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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06.07.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 22:48
I was browsing Shamus’ blog Twenty Sided the other day, idly making plans to kill him and take over his readership, when I came across a post wherein he lambasted Invisible War for largely limiting your choices to “Kill” or “Let Live”. Not only that, but compared eg. to the similarly Life/Death-based choice of what to do with Juan Lebedev in Deus Ex 1, most of these choices seem a bit tame because you usually don’t have any reason to kill the character in question.
On Lebedev’s jet, you have your orders not to kill the prisoner conflicting with Anna’s urgent demands that you execute him and threats to do it herself if you hesitate too long. It becomes a reasonably well balanced choice between killing your ruthless partner or killing the unarmed guy who claims to know important things about your past.
As with any game design observation, and particularly those that involve Deus Ex, I immediately turned it around and looked at The Nameless Mod through its perspective, and I noticed that by far most of the choices we have in the mod are similar choices for whether or not to kill different characters. On some occasions, you have reasons for and against, but I admit they’re never quite as terrific as the Lebedev dilemma, and by far most of them simply concern ancillary characters whose deaths have little consequence and offer you no significant benefits.
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- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Metallica - Harvester of Sorrow
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05.03.08
Posted in The Nameless Mod at 17:38
I can’t help but wonder if there’s something wrong with The Nameless Mod. The only person so far who’s completed it is Gelo, who went through it twice because we desperately needed somebody to. We’ve had (I think) 7 people outside the team play the game, and nobody has completed it yet. The latest round of testing was done on the A200 build, which is pretty much the finished game plus a few bugs and without most of the voice acting, and yet our testers are working at an epically slow pace.
Our testers assure me the game is great, impressive, comparable to a professional game, whatever. But none of them have actually completed it. Far as I can tell, the farthest anybody but Gelo has made it is our third mission (out of 5), meaning something like 30% of our game is largely untested. Surely if they’d been testing Deus Ex or Half-Life 2, they’d have forgotten about everything else and just been swept away by the experience? Somehow we must just be completely failing to keep the player’s attention…?
I don’t mean to whine, but it’s amazingly demoralizing when you’ve worked on a project for 6 years and then even the people who volunteer to test it (presumably your most dedicated fans) can’t really maintain interest in it. Testing should be the easy job, you just have to play the damn thing and write down whenever you find something that isn’t like it should be, so what the hell is the problem?
If you’re one of our testers and you’re reading this, don’t take it personally. I’m not mad at you, just worried about the quality of my own work.
- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Surfact - Monkey On Your Back
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04.25.08
Posted in Personal, The Nameless Mod at 09:53
I generally consider myself pretty proficient at reading and writing the English language. I put this down to a heavy exposure to English TV, English games, English books (thanks, mum!), and lots of time spent on the English parts of the Internet (something about the Danish corner of the ‘net seems oddly restricted and… rural to me, I can’t quite explain it - everything Danish on the ‘net just seems a bit pedestrian). It’s gotten to the point where my vocabulary contains words that many native English-speakers do not know, and where I certainly spell better than many of them - though it may simply be due to the fact that I care.
There is, however, one area in which I am always at a disadvantage and may always remain so: Idiolects. This is a frighteningly important part of writing, especially in English, which is a language distributed across several nations. A person’s idiolect describes so much about them, things we may or may not consciously pick up on, but which at least a native speaker will almost always understand at a subconscious level. From the way a person speaks (inflection, choice of words, and other factors), we infer their area of origin, their level of education, their social standing, and often even their ethnicity, among many other things. This is indescribably difficult to manage when you’re writing in anything other than your first language.
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04.20.08
Posted in The Nameless Mod at 20:45
There are certain advantages to having your team distributed across 4 continents. One is that somebody will almost always be working on your project at any given time of day. When you’re sleeping in America, your guy in Europe is up working, and there’s enough of an overlap to meet up in before he goes to bed and catch up.
There are a lot more disadvantages though, sadly. The chief problem is communication, of course, which is a substantial but partially surmountable problem: Wikis, forums, instant messengers, voice chat, and video conferences all exist to help alleviate communication issues, though nothing will ever beat actual physical presence.
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- Game: Rainbow Six: Vegas 2
- Music: Enemy - Pressure
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04.14.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 15:12
If there’s one game design lesson I can take away from The Nameless Mod, it’s this: It’s impossible to overestimate how much help the player needs.
Among the fan community of games in the Looking Glass tradition (System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, Bioshock, etc.), there’s a widely spread belief that games should trust their player to be intelligent and independent. Bioshock’s quest arrow and highlighting of important objects is often considered condescending and unintelligent - redeemed only by the fact that you can toggle it off in the game menu.
But the people who complain about that obviously hasn’t observed a playtest. If you make a game and let somebody else play it, it becomes painfully apparent that your player is always more stupid than you expect. If that sounds really bitter, it’s because I desperately wanted to create an intelligent game that trusts its player to be resourceful, yet ever since we started playtesting it, all I’ve been doing is to insert more hints all over the place.
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- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: Alice Cooper - Poison
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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.
