08.17.08
Posted in Games at 19:50
Took a lot of effort to resist the temptation of calling this post “Braid Blows”, but I thought that would be a bit of a low… Blow.
Ahem.
I’m through Braid, though I haven’t yet completed it. The game consists of 5 worlds (numbered from 2-6) with a 12-piece jigsaw puzzle each. Each actual puzzle in the game yields one piece, and when you’ve completed the jigsaw, you’ve solved the world. You can, however, move through the worlds without solving all the puzzles, so while I have made it through the final world, I’m still missing 1 piece in world 5 and 5 pieces in world 6.
Braid is an important game, and a major part of the continuing effort to explore the artistic potential of the game medium. Braid’s major contribution in this context is an effort to merge narrative themes with the gameplay, using gameplay mechanics as metaphors for the existential problems the protagonist, Tim, is facing.
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- Game: Braid
- Music: Jami Sieber - Undercurrent
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08.14.08
Posted in Game design at 23:45
Yesterday I had a spontaneous impulse to write down one of my generic game concepts, thematically based on a long-defunct Deus Ex mod name of The Preachers - or rather, based on the impression I got of it from reading its website 7 years ago. Reading over the concept, it was starkly clear that in many ways it resembles half of my other game ideas. I mentioned this to Gelo, and he confirmed that he’s experienced the same thing: Before deciding to write the book he’s currently working on, Rebel Cell, he had half a dozen very similar concepts under consideration.
A few more people have since confirmed this, and it does make a lot of sense: When you have loose plans to make something creative, you’ll have a pretty good idea of the basic sort of work you want to do, but it’s easy to think of many different variations of this central concept. With that in mind, here are the three components that seem to appear in most of my game concepts:
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- Game: Viking: Battle for Asgard
- Music: Carpark North - Transparent and Glasslike
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08.12.08
Posted in Personal, The Nameless Mod at 14:15
I knew before I even got there that it was going to be a busy weekend. In preparation for our 2½ day recording session, Jeremiah’s colleague Friedrich had turned our exported Trestkon script into a tidy database to be read by VoxGrinder, T-Recs Studios‘ proprietary batch recording tool, and the script counted just over 6300 lines, slightly more than half of which could be expected to belong to Trestkon.
Trestkon, our player character, has about 34,500 words of dialogue, which at a business standard of 10 words per “line” is 3450 lines to record, otherwise known as a ludicrous amount of work. Our saving grace was that about 5-600 lines were duplicates, and only needed to be recorded once and then saved to different folders, so we “only” had to record a bit under 3000 lines. Even so, there were still serious doubts about whether we’d be able to record them all from Friday night to Sunday afternoon.
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- Game: Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer
- Music: Rammstein - Ich Will
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08.07.08
Posted in Personal, The Nameless Mod at 01:07
Or: Indiana Jonas and the Quest for Voice Acting.
…okay, just Heading to Hamburg then.
A couple months ago, our prospects for having Trestkon’s lines recorded were… a little bleak. Our original motivation for choosing poor Lawrence as the protagonist of The Nameless Mod, at the risk of his being forever regarded as the source of one of the most gratuitous acts of self-insertion fiction ever, was that he had a lot of time to dedicate on TNM so we reckoned he’d be able to record the many lines the protagonist would doubtlessly have. I mean the player character might have hundreds of lines!
Six years later, the situation is a little different for a couple of reasons. Lawrence now has a girlfriend, a job, and a college education, and our player character ended up with just over 3550 lines of dialogue (a grand total of 34,466 words by last count). It also became apparent during the creation of our first two trailers that while Lawrence is not a bad actor, he is not an actual actor, and our quality standards have increased substantially since 2002.
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- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: LeoBad - Sol's Bar Ambient 2
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07.31.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 20:26
I reckon that every game project will once in a while present a few interesting design challenges. That’s one of the reasons game design is fun: Solving creative challenges can be just as much fun as actually playing a game, especially when it evolves into a collaborative discussion about possible solutions. Recently, one of our levels in TNM has provided us with a new and interesting design problem.
The Concept
The map in question is a vast sewer system designed as a labyrinth, inspired by the Hong Kong canals level in Deus Ex. Like the Hong Kong canals, there’s nothing strictly plot-critical in the sewers, the player will never need to visit them, and indeed the first two playthroughs of TNM (both by Gelo) skipped the sewers entirely to make it through the game faster. Instead, the sewers are a vessel for exploration, a recontextualization of the good old dungeon to be delved into and investigated for the sake of adventure.
The sewer level is the only map created from scratch by me, so it holds a special place in my heart. But it’s a bold design, and it’s not meant to appeal to everyone. When I originally visited Hong Kong, I was immensely thrilled by the way entire parts of the map were hidden simply by virtue of the map being so big and intricately structured. I believe I’ve mentioned it before, the sense of a “secret” that’s grounded in the fiction of the world, rather than being some sort of invisible door that disrupts your immersion in the game’s world. The sewers were designed to be so enormous and labyrinthine that things could be hidden simply by placing them slightly off the beaten path.
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- Game: Quake 4! No, just kidding: TNM
- Music: Alphabeat - Fascination
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07.25.08
Posted in The Nameless Mod at 11:18
Modding is a hobby that carries its own reward. It demands an excrutiating amount of work, but if you’re into it, it feels more like fun than duty and at the end of the day you have a product to show for it. Hopefully a product you can be proud of.
As the project draws to a close, the rewards become greater and more numerous. In the beginning, you get a kick out of seeing your dialogue implemented, your characters animated, your world lit and ready to explore. Few feelings compare to the pride of hearing an actor interpret lines that you have written, however. And finally, letting people play the mod and hearing what they have to say about it is an amazing experience.
Also painful. But thrills like that don’t come for free, you understand.
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- Game: The Nameless Mod, The Nameless Mod, The Nameless Mod...
- Music: Silversun Pickups - Melatonin
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07.22.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 18:59
Now that we’re almost done with the first closed beta build of TNM, it’s time to kick back and pat ourselves on the back until the bug reports start rolling in as an unstoppable tide (or trickle, if you’re more optimistically inclined). It’s also time to start thinking more abstractly about game design again.
As part of an ongoing discussion with Shane about the quality of Mass Effect’s dialogue, he gave me what is probably the greatest compliment I’ve ever received: That TNM’s dialogue is better because it flows more naturally. I don’t think I’d agree with that, but it did get me thinking about the different ways to use interactive dialogue in games.
Bioware’s games always put quite a lot of agency in their dialogue, meaning a lot of the choices you make in Bioware RPG’s are made through dialogue options. In Mass Effect, this usually manifests itself in the form of coloured options that are unlocked if your Intimidate or Charm talents meet the requirements. Sometimes you can go so far as to execute an NPC by selecting the dialogue option that makes Shepard shoot him in the face, and often you will use the dialogue to make important decisions concerning the direction of the storyline.
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- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: AFI - This Time Imperfect
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07.20.08
Posted in Game design at 16:54
Item sets are a brilliant invention. I’ve loved them ever since I first encountered the concept in Diablo 2. It tickles my collector gene in a way not even card games like Magic: The Gathering has managed to. The moment I pick up a set item, I know that I must have them all, even if they are individually inferior to items I’m already carrying.
Yesterday Nick ran me through the Deadmines instance in World of Warcraft with his level 41 mage. I came out of there with 3 items in a set of 5, obviously designed with rogues in mind: Blackened Defias Armor, Blackened Defias Belt, and Blackened Defias Boots. Together, they gave me a set bonus of +10 Armor and +5 to Arcane Resistance, but temptingly greyed-out stats informed me that picking up either the gloves or the leggings would grant me a +2 increase to my expertise rating (which I don’t even know what is) and that completing the set would increase my attack power by 10.
I immediately went to the auction house and spent a fortune to acquire the gloves and the leggings. The funny thing is that this set is pretty useless to me as a druid: I need Intellect and Spirit to boost my magic, but every item in this set grants Agility and Strength bonuses. I don’t care though, I’m primarily concerned with looking extremely cool and stylish in a world where almost everybody below level 60 looks like a tramp or a clown. You just can’t go wrong with black.
- Game: World of Warcraft
- Music: Three Days Grace - Riot!
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07.19.08
Posted in Games at 16:38
Now I know how Australian gamers feel. I only just realized Rock Band has been released in Europe for a while. The PR machine was running in the highest gear back in the autumn when Rock Band was released in North America, but when it was finally released “in parts of Europe as a timed exclusive on Xbox 360 on May 23, 2008″ (from Wikipedia) we didn’t hear a peep. It’s like Harmonix doesn’t really give a shit about the European market. Not sure what to make of that.
I was excited about it in the fall, but I’m not all that interested anymore. I think I’ll save my cash for the Metallica-version of Guitar Hero 3. It’ll probably be a half-assed money-grubbin’ PR stunt, but I know all of Metallica’s songs too well not to own this game. I doubt the loss of my purchase will mean much to Harmonix, but the fact that Rock Band has been completely absent from my consciousness may hint that they’ve sold very few copies in Europe. If anybody can find the numbers, I’d appreciate it. I’m simply going by the fact that I don’t know anybody in Europe who has this game, and I know quite a few Guitar Hero enthusiasts.
I do nurture a vain hope that Harmonix and their publishers will take that as a hint: It’s a simultaneous release or no release at all, thankyouverymuch. This ain’t Australia, after all.
- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: We Are Scientists - The Great Escape
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07.15.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 19:19
Overall I’ve enjoyed my vacation on Darkshore. Spent a lot of time on the beach. Didn’t get much of a tan though. My girlfriend turned into a bear a couple of times, so that was a little freaky.
- Uthar the Warrior, heading home to Stormwind from Darkshore.
How do you roleplay in World of Warcraft? With great difficulty. It’s not really a game that fosters immersion - every time you even begin to forget you’re playing a game, the rules are shoved into your face again. Enemies fade in out of thin air, bears cheerily drop battleaxes when you kill them but somehow fail to yield any claws most of time, NPC’s will mourn the death of their beloved although your own death can be rectified in the time it takes your spirit to run from the graveyard to your corpse, and food consumption has level restrictions.
WoW doesn’t want you to forget you’re playing a game, it wants you to learn the rules and then powergame the hell out of them. It wants you to keep chasing those extra 0.5 DPS forever and ever. Now that I’ve tried playing both on an RP and a non-RP server, I can say with reasonable certainty that - barring any RP guilds that have thus far managed to elude me - the only difference is that RP servers have slightly fewer characters named “uberdruid” or “UrDad”.
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- Game: World of Warcraft
- Music: Little Jimmy Reeves - Sidetracked
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