designers wanted him to do. As a result, despite many other players complaining about him, the developers never acted against him. In fact, the player behind Twixt reported several people for threatening him, and as far as he knows, they have stopped since then.

The professor in this case was studying human behavior, and certainly deviation from social convention gave him a lot to work with, however, I'm more interested in how the game design factored into all this.

While my experiences in City of Heroes are somewhat limited parts of the article and the professor's paper seem to imply that the PvP zone was simply more lucrative for players to engage in NPC combat rather than combat with other players. This is a design issue, and this is the truly important takeaway from the article in my opinion. When players do not play the game as the designer intended, and more so, actively ostracize those who do find the best way to play with your rules as in the case of Twixt, then there is a problem with the design and it needs to change. There are many ways that this could have been accomplished, but there are two overall goals that a designer can follow in this kind of situation.

They can either change rules to force the players into the correct behavior, or they can change the rules to make the players' behavior the correct one.

Now, I'm not going to say one or the other is more correct, since I think this depends on the situation. And really, in any game, players will ultimately discover more than a designer or a tester will find during the games production. What matters though is how the game and the designer react to them. Now in the case of City of Heroes, I would say that changing the rules to encourage the correct behavior would have been the best choice. The game already has many zones where players can kill NPCs and if players were continuing to do so in PvP zones, then the first thing to look at is how the rewards are assigned. The players in this case could clearly tell that it was better to attack the NPCs, so it's up to the designer to make it better for them to attack other players to preserve the intent of the zone.

Fansy, the Rebel
The case of Fansy is a similar case of following the rules of design, however this case ended differently from that of Twixt. Like Twixt, Fansy existed on a server where certain social conventions had occurred. The server that Fansy was on had a specific rule set which seems to have precluded the players to choosing the "evil" faction in this game. (The website refers to it as "no play nice rules" and that it would probably have "many unfair battles".) With only 11% of the server being on the "good" side, much of the server was taken up by these "evil" characters. Fansy was one of the exceptions, and made it his quest to defeat the bad guys.

However, because he was excessively outnumbered in this case, he took advantage of certain server rules which made him invulnerable to certain enemy skills while he low level (presumably to prevent newer players from being killed off too early). With this invulnerability to direct attacks from the other faction, and not having enough power to defeat them in a direct confrontation, he used a "monster training" strategy, to lure high level monsters into his enemies where they (and occasionally he) were killed.

What's interesting is that, while this type of behavior is not very sporting, and probably not necessarily how the designers intended the game, this was still a valid tactic, and apparently there was even a GM who told him that this tactic was perfectly legal. Even one person who was personally against him, still had to admit that the server he was on had "no rules". Another person compared Fansy's actions to other legal game techniques that are frustrating to other players, such as going into the enemy zones at low levels and preemptively defeating monsters that they use to level in order to deny them that resource.

Fansy's adventure terminated differently from that of Twixt however, as the designers changed the rule that kept Fansy invulnerable to higher level players. They removed this ability across the board for zones deemed "mid-level" and above. This was a case of the designers changing the rules of the game to fix the problem. While this does seems like a somewhat heavy-handed solution, I won't say that it was the wrong one, especially given my low familiarity with Everquest.

What's important about this story is that unlike the Twixt story, Fansy was doing something that was NOT intended by the designers (but still playing by the designer's rules). This seems to be the important distinction on why no action was ever taken against Twixt. For the designer, it's very important to remember that your intent with the game rules is not something that the player necessarily has to follow, even if he plays by your rules.

Bringing it Together, David and Goliath
The final article talks a lot about how underdogs can overcome those in power. One of the big points it makes is that David should not follow the established conventions if he hopes to beat Goliath. Goliath in these situations is much more powerful when operating under these conventions and David will most certainly lose if he follows them. This article brings up two actual games, basketball and a naval game, and shows how David can win by going against Goliath's preconceived ideas about how the game should be played. In the case of the basketball game the coach instructed his less skilled players to play full-court press the entire game, which the other teams were not used to, but is perfectly legal to do. For the naval game the winning player used strategies that no real fleet commander would ever use in a real war but within the scope of the game they were the most efficient.

Both of these players met with similar fates to Twixt and Fansy as well. The basketball team was forced to change their playstyle when a referee who didn't like their playstyle started calling four times as many fouls against them. The naval game player was asked by the organizers of the tournament not to enter again because his strategies were "not really in the spirit of the tournament". For these situations, those in power worked to coerce the players into playing their way or not playing at all. This is a somewhat more extreme example of enforcing the intent of design than the previous two examples since it involves going after the players themselves instead of the designer changing the rules. However because these examples were not video games, its possible that this approach was less feasible in the context of the problems (though I'm not entirely convinced of this).

-----

So that was three different articles, all tied together by the same thing. INTENT of design versus design RULES. These examples all show that developing robust game rules can go a long way to preventing behavior which deviates from the intent of the designer. It also puts a great burden of responsibility on the designer as it should be clear from these examples that players will always try and seek out the best way to use the designer's rules to their advantage, regardless of if this type of gameplay goes against the designer's original intent.

There's a second facet of this too, and that is for situations where you discover that your rules do not accurately convey your intent and have the chance to change them. I think that when these situations come up, it's better for the designer to try and develop better rules that accurately convey his intent rather than simply trying to develop rules to stop the player. And that even developing hard rules to stopping players is better than making players who go against your intent feel unwelcome in the game as in the case of the player in the naval game.

A game is nothing without its players, even if they don't want to follow your rules, the fact that they are playing in the first place is an indication that they find the design fun. Design needs to work with players in order to convey the intent of the designer, but it should do that through the rules, rather than through mandates to the players.

-----

That was a long one this time. There are a lot of games I need to play this holiday season and a lot more I want to talk about. Although I may be busy with my awesome job as well, I hope to find more time to talk about these issues.

The Problem With PvP

2009-08-16T18:06:00.000-07:00

I've been a fan of fighting games (especially Guilty Gear) for a while and now that I'm working on Guild Wars I find that there are a lot of parallels in terms of how the players approach the games and how new players get into them. After a bit more analysis I found that the reason for this seems to be a core of understanding the nature of competitive play.

To put this idea simply, it's that "PvP, by its nature, is designed to reject potential new players."

An adendum to this is: "The rejection rate of new players will increase with the game's lifetime."

Now, by PvP in this case I'm refering to any game which has direct competition between players based on skill. Fighting games are the purest example of this, but MMOs that have battlegrounds and balanced tournaments as well as sports games. However this also extends to just about every other method of playful competition including real world sports. I think in general the idea that competative activities can be hard to get into is obvious, but games have an additional layer to them.

Here is the process as I see it:

Stage 1: The Level Playing Field

In any PvP game that is first introduced, all new players start at the same skill level. Any new player has just about any chance to win as any other player. Obviously some players will grasp the rules of the game better than others and perform better, but in general at this point there exist no high level strategy of techniques and players work with simply their normal understanding of the rule set.

In fighting games, this is the absolute beginner stage where players mash buttons in an attempt to win.

Stage 2: Complexities Emerge

After a certain amount of time in the game a portion of players start to break off as "skilled" and have mastered all of the low level ideas of the game (punching, jumping, dashing, etc), and move onto developing more complex strategies and techniques. For fighting games this takes the form of things like wakeup games, high/low mixups, and intentionally wiffed moves.

At this point players who have not grasped these aspects of the game begin to lose more often. This is the stage at which you start to see complex behaviors develop, as designers, I think this is something we need to design into our base mechanics so that the game can reach this next level.

Stage 3: The Metagame

The metagame refers to the game that exists outside of the game. Generally this refers to elements of competative play which become determined by players rather than the designers. If a certain strategy or combo is seen as effective then it will start to be duplicated. The differece between competative players and non-competative players is that competative players will actively seek out the most efficient method for winning, even if it is less fun to play and especially if it is easier to execute for its effectiveness.

This is when specialized player terms begin to develop in a game. Game specific elements such as Wave Dashing, Roll Canceling and Burst Baiting start to show up at this time as a result of player experimentation and drive for efficiency. Generally at this level the true level of balance that the designer has achieved will become apparent.

This stage is also the one at which a barrier to entry becomes apparent. While competative players who have been playing since the beginning have gotten to the point where the previous low level elements have become simple, new players now have an even higher skill and knowledge bar to attain to become competative. This is the level at which new players start to be detered, due to the difficulty of learning everything as well as the low chance of winning against players that understand the metagame well.

Stage 4: The Slippery Slope

The final stage of PvP games comes when the influx of new players trickles to a halt or at least a slow drip. At this point new players are generally turned off from attempting this game due to the high time commitment required to compete on an even level with veteran players. The conundrum is that you have designed your game to be balanced, then this is exactly what should happen. But the problem is that if new players lose 90% of their matches or more because the game is filled with veteran players then the game has sealed its own fate by locking out any new players.

Even well designed PvP style games begin to decline at this point, and to some extent that's okay. No game is meant to last forever, but for many companies who produce these games it's valuable to be able to keep selling copies as long as possible between releases.

-----

So what can be done to prevent this kind of thing? Looking at some real world examples we can see a few solutions. Real life sports such as basketball and baseball separated players into leagues of relative skill levels. Even though NBA players would easily crush junior high basketball teams there are systems set up so that they only play people at their own skill level. Similar to this games sometimes use a ranking system to make sure that new players are not matched up with players of a higher skill level. This is a great solution and works in a lot of situations for many games since it allows new players to start out the game in an environment where their chances to win are approximately 50/50, and the large barrier of time to develop skills can proceed at its own pace. Players in these kinds of systems can choose to quit whenever they feel like it if the competition becomes too difficult.

But skill discrepancies can still cause problems even in these kinds of systems. Skilled players can often have a difficult time getting their friends to join them due to the skill barrier. If you prevent skilled players from dropping down levels to play with their friends then the system itself becomes a barrier to players. Similarly the ability to measure a player's skill level becomes difficult in video games as well, since players can simply buy another account or throw matches in order to get a low rank again. If too many players engage in this behavior then the ranking system becomes irrelavent since it does not reflect the skill level of the players anymore.

At the moment, there really isn't an obvious catch-all solution for the problems, and to some extent the solutions need to be developed to the case at hand. This somewhat extends into my ideas about game design patterns, but that can wait for another day.

My New Job

2009-08-15T17:11:00.001-07:00

I've been pretty busy lately with my new job, but I have updated my LinkedIn profile to reflect my new job at ArenaNet. My official title is "Live Team Designer" which basically means I get to work on all the issues affecting the current state of Guild Wars. This includes everything from skill balance to bug fixing to developing new ways for players to play and refining existing ones.

I've been really excited about it since I talk about and play Guild Wars a lot. I think it's going to be a really great job for me since I basically get to do what I do normally with regard to Guild Wars, except now I can actually affect changes. (And somehow I also get paid for it.)

I was a little worried when I started about the potential burnout, since I've been playing Guild Wars for so long and now I'm exposed to it even more as part of my job. So far though it's been pretty much the opposite, I've actually been trying to play the game more often since I started to see what kinds of other changes I can make and what other parts of the game could use work.

I've got a few other posts in the works that have been stewing for a while, as well as the next part of my thoughts on healing classes. I've been super busy the last few weeks trying to get up to speed on all the internal stuff as well as moving cross-country to Washington, but I think I should be able to get another one up this week.

Internet Outage and Penny Arcade

2009-07-28T13:11:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be cut off from my blog for a little while due to an internet outage while I move, so I won't be able to update for a little while. (Not that I could really update much before because of all the moving preparation, but rest assured that I've got a few things coming for next month.)

In the meantime, Penny Arcade is doing a short segment about BlazBlue which I'm enjoying immensely. I hope you will find it as amusing as I do.

Another New Job

2009-07-20T16:12:00.000-07:00

Quick update today. I'm going to be a little busy the next few weeks as I prepare to move in preparation for a new job. I'll talk a little more about that once I get started.

I've got some new articles I want to talk about as well as the continuation of that healers discussion, but most of that will have to wait until I deal with all this other stuff.

Moving is HARD!

Anime Expo 2009

2009-07-07T21:33:00.000-07:00

From July 2-5 I was in Los Angeles to check out Anime Expo 2009. It was a really fun trip and I had a ton of fun. AX is considered to be the biggest anime convention on the west coast and there were an estimated 44000 people in attendance this year. I saw some great bands, played some games, saw some movies, checked out some previews for things to come from the anime industry and even attended some informative and entertaining workshops.

But the best part was that I got to meet Daisuke Ishiwatari and Toshimichi Mori. Ishiwatari is the designer for Guilty Gear as well as the composer for BlazBlue, while Mori was the lead designer and artist for BlazBlue.

I also got the chance to ask the two of them some questions about game design during the two panels that they had. Because the question/answer period was quick their responses weren't that detailed, but they offered some interesting ideas about the games they worked on.

When I asked about what they felt was important in designing games, Ishiwatari said that he felt it was important for games to have either cooperative or competitive elements to them, since these were the things that would keep players playing the game for longer. After the queestion, Mori then asked me if I was trying to get into the game industry. I think he was a little surprised when I told him that I'd already been working in it. I hope I can design something in the future that will impress them.

Later at the second panel I asked them what the biggest design challenges they had when designing BlazBlue and Guilty Gear. Ishiwatari said that for Guilty Gear the biggest challenge was adapting the game for arcades, since the original game was designed for consoles. He said he did a lot of research into the kinds of things that would get players to keep putting quarters into the machine. Mori said that for BlazBlue the most difficult thing was getting good networking for the game. For fighting games like BlazBlue this kind of thing is fairly difficult, though I've heard that in general BlazBlue's online play is fairly solid.

-----

All in all, it was a great trip and it was pretty neat to meet the creators of the games I've been enjoying for so long. I hope I can make it to Anime Expo next year as well.

I'll end this post with a quote from Ishiwatari from an earlier interview:

"I look forward to seeing new designers come into the industry with a burning passion to create."

Reading this I'm motivated to keep working hard in order to live up to his expectations.

Blazblue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 5

2009-06-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

BlazBlue releases on the 30th of this month in the US so today I'll be finishing up my multipart design analysis of the game.

First I'll be rounding out the cast analysis.

-----
Carl Clover - Auto Maton

Carl's ability is rather unique in terms of the fighting game genre, though there was a character in Guilty Gear who had a similar ability. The gist of Carl's drive is that it allows him to control Nirvana, a robot that shares the battlefield with the other characters. This allows a Carl player to control essentially two characters at the same time. There is a meter associated with this however, which recharges when Nirvana is inactive and depletes when Nirvana is active or taking damage. Depleting it completely prevents Nirvana from being used for a long period of time while she recharges. While Carl's Guilty Gear counter part, Eddie, had a similar ability, Carl's is unique in how Nirvana occupies space and absorbs hits.

When inactive, Nirvana is like a piece of the background. she doesn't move and both players can walk right through her. When active however, players can no longer pass through her and Carl can even push her around by running behind her. Additionally, in this state she can absorb projectile attacks. Interestingly enough however she will not absorb non-projectile attacks for Carl, these attacks will hit both Carl and Nirvana.

The balancing issues here are rather interesting, as the dynamic of a fighting game is partly defined by the number of opponents that fight at once. Going against this trend opens up all kinds of opportunities for game breaking setups that need to be addressed when designing the character. The ability to attack both high and low simultaneously as well as the ability to attack a player from both sides at once are both dangerous results that can result in unblockable combos. For the most part Blazblue addresses these concerns by increasing the reliance on Nirvana by the player. On his own, Carl is an incredibly weak character having some of the lowest damage and health of the entire cast. Most damaging moves or combos rely on the player to use Nirvana for the damaging hits. This does however have the result of making Carl very difficult to learn to play while at the same time incredibly effective at high levels.

-----
Hakumen - Zanshin

Hakumen isn't necessarily an interesting character because of his drive attack, which is basically a set of counter moves, but more because of how that factors into his overall character design. When activating Hakumen's drive, the player can activate a series of counter stance which have differing activation times and effects, but only if the enemy attacks Hakumen during this state.

The real interesting part about Hakumen is how his super meter and special moves work. Hakumen does not have a normal super meter, instead he has a small meter and eight special "orbs". The small meter fills up automatically over time, and faster when taking damage or attacking and when it fills up the player gains one orb. Additionally certain counters using Zanshin will also give you a free orb. All of Hakumen's special moves and supers require varying numbers of orbs, from 1 all the way up to 8.

This turns Hakumen into an interesting defensive and offensive character at the same time. On the one hand, a Hakumen player needs to wait for the orbs to do many of his combos. On the other, he never stops building his offensive options. Due to his overall low speed and high average damage, Hakumen tends to be played as a defensive character however, though this works well in conjunction with his drive attack, which promotes an active defense.

-----
V-13 - Sword Summoner

Her name is actually pronounced "Nu" like the Greek letter. (Which incidently is the 13th letter of the Greek alphabet.) She is the last boss of the normal arcade mode game and has a somewhat strange drive attack. When activated, she summons a sword at a specified location that flies a certain distance forward. The drive button can be chained into itself twice, which shoots two different swords. Multiple versions of drive can also be chained together so a player can press drive twice, the forward and drive twice, then down and drive twice.

The result of this sword summoning ability is that her effective attack range becomes skewed. There is a blind spot for her drive attack right in front of her but generally she can attack players from entire screen lengths away. Combos with the drive attack tend to look very strange as Nu stays a modest distance from the enemy while assaulting him with swords from all directions.

Nu is considered to be one of the top characters in the game because of this ability. Despite the blind spot in her drive ability, it's generally useful because the risk/reward ratio is very good due to the high damage and pressure that the swords can achieve. The gameplay style that results from this mechanic is also fairly different from a standard "poking" character style as well since the swords can combo into each other, allowing high damage combos while staying safe from retaliation.

-----

And that brings us to the end of my BlazBlue segment. I hope it makes sense now why I'm so interested in this game. A combination of incredibly original gameplay mechanics coupled with colorful characters and a lot of extra features not common to fighting games before it make BlazBlue one of the definitive fighting games for the year.

There is still a question of balance of course, and to this effect it may not be surprising that many hardcore fighting game enthusiast find BlazBlue to be a poorly balanced game. The variety of spectactular new mechanics were likely very challenging just to come up with much less balance. However despite this, I think it's important for designers to push new ground like this in all aspects of their work. I think even if the game isn't considered to be balanced well at the moment, future iterations as well as continuing improving strategies will help push it to a level that casual and hardcore players can both appreciate.

Now if only my pre-order would get here faster...

The Three C's of Design

2009-06-20T14:32:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to come up with some interesting ways to express how good design works, and I've been toying with this new idea recently I'm calling "The Three C's of Good Design". The gist of it is that it is the three core skills that someone needs to be successful in design. It's still a new idea that I just thought up a little while ago, so there is definitely room for revision, but I'd like to share what I have so far.

The Three C's of Good Design are:
1. Creativity
2. Confidence
3. Communication

I'll go over each point individually, but before that I want to clarify something. There used to be 4 C's the last one being "Competence" but I thought it was a little redundant, since if you gain the other three you will already have competence. Or rather, having these three skills will make you competent at design.

So onto the individual parts...

-----
Creativity

This one is probably the most obvious. The job of a designer is to CREATE new experiences in every game and to find ways to make these experiences fun for the majority of the players.

I think it's a little deeper than this however, since simply coming up with the ideas for the experience is only part of the challenge. The creativity of designers has to extend to all aspects of game creation. Besides just coming up with the experience, creativity is needed to solve problems which come up during implementation, it's needed to come up with ways to use the script to support the experience, and it's even when testing levels in order to find new ways to break the very thing you worked so hard to create.

Creativity is definitely a core skill for any designer, but it's important to be creative when it comes to a broad base of design aspects and not just be someone who comes up with ideas, but someone who can see them through to completion.

-----
Confidence

I think it's important not to take this principle too far, because then it becomes arrogance, which isn't helpful and can be counter-productive in the worst case.

By confidence I mean the assurance to stick with what you think is good design. I think it's fine to look at what the player wants, but also that it's important for designers to understand that even if players say they "want" something, that is not necessarily what the game "needs".

Being confident in your own designs means that you understand what makes them good and recognize when things need to be changed, and also when it's better to stick to your original plans. Changing ideas and levels can happen frequently in the design process, but it's important to maintain a confident stance so that that you know when to stop and finish your work.

-----
Communication

Probably the least obvious of the three, this one tends to end up being the most important. As a designer, it's important to be confident, but also to realize that the majority of your work will usually depend on the hard work of other people, most often programmers and artists. Very rarely does one person do everything himself unless it's something small like a flash game or short indie project.

The final works of designers require many raw materials that are generally provided by others. While the designer is the one who creates the end result it's incredibly important to recognize and understand the work of those that come before you. Being able to communicate effectively with other designers in a confident manner that gets your creative design ideas across is what allows great games to be made.

Communication with artists and programmers can be difficult sometimes as the differences in disciplines sometimes result in designers seeing things differently than artists and programmers, but being able to communicate and understand the people who are not in the design department is just as important (and possibly moreso) than simply being able to communicate with your fellow designers.

Great ideas and a confident pitch aren't going to get you a finished game unless you can get the idea across to your peers and co-workers.

-----

And those are the three C's are the things I'm thinking are really important for being a good designer. They are aspects I try to focus on when designing and when working with others. I may think up more in the future, but for now I think these sum things up nicely.

One more thing before I sign off for today. BlazBlue is slated for release 6/30/2009 in the US. Pre-orders are currently available here. I'm still trying to figure out which version I want and where I'm gonna end up shipping it. But I'm definitely going to make sure I pick it up.

Blazblue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 4

2009-06-08T19:21:00.000-07:00

And now today we continue with the long delayed Blazblue posts! If you remember we are discussion the individual character drives and why each is a radical departure from traditional fighting game mechanics.

-----

Rachel Alucard - Sylpheed

Rachel has my favorite drive, because it's one of the most unique ones I've seen yet. Her drive ability is to create wind on the battlefield. She can create wind in any of the 8 cardinal directions on the joystick by pressing the drive button in conjunction with that direction. The wind lasts for several seconds and affects the movement of both her and her opponent. Rachel uses a special wind gauge to determine how many times she can use this drive before it runs out. The bar stocks 4 uses of wind, and actively recharges as long as Rachel is standing on the ground and not defending.

Now this drive would be interesting on it's own since it affects the movement of both characters when its used. For example a player can use wind to blow himself at the enemy or use wind to blow the enemy away. While the wind affects both characters, it affects them more strongly when jumping, so it's possible to use it to mess up an opponent's jump in attack as well. In fact some of Rachel's moves and combos require wind to get the maximum effect.

I said it would be interesting on it's own, but in fact there is also more to it. Rachel has a set of projectile moves which are also affected by the wind. One of them shoots a projectile in an arc which has three variations on the ground and in the air. The wind affects these projectiles so the player can determine where they land. In some instances it's actually advantageous to blow a projectile back towards you to hit an enemy. The second projectile actually does nothing on its own. It just sits there and slowly floats upwards. However when the player uses wind, it becomes an active projectile, which can hit the opponent or cancel other projectiles. This creates a dynamic multi-directional projectile that can even come from behind the enemy.

The originality of this drive as well as the fact that Rachel's movelist builds upon the mechanic is what makes it my favorite.

-----
Arakune - Crimson

Moving on to the next drive reveals not only an interesting mechanic but also a very oddly designed character as well. Arakune has the appearance of an amorphous blob and as a result many of this attacks change his shape in addition to his size on the screen. This has interesting effects on the gameplay since he even dissapears completely when performing a forward dash.

His drive ability is a set of moves which "curse" the opponent when they hit. (One variation curses even on block.) Once cursed, a small meter appears that represents how long the opponent is cursed for. After this point pressing any of the attack buttons (including drive again) causes a small bug to fly on screen from a preset location to attack the enemy. This action also causes the meter to deplete slightly although it can be renewed by connecting with another drive attack.

Outside of this very different drive attack comes a very different style of play. While most characters focus on combos (and Arakune does have combos) his drive mechanic and moveset seem to support a style of play which involves tricking the player into blocking incorrectly. Since the bugs can attack from multiple angles, this allows Arakune to switch sides with the enemy several times using his unique array of teleport and short movement skills. The bugs enhance this ability to do strange and different combos when the opponent blocks incorrectly.

-----

Bang Shishigami - Burning Heart

Bang has a more natural feeling drive attack, but this is offset by several other game mechanics that he has and how they factor into his overall playstyle. His drive attack causes him to do a slow and telegraphed powerful attack. However the start of the attack guards against incoming attacks. Some version guard against more types of attacks than others, but all of them guard against something.

This "guard point" style is actually present in other games so it might seem strange that I still call it very unique. The reason for this is the other systems linked into this guard point system. First, when Bang successfully guards an attack with his drive he has the ability to instantly teleport before finishing the attack. This allows for movement options if the guarded attack has more hits coming and allows Bang to even appear behind his enemy while completing the attack. Second is that the attack itself is linked to one of Bang's supers commonly refered to as "Bang Install" which completely changes his base mechanics. Activating the move requires the player to land 4 hits with his drive and changes his movement options to allow dashes in 8 different directions as well as allowing him to move through opponents. This causes him to become even more mobile than Taokaka, however it also strips his ability to block attacks, making the guard points more important. Bang becomes a unique character because of how his drive mechanic factors into his other moves.

If that wasn't enough Bang also utilizes a supply system of "nails" which limit the amount of certain attacks he can do. He starts with 12 nails and uses them up as he performs certain moves. These moves consist of different styles of projectiles which give him strong options for attacks and a move which creates a "bumper" in the air which persists for the entire round. The presence of the bumpers is yet another unique thing about Bang as he is allowed to dash in any direction as soon as he touches one. This allows him to control his movement with a high degree of precision, but only in locations where the bumpers are.

-----

Litchi Faye Ling - Mantenbou

The last character is Litchi, who's drive allows her to control a special staff weapon that floats alongside her as she fights. Pressing the drive button sets the staff on the ground (or throws it to the ground in some cases). Pressing the drive button again calls the staff back to her, hitting anything in its way. Certain special moves also plant the staff to be called back later. Litchi's drive can be used in a variety of ways to create unique custom combos. Traditional combos with the staff involve knocking the enemy to the ground with the staff, only to relaunch them when the staff is recalled.

This mechanic is similar to a character in Guilty Gear (not surprising since its the same company) though Mantenbou adds onto the previous ideas. First is that Litchi's attacks change depending on whether or not she is in possession of the staff. She basically has two sets of moves with differing properties depending on if she is holding the staff or not. Additionally besides the special moves she can only do with the staff, certain special moves require her NOT to have the staff in her possession. Things get even more interesting because some normal moves with the staff cause her to lose possession of the staff for parts of the moves. This means that the available move list can change in the middle of combos which creates not only an intesting gameplay element, but likely a challenging aspect of this character for balancing.

-----

That's it for this week, one more post of characters, as I push to the end of the list of characters.

Team Based Games and Healer Classes Part 1

2009-06-01T13:43:00.000-07:00

I was planning to write about Blazblue today, but something else came up that has been dominating my thinking time recently so I'll get that off my chest first. Blazblue updates will continue soon, since I want to finish before the game is released. It seems bad to start another multipart post when I still haven't finished my first one but I think this is worth it.

-----

Today want to talk about healer classes and their presence in team based games. I speak primarily of MMO style games like Guild Wars, as this is where the majority of my experience comes from, though I feel it has relevance to other games with healing roles as well, such as Team Fortress 2, to a lesser extent.

So my main issue with healers is that I don't believe that it's possible for them to be balanced. Certainly healers can have a degree of balance and games with healers enjoy what can be construed as balanced play with occasional updates, but I think in general the concept itself has flaws at the game mechanic level. Let's set up some premises first on which I'm basing my argument.

1. In a team based game, it's possible to focus fire. Which means that one person can potentially be ganged up on by several enemies, causing him to die very quickly.

2. Dying is bad. This is common to all games, but most of the time it carries a penalty so that players will avoid it.

3. To counter dying as a result of many simultanious attacks, the designer creates a healer class.

4. A healer is a class dedicated to the defense of his allies, while he may have some offensive skills, in general his assumed role in the team is to keep his allies fighting while being attacked.

Based on these premises, a few conclusions quickly develop:

"A healer must have the potential to protect an ally from the damage from at least three enemies."

Let's start from the beginning here. If a healer can only keep himself alive, he is worthless, if he can only keep one ally alive, then you should take another damage dealer instead. Because healing classes typically contribute very little in the way of offensive power you can consider that they add a value of zero (0) to the parties offensive capabilities. If we assume that any other class contribues equally to attack and defense in a ratio of 1/1 then a healer must contibute at least 0/2 to make him worth taking. In fact, because he does not contribute significantly to attacking which is the ONLY way to defeat opponents in most games he must be worth more than 2 in terms of defense to warrant a spot on the team.

The next logical following is where things start to fall appart:

"Because healers are worth so much defensively, they become priority targets."

This conclusion is backed up from emperical evidence. If you look at any Guild Wars PvP game or even many situations in PvE the first target is always the healer. This is because every player on some level inherantly recognizes that he is more valuable than the other classes. Looking at TF2 yields this example as well if anyone remembers the Penny Arcade strip about "shoot the doctor".

Another thing to consider here is a situation where a healer class fights any other class in a 1v1 situation. If we consider the non-healer's goal to kill the healer and the healer's goal not to get killed then the result will commonly be that the healer "wins" and the attacker "loses" even though the match is technically a draw.

Expanding this to larger groups, the case tends to be that groups with healers tend to have the advantage over groups without healers. Take a 4v4 situation where one group has a healer, assuming average players the team with the healer is more likely to win. The reason is because if a good healer can heal the damage from up to three enemies, then that one healer is already worth three members of the opposing team. Taking them away means it is a 3v1 situation. The condition only escalates when more healers are added, though there is obviously a limit (which I will address in a later post).

So in the end the final conclusion we arive at is:

"Healers are objectively worth more than other characters."

-----

Now that we've established the basic idea, the next post on this topic will go into arguments in favor of healers and why they still do not address the problem. Stay tuned!

Standard Practices, and Lack Thereof

2009-05-26T23:03:00.000-07:00

Well it looks like I'm officially unemployed now. I've been looking for a job for a little while now, but things have now escalated a bit.

In that vein I've been taking many different design tests in these past months, so far I haven't had too much luck with them, but I'm always hopeful that I will do better on the next one.

However it's brought to my attention an interesting problem with the game industry.

"There are no standards."

Now I don't necessarily mean standards as in pricing or genre, as those things are somewhat established. I refer more to standards when it comes to hiring and best production practices. This is partly the fault of the type of work that is done in the industry and partly a result of the young age of the industry.

The fact of the matter is that every single company I have ever applied to has had radically different design tests, procedures for their interviews (and in the ones that I've visited) significantly different working practices and environments. Naturally you would expect different companies to use the interview procedures based on factors such as size and the nature of the work, but even within similar companies you get very inconsistent results. Similarly when you get a design test, it can range anywhere from six hours in one block to several weeks to complete a level, and the content varies as well, sometimes its a questionnaire, sometimes it's a paper level, other times it's a level built in an editor, and occasionally you get a test that asks for just about all of them at once.

Now I want to be clear that I'm not blaming the companies for this, as they each have developed their own way of doing things. What I am concerned about however is the isolation that has resulted in these types of differences and the results on people interested in getting jobs.

When every company does creates their own special way to create games the result is that workers become incredibly specialized to a certain way of working. If company A has their own procedure for creating a game of a certain genre that involves specialized job descriptions and certain procedures, then it becomes difficult for the company to find new workers and it becomes difficult for workers at that company to find new jobs should they want/need to move on.

For example, say company A has designers wear multiple hats and design levels, script scenarios and write the dialouge, while another company B has a separate jobs for designing, scripting and writing that are fulfilled by specialists. Designers from company A will not be specialized enough to work at company B and workers from company B will not be experienced enough in the other job aspects to handle work at company A.

This is probably more of a designer issue than an artist or programmer issue however, since designer jobs seem to be the ones that differ most significantly from one company to another. However the testing procedure for hiring new workers is something that seems inconsistent for all development disciplines.

While I understand the value of testing potential applicants and I don't think it should stop, I simultaneously question why the transitions between companies is so jarring. I can be working on a week long written exam for one week and then follow it the next week with an intense 3 day design work in specific level editor. With jumps in productivity like this I think it only makes it more likely that the odd pacing will result in lower quality work overall in the long run. Additionally because of the length of time some tests take it makes it difficult to apply for multiple jobs at a time, this again, can result in a lower quality of results. Finally because the content of an employment test can vary significantly from test to test it's impossible for a job seeker to practice or prepare himself, which means the test will not necessarily be an accurate measure of his abilities.

Personally I'd like it if there was some kind of standardized way to test for certain qualities of design in a way that did not result in the guessing game that seems to happen from both sides when an employment test is issued. Of course, I realize that it's not likely to happen for a while, since part of what makes this industry so vibrant and changing is the spontaneity that pushes the limits of gameplay and design.

In the end, game design ability isn't easily measured because it's not like building a house or fixing plumbing; it's creating fun experiences from nothing but imagination.

Which unfortunately can't really be measured with a ruler.

10 Pitfalls of Game Design

2009-05-10T16:34:00.000-07:00

Normally I don't like to post something so small and trivial as a link to a new article since I feel that when you make a blog post it should be something meaningful.

However, I'll make an exception this time and post to this article about the 10 Game Design Process Pitfalls.

It's a really good read. Even though I think a lot of the things he talks about should be obvious to most designers, I think they are also the things that tend to get caught up and missed in the design process and deadline crunches.

In short the pitfalls are:
1. Not playing games
2. Overemphasizing paper designs
3. Not using peer review
4. Choosing leads for production skills and not content creation skills
5. Not using placeholders
6. Letting the story control the design
7. Restricting designer tools
8. Building before you find "fun"
9. Out of date documentation
10. Not using outside playtesting

I'm not going to go over these here though, since the author does a much better job. But these are things I definitely will take to heart and try and remember so that I won't fall into the same pitfalls.

Hard Times

2009-05-08T22:25:00.001-07:00

Seems like pretty difficult times for the game industry. Not that I wasn't aware of this from being laid off, but I recently read an interesting article that estimates the number of layoffs to be around 8450 since last July. It's a pretty staggering number when I think about it, and it only makes me realize how much harder I need to work to find a new job.

The interesting thing about that article is that the author also talks about a Gaming Renaissance movement that is taking place. It's an interesting read, and makes me a little concerned about the my future in this industry. Although at the same time I suppose I am also cautiously optimistic about the changes and the new studios that are springing up...

...though I'm not so optimistic as to stop applying for jobs and make my own company just yet. I'd like to get more experience in this industry before I can do something that radical, but it's definitely something to consider in the future.

Gonna be putting of the next BlazBlue installment for a little while since I have yet another design test I need to work on. I'm hoping to finish that set of blogs before the game actually comes out on 6/25. Well assuming it comes out on the same date in the US...

Guild Wars and Design Mechanics

2009-05-06T18:05:00.000-07:00

Instead of continuing with the BlazBlue stuff today I thought I'd take a break and talk a little about some issues going on in a game that I play frequently, Guild Wars.

Guild Wars established itself as an online RPG without monthly fees, which at the time was pretty much unheard of in the MMORPG market. In fact, there really haven't been too many other games that have followed the Guild Wars model an been successful (at least not that I know of), moreso, I'm not even sure if there are any that tried to follow it. Guild Wars strikes me as kind of different from tradtionl MMORPG structure anyhow and I hesitate to affix that label to it since the game is fully instanced and is focused more on skills than on leveling which sets it appart at the base mechanic level.

Background asside, the game has been around for four years so far and recently had it's 4th Anniversary. The fact that the game still has an audience after four years is pretty impressive for one thing, but for this event they added a host of new features and game elements in an attempt to liven up the game and get people to play it.

And yet as I browsed the forums I found this amazing sense of entitlement from a lot of the playerbase which even got hostile at some of the updates that the developers worked hard to bring to this event. Obviously, not everyone is like that and I recognize that the percentage of people who complain on online forum postings tend to represent only a small portion of the audience (the people who like it tend to go and PLAY THE GAME instead), but I wanted to talk about some of the new features and my thoughs on them from a design perspective.

-----
Pet Management
An entire new area was introduced that allows players to store their captured pets and pet evolutions. As you level up pets you can unlock them permanently in this area, called the menagerie and summon them back at any time. It's useful for players who want to use different types of pets on their rangers and ranger secondaries, since it allows to you experiment with different pet evolutions. Further it provides a sink for certain resources both old and new in order to unlock pets that would otherwise be too troublesome to find or level up. As a final option players can purchase an unlock pack to unlock everything for about $10. This type of thing isn't new with Guild Wars, since they also provided a PvP skill unlock pack for about the same amount.

What is interesting about this, is that I always felt that pets were a very small part of the game. Your character has to be ranger primary or secondary to even use a pet, and for the most part, it's fairly uncommon to see pets in PvP and PvE. There is a clear expenditure of resources for this new area, but at the same time I wonder how big of an impact it ends up having, since the actual use for pets is limited to a small part of the game.

-----
Extra Storage Tabs
More storage is always a useful thing especially for people who like to save everything they pick up like me. ArenaNet has always been warry about giving more storage though since they claim it has an associated cost. Many people will tell you that server space can be bought relatively cheaply ($100 per TB was one such number I've heard), so the logic is that it should be realatively easy to add without a huge cost to the consumer. In fact this update did add a large quanity of storage to the game without any cost to the player. There is a free promotion for 20 extra storage slots on the website and new 5 slot equipment bags can be purchased for a resonable cost in game.

Oh but here is where the entitlement comes in. If you want more than the 20 free slots with the promotion which oddly enough people actually DISLIKE because it requires you to make an NCSoft account (it's STILL FREE), you need to pay $10 per 20 slot tab, up to 4 tabs. Now the thing is that storage tabs are more convienient since they can be accessed on all characters on your account, but the thing is another character slot cost $10, and characters can hold over twice that amount in their normal inventories. So it becomes a matter of cost vs convenience. I'm not going to argue one way or the other, I think the sales numbers will influence any further changes to the price, and I'm not privy to those things, but some of the complaints call charging for storage a scam because it costs a disproportionate amount.

-----
Extra Storage Bags
The equipment bags are another can of worms. Anyone can by a 5 slot bag for a modest fee but 10, 15 and 20 slot bags come at a much higher cost. You need to trade in special coins for them, coins that can only be aquired through questing. Additionally the price for the larger bags increases exponentially. The 20 slot bags cost FIFTEEN TIMES more than the 10 slots. Which is a large commitment in gameplay time, since you have to earn the coins and cannot trade them with other players.

I'm not sure how I feel about this type of incentive, and certainly there are many complaints about having to grind coins for storage, but in general the tasks required for gaining coins feels fairly entertaining for me most of the time. The notion though that players should be entitled to the 20 slot bags though is something I can't agree with. Certainly everyone CAN get them, but like most things in Guild Wars, it's a goal with clear steps to reaching it. I don't want to say this is the perfect solution (since the cost is truly does feel steep) but think people exagerate the magnitude of the issue. It's actually fairly common to set up grind for players in MMOs for more storage, you tend to earn more as you level up, so I don't see this as that ridiculous. If anything it's just a way for players to advance their characters after level 20. I find that the general design behind most MMOs is to develop a character you really like and get them all sorts of cool things. Since you can't progress past level 20 in Guild Wars, the team has made many other (optional) things players can do to advance their characters, and this doesn't seem any different.

-----
Daily Quest
This is kind of an odd little thing in my opinion. Daily quests are common to other games like World of Warcraft already, and the idea is that every day some new quests are available for some kind of reward. In the case of Guild Wars, that reward tends to be the coins I mentioned earlier as well as cash and sometimes faction (another type of currency really). The only wait to get the coins required for the equipement bags is to do these quests (there are other rewards for turning in the coins). There are three types, two for PvE and one for PvP that cycle every day, and players are limited to having three of each type in their log at a time.

This is an interesting strategy, but one that so far seems to be working well. The problem that occured after four years of being online is that certain areas of the game were basically empty and nobody except new players would be there. Older players would rarely go back to old content, and unless you had a guild or group of friends, it was unlikely for you to find many people to play these areas with.

The daily quests encourage people to go back and re-do old stuff for new rewards. So far this has revitalized areas of the game as they daily quests change every day. Certainly some of them have been far more challenging than others, but if one quest is too hard, you just have to wait a day until a new one replaces it. This seems to be an amazing way to revitalize mission towns and areas of the game that the designers feel are lacking, without actually creating new content for the areas. I'm a big fan of this part of the update myself.

-----

Wow, I talked a lot about that, so I guess I'll stop for now. There's certainly a lot more to it, but I don't want to make these blog entires so long that nobody will read them.

BlazBlue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 3

2009-04-28T19:08:00.000-07:00

Continuing today with more drives! They just get crazier from here.

-----

Noel Vermilion - Chain Revolver
Noel's drive is pretty interesting in that it opens up interesting combo chains. Basically by pressing the drive button and different directions you can chain together a certain set of moves. There is one that hits overhead and one that launches and another that switches sides with the opponent. You can do up to 4 or so of them in a row but you're not allowed to do the same one twice in a row. At the end you can even do a finishing move that blows the opponent away! It allows players to mix up interesting combinations of moves all in a single sequence with just one button. This drive isn't quite as radical as some of the others but gives many more interesting options for the player with only a single button.

-----

Iron Tager - Voltec Battler
Tager's drive ability is basically magnetism. If he hits you with a drive move, you are temporarily magnitized for a duration dependant on the move that he hits you with. Until it wears off ALL of Tager's moves which use the drive button will pull you towards him. Add to this that Tager is BlazBlue's throw character and you've got an amazing departure from the norm. Unlike throw characters from other fighting games who try to get close to the enemy, Tager can also attempt to pull the enemy into him. Tager also has a very fast magnitizing projectile that he can fire for magnitizing enemies who try and play keepaway. This is balanced by the fact that he has to charge it up before firing (or wait a while since it chages slowly by itself). This effectively limits him to being a close range character with the option to occasionally magnitize longer range keepaway characters.

-----

Taokaka - Dancing Edge
Besides Tao's character design (which I'm a big fan of), she also has a pretty neat drive mechanic. Pressing the drive button plus any direction causes her to launch herself in an attack in that direction. This wouldn't be that unusual except for the amount of range the attack covers which is practically an entire screen length. Additionally she can cancel this drive move from just about any of her normal and special moves as well. The end result is a ridiculous amount of movement control over the whole screen. No other character really comes close to matching her sheer speed and movement options. Speed characters in fighting games aren't that uncommon and like most speed characters, Tao has low damage on her individual hits to make up for her longer combos. Taokaka really breaks conventions when put into practice though. The ability to transition between retreating and attacking with the press of a single button makes for some very flashy combos as well as movement control not common to any other fighting game.

-----

That's it for this edition, stay tuned for my favorite one next time!

Bionic Viking Video

2009-04-21T14:25:00.000-07:00

Quick update. I fixed up the Bionic Viking Trailer so that it is now smaller and proportioned correctly. The new video is bigger than the old one despite being smaller in size since the old version had black bars on the tops and sides which I removed.

BIONIC VIKING! BIONIC VIKING!

Video Update

2009-04-19T20:12:00.000-07:00

Got some new videos up today. Dead-end Freeman: Reload now has a walkthrough video. It's a fair amount larger than the others, since this map is bigger so be careful if you have a slow connection.

I also uploaded higher quality videos for all of the maps on the Big Huge Games RPG I was working on. A bit of explanation is necessary here for these videos since they are not simply higher quality videos of the small flash movies but entirely different videos of the same dungeons. I lost the higher quality versions of the small flash videos when my hard drive crashed. Since I'm not really working there anymore I had to ask someone else to take videos for me. This may result in the videos being a little jarring or fast because they had to be flythroughs. Hopefully you won't have too many problems with them.

That's it for now, gotta get back to this design test...

BlazBlue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 2

2009-04-17T12:01:00.001-07:00

The job hunt is going about as well as can be expected and I've got my first design test to work on now. In the meantime I thought I'd continue my discussion of BlazBlue and the original game mechanics it introduces to the fighting game genre. Today is a discussion of the "Drive" system and the start of the individual character analysis.

-----
The Drive System

The button scheme for this game consists of 3 attack buttons of varying strength plus a 4th button called the Drive button. Now the first part isn't very unusual. Many fighting games have 3 or more attack buttons, but 3 is about the bare minimum that most games get away with currently (although Virtua Fighter only has punch and kick). Of course the problem with having less buttons is that you have to use additional button combinations and direction/button combinations to get more moves. So based on the ratio of actions the character can perform the amount of complex interactions can change.

I'm getting a little off topic here, so getting back to the drive system, the 4th button in BlazBlue is used for character specific actions. I believe in an interview someone related to the game mentioned that it is the button "that makes your character do something cool". It's an interesting button because the effect of it varies wildly percharacter. For some characters it is a separate attack, but for others it is an entirely separate mode or action that interacts with attacks. The result of this drive system is that every character has one ability that wildly differentiates them from the other characters beyond the simple special move properties common to most games.

Additionally behind each of the drive systems is a completely unique mechanic that none of the other characters really have. Some drives can be used an unlimited amount of times while others have special meters. Additionally the applications of each one are different, some have multiple moves associated with them while others only have a few.

The drive system is the crux of why I'm really attracted to this game. It screams original design and feels like a huge stretch beyond just simply giving each character a different theme. It sets them apart on an entire game mechanic level and I imagine it was incredibly difficult to balance as a result of that.

I seem to have written a lot there so I'll just do a few characters this time

----

Ragna the Bloodedge
Drive - Soul Eater
Ragna is the main character and his drive allows him to steal health from the enemy. For him the drive button acts as a separate attack button. Each attack that hits using this button drains a small portion of health fromm the enemy. I found this to be a really crazy idea for a fighting game when I first heard about it. Generally ways to heal are rare in fighting games since the matches are decided based on who loses all their health first. Any way to heal is generally very difficult to pull off or has very small rewards. (In awkward contrast suicide style moves which drain the player's health tend to be much more common.) The fact that only Ragna has these types of attacks is a pretty bold move on the designer's part, since this kind of ability is one that can easily be either too powerful or too weak to be useful. So far tournament play from arcades seem to suggest that it was balanced fairly well. The drive attacks steal life and Ragna was created with lower than average health and an offensive oriented playstyle to compensate.

As a final twist Ragna also has a special mode called Blood Kain that causes him to actively lose health gradually while increasting the amount of health that his lifestealing takes. It's an interesting tradeoff though from what I've seen most players find it to be too risky to bother using.

-----

Jin Kisaragi
Drivce - Frostbite
Jin's drive as the name implies freezes the enemy. It's similar to Ragna in that it is done in the form of an attack and can be used indefinitely without penalty. Freezing in fact has been done before in some other fighting games and I think it's tends to fill the role of stuns in other games. Jin's is no exception, but the number of freezing attacks he has in comparison to other games seems to be much higher, but is balanced by the fact that two freezing attacks in a row will not freeze in succession.

Now as I said the actual freeze mechanic has been done before, but where it gets interesting is how its combined with another mechanic common to games. I guess I'll call it the EX mechanic. Certain special attacks, when performed with the drive button drain 25% of the player's super gauge in order to launch a more powerful or upgraded version of the attack. In addition to the freezing mechanic, this gives players a many more moves to work with when playing Jin and allow them to plan effective strategies through the use of their super bar (since the bar is also used for the roman cancel and super move).

-----

That's all for now, I've gotta get back to design tests and applications. I will eventually finish this segment though so stay tuned.

Quick Update

2009-04-13T16:07:00.000-07:00

So it looks like my external drive is pretty much done. I still can't believe the horrible timing of it breaking, but I'm working on getting some new videos to replace them. They won't be the same ones unfortunately, but they should at least be the same dungeon. Not sure when I'll be able to get them, but at least I should be able to get some higher quality videos at some point.

I've also been contemplating changing a few things about the website. It's been a while since I graduated from the Guildhall and I'm not sure it's clear yet from the way the front page looks. The Team Projects section seems a little vague too, I'm considering renaming it to something else.

I haven't forgotten about the BlazBlue stuff, job hunting has just been taking up a lot of my time recently. I try and hit another section of it this week.

I'm also thinking I should start another personal project but I'm not quite sure what just yet.

Big Huge Update, Murphy's Law

2009-04-06T20:53:00.000-07:00

I've uploaded some big changes to the Team Projects section with the addition of the Big Huge Games RPG. This section was so big it needed a separate page to hold it all. Several videos and a lot of cool screenshots are included.

Murphy's Law seems to have struck today as I was planning a larger update only to have my external hard drive abruptly stop working before I could upload the higher quality videos. I did move the high quality image sets to another computer before it died, but I only have the lower quality flash videos available right now. I'm looking into getting the data recovered but it might be too expensive for me to afford depending on the damage. I'll try to get them uploaded at a later date, but that's only if I can recover them at all.

There were also some minor fixes to the CSS scripting and to the front page although I doubt too many people really pay much attention to those things.

Resume Updated

2009-04-02T14:04:00.000-07:00

Did a quick update to the resume section of the site to reflect my work at Big Huge Games as well as a LinkedIn profile link. I was planning a larger update with some images of the stuff I've been working on, but I'm having to double check some procedures to make sure I'm not breaking any rules.

I'm trying to get this resolved as quickly as possible, hopefully I can add the new stuff in a few days.

Job Search Resumes

2009-03-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

I won't say much, but I'm currently looking for a new job now. Expect some updates to this portfolio site within a week or so.

BlazBlue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 1

2009-03-26T18:28:00.000-07:00

I mentioned before that I was looking forward to the Arc System Works game BlazBlue in an earlier post, and I wanted to take a little time to explain why I find it interesting. Now there are the obvious fanboy reasons for it, since it's made by the same team that made Guilty Gear, one of my favorite games, but from a design perspective, I find it facinating that the designers managed to set up a game that seems to have a good balance and yet also include a whole bunch of bizzare design ideas.

This first part is an introduction to the game and it's predecessor Guilty Gear and how the base game system has a lot of things that are a radical departure from how most fighting games are set up. After that I'll take a few more posts to go over each of the characters and how in their own way each of them expore a radically different playstyle and how it factors into the overall game balance. And hopefully at the end, I'll have an analysis of how the game compares to other contemporary fighting games and their systems.

Hopefully I won't bore anyone.

-----

So as a bit of background, both Guilty Gear and BlazBlue are 2D fighting games which have a unique anime-style artwork and fast-paced, heavily offensive battles. The original Guilty Gear game was released in the U.S. in 1998 for the Playstation and subsequent releases mostly came out for the PS2. Each game expanded on previous mechanics and usually added a few new characters. The series has enjoyed a fairly large tournament scene which flourished around the time of the third game, the first game being considered a cult hit and the second somewhat unrefined. By the third game, several interesting mechanics had been developed and refined to provide a unique game experience. Specifically the mechanics I'm focusing on are:

Perfect Guard - Removing Chip Damage
In both games the player can hold two buttons while blocking to activate a perfect defensive manuver which prevents them from taking block damage. This mechanic also pushes back the enemy during combo strings to create space. In Guilty Gear the penalty for using this guard was the sacrifice of your super meter. In BlazBlue, it consumes a separate meter which recharges over time automatically. The advantage of the BlazBlue system is that it allows players who are not as offensive to use the technique (super meter is gained in both games from offensive actions), however if this extra gauge is depleted the player takes additional damage until it fills up again. Thus it becomes a different type of resource that the player can manage.

BURST - Combo Breaker
This is a mechanic that allows the player to immeditely break a combo initiated by the enemy. It makes them temporarily invincible and then causes a knockback effect in a radius around them. Both BlazBlue and Guilty Gear use this mechanic although there are some small differences. Guilty Gear used a timer for the burst, and had it charge up faster as the player gets hit. This generally allowed 2 bursts in a three round match. There were two types of bursts, one used defensively which rewarded you with the gauge refilling a bit if it hit, and one used offensively which completely charged the player's super bar if it connected. In BlazBlue the burst is given to players every round and there is no longer a recharge timer, the player only gets one each round. The penalty for using the burst is that you can no longer use a perfect guard and your overall defence is lowered. This changes the mechanic from an ability that players tended to use early in Guilty Gear, to one which players tend to use late battle because of the strong negative drawback. This new tradeoff is interesting because it requires more strategical thought on the part of the player.

Roman Cancel - Custom Combo Creator
The Roman Cancel or Rapid Cancel as it is called in BlazBlue is a game system that allows players to immediately stop any action that hits the enemy and allow all normal movement options again. Both games use this mechanic to allow players to create specialized combos and unique actions that couldn't otherwise be created. This action costs 50% of a player's super meter (Guilty Gear has a special version of the roman cancel that costs 25%) and so the resulting action generally needs to be worth the amount of damage a super move would do, since those cost the same amount. It's another type of tradeoff that gives the player some new options.

Recovery - Avoiding Followups
This is actually a more common feature of fighting games than the last few, but I thought it was worth mentioning because of the way that BlazBlue handles it. If the player is hit into the air, he can recover by pressing a button and a direction to flip away from a followup attack. In some cases it is advantageous to wait before recovering in case the enemy anticipates your recovery, so it becomes a guessing game that keeps the players engaged as soon as the previous sequence which resulted in the recovery ends. BlazBlue takes it a step further by allowing the player to recover on the ground in different directions. This is actually common in 3D fighting games, although 3D fighting games generally do not include air recovery. Since the player can be hit during ground recovery in BlazBlue at certain points it opens up new combo options and a deeper overall gameplay.

Instant Kills - The Counter-Intuative Mechanic
Both games have the concept of instant kills moves (called Astral Heat in BlazBlue), these are manuvers which kill off your opponent in a flashy way. In Guilty Gear they were ridiculously difficult to do and resulted in the player sacrificing his entire super bar if it missed (which means no supers, perfect guarding, or roman canceling). Also because they were so powerful, most of them were set up to be incredibly slow and almost impossible to connect with. As a result, they were rare and a gimmick at best. BlazBlue's mechanic is a little better in that the Astral Heat moves are a little easier to hit with (at least the ones shown so far) and they do not remove the super bar if they miss. However as a tradeoff this move can only be performed when the enemy is at low health and on the last round. This changes the nature of the move to simply be a flashy finish to the round. It will likely see just as little use as the original Guilty Gear instant kill, due to it being more useful in most circumstances to use the super bar for two normal supers or roman canceling, but because they are no longer as strong, the moves can be made more useful and easier to connect with. Hopefully this will increase their usage.

-----

That's the end of part one. Next time I'll start going of the drive system and some characters.

On RPGs...

2009-03-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

I'm working on adding the unreleased RPG that I've been working on at Big Huge Games to my resume page in the future, but before I do, I wanted to talk about some of the things I've been learning from working on one.

Now as a bit of background, I mostly played JRPGs before getting into this industry. As a bit of background, the JRPG or Japanese RPG genre is named as such because the majority of titles with this style of design come from Japan. Now there is actually a significant distinction in design between JRPGs and their counterpart Western RPGs, one which I had been aware of before starting this job, but never really took the time to explore until I started working on a Western RPG myself.

The main differnence in design between the two is that Western RPGs are traditionally drawn off of the old Dungeons and Dragons style tabletop RPGs and usually contain a high degree of character customization including having stats such as charisma, strength, or wisdom. Additionally because of this focus on the player being the character in the game, these games traditionally have more than one way to solve a given quest. If the player wants to open a special locked container, he could intimidate the person with the key, steal the key, pick the lock, or even make an acid potion to eat through the lock.

JRPGs on the contrary tend to contain fully developed characters who's stats and abilities automatically grow as the player goes through the game. These types of RPGs traditionally focus more on telling a specific and special story that is tailored to the characters given to the player to control. While there is usually some level of customization available it tends to lean more towards the aesthetic or battle influincing changes such as new clothes or a different set of fighting skills.

The difference between the two design styles of the game never really stuck me that strongly until my work on the Big Huge RPG. First of all, because I was working on a western RPG I was asked to play as many of them as I could, so I played some Neverwinter Nights, some Mass Effect and some Fallout 3, all of them well known and well reviewed RPGs. I was still playing some great JRPGs at the same time including Disgaea, Odin Sphere, and Final Fantasy, so there it became easy to compare the two RPG styles. Additionally working with quest designers to implement quests in the game also brought many other things to light that I had not previously considered while playing JRPGs.

Now just to be clear, I like both genres even though I have mostly played JRPGs in the past, I don't intend this post to be a declaration of loyalty to one genre or another, simply a design analysis of what seem to be the strong points of each and the reasons why.

The western RPG system has many positive aspects to it. The most important one that I see is replayabilty. Because there are usually multiple ways to solve any given quest over the course of a given game I found myself wanted to play games like Mass Effect multiple types in order to try more than one solution to the problem. Additionally, because the character customization allowed me to pick from six different classes, each that had a different playstyle I was encouraged to play the game more than once simply for the combat aspect (which I did). In the JRPG genre the solution to extend playtime like this usually comes in the form of a "secret" or "bonus" dungeon that has content much more difficult than the rest of the game which requires some level of grinding to complete. Even though I tend to play more JRPGs it's rare that I bother to play them more than once. The story and events don't change on the second playthrough so it doesn't seem worth it. Even though some of the events in a wester RPG will be the same on the second playthrough there is usually enough different content (usually as a result of the way I'm playing) to keep it interesting for a second time through.

Now this model has some problems as well. In a JRPG the designers know pretty much exactly how things are going to play out in terms of events and dungeon order. There are far less unknowns to deal with in quests as well which means that the designers can focus more on other aspects of the game such as the combat or item systems, or even the cinematic presentation of the levels. Western RPGs have to worry about odd scenarios such as:

- Many western RPGs are free roaming, how do you scale dungeons so the player is not overwhelmed?
- If the player can solve the quest in multiple ways, how does that affect the world and subsequent quest? Each of these scenarios might have to be built.
- How do you balance the different methods of solving problems in the game world? If a player with a high charisma score can talk his way out half the problems in the game, will he be frustrated when he is forced to fight a boss and is not strong enough?

These are all problems in the RPG style that need to be dealt with in addition to the normal tasks such as building the levels, and scripting the main storyline events. As a result of this I tend to feel that JRPGs feel more solid and cohesive overall. There seem to be more bugs and glitches in western RPGs that I've played as well, possibly as a result of the massive variation that can be spawned as a result of trying to create dynamic worlds that can respond to so many player inputs. A final problem with creating so much extra content is that not all players will experience it. While I did play Mass Effect through twice, I'm hard pressed to play it a third time, which means I've only really experienced 1/3 of the combat styles in the game, and I still haven't explored all the solutions to each quest. This happens sometimes in JRPGs as well, but the amount of alternate scenarios and bonus content is far less in general. The designers have to realize that a large chunk of the work they are doing will not ever be experienced by the majority of the player base, even if they play the game more than once.

So all in all, I can't say I have a preference between the two types of RPGs. They each have their own merits and deterimets and it's going to be up to the player which type of experience they prefer. However, as a designer I think it's worthwhile to be aware of these types of differences while working on a game in order to maximize the effectiveness of the experience provided to the player.

Back to the Blog

2009-03-19T17:04:00.000-07:00

So first off, it's clear that I need to post here more often. There have been a ton of things going on recently that are highly relevant to my design work and thoughts on design.

Now that I've got that out of the way, onto the important stuff:

-----

COLOR OF DOOM WINS AT IGF

Color of Doom ended up as a winner in the 2009 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase. I'm pretty proud of this and I think it shows how much work everyone on our team put into the game. The fact that it won makes me really want to take the whole game concept further. My original concept for the game turned out very different from what our group went with, and while it obviously turned out great, I still feel like I'd like to do something more with the original concept and story.

-----

BLAZBLUE COMING TO THE U.S.

I've been really psyched up about BlazBlue recently. It's a game by the studio that did Guilty Gear and I've been a fan of their games since the first game hit the U.S. in 1998. The new game is an HD 2D fighting game for both the PS3 and XBox 360 with a simultaneous release in Japan and the U.S. on 6/25.

I've been immersing myself in the game system and videos from the arcade version that are populating youtube recently. The game has some great new characters and design systems that give it a fresh look that is both very new and different, but also keeps itself similar enough to Guilty Gear that it's easy to see relations.

This would all be a great thing, except for the part where I don't own a 360 or PS3! I'm still not sure which is better as there are many things going for each console. The 360 has the exclusive Guilty Gear 2: Oveture, but the PS3 has free online play to name a few differences. I still have a few months though, which is great, because with student loans to pay off, I need to save money in order to buy it!

I'll talk more about the game systems in another post.

-----

BIG HUGE... PROBLEM?

So it's been announced on a few websites so far about THQ closing the company I work for if a buyer is not found within a certain timeframe. Due to NDAs and the like I can't say too much about it, but it's definitely something that I think about a lot. Maybe I'll be able to talk a little more about it in the future, but for now all I'll say now is that it's a reminder that the game industry is very volitile and ever-changing.

-----

GDC A LITTLE OUT OF REACH

It makes me sad, but given my current financial outlook I won't be able to make it to GDC this year. Last year going with the Guildhall folks was a blast and I would have loved to have gone this year as well. However given the section right above this one, I felt it was better to opt out in this case. Hopefully my situation next year will be more condusive to going.

-----

There's a lot more to say to catch up for the last two months, and definitely more to say. If anything I feel like I should be updating here more than once a month.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-25T11:32:00.000-08:00

...and a happy New Year.

Updates will continue in January.

Left 4 Dead

2008-12-01T17:13:00.000-08:00

Work and games have been keeping me pretty busy recently, so I haven't had too much time to work on updates for the site. I've got stuff in the queue, but just playing catchup with all the games I missed out on while I was at Guildhall studying is taking a lot of time! Plus even work wants me to check out some of the competition in order to help make the game good.

...Incidentally, the part where my job asks me to play games is part of the reasons I think my job is super awesome.

Today I want to talk about one of the games I've been playing recently: Left 4 Dead. While it wasn't one of the games I was recommended to play, enough people at work play it so that I think it's worth talking about.

-----------
LEFT 4 DEAD REVIEW

So Left 4 Dead is basically one of the best co-op games I have ever played. It's a first-person-shooter set in a zombie apocalypse movie. You can choose to play as one of four generic personalities although it's a purely aesthetic choice since all the characters can perform the exact same actions in game and use every weapon. The game focuses on a heavily cooperative experience by using several design techniques. I'll go over some of the ones I though were impressively done.

Limited Inventory: When you play Left 4 Dead your character is only allowed to hold 1 primary weapon and pistols (with infinite ammo) as defense against the zombie hordes. Additionally you can hold one grenade type item, and one of each of the two health items. Because of the limited inventory space on your person you rely on other players to carry other items that can be used to help the group. Additionally, because of the sheer volume of zombies, its good to have four times as much ammunition. You can even use the health items on other players if you want, which is important because losing any player to the zombie horde drastically reduces your chances of success.

Disabling Enemy Attacks: A few of the special boss zombies you fight in the game can completely disable your character, leaving you helpless while slowly taking damage (or quickly depending on the difficulty level). While this sounds like a bad design choice, it actually works amazingly well for this type of game because it forces your teammates to be aware of each other and stick together in order to avoid being isolated and killed. In addition to the special zombies, normal damage from other zombies can simply "incapacitate" your character which causes you to slowly bleed out unless another character comes and helps you up.

Procedurally Generated Content: Here's a big one. With only 20 maps total in this game it would seem like it would get pretty old, pretty fast. The addition of two AI "directors" that control enemy spawns and music respectively make each experience really unique and different. The four campaigns that this game has have been keeping my interest for a long period of time. Even with other great games from Valve like Half-Life 2 I only played through once, because it's still pretty much the same experience every time. Not knowing when enemies will spawn or if you will find ammo or health in a certain area gives each playthrough a great unique feel. All this serves to support the co-op experience since you have no idea when you might get suddenly ambushed.

Friendly Fire: Okay, I'm normally not a huge fan of this, but for this game it works very well. Because bullets tend to do far more damage than most zombie hits, communication and awareness of your teammates becomes essential to keeping your health high. A misfired shot that hits an ally at the higher difficulties will do more damage than nearly every zombie in the game short of the tank or witch (the later can kill in one hit on the harder difficulties).

So in general I really like the game. It's got a few faults though, and I don't think it would be fair not to mention a few of them:

The Director Can be a Huge Jerk: Procedurally generated content is nice, but sometimes the director goes a little overboard and seems to be going out of its way to kick me and my friends when we are down. Sometimes it'll put a witch (and enemy you are encouraged to avoid) right in the critical path of the level, in a position where avoidance becomes impossible. Other times the director will see it fit to send the tank (and incredibly tough and damaging enemy) after the party, right after barely surviving a group of zombies, and when you are within a few feet of the exit to the level. It doesn't happen that often, but when it does, it's not cool.

The AI are Kinda Slow: Most of the time the AI allies you get to fill in any missing players are pretty useful. They have impeccable aim and can see zombies hiding in the thickest trees almost instantly. However I find that sometimes they need to work on their battle tactics. When planning to hold out in a certain area, like a small room with one entrance for example, it's difficult, if not impossible to get the AI to come into the room with you, usually they end up fanning out a bit and standing in a tactically unsafe area, where zombies then proceed to mob them from 5 directions instead of 1. They also don't understand the finer points of ducking to allow the person behind them to shoot over their heads. Even when I'm very careful, it's usually inevitable for one of the AI to step into my line of fire and take some team damage.

The Witch Instant Kills on Expert Mode: Okay, now I know it's expert mode for a reason and that you should be prepared for increased difficulty of the enemies. But with this happens in conjunction with "The Director is a Jerk" you get to the point where the player no longer blames himself for his failure, he blames the game. Just in general, as a piece of my own design philosophy, I'm generally against the idea of instant kill mechanisms. While they work for some games, that are built around them (Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for example), most games do not. Even a two hit kill is better than this, since it at least gives the player a more reasonable chance.

In the end, I recommend this game to anyone who like co-op play with their friends. There are some faults, but in general it's great, well made game... and one that I think I'd like to build a map for once the SDK comes out.

After 4 weeks of work

2008-11-17T16:31:00.000-08:00

I finally manage to get around to posting on this blog again. I definitely need to shoot for once a week from now on, otherwise I'll start feeling too complacent.

So first how the job has been after 4 weeks, in a word: AWESOME.

In more words: SUPER AWESOME

Seriously though I think working at Big Huge Games is a fun and interesting place to work where I can do all the stuff I studied for back in Guildhall, except now I get paid for it! The only odd part is that now I seem to be much more of a money hoarder than before even though I have income coming in instead of going out, it's a very strange effect.

I mentioned before that I can't say much about the game I'm working on due to the NDA I signed, but will say that I work with great people in a relaxing and casual environment that is pretty amazing when I remember that in addition to all this I'm working on stuff for a video game and getting paid for it.

---

I promised I'd talk about YANPA this time so here's the idea.

YANPA stands for: You Are Not the Player's Adversary

It's a funny acronym that I always try to remember when working on a level. The goal of the game is not to torment the player or to make a puzzle that the player is going to have to try very hard to solve (although this second one may be part of it). The point of the designer is to provide fun. Now I said previously that I don't really agree with the entitlement mentality that some people have. I believe that as a designer, the player is entitled to the chance to have fun, and that the designer should make every effort to provide that fun to the player. However I don't think that the player deserves to win because he bought the game or regularly pays a monthly fee (in the case of MMOs). Winning with skill is part of what creates fun, and it's the designer's job to work that fine line between fun and frustration to create a challenging experience for the player without becoming the adversary of the player.

The term YANPA was coined by an instructor I had when I was in college at ASU taking the first iteration of a "programming for game design" class taught by some graduate students. Admittedly, the class was fairly rough and I didn't have the best of experiences in it, but I did learn some important lessons about game design that I still keep in mind today.

I hope the instructors for this course have been improving their teaching methods and class structure in order to get more students interested in game design.

---

Next time: Left 4 Dead and why it is one of the most awesome games I've played this year.

First Day / Design Thoughts

2008-10-20T16:58:00.000-07:00

My first day of work at Big Huge Games just completed and I came off with the impression that this job will be pretty fun. I'm still learning a lot of things about the game (not that I could really say much about it on a public blog due to NDA) and I'm looking forward to working on it. Unfortunately I got very little sleep the night before due to my air mattress getting a hole in it and me spending half the night trying to find, and then fix it. Sometimes I feel like have very awkward luck.

I had a conversation with my lead near the end of the day that I wanted to expand on a bit. It comes from the idea about making games easier for players to complete. In general I think that games (with the exception of a lot of MMOs and the notable Ninja Gaiden series) have been lowering the difficulty scale so that it becomes accessible to more people.

Back in the day of the arcade, games were made difficult on purpose to get the player to keep shelling out more quarters, but the idea that was presented here was that nowadays when a player buys a game he is giving the designer all his quarters up front. So he's entitled to beat the game.

... Honestly I don't agree with this.

Now I understand that yes the player is paying money for the experience and entertainment of playing the game. Further, if the game is too difficult for them and they cannot complete it, there is a chance that they will feel that they didn't get their money's worth.

I look at it a little differently though. First of all I don't think that purchasing a game should entitle the player to experience 100% of it. Certainly 100% of the game should be available to the player, but to believe that the game designers should try and please every player is absurd. If you pay to watch a movie and then don't like it, you can't get your money back, if you buy a basketball court that doesn't mean you can suddenly become an NBA player and putting money into a slot machine sure as heck doesn't mean you're gonna get a jackpot. In the end though, people still enjoy movies, basketball and gambling.

I believe that part of being a game designer is being able to anticipate the needs of the player, and that good design is one that takes a challenging, but not adversarial relationship with the player. (I'll talk about YANPA in my next blog entry.) The designer shouldn't be a person who tries to frustrate or foil the player, but I don't think that he should be a person that sacrifices the challenge that defines video games for the sake of reaching a few extra people.

New Job

2008-10-07T13:45:00.001-07:00

Sorry about the lack of updates recently. The reason is because I've recently accepted a new job as a level designer at Big Huge Games and have been busy working out the details of relocation.

However just because I have a job now doesn't mean I'm abandoning this portfolio. I'll continue to update this website with my side projects as well as more information about the current projects that I have up.

Additionally, I'm hoping to have more stuff for this blog as well. It is a "design" blog after all and I want to start talking about my thoughts on game design in the future as well.

Blaster Master Video

2008-09-11T16:10:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty busy these last few weeks with design tests and onsite interviews, but I've managed to get a video up of a Blaster Master playthrough today.

Go the Blaster Master section of the Personal Works page to view them. You must have flash and may need to reload the page in your browser before the video shows up.

The Personal Works page is getting a little long recently, hopefully by next update I'll have separated it a bit to reduce page load.

Shatter-Storm Fix

2008-08-14T17:41:00.000-07:00

I've fixed the problem with the Shatter-Storm map. Turns out that there were some extra texture and mesh files that don't come standard with UT2004 that I used while building it. I've uploaded a new version that should work for most versions of UT, although the file size has increased slightly. If you've already downloaded a copy of the map you'll have to download this new copy instead. Sorry to anyone who has had trouble with it.

In addition to this fix, all the downloadable levels now include the name of the game required to run them. Since some engines are used in a variety of games this should reduce any confusion that might occur.

First Videos

2008-08-12T19:03:00.000-07:00

Today's update includes two videos of playtesters who played my thesis level. You can watch them here, and in the thesis downloads section which has high quality avi's of the videos.

I've also updated the personal work page to include the games necessary to play each of the levels, since there has been some confusion in a few instances on how to run the maps.

Finally I've had a few people tell me that they've had problems running the map Shatter-Storm. I'm currently looking into the issue and am working on fixing it. Watch this space for updates on the progress.

More videos coming soon!

Embedded video player courtesy of Flowplayer.

Major Website Update

2008-08-05T16:18:00.000-07:00

It's been a few weeks since graduation and I've been working hard to make some important changes to this portfolio site. This update will be the first of several which aim to improve the accessibility of the site as well add content that has been previously unavailable.

One of the most notable changes is that the website is now larger and speced for 1024x768 resolution and above. I and several others felt that the website was a little too small to properly show off the work I've done. This means, LARGER pictures. Most of the galleries have been overhauled with much higher quality pictures and the high quality download packs also have higher resolution images (1920x1200 for several of them).

In addition to this change I've also added more of my work in the Half-Life 2 Source engine. The first one is Dead-End Freeman: Reload, which was a directed focus study map I made at the Guildhall. In addition to this map I've also added a section devoted to my Masters Thesis Project, which also involved a Source map. The map for my masters thesis was originally intended to be the prequel to the focus study map and is called Dead-End Freeman: Dead Angle.

I've removed the "Extras" section from the site since I found that the majority of the information was better suited to other sections of the website where it is more relevant. For example the design highlights mini-portfolio is not located in the same section as the project it highlights.

The last major addition this update is this design blog. Here's where I'll talk about my current and future plans in game design as well as updates for this site. I'm looking into adding videos of several of my levels soon, so check back every now and then.

Test Post

2008-07-13T11:21:00.001-07:00

This post is a test