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 Nightmares are keeping me awake again. I wish I could attribute this so some great philosophical conflict, but sadly it's just stress from work. Today, gravity has an exceptionally strong pull. It's as though the ground is a long absent but beloved friend, and I am constantly drawn to give it a hug.
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 Continued work on "Arcane Investigations". Since the game is basically Dominion mixed with a Dungeon Delve, I decided to work on the Dominion side of it today. As an economist, I see terrible storm clouds on the horizon as I balance the complexity of the resources. I decided to eschew Dominion's discreet actions and buys, and instead focused on defeating foes or contributing to the completion of an abstract puzzle. (The puzzle needs certain resources to complete, and players accrue "harm" if they do not contribute to the puzzle.) 

The basic premise is the players all enter "a room" and must face the enemies and the puzzle that is there. While enemies provide the resources necessary to improve the players, they also cause harm. Conceptually, the enemies should deal more harm than players can sustain. (Thus encouraging players to complete the puzzle quickly.) Once the puzzle is complete, players may rest and remove all "harm" and "injury" that they have accrued.

During this rest phase, players use "dark secrets" to influence the course of the plot in their favor. So, there is a micro game of combat and resource management layered into a game about strategic use of resources to gain victory points. (Players have various goals they can have at the start of the game, such as a Witch Hunter that gains victory points for defeating Unholy enemies and solving puzzles at Holy locations. Or a Pugilist who gains victory points for defeating any enemies, but loses many points for each mechanical or arcane card in his deck.)

So, the problem has come up that using "dark secrets" as currency in the micro game makes it very hard to have any left when a puzzle is completed. (This may actually be ideal. It is hard to say.) However, I can also make dark secrets MUCH harder to get and use a different, more diversified set of resources be used to actually acquire cards in the micro game.

Anyways. I'm having a pretty good time of it, and I'm making a pretty solid game. Well, I've got the groundwork of a solid game anyways. Also, and this is important from a personal goal standpoint, the game is highly modular. Cards can be added and removed from the game without harm, much like Dominion, and the game still functions.

I need to do much more testing, then I can move on to replacing the mechanics which stand in for the exploration side with the actual exploration mechanics. Should be fun.

Unwritten

Mar. 9th, 2012 08:13 am
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Projects are hard to finish. I used to think that personal projects were hard to finish, then I discovered that professional projects were just as hard. Most anything that I work on is an infinite time task: an activity which, much like a gas, expands to fill whatever container it is placed within. 

This was not a problem I encountered during film and theatre production. The schedules were so tight that it became easy to prioritize a task list. Also, if time ran out, the show just sort of happens. With most everything I do now, however, that is not an option. An unfinished novel does not just walk on stage and tell its story.

Bogart, Empire's Edge, and Gemini all sit half finished in "The Cloud" waiting for the singularity to occur and for Google docs to just decide to finish my novels for me. On top of that, I sat down and played Red Dead last night and still took notes about what to fix. 

Perhaps finishing takes a different kind of thinking than I am normally capable of.
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 I grow increasingly interested in making an indie game. This is a poor choice, perhaps, since my primary skill set stems from coordinating large groups of people. That, and cinematic storytelling. These skills largely benefit from a big bankroll. 

I've been working on a board game prototype for an exploration-themed adventure game. Players cooperate to defeat the denizens of an ever-expanding underground map. The idea is that players will not survive alone, but they are competing over a resource: dark secrets. In many ways, the game has a lot in common with pen-and-paper RPGs, but it does not require that one player to take on the "master" role. For now, I've been calling it "Arcane Investigations." Since I'm prototyping some pretty strange mechanics, I've fallen back on the old Lovecraftian theme. It's pretty played out now, but it's a theme I'm familiar with.

I'm taking lessons from The Procedural Content Generation Wiki. I'm hoping this works out well. 

I'm working on a board game version, but I'm also thinking about how to apply the same lessons to a digital edition. 

I'm also fascinated by the changes in what makes me happy. It's not a daily thing, but month to month some different things bring me great joy. Games, always, but very different ones. Sometimes deep strategy, sometimes direct conflict, sometimes cooperative. (Though, boy, cooperative games are hard to come by. Well, good ones anyway.)

Tai Chi is holding a lot less romance for me now that I can't make it to group classes. Development schedule is finally getting out of hand. Briana and I are going to invest in some LARP weapons. We've got a merry little band of fighters down here, and we're going to try to run fight practices down by the college. 
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Wednesday: An attempt to go to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at USCD turns into a guided tour of geek subculture at the venerable establishment. You see, the organizer of the event transcribed the date incorrectly, and, as a result, the missus and I wandered the campus aimlessly looking for an event which would never happen. Just as we were walking back to our car, planning on Facebook unfriending the hostess, we get a call. She explained the mix up and volunteered to escort us about campus.

Discovery: The Students with Disabilities Club on campus has remarkably few students that are actually disabled. Admittedly, our sample size was small, being four students, but they did constitute the whole of a meeting. Troubling.

Discovery the Second: The RPG Club is full of geeks. 

Discovery the Third: I've probably been playing too much LA Noire, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Thursday: I'm getting better at Tai Chi. Sadly, I had no private lesson this week and instead had to console myself with getting soundly defeated at push hands again and again.

LA Noire arrived on Wednesday, but I did not bust it out until Thursday night. This resulted in a second day of very little sleep. The game is pretty excellent, however I've just gotten a little disenchanted with it. However, I have once again gotten ahead of the timeline that is the framework of this narrative.

Friday: The missus and I have done something terrible. We've been trying to keep our finances in check by cooking more often and eating in more often. This attempt has been a miserable failure. On Friday, we had Phil's BBQ. We can't ask forgiveness; we know we will never get it.

We could have socialized with friends. Instead, we played LA. Noire.

Saturday: We were supposed to go out an socialize with new UCSD friends... instead stayed in and played LA Noire. At this point, the pattern has developed into a full-fledged picture. Or a coat. I can never remember what patterns turn into when they develop into maturity.

Sunday: We planned to go out with friends this afternoon... AND WE DID! HA! Thought you had me figured out, didn't you?

Then I went home and played LA Noire. I completely botched two cases straight. Lost my wife and kids. It was horrible.

This brings me to why Ms. Noire and I are on the rocks at the moment. It's the same mechanical failure the haunts the Phoenix Wright series of games. Due to the artificial nature of the player's interaction with the suspects, the game initially both seem quite unpredictable. So the initial cases are made as simple as possible. Characters that are telling the truth do so blatantly, and lies can be picked apart by concrete evidence. 

Soon, this interaction becomes routine and escapes from the obtuseness that haunts all such artificial interactions. This is all well and good until the designers decide to ratchet up the difficulty a bit. They decide to give you a couple pieces of evidence at any time that could easily contradict statements, but only one is arbitrarily determined to be correct. They also start to introduce the idea that sometimes evidence can be used to introduce a radical change in subject when accusing a witness of lying. Effectively, this causes the player to realize that sometimes someone can be exposed as a liar by injecting a completely random piece of evidence to the conversation. 

Good times. If, by good times you mean the exact opposite of that. 

The dialog and drama are still stunning. It might be time to hit up a walk-through and just treat the game as a long movie. It's a shame, for a while there it was a totally unique battle of wits. Late in the game, sadly, that battle of wits was not between the detective and the suspects but rather between the players and the designers.
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 Beneath the dim, diner lights, they whispered of great heroes, unusual creatures, and secret crimes. A crowd roared nearby as their home team scored some point against their antagonists. The small huddled group did not seem to notice. Together they spun webs within webs of intrigue and turmoil. The conspiracy invigorated them, and late into the night they spoke until the management came and asked them to take their hidden conflicts away.

The four, as there were four of them, were all storytellers in a game. Unlike many games these days where storyteller and player are divided, separated by a physical or metaphorical screen, this group was mixed. Two were "merely" players; two were the organizers of a LARP. These organizers had asked each of their players to answer some questions about their characters' back-stories. Because of the limited scope of the world revealed to the players beforehand and the number of players involved, there was a great deal of crossover amongst the stories. Plots criss-crossed with plots to build a beautiful montage of a world of great complexity. That, and the game has not even started.

The usual perception of a role-playing game is much like a play. Even tabletop games frequently treat the relationship as very one-sided: a storyteller regurgitating a steady stream of plot to its young players. But this is not the way of actual human interaction. Even in theatre, the audience influences the show, sometimes subtly but sometimes to great effect. This relationship is more pronounced in a game, storytellers need to consume story in order to continue. They draw this, often, from external sources before the game starts, but once everyone is gathered around the table, all bets are off. The players, outnumbering the storytellers, take over. 

My friends, the organizers of this LARP, have decided to bring in that player input much earlier. At the earliest stages, they are letting their players... dig their own graves. It will be great fun, but players, again and again, demonstrate a remarkable power to make their own lives both harder and more interesting. They grasp onto odd plot threads and bring in their own weird influences. Yes, they often need guidance in order to keep from breaking the theme, but otherwise they are on almost even footing with the so-called "storytellers."

The Digital Age
In application, this is not how digital games work. In most modern, big-budget games, players are herded from one moment to another. Their choices, rather than truly impacting the story, simply determine how long it takes them to get the next nugget of plot. This can be quite fun, the process of exploration, the trial and error, and the stress of violence can all be quite rewarding and exhilarating. Saying, however, that a player is the protagonist of such stories though is misleading. They are a pawn of the designers - pushed from one threat to another - and rarely contributing to the story in any meaningful way.

This happens for a myriad of reasons. Largely having to do with money. L.A. Noire comes out next week, and I am quite curious to see how it handles this. I know a little, having watch it develop in the cubicles beyond my own, but I don't really have a good grasp of how it handles the storytelling aspects. Given the cost of producing the cutscenes, I suspect it will be like a choose-your-own-adventure novel: discreet pre-made chunks revealed to players in varying order. 

A game that comes close to letting players tell their own story is actually Mass Effect 2, though, in a sense, Mass Effect 1 is actually an incredibly long character creation process for that game. Many, seemingly all, the choices you made in game 1 alter the world of game 2. It's odd. Each choice is encapsulated in a way that would not impact the larger story, but they are so liberally spread throughout the universe that player are constantly rewarded for contributing to the story.

However, this is not enough. Okay. It's not enough for what I wish to see. A game that I am very fond of is Dying Kingdoms. Some members refer to it as the "game that says 'yes.'" Like a good improvisation, the storytellers say "yes, and..." in response to player input. Certainly this has lead to no small amount of silliness, but it has also brought consistent and great drama into the game. 

I want to do that same thing inside a digital game. I want to let players choose who their enemies are and what motivates them. A player gathers three pieces of evidence: a wrench, a doll, and glowing jewel. When the sidekick asks who the villain is, the player can choose from the enemies they have discovered. "It was the Ragnorok beasts of Caer Dandor." No, the designers don't need it to make sense to them. They are not involved in this decision. "Yes", the sidekick says" of course, I should have known... but why?"

"Well" the player avatar replies, "we'll have to..."
A) Go there to find out
B) Seek out their accomplices here
C) Seek information from our allies at...

With modular and interchangeable assets and environments, it should be possible to make all of these choices interesting and visually consistent. Audio would present a problem. Likely the character would need to rely on some fake language and subtitles. More exciting, players who make similar choices could be sent to the same instances, each having uncovered the same conspiracy. 

By laying out encounters and assets intelligently, such a game could be designed and created to appeal to a massive audience. Players with divergent attitudes and styles would automatically segregate from each other as they progress since their plots would not overlap. There would be a challenge involved with creating so many assets (to allow players many choices), but that could be a large chunk of the monetization of the game. Players could purchase enemy and allied factions and even plots. If you like rescuing people, buy the rescue pack. If you like a good war story, pick up "The Great War". 

Developing such a game would be an enormous challenge, since it would require such a change to how we, developers, think about storyline and motivation. However, I think audiences would find the whole process quite natural. After all, this is the way we communicate every day. We let players enter into a real dialog with the game, and the game will always be agreeable.


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Stick to what you are best at. Correction. Find what you can be best in the world at, and do that. It's my first big takeaway from "Good to Great" by James C. Collins. Today, we are discussing two games that won accolades for doing nearly, if not exactly, that.

999 - or more exactly Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors. The game is honestly reason enough to by a Nintendo DS. The DS handles "Room Escape" puzzles as well as any mouse and keyboard, but it is also immensely portable. Cheaper than a good smart phone, the DS is just a really good venue for such a quirky point-and-click adventure. However, there are many such adventures already on the platform. 

Where 999 really sets itself apart is in the intricacy of the storytelling. Not only is the game internally a web of intrigue, but the mythos is shrouded in so much real world shenanigans that it becomes difficult to parse truth from fiction. If you've ever wanted to see the theories of Rupert Sheldrake mingle with the Titanic in a crazy death-game: 999 is totally for you. If you could not be bothered to click those links, you should probably seek more instant gratification.

Speaking of Borderlands, it isn't easy to make a Game of the Year quality game. I know. I understood the appeal immediately. Take Diablo and Halo and slam them together. It sounds like a winning combination right from the get go, but the real trial is finding what parts are really important. You need to know what RPG elements to stick with and what to keep from the first person violence. When I first picked up the game, I was immediately disappointed. I could not tell what was special about my class, the firefights did not have the AI I'd come to expect from Gearbox products. I was simply disappointed. 

Almost a year later, I picked it up again. I took some advice and did two things.
1) I gave it an hour.
2) I gave that hour a beer or two.
Now, I'd forgotten how much instant gratification benefits from alcohol. Shortly, I was teleporting around the battlefield with my shockingly bloodthirsty, psychic spelunker and having a grand old time. Sure there was a lot of down time, and the car is one of the worst cars I've ever driven in any game ever, but popping the heads off of ugly, foul-mouthed loot-piñatas was a blast.

There were problems. Big, glaring problems rounded their ugly heads all the time. Enemies were dumb as bricks sometimes, the car was awful, and 99% of the millions of guns were just terrible. (Though, admittedly, they all actually look just fine.) Worst of all, Gearbox seemed to have no idea of what in their game was actually un-fun. There is an entire hour long or more section of the game dedicated to the car which I'm certain that no sane person actually enjoyed. Inventory management becomes a chore, just like in the first Diablo, and most of the missions have no personality at all. In other words, the game is, quite possibly for most of its duration, tedious. 

However, The game comes together some times. Sledge's Safe House is one of the first time this happened. The game goes from pedestrian to unique and exquisite in a matter of footsteps. This area and places like the bandit base in Rust Commons West really explore what the game is best at, and, oddly, what Gearbox is best at. They force players to make rapid tactical decisions about how best to use their resources. One does this by making space a commodity, and the other does so by making open space incredibly dangerous. This makes the play RELY on the powers unique to their characters and therefore on the decisions they have made to improve their character throughout the game. Suddenly, all those old decisions become significant. 

The transformation is magical. I highly recommend you check it out. Give the game an hour and a beer, or glass of wine, or whiskey. You won't be disappointed. If he have a discerning eye, you might even learn something.
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I would love start this up with something grand, but that is not in the cards. What is in the cards is that I am still reeling from my first ever migraine. Now that I have an appreciation for what that means, I will have more respect for my friends who endure these regularly. Now, I'm sitting with my monitor on the lowest brightness and viewing it through sunglasses. This is, likely, the most goth thing I have ever done. Some, if not all, of that goth-ness is subverted by my fluffy green robe.

I only worked a half-day today at work. I thought I had overcome my migraine, but I found light nauseating. Slowly, that nausea grew to be crippling and I went home. It's painful to trust your body and be betrayed by it. This has, oddly, brought me to a discussion of game mechanics.

I work with some people that care deeply about perspective. Specifically, there is a constant battle between those who prefer their adventures from viewed from a third-person perspective and others who wish to see from the character's eyes.

I have good body sense: I am aware of where my body is without seeing it. This has been an aid in martial arts, in stunt work, and in theatre. This body sense has kept me alive. When I play a game, my avatar relies upon me for survival in circumstances routinely more dire than I shall ever experience. In a game, though, I cannot touch, smell, or, in many ways, hear. In life, I depend on those senses.

Perspective, in a game, decides how we compensate for the loss of those senses. In first person, we are given a view unobstructed by distractions. Only weapons occupy our vision. We become death focussed. Without cues to guides us about our immediate surroundings, we are drawn forward and the solutions to all our problems are found in the barrel of a gun.

In third person games, we are given a sliver of our surroundings as well as our avatar's animations as cues to our environment. We still suffer from the tunnel vision inherent in television, but we can sense more of our environment due to the pulled back camera. We lose detail in exchange for greater scope. Because of this heightened awareness, we are also expected to make more educated choices about how to deal with the environment. Murder, while still the most common solution, is definitely less common than when the player avatar is merely a gun.

I'm going to explore this topic at greater length later. Probably when I can trust my body again.

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