It was a fairly empty feeling to leave the game jam without a game to show for it, but I made a couple of great new friends/contacts, and I’m particularly proud that I managed to flag down the keynote speaker Manveer Heir, senior designer on Mass Effect 3, to interrogate him about BioWare and their hiring practices. If only the bottom line weren’t that I shouldn’t expect to get a job there until I have 5-6 years of industry experience…

My favourite games produced at the jam (that I’ve seen) are Mein Panzer (which I kicked everybody’s asses in at the after party) and Infinite SWAT (which was developed by – among others – Jan Willem Nijman and Rami Ismail of Vlambeer, the Super Crate Box guys). If nothing else, you owe it to yourself to watch the hilarious trailer for Mein Panzer.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Abstract

The design of the game space is a major factor in shaping the player’s movement patterns and the player’s perception of movement (kinesthesia) in computer- and videogames, but very little research has been done into which aspects of the game world affect movement in what ways. Understanding the specifics of how space shapes movement is important in designing varied game worlds that affect the play experience in particular ways. This thesis analyses how different spatial structures give rise to different movement patterns in games with or without context-sensitive controls. The thesis analyses the dynamics between the game world, the controls, and the rules, and employs methods from user experience research to gather qualitative data about how players experience changes to each of these aspects of a game. The results demonstrate concrete relationships between different types of game space and different movement patterns and explain the player behaviour underlying these relationships, which will be especially valuable to those seeking to design environments for games where movement is a central part of the play experience.

Kinesthesia and Game Spaces is my Master’s thesis from the IT University of Copenhagen. It’s 70 of your regular human pages, which comes in just under 90 magic university pages (2400 characters per page). It was handed in on the 1st of November 2011, three months after the original deadline, and I defended it orally yesterday to the grade of 10, which translates into an A on the American scale or a B on the European scale. Not that the grade matters much to me right now, as I’m frankly just happy to have graduated with the least scientific Cand.Scient. in the country after 18 years of education.

I guess this marks a goodbye to this blog’s “University paper” tag.

You can download Kinesthesia and Game Spaces as a PDF weighing just under 2 MB.

I’m almost afraid to write this post. There’s so much to say, and I’m not sure how to organise my thoughts. Moreover it’s difficult to identify my own biases based on my history with the Deus Ex franchise and weed them out of my opinions to form something at least marginally useful. I’ll give it my best shot below, but remember this is not a formal review, this is just my thoughts on the game, written in whatever order they matter most to me.

You may expect intense spoilers. Lots and lots of spoilers. All sorts of spoilers, both for the narrative and the mechanics of the game. You should not read this unless you’ve finished the game.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is brilliant

I love it to bits. I’m mostly going to write about the things that bothered me, or the design decisions that I disagreed with both in general and relative to what I know about the paradigms that gave birth to Deus Ex. Before I get to any of my criticisms or doubts, however, I must emphasise that I mainlined this game for 4 days straight and finished it in just under 40 hours. I forgot to eat. I neglected to sleep. I let myself be transported into a completely different world, at once reassuringly familiar and intriguingly fresh and different, and I loved every second of it. Yes, every second. Yes, even during the boss fights, which isn’t to say I like the boss fights at all – I’ll get back to that.

Deus Ex 3 is very much a return to form for the franchise – in abandoning the uncompromising ambitions for constant reinvention of the Origin / Looking Glass school, they’ve managed to recreate most of what made Deus Ex special while introducing all the no-brainer features that are expected of a modern AAA game. A lot of what Deus Ex does, Human Revolution does better – as just a few examples, the city maps are much bigger and function as proper hubs to an extent the original city levels didn’t, hacking a computer gives you unlimited time to read through all its emails, and the acting is infinitely better (people in China actually often speak Chinese! I have much respect for this). Most of the modern updates they added to the design are unmitigated improvements, such as the cover system which changes the nature of both the stealth and the combat in directions I wholeheartedly approve of, or the iron sights which are pretty much mandatory in a modern shooter and improve the feel of the combat significantly.

Their dialogue is well written and well implemented, and their narrative is thematically extremely strong. Though I caught myself hoping for a revisit to one of the original Deus Ex locations, I very much respect and appreciate that Eidos Montreal resisted the urge to shoehorn obvious references to the original into every aspect of their game – you’ll find plenty of tie-ins to the DX story if you look for them, but they’re mostly quite subtle and fit naturally into the plot and setting. (Still hoping to infiltrate Area 51 or Liberty Island or somesuch in some DLC though.)

There are other minor ways in which DX3 falls short of DX1, especially the end of the game (it got the job done, but it was fairly weak compared to the first game, both in terms of the endings themselves and the build-up to them). It also seemed to have fewer memorable characters than DX1, but it also had far fewer characters that seemed included just for the hell of it, so I guess that evens out. The health regeneration didn’t bother me nearly as much as I’d expected it would, but the energy system did foster some weird and problematic behaviour in me – I quickly realised the best tactic was to keep all but your last battery drained most of the time and instead drag around a bunch of items to charge up your energy for when you need it.

Instead of trying to list a myriad of small criticisms, however, I’ve picked the 5 main problems I had with Human Revolution, presented here in order of most to least annoying:

1. XP for takedowns

As I understand it, Deus Ex was fundamentally conceived out of Warren Spector’s frustration that Thief would not allow him to think on his feet and fight his way out of a bodged stealth attempt. The whole philosophical core of the game design is that players should be able to play the game in whatever way they choose, and not get punished for it. The original game didn’t entirely succeed at this – some play styles are vastly more useful than others, and some styles yield far more rewards in the form of items or background info. Nevertheless, you never feel overtly punished for indulging in some combat here and there, you rarely have to load your quicksave if you trigger an alarm, and for every NPC that scolds you for murdering enemies, there’s another NPC ready to pat you on the back for being a cold-blooded badass.

One of the most important design decisions that facilitated this balance was the lack of skillpoints for taking out enemies. Skillpoints were reserved for completing objectives, be they mandatory or optional, with a few bonuses thrown in here and there for exploration*. That way, neutralising enemies was only mildly more rewarding than avoiding them completely, and only in ways you were unlikely to need with such a play style anyway (after all, what use is ammunition if you’re not confronting enemies anyway?) Knocking an enemy out was completely the same in gameplay and balance terms as killing them, only the narrative would change.

Human Revolution gives you XP for taking out enemies. In fact they give you XP for damn near everything – missions yield XP to the tune of 1000 or so a pop, pretty similar to Deus Ex. Exploration rewards are routinely 100 or 200 XP, however, to Deus Ex’s 30-50 points. Even hacking yields XP, as opposed to Deus Ex. Not raising any alarms is 200 XP extra at the end of the mission, and not getting spotted triggers a whopping 500 XP bonus. Would you rather fight? Tough luck, you’ll have to write off 700 XP per mission. Perhaps even more heinously, taking an enemy out non-lethally gives you far more XP than killing them. Shoot somebody and you get 10 XP – 20 if you got a headshot. Shoot them with a nonlethal weapon and you get a 20 XP bonus. Eviscerate an enemy with a melee takedown and you get 30 XP, knock them out and you get 50. Get two enemies together and knock them out at the same time if you have the aug for that, and you get 125, 62.5 XP per head.

You might suggest that this is done to balance the fact that unconscious NPCs can be woken up again, but the fact that non-lethal weapons and takedowns are completely silent whilst the lethal approach generates ridiculous amounts of noise should easily take care of that, and besides – nothing except your own squeamishness/ethics is stopping you from executing unconscious enemies if you bring a silenced weapon. The funny thing is, I prefer going the stealthy route, I derive incredible enjoyment from sneaking around levels and knocking enemies out, remaining unseen and causing no alarms to be triggered. The XP system is rewarding my favourite play style, but it bothers me out of principle. I want to select this play style because it’s what I like, not because it yields better rewards, and more importantly I want the freedom to draw my weapon and blast my way out of a sticky situation if I get spotted, and the freedom to hack a robot and turn it loose on the unsuspecting enemies without losing a 200 XP bonus at the end of the mission plus 30-40 XP for every enemy the robot mows down. I want to be able to use the silenced and fully upgraded combat rifle I’ve been lugging around since the first mission without being annoyed that I’m missing out on 30 XP.

In the end I mostly stuck to non-lethal takedowns even though I didn’t really need the extra XP, and I finished the game with (according to his calculations) 7 upgrade points more than Mads, who went for a more aggressive play style. I also hacked every PC and keypad and explored every nook and cranny of every level religiously, but I’d have done that anyway, because that’s the only way I know how to play a Deus Ex game.

* As an aside, I don’t feel exploration can be accurately classified as a play style on par with eg. Stealth, Heavy Weapons, or hacking turrets or robots to turn them against their former masters – exploration is more of a meta-play style that facilitates the other play styles. After all, how would you be able to play puppetmaster if you didn’t know about the back route that takes you right past the outer patrols to the security computer that controls the robots?

2. Boss fights

Much has been written on the subject, but I’ll try to see if I can’t add anything to the discussion. By the time I started the game, I’d already been warned from every source that the boss fights are pretty much terrible. Some had referenced Alpha Protocol, which I notably never finished because I got stuck on motherfucking Brayko as my stealth/hacking character build was totally useless in that boss fight. With this in mind, I stocked up on grenades and made sure to bring a combat rifle with me at all times: in case of surprise boss fight, break out rifle and hope for the best. The first boss fight proved just as terrible as I’d expected, but perhaps not in the way I feared – the first three times, he survived me unloading a full magazine of my upgraded combat rifle in his face, and then destroyed me with grenade spam. The fourth time, I threw a frag grenade at him first, then unloaded my rifle in his face, and he went down in all of about 5 seconds. The boss fight went from damn near impossible and entirely unfair to completely anticlimactic in an instant, with apparently nothing in between – not a good sign.

The second boss fight was not as bad, a little gimmicky but I failed it twice and then succeeded – it didn’t feel as unfair, but I cheesed my way out of it with frag mines. The third boss fight was over in the second attempt when I found the right rhythm between spamming frag mines and shooting him with a stun gun. The final boss fight was much different and actually felt like it made pretty good use of the various augmentations and play styles at your disposal, but it was a little confusing and I’m not sure how it would play if you can’t hack. I also think I managed to break it on my first attempt, but it worked fine the second time around.

My main problem with the boss fights isn’t so much about gameplay as it is about narrative and… philosophy. Honestly, failing a boss fight 3 times before you succeed is totally acceptable, and seeing how I cut loose with the lethal weapons anyway, it didn’t affect me in directly that they all died in cutscenes in the end. However, knowing that there is no way to use stealth against these enemies, and knowing that even if you stick to stun gun, tranquilisers, and knock-out gas, they still die in cutscenes, offends me as a Deus Ex fan. What did affect me directly was how spurious and poorly supported they were. An antagonist is somebody who’s supposed to be connected to the protagonist, and merely being another mechanically augged person in a world surprisingly full of mech augged people does not count.

You see all three bosses in a cutscene after the tutorial level, and the third boss shows up in another couple of cutscenes throughout the game, but apart from the first one who shows up in a couple of emails, you never even know their names until you look at their corpses after each fight. When I killed Anna Navarre in Deus Ex, and when I faced Walton Simons, they didn’t have to be introduced in cheesy cutscenes and they didn’t need special scripting – they didn’t even have to put up much of a fight, because no matter what, it was going to feel special. They were characters I knew because I’d dealt with them many times and had interesting conversations with them throughout the entire game, they had reacted to my play style and other NPCs had discussed them with me behind their backs – I know these people and killing them was always going to be meaningful no matter how it went down. You could remove all three boss fights and every reference to the characters involved entirely from Human Revolution and it would change precisely nothing. Except the game would be three pointless, out-of-place boss fights lighter.

I wish they had.

3. Pheromones

Maybe this one should be higher, but… it’s less of a flaw than a massive missed opportunity. In case your memory needs refreshing, the game offers a social aug (“CASIE”) which does a variety of things. This is used exclusively in a sort of negotiation-style conversation minigame where you have to pick your way through precarious dialogue with major characters that you need something from. Without CASIE, these conversations are incredible – you’re forced to really listen to what people are saying and consider everything you know about them in relation to your dialogue options. In some cases you can even get useful clues as to how you’re doing out of their facial animation, though more often than not it’s too crude to read properly.

Many of the things CASIE does are fine. It displays a window with a short psychological profile of the person you’re talking to, which genuinely helps you decide what to say. It gives you a reading of their personality type (Alpha, Beta, or Omega – I don’t know if these are ever properly introduced, but I figured out what they mean pretty quickly). Most usefully, it gives you a “persuasion level” reading of how close you are to either losing or winning the argument. All of this works splendidly. Where it picks all of that up and tosses it directly out the window is with the addition of a “pheromone” button. This is basically a magic cheat button where no matter how good or bad a job you’re doing of winning your opponent over, all you have to do is keep an eye on their personality type readings and then pick the matching line to instantly win the argument. That entire brilliant structure I outlined above, all of the work and thought that went into that goes completely out the window, and worse – you miss out on a whole bunch of really well written and acted dialogue.

If you have yet to play Human Revolution and you unwisely decided to read all the way down to here despite that, I implore you: never use the pheromone button. You can still get the CASIE aug, its persuasion level reading and its psych profile are both extremely useful, but winning an argument the proper way is by far the most satisfying way to do it. I’ve tried both ways, and I can tell you I’ll never be using those damn pheromones again.

4. The economy is broken

We’re approaching niggle territory. Those three points above? Those were some serious points of critique, major annoyances that bothered me for the entire game. This… is more of a detail. And really, it’s not like Deus Ex did it much better, but still: the economy in this game works poorly, and I blame it mainly on being able to sell items to vendors. Each city hub level in the game has two vendors, and certain missions have vendors of their own. So far so Deus Ex. Human Revolution adds a shop GUI to make trading a more pleasurable experience, which also allows the vendors to stock more items than Deus Ex could, since that was all handled through dialogue.

Being able to sell stuff was one of the most requested features in The Nameless Mod. Do you know why we refused to implement it? For the same reason they never let you sell items in Deus Ex: it encourages you to wade like a pack mule back and forth between some alley where you killed a bunch of enemies and the nearest vendor, selling all their items and weapons one by one. Sure, it doesn’t force you to do so. Sure, you still get enough money in the long run that there’s no need at all to do it. But when you find that praxis kit for 5000 credits, you better believe you’re going to make your way back to that apartment where you left two shotguns and take them one at a time to the vendor two blocks down where they sell for 750 credits each.

I did this. And I hated myself for it. I felt like an idiot, I knew I was just being impatient and that I would make that money through normal means soon enough, but I just had to have that praxis kit. It was the worst parts of Diablo all over again, and this time you can’t even pick up two shotguns at a time because they’re simply merged in your inventory. So I wasted my time and turned Adam Jensen into a pack mule, and at the end of the game I had 26755 credits – more than I could ever possibly hope to spend.

Obviously this hilarious surplus of money wouldn’t have been entirely fixed by not letting you sell things. You’d have prevented players like me from carrying out some severely boring commuting, but I still would’ve had far too much money at the end. The game needs some sort of money sink, something you can buy if you have loads of money, but the lack of which doesn’t nerf you completely. For a while, the praxis kits looked like they might be it, but the 5000 credits that seemed so outrageous at the start was spare change half-way through the game. Deus Ex had this same problem, but Eidos fixed so many of Deus Ex’s other weaknesses, I would have liked for them to fix this one too.

5. Too many praxis points

By the end of the game, I had fully upgraded every augmentation that I gave half a damn about and then some. I bought and maxed-out dermal armor basically because I had nothing to spend my points on that I really wanted. I bought the wall-hack augmentation just to see how it looked – used it once, nodded approvingly at the nice visual effects, then turned it off and never used it again. Taken in isolation, this is good and bad, but in the context of the franchise I think it’s mostly bad.

Irrespective of Deus Ex’s design philosophies, it’s fine that you have points to spare. You still have to prioritise your upgrades since the first half or so of the game does change substantially depending on what augs you upgrade first, and knowing that you’ll eventually be maxed out gives you some leeway to build a more all-round character right from the start instead of having to pick a specific play style and stick to it. Essentially this fits right into that fundamental design ethos I outlined when I was criticising the XP system, in that you can easily “multiclass” between stealth, hacking, and combat without being underpowered later on, which gives you freedom to switch to combat whenever you get tired of stealth.

On the other hand, it really limits the replayability of the later levels. ION Storm Austin put a fair amount of thought and effort into making sure Deus Ex would remain interesting on further playthroughs. Every aspect of the game contributed to this, from the semi-reactive narrative and the multipathed levels to the limited inventory and the skill system being tied into your item use. One of the most obvious aspects of this was how augmentations were set up to be mutually exclusive. The game had twice as many augmentations as you could install, and they typically came in matching sets of two. The result was obvious: to try out all the augs, you had to play at least twice.

To be fair, I was incredibly thorough. I mostly stuck to non-lethal takedowns to get the most XP, I explored every level fully, I hacked everything, and I got a fair few ghost and smooth operator bonuses. Less OCD players may not experience quite the same abundance of praxis points by the end of the game as I. To be even more fair, I didn’t max out all the augs I wanted until about half-way through the game, so the first half of my second playthrough will be just as different as my second playthrough of Deus Ex. But my abilities in the second half of the game will never be much different from playthrough to playthrough. I’ll upgrade my inventory fully so I can carry all the weapons I want, and there are no secondary upgrade system such as Deus Ex’s skills to further differentiate character builds from each other. I’ve already seen nearly everything the game has to offer in terms of level and narrative, so the only motivation I have to play again is a scattered handful of narrative choices that may have interesting alternative outcomes if I choose differently next time.

It’s not a huge problem, but it does feel like a small step in the wrong direction. When so many aspects of the original game have been improved, it feels particularly disappointing when the game falls short of its predecessor on such a comparatively major point.

In summary

It’s important that you understand why I have so much to say about the things that annoyed me in Deus Ex 3. It’s because I love this game, it comes so close to perfection and so close to its predecessor, which is deeply embedded in my personal identity. Any flaw I perceive in such a game will inevitably draw far more attention than a similar flaw in a worse game. Furthermore, my history with the franchise and my fairly deep understanding of and respect for the design paradigms that gave rise to it and the handful of games like it adds a philosophical layer to my experience of the game – I’m bothered by things that don’t directly affect me, simply because they don’t fit with the intentions behind the original game. Finally, the very fact that I’ve dedicated over 3000 words to discuss the things I didn’t quite appreciate about the game should indicate how much I care, and though it won’t necessarily communicate that I really really love the game, rest assured this entire post was born from powerful, undiluted enthusiasm.

To make it clear that I really did enjoy this game tremendously, I’ll end with a short list of my favourite details in the game:

• Laser grids shut down when your enemies walk near the lasers, to allow them passage. This also means you can disable the lasers by dragging the dead or unconscious bodies of your enemies with you through the lasers. EMERGENCE!
• As if it’s not enough of an emotional high point if you fail to save your pilot after you’re shot down, you can find her dissected corpse at the Harvesters’ later on, as they’ve been digging out her augmentations. It’s an incredibly cruel gut punch, and it totally works.
• One of the most powerful scenes in the game for me was showing up at Picus HQ in Montreal to find it completely empty. It’s quite startling how unsettling and cinematic that whole scene felt simply because there was nobody there, and just like in the pod hotel in Hengsha, getting a chance to explore the level thoroughly before the enemies turned up made the following escape all the more fun.
• The helipad storage room in Sarif is restocked between each of your visits.
• Eidos Montreal has played around with the emails just as we did in TNM – you can track reply chains across different PCs and piece together little background stories if you read everything. As far as I can tell, even the TO and FROM fields are consistent, using names where there should be names, addresses where there should be addresses, and mailing list names where there should be mailing lists.

Yesterday I handed in a 20-page paper on the topic of emergence vs. progression. I wrote the paper in April to get it out of the way so I could concentrate on my Master’s thesis, then proceeded to do fuck-all on the thesis for the entire month of May because I’m an idiot. The project was focused on the production of Archive X, which was meant to be an arcade-action game but turned out to be a puzzle game instead. In relation to the point of my paper, the game is quite a failure, but in and of itself it’s a pretty decent, if very short, puzzle game.

You might wonder how I could manage to work on two different Unity-based university games (Archive X and Broken Dimensions) at the same time. The answer is that I could not, and I did almost no real work on Archive X other than writing the original pitch document and putting the level geometry together in 3D Studio Max (a painful process which required me to first learn how to use 3D Studio Max). Most of the credit for the game should go to my class mate and programmer Isaac Dart (who is also not responsible for its failure to be properly emergent) and the rest is due to his partner in crime Juan Ortega and our artist Veselin Stoilov. They did most of the work while Ali and I were occupied with Broken Dimensions.

If you’re in the mood for a quick little puzzle game based on a very clever physics/chemistry simulation, feel free to download Archive X (111 MB). If you’re interested in the project and how it was used in my academic work, by all means grab the paper, Designing Emergent Gameplay (7 MB). I actually quite like it, it’s probably the first truly academic paper I’ve written at the IT University.

The exam is scheduled for June 16, and it’ll be my last exam before I defend my thesis.

Broken Dimensions is my graduation game from DADIU, the Danish Academy for Digital, Interactive Entertainment. Ours was the last class to make two full game productions as part of the programme (last year I worked on Imachination) – starting this fall, DADIU will become a one-semester programme involving a curriculum and a small prototype-style project in addition to one big game production. Time will tell if that produces better games or not, but it certainly will fit better into the curriculum of IT University students. I didn’t get any ECTS credit for this production, but I’m using it in my MSc thesis, so at least it’ll get me a modest scope reduction there.

Broken Dimensions is a puzzle-adventure game. I could also call it a puzzle-platformer, but then you immediately think of side-scrollers about jumping accurately, and Broken Dimensions is more about… falling with style. I could also call it a horror game, but it’s more creepy-freaky than horrific. Puzzle-adventure it is.

You’ll find it reminds you a lot of Portal. This is down to several factors, the overriding cause of which is a combination of me really liking Portal and just happy circumstance:

1. Like Portal, Broken Dimensions was built entirely around a single core gameplay mechanic. Everything else, though also important in my opinion, came second.
2. Like Portal, this mechanic isn’t just a way to solve the puzzles, but also immediately becomes your primary way of navigating the levels.
3. Like Portal, you’re guided through the levels by a friendly woman (sometimes appearing only as a disembodied voice) with the promise of candy.

Reception has been pretty good. Though I fully expected to be cleft in twain by the panel at our evaluation, if nothing else then because the game is super hard if you’re not a bit of a puzzle game connoisseur, their feedback was overwhelmingly positive (none of them had actually finished the game, but they all enjoyed the parts they saw, and at least one of them would’ve definitely finished it if the final puzzle hadn’t glitched out on him). Likewise, IndieDB and Desura‘s users have given us a fairly good rating and many flattering reviews – amusingly, many of the comments there indicate that the game is too easy for hard core gamers.

Finally, the national newspaper Politiken has reviewed all the graduation games and gave Broken Dimensions 5 out of 6 stars with a special emphasis on the quality of the puzzles.

I’m not going to do a full post-mortem here, but I’d still like to go over what went right and what went wrong in my opinion. I think the best qualities of Broken Dimensions are its completeness, its consistency, and its intuitive controls. It may not seem so, but Broken Dimensions is a very long game for a 5 week production – though this meant our artists couldn’t spend nearly as much time as they’d have liked sprucing up the levels and making them look less boxy, it gave us room to let the game develop as you play through, including a complete story arc, a minor plot twist, gradual introduction of new mechanics, and most importantly a suitably gradual difficulty curve in the puzzles. We even managed to squeeze a little environmental storytelling into the levels, and the final level has an in my opinion genuinely startling aesthetic shift.

The consistency of the puzzles is another success, though bear in mind this is essentially me patting myself on the back for a job well done. I completely bent my brain over and folded it in on itself to design properly 3-dimensional puzzles for a fundamentally 3-dimensional game, and I’m quite pleased with how well the final set of puzzles that made it into the game explore and exploit the core game mechanic of rotating the world around you. We had many more types of obstacles and possible ideas for extra mechanics in mind while working on the game, but in the end we kept it pretty simple, and the game is all the better and less gimmicky for it. This is aided tremendously by the intuitive control system, for which I can only take half the credit – the other half must be given to the programmers who helped me plan it by pointing out problems with the initial design, implemented it, and made it work. I’m quite proud of the way the rotation keys change to match the orientation of the camera, everybody seems to find it very intuitive, and I personally find it incredibly satisfying to control.

All this is tainted by a few problems, primarily an annoying amount of glitches, some general difficulty issues, and several missing features. The PhysX system in Unity gave us quite a lot of grief throughout development – PhysX is probably the best physics engine on the market, but Unity doesn’t give you full control over it, making it hard to tweak it just right. Exacerbating this, the whole idea of physics-based puzzles in the first place is a little problematic, since puzzles (unlike problems) are essentially non-emergent, and the emergent nature of physics systems tends to do more harm than good when used for this sort of puzzle.

I’m overall pretty satisfied with the way the difficulty ramps up gradually throughout the game, but the general difficulty of the game seems to suit very few people. A lot of players find it excruciatingly hard to even navigate the game, many others find the puzzles to be trivially easy. I’ve talked to just a handful of people who thought the difficulty suited them. Puzzle games, at least of this kind, are extremely hard to balance, and next to impossible to implement different difficulty options for. You can’t just raise the player’s health like in combat games, and there are no opponents to be made weaker or less accurate. The only real option would be some sort of hint system, and that tends to ruin the play experience entirely.

There are certain other features I miss, however – most importantly, the game really needs a level selection menu. This is on the list for our lead programmer Elvis to implement when he has time, but I think its absence hurts our chances at the various competitions and festivals where we’ve submitted Broken Dimensions. Another problem is that you can’t access and change the options from inside the game, meaning if you play it for a while and then realise that you’re constantly rotating the wrong way, you have to start over if you want to invert the rotation controls. As an advocate of accessibility, it also saddens me that we didn’t have time to implement closed captioning: subtitles for sound effects as well as dialogue audio.

Overall I’m extremely proud of Broken Dimensions, both of my own contribution and of the overall quality of the game. Everybody on the team did a bang-up job in the face of our own far too high ambitions, and though I flinch at the thought of the glitches people have encountered, I’m astounded that the game works at all considering how little time we had to develop it. As I mentioned, the game has been submitted to several festivals, including PAX, IGF, and Indiecade. I really hope we get to go to at least one of them, as I think we deserve it for having made a super engaging and satisfying little puzzle game.

You can play Broken Dimensions in your browser at BrokenDimensions.com, but I recommend downloading the Windows or Mac client, available from the same website, as it looks a whole lot better.

The Global Game Jam came and went around two months ago, but I never got around to blogging about it because things started happening immediately afterwards and never let up. Same old excuses I suppose. I also wanted to wait with posting about the game until I’d finished editing a quick video playthrough of the game, but when I did finish working on the video a few weeks after the jam, it had all sorts of problems pertaining to framerate and aspect ratio, so that whole video has been scrapped. Now I find myself with half an hour to kill before bedtime, I figure I may as well squeeze a game jam post in before my current project wraps up and I’ll need to write about that.

The Nordic Game Jam, flagship jam of the Global Game Jam was, like last year, totally epic. Better yet, unlike last year, I did not throw up out of sheer sleep deprivation and have to go home to sleep through most of Sunday this year, though I did as usual feel incredibly sick Sunday morning after just 4 hours of terrible sleep. The jam took place from Friday to Sunday, with some lectures and seminars on Friday culminating in a string of keynotes and announcements leading into group forming, game pitches, and teams filing out into different rooms across the IT University of Copenhagen.

Dutch Gentleman Adventurer Erik “EER” Renes answered my call to action and made the 10 hour drive from The Netherlands to Denmark to attend the largest game jam in the world. We quickly met up with a couple of class mates from what has become my steady group for socialising, and in complete spite of the philosophy of the “capitalist line” (ideas first, groups second), we decided to work together before we even had this year’s theme. The theme was the for a game jam excellently suited “Extinction”, and after pitching three ideas between us, we caught hold of a graphics artist and decided to make a game about destroying all life in the universe.

After briefly entertaining the idea that we might use Unity, we sobered up and chose XNA for the project. We then proceded to make The Gods Must Be Crazy. I’ll just reuse the promo text from the game jam page here:

Clearly, life has to go. It’s been messing up your godly Creation for far too long. The universe is in dire need of a good hard reboot. Throw meteors to wipe out all sentient life in the universe before each species has time to expand beyond control. Create solar flares to pause the growth of their populations while you plot their death. Don’t let any of these pesky civilizations send colony ships to other planets!

It’s far from a perfect game, but I think it turned out to be a pretty entertaining and amusing little diversion, and most importantly we had a very good time working on it (mostly). Moreover, we ended up actually getting a jury’s award from Jesper Juul, whose name you may if nothing else recognise from my blogroll, where he’s been for absolute ages. It even came with this fancy diploma, so even though our game consistently got tragically few votes from the audience, at least we have proof that one of the real experts appreciates our work.

You can download the game from the Global Game Jam page, or you can grab it directly from the OTP servers by clicking these very words .

[UPDATE: 10-12-2011]

Prakash created a video of the game a while ago, I finally thought to embed it here for the convenience of future visitors. Enjoy.

I have three projects this semester. Due on the 15th of December is a group project where we’re attempting to make a highly emergent game in the Unity engine. For December 8, I need to create a game level for Gamewords as Fields of Expression – I’ve decided to use the UDK because it has good CSG tools so I can produce something relatively good-looking without doing any real modelling. Also for December 8, I’m working on a game prototype with my mother as a target audience for User Experience and Prototyping. This, I’ve chosen to use XNA for, because I’m a masochist.

There are two reasons I chose to go with XNA. The weak reason is that my target audience (mom) prefers to play games on her Xbox 360 than on her PC, primarily because the gamepad is more ergonomic and its buttons are better structured semantically. XNA already has all the gamepad stuff taken care of so I can concentrate on translating the input into useful output rather than figuring out what the input is in the first place. However, the real reason for choosing XNA is that I’ve been wanting to learn C# for ages.

C# is a proper programming language, unlike eg. LUA or Uscript or NWscript (which is the language that taught me about programming), but at the same time it’s a very tidy and approachable language. Everything I’ve heard about C++ indicates that it will destroy your soul if it’s the first language you attempt to learn, which is why I didn’t opt for that despite it being far more popular for game programming. I’d heard C# was supposed to be a lot easier, and since it’s derived from Java the same way NWscript was, I’m more or less familiar with the syntax already.

It’s not been easy to pick it up though. I tried going by some Internet tutorials first, and while I did manage to set up a game with a movable avatar, it didn’t really help me understand what I was doing or how it worked. I took out a couple of XNA books from the university library and one of them (Grootjans, Riemer: XNA 3.0 Game Programming Recipes) proved incredibly useful for setting up the basics of a 2D game and writing a general-purpose menu system.

Ultimately I’ve learned the most from my friends. My class mate Prakash was generous enough to give me a whole day’s worth of his time to walk me through setting up a hex grid with some code I’d found on the Internet and figuring out the player movement scheme. Shane, Jim, Mads, Mike, and Nick have all been tremendous help in answering specific questions, mostly pertaining to where I should put certain code or what particular errors mean. I’m very grateful that I know so many skilful programmers.

Yesterday I experienced a bit of a personal triumph when I managed to set up a follower selection menu for the player to choose which people to have in her expedition when the game starts. It involved two lists that the player needed to be able to scroll through and switch between at will, and it was quite complicated for me as an absolute newbie programmer to set up, but I managed it almost without help (mainly needed Shane to tell me if I had to add a certain variable to keep track of the current scroll progress or if I could infer it from the existing variables – he told me to just add the new variable). It’s nothing even close to the most impressive code ever, but the fact that I managed it shows that I actually understand how my menu system works, which is good because I’ll be using it a lot.

I’m sure any real programmer unfortunate enough to look at my code would, depending on their inclination, either cry tears of blood or just start laughing and never stop. For one thing, I know there are lots of more advanced functions I don’t really know about – I bet a lot of the more laborious if’s and switches I have could be replaced with arrays or other far more elegant solutions for example, but I’m sticking to what I understand for now. Make it work, then make it fast, as they say. Another thing is that I don’t understand encapsulation and I only half-understand inheritance. I have a feeling 90% of my public variables ought to be private or protected, but I don’t know how to move the necessary information between game objects in the proper way so I use whatever ill-advised shortcuts will get me the results I need.

So that was a bit about my troubles with getting into programming. Diving head-first into it with a fairly complicated system-based game project is not the least painful way to learn to program, but it’s the only way I can stay motivated (knowing I’ll have an awesome product to show for it when I’m done). Now the skill and expedition selection menus are done, the next hurdle is to set up a system for reading tile properties from a CSV file and apply them to the grid, and a system for calling individual event scripts when the player lands on certain tiles. Once that’s done, it should be downhill the rest of the way towards the hand-in date.

Once I have a bit more of the game to show off, I’ll probably post again with more information about the actual game, and eventually there will be an installer for you to download so you can try it out yourself. It’s going to be fun! I promise.

For the last month or so, I’ve been increasingly obsessed with a TV series called Burn Notice. Described with a cheap one-liner, Burn Notice is what would happen if you combined James Bond and Angus MacGyver into one person and then set him up as a one-man A-Team. It’s about an international super-spy who is set up and fired and then dumped in Miami with all his assets frozen under orders to stay put or bad things will happen to him. He then has to take on odd little jobs to help random people for money or as personal favours, most of which tasks he is grossly overqualified for. It’s basically a whole show based on that scene in action films where a couple of unlucky thugs try to mug the secret agent and have their asses handed to them.

Since I am me, and everything I see, hear, or do makes me think of computer games somehow, I’ve been considering all along how one might turn Burn Notice into a game. Let’s assume that some irresponsible fool gives me the Burn Notice license and $25 million and puts me in charge of a game development team, how do I design a game about the sort of emergent MacGyver-as-a-gun-for-hire aesthetic that the series delivers?

My answer would be to combine the mission structure of Hitman: Blood Money with the overall structure of Alpha Protocol. It would be a singleplayer game. Friend Mads has pointed out that the spirit of Burn Notice is just as much about team work and coordination as it is about Michael Westen being an incredible badass, so it would probably be more faithful to turn it into a co-op game, but my plans are already complex enough without introducing network code and co-op dynamics to the mix, so let’s just stick to singleplayer for now.

Think of the game as a season of the TV show. Let’s say that the game consists of six “metaplot” missions and five “episode” missions. The metaplot missions are about coming closer to finding out who burned you, or at least who your current shadowy puppet masters are and what they’re using you for this time. The first metaplot mission serves as an intro to the game, with whatever tutorial pop-ups the playtests reveal a necessity for, and sets up the overarching antagonists for the game. It’s probably comparatively linear, and it ends with you needing a lot of money to get any further.

Now you get access to a map of Miami, with points of interest appearing as icons like in Alpha Protocol: your loft apartment where Fiona is staying and where you can build gadgets or pick up weapons or tools, your mother Madeline’s house where you can get new episode missions, a bar where you can find Sam, a pier where you can meet Barry the money launderer. Fiona and Sam can be recruited as mission support like in Alpha Protocol, and they can also get useful things for you – Fiona can get you new weapons and explosives, Sam can get you cover IDs for your missions or acquire intel on your clients and targets. Through your mother, you will meet people who need your help, which is how you get episode missions. Perhaps there will be two episode missions available at a time, after each of which you unlock new metaplot missions, either because you earn enough money from an episode to pay Barry for whatever you need in the metaplot, or you gain favour with somebody you needed something from, or simply because enough time has passed that there are new developments in the metaplot.

Once you get started on an episode mission, the other missions would be locked until you’ve finished it (to avoid ludo-narrative dissonance surrounding implied time pressure in the mission). Each mission would be a lot like a Hitman mission, in that it takes place in one or two locations (a museum where something has been stolen, a drug lord’s mansion and a hotel room where you can take one of his dealers to interrogate them, a bank that’s being robbed, a bar where a con man does business and the yacht where he lives, etc.) each with a system of restricted and unrestricted areas, computers to covertly access, places to hide bugs, file cabinets to search, food to poison, electrical systems to sabotage, henchmen to manipulate with an Alpha Protocol-style dialogue system, and all that good stuff.

The major difference from a Hitman game is that you can’t switch disguises mid-mission, once somebody has met you under a certain cover ID, you will have to maintain that ID while dealing with them for the rest of the mission. Each mission would probably only have one or two cover IDs, possibly with different IDs for each location involved (so you can be a different person to different people), and it’s up to you to pick the right time to drop your cover – usually when everything is falling into place and it’s time to close the deal. Another difference is that you can move freely between the available points of interest on the map during your mission, which allows you to go back to base to consult your team if something doesn’t turn out the way you expected, or you can move between two locations to play enemies against each other, or you can plant a bug somewhere and then head home to the loft to listen in on what the bug picks up.

Since social engineering is an important part of Burn Notice, Alpha Protocol’s dialogue system would be extremely well suited to the sort of aesthetic we’re trying to replicate, and we could solve one of the major problems with it by playing up the “what will Michael Westen do now?” element – a lot of the joy of the show comes from Michael always being several steps ahead of both his enemies and the audience, and by embracing that at the probable expense of full player-avatar identification, we would bypass the annoyance of picking a vague dialogue choice in Alpha Protocol and getting a result that you didn’t expect at all. Especially the special actions you can trigger in Alpha Protocol are often very vaguely described and end up doing something you didn’t intend at all. However, if a dialogue option in our hypothetical Burn Notice game says “Take pistol” and you don’t really know if that means cheating the guy holding a gun to your head into turning over his weapon or elbowing him in the face and taking it from him by force, that doesn’t have to be a problem as long as you understand that Michael may not always do what you expect in those situations.

In lack of a full-on co-op option, thorough implementation of Fiona’s and Sam’s mission support would be paramount to replicating the spirit of the show. Alpha Protocol offers some good examples of how it can be done, with your friends leaving equipment pickups for you in certain places, working as handlers to give you hints, information, and optional objectives over the radio, or even showing up guns blazing to take some of the heat off of you if things go wrong. Clearly, there would also have to be an option to get Fiona to blow everything up, which I imagine would have its uses. Some cover IDs might simply require you to not show up alone, in which case Sam or Fiona would have to come with you and hang around in the mission area to sell the lie convincingly. You might even be able to split up and have them handle certain optional objectives for you while you do something else, when you need to be in multiple places at once.

All of this hinges on being able to add as many different points of interaction to each mission as Blood Money, preferably even more, and not having them depend too strictly on each other. Blood Money is so open because it’s not too strictly scripted, many of the things you can do in that game simply stimulate the AI in certain ways, meaning you can set up your own string of actions and effects to deal with each mission. If cutting the power box to the TV meant you had to rig it with a proximity mine next, to take out the guard who comes out to fix it, and then call the target’s telephone from across the street so he comes over to the window, which requires you to first poison the guard dog in the house across from his… it would be a lot less interesting than finding your own combination of interactions to achieve your objective.

It’s very important that a game like this not simply turn into a point and click puzzle game where you must discover the correct pre-defined sequence of events that lead to success, it has to be as emergent as possible, which comes down to how complex and flexible the artificial intelligence is, and how many different ways for the player to stimulate it you can squeeze into each mission.

Now that everything is accounted for, all I need is the Burn Notice license, $25 million, and a game development team. Any takers?

DADIU stands for Danmarks Akademi for Digital Interaktiv Underholding, which is Danish for Denmark’s Academy for Digital, Interactive Entertainment. It’s not a university, but rather a fairly unique collaborative organisation that every year arranges game development projects for students from a series of Danish university-level educations. Whereas most educational game projects give groups of 4-6 students a whole semester or more to create a game, DADIU takes the opposite approach: teams of 12-15 students get one month to make a game. Under the old DADIU system, which I have the fortune to be among the last participants of, the programme consists of two projects, a practice run in May of the first year and a graduation project in March the year after. I’ve been told the new system will only have one project, during the fall.

Still with me? All right. I’m gonna go on a bit more about DADIU; if you’d rather know what the hell is up with the post title, skip to the sentence marked in bold below the next picture.

I had my first DADIU project, the practice run, this May. It was an incredible experience that I enjoyed immensely. DADIU is brilliant for pretty accurately recreating the structure and the dynamics of a real game development project – each team is composed of students from completely different educations, working with pre-assigned roles in a strictly defined (but optionally enforced) hierarchy, in the same room for 8 hours a day. The management team is the project manager, the game director, and the game designer (that would be me). An art director and a lead programmer further make up the leads. The rest of the team consists of a number of programmers, CG artists, animators, one or more graphic designers, and a sound designer. The practice run is executed under strict constraints (this year we had to design a game for 3-7-year-olds, playable with just the mouse and the left mouse button, featuring 3D and AI with critical importance to the gameplay, and playable in a browser) and all teams must use the Unity engine.

As a game designer on this project, I had so much fun. I like to think I have the qualities to make a good lead designer, because I won’t hesitate to decisions on the spot when necessary but I also respect everyone’s competences and creative input and I understand how to delegate tasks and share creative power rather than trying to do everything myself. On DADIU teams, the major conflict zone tends to be between the director and the designer, because their areas of responsibilities are a little poorly defined. Further, the game director is a person from the animation line on the Danish Film School, who will often have no prior experience with game development and no knowledge of the medium as such, yet has been given veto and creative oversight by the organisation. Fortunately I got a director who was fully aware of these issues and we were both determined to collaborate, give each other space, and work together.

I will say, however, that if we’d had a level designer on this project, I would have been bored far more often than I want to be. I feel that it’s important as a designer in a lead position to set an example for the team by working hard, and personally I enjoy getting my hands dirty if there’s time – since we had no level designer, I did all the level design and construction myself, which was the only reason my position wasn’t purely managerial.

At the end of the project, I had to hand in a personal report to our DADIU contact person at the ITU. It explains every facet of the project in more detail, focussing on my responsibilities and how I handled them. If you think you might find that interesting, you can download it here , it’s 8 pages and weighs a mere 589 KB.

The game we made in May is called Imachination. It’s a game for 7-year-olds about digging through Earth from Denmark to China with a huge construction vehicle stocked with weaponised tools and building equipment. At its most basic level, Imachination is an arcade shooter in the vein of Robotron 2084, but it has one very significant fundamental twist: your weapons fire automatically at a predefined rhythm, all you have to do is move and aim.

As you will see if you choose to read the report, it’s not a decision I’m particularly happy with in hindsight. Personally I enjoy playing the game and I think it works great, and so does most of the team. The problem is only about half the people who’ve played the game agree. Far too many players think it’s unsatisfying not to have to click to shoot – clicking gives the player a very direct connection to what’s going on in the game, and many players simply don’t find our gameplay involving enough without it.

If you’ve played Invisible War, the sequel to Deus Ex, you’ll be familiar with the concept of universal ammunition: instead of each weapon using an individual ammunition type that is spent and replenished independently from the ammunition for other weapons, every weapon shares a single pool of generic ammunition. This has the advantage of making game balance somewhat simpler for the designers, but the fairly significant disadvantage of making side-arms pointless (if you’re out of ammo for your primary weapon, you’re also out of ammo for all your other weapons) and making heavy weapons too expensive (the flame thrower for example will eat up all your ammo very fast, and then you’re stuck with melee weapons). It’s an original design decision that looked perfectly innovative on paper, but in practice it doesn’t really work – at least not the way it was implemented in Invisible War (Mass Effect 2 makes the whole thing work simply by divorcing the ammo expenditure of its weapons from each other, while picking up one clip will still add its ammunition to every weapon the player has).

Though it’s obviously not quite the same, I can’t help but think of the auto-firing weapons in Imachination as my own universal ammunition. There were signs of controversy already during development (I once read that Warren Spector himself was worried about universal ammo; likewise, one of our industry consultants repeatedly spoke out against it during our meetings), but the idea stayed, I guess primarily because it was sold convincingly to the rest of the team – everybody understood the reasons why it was a good idea, so the reasons why it might be a bad idea weren’t given sufficient weight. Finally, it’s a streamlining of the core gameplay that makes the designer’s job somewhat easier (in the case of Imachination, it was the least complicated way of handling our one-button constraint) but takes something away from the gameplay that most players enjoy.

In the end, the problem isn’t that only half the players think the game is fun without clicking to attack, the problem is that all players would have thought the game was fun if the clicking had been there – I introduced a problem without really fixing another one.

I’d like to think I’ve learned from this. Learned to be more careful about what to innovate in the future perhaps, and to test the game even more with people outside the team, even if there’s not really time to run those tests. If nothing else, I’ve learned that when there is shooting, the player wants to be the one doing it.

If you have twenty minutes to spare, please do give Imachination a try and let me know what you think. It runs in your browser if you have the Unity web player, it only has 3 levels, and all you need to know is that your health regenerates if you avoid taking damage for a while, everything else of importance is explained in the brief tutorials at the start. Drop me a comment to let me know what you think if you play it

I just finished editing this new ParaDime trailer to present the game for our exam on Thursday. The voice-over may change, as I haven’t run it past the group yet, but it’s from the actual game and there’s a lot to pick from, including a bunch of recorded audio that was never implemented, so changing it if the group is unhappy with it is no big deal.

For posterity’s sake, here are the trailers for the other games produced for the IT University’s Game Development course this semester:

Cyclopes Arena

Impressively polished but disappointingly ordinary multiplayer FPS.

Don’t Look Now

Remarkably scary game. Haven’t played it myself, for that very reason.

Heroes with Rubber Swords

Cute top-down RPG-style multiplayer game based on live-action role-playing.

Little Lisa

Cool premise and interesting story, but damn I hate puzzle games. Yes, I realise ParaDime is a puzzle game too. Shut up.

Oh My God, She Dropped The Baby

Sadly I haven’t had a chance to play this.

The Platoon of Psychedelic Soldiers

Somewhat too ambitious for their own good. Scope and size, people! Scope and size. Their level design is pretty solid though.

Snowball Fight

My personal favourite of all the games produced this semester.