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.

Braid’s narrative also has the amusing little intertextual quirk that it’s based on the old Super Mario Bros. plot. It essentially takes the line “Your princess is in another castle” and reinterprets it completely, turning it into a story of soul mates and a failed relationship.

The thing with Braid’s narrative is that it’s not a plot, it’s a set of vignettes. It’s very artful in that sense, and pretty far from the mainstream: It’s not really interested in telling you a story, it describes a set of powerful moments and then uses its art and its gameplay as an abstraction of this already pretty abstract narrative.

But hey, it works, and it’s a lot of fun. Especially for a puzzle game, because that’s what it is. It may look like a platformer, but it’s not primarily about hitting the jumps right or timing your movement (though it is about that as well), it’s mainly about figuring out how to use the time-bending tools at your disposal to obtain the jigsaw pieces. Enough has been written about how Braid’s challenges seem to expand your mind, and it’s all true. It’s so true that I find myself completely unwilling to use a walkthrough, which is why I’m still 6 pieces short of completing the game. I will eventually, because the puzzles are that good.

I would have liked to describe the fantastic artwork and music in Braid, which looks like a moving painting and sounds like a happy dream, but instead I’ll direct you towards artist David Hellman’s outstanding illustrated Gamasutra article about the creation of Braid’s art. The only thing I could possibly add to that article would be every superlative in my vocabulary, but if you only read the article, maybe all those superlatives won’t be necessary at all.

I’m compelled to finish this article with a warm recommendation: Please purchase Braid. It’s out for X-Box Live Arcade right now, and it’ll be out for PC soon - hopefully very very soon. I have no qualms about making this recommendation, because I simply find it difficult to imagine the sort of player who wouldn’t enjoy Braid.

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:

An open world
Not necessarily a completely open streaming one-level world like eg. Oblivion, but almost all of my game ideas entail freedom of movement on the micro- as well as the macro-level. If it’s not a streaming world (Oblivion, Boiling Point), it’s a linear succession of wide-open levels (STALKER, Crysis) or a selection of multilinear levels accessed from a map screen between missions (Jedi Academy - sort of).

Problems with multiple solutions
If the previous element meant nonlinearity on a macro level, this is the nonlinearity on a micro level. I have a vague idea that it must be possible to design a game from the bottom up in a way that allows the game to react sensibly to pretty much anything the player can throw at it - to design missions in a way that permits any solution the player can think of within the fictional world of the game.

Unfortunately whenever I try to actually define this idea more specifically, to make it more concrete, I always draw a blank. Until I manage to wrap my head around the actual implementation of such a design ethos, multilinearity will have to do: specifically implementing as many different solutions to a given problem as you can think of. It’s a lot of work, but it makes for some impressively lasting player experiences.

Non-lethal gameplay
Whether through sneaking, diversion, negotiation, or social engineering, I am hot for non-combat gameplay. The question often comes up “Why would a game be more fun if you took out the combat and replaced it with dialogue trees or stealth?” and the answer is that it might not be, but it’d certainly be different, and I’m utterly convinced it could be at least as much fun as blasting your way through problems. And don’t we have enough combat-based games already?

So basically, I want to make games that I like. No surprises there, I guess

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.

The train ride from Copenhagen to Hamburg took about 5 hours including 45 minutes by ferry. The Rødby-Puttgarten ferry is quite a circus. They drive the whole train onto the ferry along with whatever cars and trucks need to pass the belt, but due to safety precautions, you’re not allowed to remain on the lower decks. Instead you’re made to stay in what can best be described as a floating mall - apparently there are people who take the ferry just for the tax-free shopping. It was still an enjoyable little trip, however, as the last time I went anywhere by boat was, as far as I remember, in Greece many many years ago.

When I arrived in Hamburg Hbf. around 4 pm, I was quite dismayed to find that the only way to get subway tickets was from the vending machines, and the many charts and signs plastered on and around these machines completely failed to explain anything in English. Now, I did study German for 5 years, but while this has equipped me to understand German if spoken slowly and with no weird accent, it does not suffice to help me figure out what train would take me to Altona and how to get a bloody ticket.

Somewhat desperate and already running late, I turned to the woman behind me and asked if she spoke English. She tentatively replied in the affirmative and I asked how I would go about getting a ticket to Altona. Then she asked, in clear and native Danish, if I was from Denmark. Slightly taken aback, I confirmed - also in Danish - that yes, I was, and communication suddenly became quite a lot easier.

Jeremiah picked me up at Altona station and took me to his studio, no more than 5 minutes away on foot. I wasn’t sure quite what to expect, but it turned out to really be a professional recording studio, complete with a waiting room and a thoroughly soundproofed recording booth. After dinner, we recorded the last lines for Scara. It’s a big shame I didn’t get a photo of Jeremiah’s Scara-face, because it looked so hilarious I couldn’t help but laugh. With Scara out of the way, we settled really quickly on a voice for Trestkon, which was pretty close to Jer’s normal speaking voice so as to make things easier on him. We sent a sample to Lawrence and Nick, and with their approval, we got to work.

[See post to listen to audio]

The weekend passed shockingly quickly. It’s almost a lie to say I’ve been to Hamburg, because I only ever left the studio to have dinner, although Jeremiah did take me for a quick walk before the return trip on Sunday (which is incidentally when all of these pictures were taken). Saturday was particularly hard core as I got up at 10, we started recording around 11, and we stopped at 11 pm, so 12 hours of solid recording, only interrupted by lunch, dinner, and the occasional Call of Duty 4 break. When we finally hit our stride Saturday evening, we were recording about 100 lines per hour.

Unfortunately our concerns about the time turned out to be quite warrented as we still had about 5-600 lines left when we stopped recording Sunday afternoon. I’m pretty happy with how much we got done though, we must’ve recorded almost 2500 lines of dialogue, which is completely crazy. I was exhausted when we were done, and I wasn’t even the one doing the acting and having to stay in-character the whole time.

Jeremiah’s hospitality really overwhelmed me. I slept in a room that’s being turned into a second studio, and I was given a key and everything. He even brought breakfast on Saturday morning.

Although this definitely wasn’t a vacation, but rather hard work, I enjoy these semi-business-related trips out of the country. Visiting another country is a completely different experience when you have something specific to do there rather than just being a tourist. I would have liked to see a bit more of Hamburg though, so if I have to go back at some point, I’ll schedule a whole week so I’ll have a few days off to just go exploring.

…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.

Enter Jeremiah Costello, professional voice actor and creative director of T-Recs studio, located in Hamburg. For some inexplicable reason (divine intervention?) he contacted us to offer his help with some voice acting, and we got him to record all of Scara’s lines, at which he did an outstanding job. When he heard we were considering releasing TNM without recording Trestkon’s dialogue, he offered to record them on the condition that I come to Hamburg to direct.

So off I go to Hamburg tomorrow (technically), Friday the 8th. I’ll be staying until Sunday evening, sleeping in the studio basement, and hopefully we’ll manage to record all the lines before I leave again. We’ll be using T-Recs’s awesome batch recording tool that I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to talk about, and since Jeremiah’s friend Friedrich has helped me weed out the identical lines so we don’t have to do them twice, we’re down to about 2500 lines. I’ll bring my camera and give you as detailed a report as respecting Jeremiah’s privacy allows early next week.

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.

The Problem
The problem with the map became apparent during testing. In the alpha, a few testers expressed slight annoyance and frustration with how confusing and hostile the sewers are. Since we released the beta to more people, I’m not sure we’ve received any positive feedback to the sewers yet - the testers I’ve heard from have wanted to spend as little time as possible in the map, and some have gotten outright stuck in the level for several hours.

Which raises an interesting question: How do you get stuck in a map with seven exits? There are very few dead ends in this map - you usually just have to keep walking, and eventually you’ll find a way out. What exactly is the problem with the sewers? Why are people not liking it?

I talked it over with some of my fellow game design obsessives, and between us, I think we’ve figured out what the underlying problem is. It’s a discrepancy between what you expect and what you get: The map is designed to be explored without purpose - to get yourself willfully lost in and just poke around to satisfy your own curiosity and see what you’ll come across. If you don’t have any desire for aimless exploration, you shouldn’t enter the level in the first place. The problem arises when our players enter the level looking for something. Usually the entrance to the hidden basement of a building they’ve been given a side-mission in.

If you enter the sewers actively searching for something, it will immediately be a frustrating and terrifyingly hostile map. It’s a map designed to obfuscate, not direct - if you’re looking for something down there, the environment will be working against you at every turn. How to solve this?

The Possible Solution
Well there are a couple of solutions. One is to remove or completely redesign the map. This is not going to happen at this stage, the map took months to create, and I’m not yet ready to give up on the concept of the level. Another solution is to inform the player better. We already have messages in place when you enter the level, ensuring you understand that it’s easy to get lost down there, but players will still expect that they’ll be able to find the entrance to that hidden basement. This, I think, can also be changed through the power of More Information®: There’s a far more direct and easy entrance to it from another map, maybe all we need to do is make sure the players understand that the sewer entrance is just an alternative, and a harder one at that.

By changing one or two lines in the script, we could considerably improve the player’s experience with this level. Instead of changing the map itself, we’re going to try to change your expectations towards the map. We haven’t tried it yet, so I’ve no idea if it’ll work, or if it’ll be enough, but I’m hoping we can make the player understand that the map is completely optional and should be played at your own leisure. If it turns out to work, I think that’ll be an exceedingly valuable design lesson.

Warning: The comments contain minor TNM spoilers.

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.

Beta tester response to The Nameless Mod has generally been positive. Some testers felt compelled to play the mod for 5 hours at a time, tearing through the missions. Some testers are still mucking about in the first mission, poking it relentlessly to see how many different solutions it has (spoiler: A ridiculous, unbelievable amount). A few testers have been bogged down by our still annoyingly unstable first hub level, but they seem determined to defy the crashes and give the game a proper testing.

As an aside, how embarrassing is it that our first hub level crashes all the time? The rest of the game is almost completely stable (with the odd path finding error still needing to be found and fixed), but what good is that if most players give up because all the crashes are in the first mission? We’ve done some drastic things to eliminate them (the map used to be approximately 30% larger than it is now), but clearly not drastic enough. Methinks it’s time to give the ambient lighting in that map a complete overhaul.

Some annoying mistakes made it into the beta build. Predictably, almost all are results of last-minute fixes made during our short crunch before the beta deadline. Fixes beget new bugs, and though most of these are small mistakes, easy to fix, the sheer size of our builds (Beta 1 was 583 MB) makes it impractical to put out a new build until we’ve accumulated a greater amount of fixes.

Our game is structured into 5 “missions” (a Deus Ex term - more accurate nouns would be “chapters” or “sections”). Our first chapter makes up ca. 40% of the game, and has been tested thoroughly. Second chapter is tiny but notoriously buggy - we’ll see how many bugs persist in the beta 1 build - and the third is another enormous chapter, a revisit to the locales of chapter 1. Chapters 4 and 5 are small but brimming with special-case scripting and complex events and systems. These last two chapters have barely been tested at all in alpha, and I fear we may be flooded with bug reports when our diligent beta testers reach it.

Our testing method is aimless and far from thorough. We have no coordination between the testers to ensure that every corner and every plot branch of the mod is tested. We’re running a very real risk that certain more obscure branches may never be tested at all - that some choices are simply too unlikely to be made until a larger population of players gets their hands on the game. If this had been a real game, some form of automated unit testing would have been indispensible, but if I suggested any such thing to Shane or Nick at this point, they would strangle me to death with my own mouse cord. As it stands, we must cross our fingers and pray that everything is tested properly, and then patch after release if we turn out to be mistaken.

As the testing carries on, my ego swells to formerly unheard of sizes. It seems we’ve done it right, but of course we’re standing on the shoulder of giants. What TNM has taught us, essentially, is how best to design Deus Ex.

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.

Conversely, in Deus Ex (and by extension TNM) the dialogue has far less agency but far more reactivity. The dialogue options are pretty limited, usually used to let you buy items from NPC’s or ask about optional subjects that are irrelevant or incidental to the plot. Instead, the options that affect the plot are placed in the gameplay, and the dialogue automatically changes to reflect these choices. For example, probably the most important choice in Deus Ex until the endgame is whether or not to save your brother, and this decision is made by either fleeing out the window like a coward or staying in his room to fight like a man. For the rest of the game, the dialogue will occasionally change to reflect whether or not Paul is still alive.

The enormous advantage of Deus Ex’s ethos is that the dialogue is a lot less detached from the gameplay. Sometimes, the dialogue in Mass Effect and other Bioware games has a tendency to feel like another game tacked onto the actual game. It has a hint of the same detachment from the gameplay that cutscenes suffer from. To counter this, Bioware often makes your dialogue choices influence the gameplay by eg. making enemies hostile or spawning or removing them depending on your choices. Arguably, however, actions should speak louder than words, and in Deus Ex they do.

A disadvantage to Deus Ex’s method is that it’s generally completely impossible to interpret the player’s intentions with sufficient nuance to inform the dialogue. The example I usually employ is the Battery Park Station hostage situation in Deus Ex: If you mess up the mission and get the hostages killed, JC will act completely brash and unconcerned about it when questioned by his brother, even if the player is feeling a bit remorseful or ashamed about the whole thing. The game can easily tell that you failed to save the hostages, but it has no idea why. If you make the game monitor the situation closely enough, you can make a more educated guess (if the player directly shot at the terrorists’ explosives or even threw a grenade down there to clean the station out, it’s a safe bet he didn’t mean to save the hostages, for example), but this can get very complicated very fast.

Deus Ex is pretty uncompromisingly reactive in its use of dialogue, but Bioware’s games often let the dialogue change a bit depending on the player’s gameplay choices. As with most aspects of game design, I think the best solution is a compromise. In TNM, we’ve maintained the Deus Ex ethos, but mixed in some dialogue options for nuance. I’m sure it can be taken even further though, and given the chance, I’ll be experimenting with that in the future.

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.

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.

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”.

Nick contributed with an interesting observation the other day though: In many cases, non-RP PvP servers actually have more roleplaying than non-PvP RP servers simply because there’s a lot of legitimate hostility between the game’s two factions: Horde and Alliance. You may still not see any players mourning the death of their friend - that would be a little awkward 10 seconds later, when the dead friend resurrects on the same spot where he died - but thanks to the constant threat of getting ganked by a three level 70 players in a contested area, you’ll see a lot of players express genuine hostility towards players of the opposing faction.

Of course you can ask if that’s really roleplaying. If you actually feel that loathing towards the other team, you’re not really pretending anymore, right? Personally I hope players aren’t genuinely hating each other - I’d hate to ever read in the newspaper that an Alliance player has killed his neighbor because he found out the neighbor’s primary character was Horde - but in any case it creates the desired effect: As an Alliance character, you learn to fear and despise the Horde before you even meet them and vice versa. Could this be the way to foster roleplaying in an MMOG?

Shamus had a good explanation of why you can’t really expect MMOG-players to roleplay on their own accord, even disregarding the constant sabotage any attempt at RP will face from the game’s rules:

Everyone has a different idea of what roleplaying means or how it works. Everyone has their own taste for how much roleplaying they want. Is it okay if we just avoid talking about cars and the internet, or do we need to speak in arty language? What about game mechanics? Do we need to talk around things like what level we are? In a tabletop game you might have a character who is terrified of spiders, or a Dwarf who has a deep hatred of Elvenkind. Those are fine attribures in a game with friends, but in an online game that guy is just going to be a pain in the ass to play with.

Everyone has a different idea of what it means to roleplay, but everybody seems to disagree to hate the different faction. Maybe it would be worth looking into more possible ways to foster roleplaying. Your lore calls for dwarves to be repressed and mistreated by humans? Give the human characters some psychological advantages - the ability to own a home, for example, in a city where dwarves may not. You want druids to really care for nature? Tie some of their abilities into the environment and give them the ability to improve their character by protecting and nuturing plants and animals near their home.

Game mechanics can be a powerful way to wring emotion and drama from a game, but of course it can be a bit of a hazard to the game balance. You’ll want to be careful not to weigh the PvP balance of the game too heavily in the favour of a certain group of characters, otherwise you’ll end up with a race or class that nobody will play. But considering how much players bitch about perceived balance problems in World of Warcraft, it looks like it takes a lot more than unfairness to make a player switch classes. I think it’d be an interesting area to explore. Dangerous, but interesting.