If we’d known what we were getting ourselves into, we’d have run away screaming. The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex stands out for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s a single-player total conversion, which isn’t the easiest or most popular category of modification on the internet. Secondly, it’s enormous: The Nameless Mod features over 14 hours of voice-over, the average length of a playthrough is 15 hours, and that’s just playing one of two significantly different, mutually exclusive plotlines. Third, and arguably most notably, The Nameless Mod has been finished and released to very favorable reviews.

The project was in development for seven years, two months, and 11 days by an international team of hobbyists who never met each other. It placed enormous demands on communication, leadership, and quality assurance, and to top it all off, it started as that most reviled of genres: forum fan fiction.

And then I go on to talk about the development process and describe 5 things that went right and 5 things that went wrong, in the usual fashion. It’s as honest as I could make it, and I hope you can find the time to read it, even though it’s quite long. The post-mortem may be found here.

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.

I beg to differ. In my opinion, writers are good for at least two other things: Story and dialogue. Here, it’s important to discern between story and plot: Plot is what specifically happens on the screen or on the pages throughout a book, film, show, or game. Story is all of that plus anything else that’s mentioned, referenced, or subtly hinted at. The new Star Wars trilogy was already part of the story for the original trilogy before they were used as plots for films in their own right.

I agree that it’s often best to leave the plot to the designers. Good designers have a strong concept of what sort of plots work well in a game and how to turn them into gameplay. A good game plot needs to be created together with the gameplay, not before the gameplay and certainly not after the gameplay.

I think story is a different matter though – creating a world full of potential for gripping plots is an important part of much writing (especially science fiction and fantasy, in my experience), and though I base this on no personal experience, hiring a writer to flesh out your setting before you set about designing your game ought to give you the same advantages as working with a licensed IP, but without many of the disadvantages. You have a clear set of limitations and guidelines to build your plot and your gameplay on, but if you run up on a snag, you don’t have to ask for permission to change anything in your story.

More importantly, I think many modern games demonstrate an urgent need for professionally written dialogue. Some designers are brilliant at dialogue, of course, just as many designers are great at story and setting, but many many designers are apparently rubbish at writing convincing exchanges. I think I write reasonable dialogue for a designer, but there’s no way I can compete with a person like Smike who’s dedicated his whole carreer (not to say his whole life) to becoming a great screenwriter. The games with the best dialogue seem to generally be written by people who are primarily writers and designers second or not at all. This is true for Deus Ex, it’s true for Half-Life and Portal, it’s true for Grand Theft Auto 4, and it’s true for Bioware’s entire portfolio.

Not all games need writers of course. Crysis certainly seemed to do alright though its plot and its characters was all terribly cliché, and the same is true for so many action games. Nor am I saying a great writer who is also a great designer wouldn’t be a fantastic boon to a development team. I’m just saying maybe the reason so many modern games have whince-inducing dialogue is that the industry isn’t quite as good at discerning between different writing jobs as it could be. You probably shouldn’t hire a famous novelist to write the plot for your game, unless they’ve also proven themselves to have a strong understanding of game design, but I bet such a writer could do a terrific job of fleshing out your setting or tweaking your somewhat utilitarian dialogue.

Even though I love to write, I’d certainly look around for a professional screenwriter to polish my dialogue before I’d send it out to be recorded if I were designing a proper game. You just can’t compete with years of dedication to a single discipline.

Schlock Mercenary
One of my favourite webcomics, Schlock Mercenary offers an intricately detailed and hilarious universe with many unique details to set it apart from other sci-fi settings. It also has a protagonist with endless possibilities for unique new verbs: A carbonsilicate amorph. I can see this working as a Mass Effect sort of game, but possibly with less roleplaying and more action. As Captain Kaff Tagon, you could steer your warship Touch-And-Go around the galaxy looking for ways to maximize profit, putting together a ground team from the crew roster when it’s time to board pirate ships or raid bandit outposts. Schlock himself would be overpowered, but awesomely so. Maybe you could even have Kevyn research new technologies as the game progresses!

Blake & Mortimer
When I was a kid, I used to bring home a lot of mystery comics from the library. Some of my favourite series were the tragically small Jonas (not just because of the name, but because of the supreme sense of wonder in those books), and of course, Blake & Mortimer. It would probably be a substantially more down-to-earth version of Tomb Raider with more character interaction and less platforming. And better, simpler action scenes. For co-op, allow each player to control either Blake or Mortimer!

A Wizard of Earthsea
Best fantasy novel I’ve ever read, by my favourite author, Ursula K. LeGuin. The Earthsea Cycle is a perfect specimen of low fantasy with a really atmospheric setting – a great sea dotted with hundreds of tiny islands, the primary means of transportation being by boat. I can see this as a freeform adventure RPG, where actual confrontation would be reasonably rare. Travel from island to island doing magical work for people, all the while collecting the true names of various objects to expand your magical abilities. The overarching storyline would be focused on character development, similarly to Planescape: Torment. And just like Planescape, the Earthsea setting is ripe with opportunities to deconstruct common fantasy clichés.

Mission: Impossible
This franchise is just a goldmine waiting to be ruthlessly exploited in our interactive medium. But it also has a lot of potential for good gameplay. In my mind, there are two ways to go with this. The first option is to draw from the original TV series. The player could be tasked with setting up a team of specialized intelligence operatives and then travelling around the world with them, carrying out Commandos-styled covert missions. Each mission would be completely open to the player’s planning, a sandbox of systems and patterns for the player to exploit and manipulate using the skills of each of his team members. The other option is to lean more on the films with Tom Cruise, letting the player control a single operative – Ethan Hunt – sneaking, hacking, deceiving, or shooting his way through missions – a lot like the Splinter Cell games, but with far more lenient combat and even more hard core melee moves. And maybe more open missions, more like Deus Ex.

Battlestar Galactica
Seriously… what the hell is this? I could do better than that. I could do way, way better than that.

Lately I’ve been trying to keep up with the “The PC as a gaming platform is dying!” “No the PC as a gaming platform is doing fine!” debate, and frankly it’s not very easy. A lot of the participants in this debate have something at stake (it’s difficult to trust the pro-PC gaming arguments entirely when they come from Valve and Epic who have massive market shares to lose if the PC dies as a gaming platform) and I have significant problems digging down to the facts at the heart of the debate.

I’d like to link to a couple of interesting articles in these ongoing discussions, the first being a righteously bitter forum post by Michael Fitch from THQ over at Quarter To Three, “Venting my frustrations with PC game-dev“. One of the main points of the post – inspired by the closing of Iron Lore, developers of Titan Quest – are the corrosive effects of PC game piracy. Now, the piracy issue is a debate worthy of its own blog post (if not several dedicated websites) but Fitch brings up a lot of really interesting issues, all of which lead to depressing conclusions.

The more optimistic counterpoint is Gamasutra’s interview with Valve’s marketing VP Doug Lombardi and business development director Jason Holtman, “Valve Explains Why PC Gaming’s Gaining Steam“. The Valve guys claim that the depressing numbers of PC sales are largely to be blamed on the focus of certain surveys: If you don’t ignore MMOG’s, the disturbingly gigantic PopCap, and Valve’s own Steam distribution platform, things look a lot better for the PC.

I don’t know what to believe because I don’t know whose numbers to put the most trust in. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is no easy summary – I doubt PC gaming will ever die, but I’m certain it will change. I don’t know how much it’ll change because I’m not in the habit of trying to predict the future, but I hope 5 years from now, we won’t be left with a platform full of MMOG’s and casual games.

So I ease the pain by reading all these great reports from the GDC, checking out the dev blogs regularly, finding videos of the presentations on RPS and elsewhere, and generally being a little OCD about it all. But that just makes it worse.

Never-the-less, here are two pretty awesome pieces of GDC I’ve managed to pick up over the last couple of days. First is a very very funny rant by Jane McGonigal titled Reality is Broken. I heartily recommend getting the slides too. If anybody knows where I can find a video of this rant or any of the other rants, I would be much obliged.

The second bit is Gamasutra’s summary of the Game Design Challenge, where I definitely think they picked the right winner. Any game design that can be sold with the phrase “the game that puts the fun back into fungicide” gets a star in my book!

I’m taking recommendations for other goodies I may have missed.

It’s about how to prevent the player from loading too frequently, thus overriding his own actions and damaging immersion, by design rather than restrictions. The main point seems to be that whenever the player takes a loss (to health or ammo in a shooter, for example), he should feel that he has gained more than he lost (by beating a tough boss or somesuch). Interestingly, Smith used Thief as an example of a game where the player is quite inclined to load if he slips up the least bit because regaining what you lost is much more trouble than simply quickloading and trying again.

This is a great point, and explains why I loaded so much more in Splinter Cell 4 than I ever did in Deus Ex. If I get spotted by the guards in Splinter Cell 4, I’ll suddenly have a whole group of enemies searching the area for me, and I must find some place to hide and wait until they go back to their patrols (which is realistic, yet very boring). If I get caught in Deus Ex, I just whip out the ol’ assault shotgun and start pumping hot lead left and right. In a few minutes (of great entertainment!) I’ll have wiped out all the enemies who knew I was there, picked up some ammunition from their corpses, and I’ll be on my merry way again.

Another good point was that if the game systematically provides feedback on the player’s choices, the player will be less inclined to load. This is something SC4 did perfectly: By failing one mission, you often completed another, thus getting the feeling that you weren’t really missing out on anything. Best example is (SPLINTER CELL 4 SPOILER!) after the cruise ship mission when – if you completed certain optional objectives in two previous missions – you’ll get the choice to jam the signal for the bomb, preventing it from blowing up the ship, or letting the ship explode and ostensibly killing hundreds if not thousands of civilians (unless you managed to place smoke bombs in the ventilation, in which case your killcount will be significantly lower – yes it’s that open-ended). If you jam the signal, Enrica – a member of the terrorist organization you’re infiltrating – will be shot right then and there. If you don’t, civilians will die, but Enrica will survive to show up in the climactic second-to-last mission to hand you your equipment, saving you a LOT of trouble later on.

Getting Enrica killed will constitute a huge loss later in the game, but on the other hand you’ll feel like a really good guy, and you’ll get the joy of seeing terrorist mastermind Emile Dufraisne (the bastard) in his worst possible mood.

I just took a sort of blog sweep today, starting with an column on Gamasutra and following a link from there to an interesting blog, then from that to another blog, etc. The one I linked to above was probably the 5th or 6th blog in that chain. Some of the blogs were really depressing (I mean when you’re well underway to devote your life to an emerging art form, you really don’t want to be told that it’s already dead and that your life will be ruined if you ever get a job in the industry), but others were more uplifting, and then some were just downright inspiring.

I got a ton of ideas, and while I was reading, I discussed the ideas, observations, and arguments put forth in the articles I read with some of my equally game-design enthusiastic friends over MSN, and a lot of great stuff was bounced back and forth. Some things were rather theoretical and unapplicable, other things were concrete enough to be immediately applied to our existing game concepts. I really wish I had a real game studio to put to work now. With all this input, I could make one hell of a game tonight.