Game Design: Theory & Practice- P12 ppsx

In Myth, every bit of technology is used to its greatest gameplay effect, as is typical of projects run by designer/programmers such as Jones. This hybrid devel - oper understands what the technology can do perfectly while also understanding what would be compelling in terms of gameplay, making for very economical game development. Thus, when the technology does something that can enhance the gameplay, the designer/programmer instantly notices it and is able to exploit it to its maximum effect. This differs greatly from so many projects where programmers implement complicated functionality that is never used because the designers never fully understand it. Of course, adapting gameplay from 2D to 3D is not without its drawbacks. For instance, despite being able to zoom in and out in Myth, one is never able to zoom out from the action quite as much as one would like. This is in part because of the precedent set by other RTS games, which, because of their 2D engines, can have a much more distant viewpoint, a viewpoint that lends itself to tracking and moving large numbers of units. A patch was released for Myth shortly after its publication which allowed players to zoom the camera out farther, but with the side effect of decreasing their frame rate, since more landscape and hence more polygons are now in view. Of course, the engine could probably support viewing the landscape from still farther away, but the amount of polygons on the screen would quickly become prohibitive, decreasing the game’s overall speed unacceptably. Thus, the limitations of a 3D engine come to limit the gameplay choices the designer can make. Another gameplay drawback that results from the technology is the often confusing camera. Though the camera is able to rotate to view whatever side of the action is desired, this camera rotation can often become jarring and disorienting, causing the player to lose track of where different locations and units are on the map. For a novice, a casual gamer, or anyone without a good sense of direction, the camera’s movement would probably be altogether unmanageable. Game Focus Myth is also a good example of a well-focused game design. As mentioned previ - ously, Myth came out several years after the success of two other RTS titles, Command & Conquer and WarCraft. In both of those games, the player builds structures which exploit the terrain’s natural resources in order to create additional units. The player is then able to direct these units against his opponent in a combi - nation of ways. Thus, those trend-setting RTS games are a mixture of gameplay— part resource management and building, part combat. Many of the subsequent RTS titles, both the successes and the failures, copied this general model, dividing the player’s efforts between unit creation, resource exploitation, and strategic unit deployment. 308 Chapter 16: Game Analysis: Myth: The Fallen Lords TEAMFLY Team-Fly ® But Myth does not feature any resources to be mined or structures to be built. Instead the player is focused entirely on the tactical side of the game, on the combat experience. The player starts out on a level with a given quantity of units, and for most of the levels in the game those are the only units she gets for that entire level. In some levels, additional units are acquired later in the level, but those levels are the exceptions rather than the norm. Myth does away with everything except for the combat elements of RTS games, which gives its gameplay a unique focus. This tactical emphasis has several ramifications on the overall game design. First, by not needing to worry about developing a resource exploitation system, Jones was able to focus on making the combat model as good as it could be. This resulted in more sophisticated and detailed combat than was found in any other RTS game at the time. In Myth, unit facing, formation, and placement matter more than they had in other strategy titles. Because the developers did not have to worry about how the player would use resources, more time could be spent on the physics system and other technologies that would enhance the combat experience. For example, this attention to detail meant that archers needed to worry about finding a clear shot through the trees, how the weather would effect the trajectory of their arrows, and how their vertical placement on the landscape would impact the dis - tance they could shoot. The lack of ability for the player to build additional units also affects the care he will take in using the units with which he starts a level. In WarCraft one can make a very substantial blunder early on in a level and still be able to win by wise resource usage and unit creation. In Myth, such an error is often fatal, with the lev - els becoming less and less forgiving as the game progresses. The player’s only Chapter 16: Game Analysis: Myth: The Fallen Lords 309 Myth’s gameplay is entirely focused on tactical combat, leaving out the resource management found in many other RTS games. recourse when his plan of attack fails is to reload the level. This makes for a very different kind of gameplay than is found in WarCraft. In Myth, the player must think through his actions fully instead of just trying whatever first pops into his head. The units the player has are much more precious and, as a result, the player starts caring for their welfare. Since more can be made easily, the units in WarCraft may seem like just so much cannon fodder. Conversely, in Myth a particular unit may be crucial to finishing a level, and there is no way to bring him back once he is killed. Storytelling Despite its exemplary game design, a large component of Myth is its storytelling, which is conducted using a number of well-integrated devices. First are the cut-scenes which appear sporadically throughout the game, outlining major plot points and setting up certain levels. These are often used more as “teasers” than to really advance the story significantly. Second are the mission briefings which pre- cede each level. These contain a large amount of detail about the progression of the war between the Light and the Dark (the game’s two opposing forces). They also give meaning to the level the player is about to play, making the mission objective more than just some arbitrary task picked by the level designer. Third, and most interesting, are the in-game storytelling devices that are used. Of course, the levels are set in locations that match the needs of the story line, whether it be a frostbitten, barren mountain area or a smoldering lava pit. The bat- tles and missions contained in the level match up with the story as explained by the mission briefings. But the player can also see and hear exchanges within the game between different characters. For instance, a townsperson may advise the player of the location of a traitor. Your troops may provide advice such as, “We’d better get back to the bridge!” Though the player never loses control of his units, the game is able to trigger these bits of dialog at different key points in the levels. In one mis - sion, as the player’s troops approach an insurmountable mass of Myrmidons, the Avatara the player has been guarding steps forward and proclaims, “Let me handle this.” He begins a conversation with the Fetch leading the opposing forces and the story line unfolds right there in the game-world during game-time. In contrast to the majority of games which use storytelling as little more than an add-on to an already existing group of levels, Myth makes the story line, levels, and gameplay dependent on each other, strengthening each as a result. Players enjoy games because they enjoy the gameplay, not because the games are accompanied by long, non-interactive cut-scenes. Yet players do enjoy having stories in their games, since they can give the gameplay meaning. The best way to communicate a deep story is by making it integral to the gameplay and by revealing a little bit of it here and a little bit of it there during actual game-time, something Myth does 310 Chapter 16: Game Analysis: Myth: The Fallen Lords expertly. Of course, the fact that Myth’s story line is top-notch, the script is well written, and the voice acting is professional certainly helps. Telling a story line through gameplay will not do a game a bit of good if the plot is hackneyed, the dia- log is contrived, or the voice acting is amateurish. Hard-Core Gaming Myth is a game design by hard-core gamers for hard-core gamers and makes no apologies about it. Far from trying to capture the “mainstream” or “casual” gamer market that so many companies have tried to court, Myth is a game that would quickly frighten away anyone who is not already familiar with other RTS games and who does not have the quick-clicking skills required by Myth. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, and it is pleasing to see a game which has the artistic conviction to know its audience and to stick to it. Indeed, since the game’s develop - ers are among the ranks of the hard-core gamers, it only makes sense that they will best know how to make a game that this audience will like. Often, when a group of hard-core gamers try to make a game that the mythical casual gamer will enjoy, they end up making a game they themselves do not like very much, and that the casual gamer does not care much about either. It is very hard for an artist to make art that appeals to sensibilities which are at odds with her own, the end result often being works that are without appeal to any group or demographic. But Myth did not have this problem; its developers created a game which no casual gamer would ever be able to pick up. One reason for this is the incredibly sophisticated and challenging set of controls. For instance, consider the control of Chapter 16: Game Analysis: Myth: The Fallen Lords 311 Myth tells a compelling story through a combination of mission briefings, level design, and gameplay. the 3D rotating camera. As opposed to other RTS games at the time, where the camera could only move horizontally along with the terrain, Myth’s camera can move horizontally, zoom in or zoom out, rotate around a point, or orbit around a point. Even experienced game players find it somewhat challenging to get used to this system. However, once one masters the camera’s movements, one finds that they are expertly designed and provide all of the freedom one could reasonably expect given the technology the game uses. The game is also littered with special keys for different actions, such as formations, special actions, and alternate attacks. Again, these commands, once mastered, provide the player with a large degree of control over how her units move and attack, but do take some time to learn. Indeed, these keys make the game impossible to play with only the mouse, something almost all other RTS games focus on. The “gesture-clicking” is another interesting feature, used for pointing units in a certain direction when they reach a given loca - tion. The system for gesture-clicking is quite powerful yet nearly impossible to learn without being taught in person or by practicing a great deal. Nonetheless, for the hard-core players who are willing to put in the time to learn the controls, the end result is an extremely enjoyable game-playing experience. Myth is also an inherently hard game. Even for players experienced at RTS titles, the game will prove to be extraordinarily difficult from the get-go. Custom- arily, games include a few simple levels toward the beginning of the game, in order to give the player a fighting chance while they are still learning the controls. Myth does not. Immediately, players are presented with barely accomplishable goals, where one mistake may make the level virtually unwinnable. The loss of a particu- lar unit will often cause the seasoned player to conclude that the level is now too hard to beat, so why bother? They will just restart the level instead. The sad thing is that, despite their great difficulty, the levels toward the beginning of the game are the easy levels, with the levels becoming exponentially harder from there. How - ever, this is the sort of challenge that truly hard-core game players thrive on. It is not that the challenges are unfair, arbitrary, or unpredictable, at least not always. In most cases, players can beat the levels on their first time through; it is just extraor - dinarily difficult to do so. Myth is the kind of game that many publishers would demand be simplified so that non-hard-core gamers would not be frightened off by its complex controls or sadistic level of difficulty. But if the game were simplified significantly, would it still be as compelling as it is now? Probably not. For whatever small number of casual gamers might be gained, large numbers of hard-core gamers would be lost. 312 Chapter 16: Game Analysis: Myth: The Fallen Lords Multi-Player As with the Marathon games before it, Bungie created Myth to excel both as a single-player game and as a multi-player experience. What is most notable about this is that Bungie manages to do both so well. Many games are criticized for emphasizing one over the other. Quake and Quake II, for instance, were both praised for their solid network play while being lambasted for their lackluster sin - gle-player games. Many other games seem to add multi-player support as an afterthought, hoping to get another bullet point on the back of the box. Centipede 3D is a good example of this, where multi-player was added late in the project as a marketing consideration, and almost no design time was spent making it any fun. Bungie’s well-publicized strategy for making a game that excels in both the sin - gle- and multi-player arenas is worth noting. After they have established the core engine technology for their game, getting the networking functional is the next step. Once it works, the entire team starts playing network games, and keeps playing them until they are fun. At this point no work has begun on the single-player game, and the team is entirely focused on enhancing the network play experience. Only after the networking game’s core design is completed does the team start work on the single-player game. However, this is not to say that the single-player game is rushed. This merely means that the entire team knows what “works” and makes the game fun before any solo levels are even created, resulting in less reworking on those levels and leading to more entertaining levels in the final product. It is because the team has spent so much time playing the multi-player game that the net games have the depth to hold up over time. If the team were creating a shallow experience they would quickly grow tired of it. Myth’s multi-player allows players many different game types with a variety of goals, all of which require dif - ferent playing styles. The interesting pre-game unit trading system allows players to think up their own “killer” team, much like a player of Magic: The Gathering spends time developing the perfect deck of cards. Team play, where multiple people control one set of allied units and go up against another team, opens up many possi - bilities for strategies too complex for a single person to pull off. It is because of the time Bungie’s development team spent playing the multi-player game that it has the impressive staying power it does. Chapter 16: Game Analysis: Myth: The Fallen Lords 313 Overall Myth is also littered with little design touches that add a certain luster to the solid foundation of the core design. Whereas missions in other RTS games exist as sepa- rate, self-contained play-spaces, in Myth the missions become a part of the whole due to the use of “veteran” units. These units, if they survive a given battle, will be available for the player to use on the next level, and their skills will be noticeably stronger than the greenhorn units. This makes the player treat those units with spe - cial care, expending the greenhorns on more dangerous exploration. Another nice touch is the ability of the units to leave footprints in the terrain, which adds an inter - esting element to tracking down enemies on snow-covered levels. The variety of missions available provides a much more diverse set of goals than many other RTS games, causing the player to modify his gameplay style drastically from level to level. Of course, Myth is not without its problems, even if one can accept the chal - lenging controls and staggeringly difficult levels. Clicking around the overhead map sometimes causes the camera to rotate in ways the player does not expect, pos - sibly throwing off his orientation in the world. The overhead map is actually translucent and drawn over the play-field, which can sometimes cause players to click in it by accident. The desire to see more of the play-field at once is a valid one, even if it is a limitation of the technology. Nevertheless, these are truly minor flaws in an overwhelmingly impressive design. Myth represents how a great game can grow out of the marriage of technology and gameplay. This is not a shotgun 314 Chapter 16: Game Analysis: Myth: The Fallen Lords Myth’s developers paid a lot of attention to detail, which helped to create a deep gameplay experience. wedding, however, but instead one where the bride and groom have carefully thought out how they can happily live together, enhancing each other’s strengths, thus creating something new and exciting in the process. Chapter 16: Game Analysis: Myth: The Fallen Lords 315 Chapter 17 The Design Document “It wasn’t until Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, that Ultimas really started hav - ing compelling, purposeful stories, and it was the first game in the series to have a social commentary subtext. Not only did I want to build worlds that were large, epic, and meaningful, I also wanted to add a subtext to each game which might not necessarily be obvious in the actions your characters took in the game, but one which ultimately would give the game a more last - ing meaning. So in Ultima IV you had to prove yourself to be a good person, one who could be an example to the people of Britannia. The game acted like a ’Big Brother,’ requiring gamers to behave in a ’heroic’ fashion in order to win the game. I thought that design was pretty cool, since gamers were accustomed to pretending to be the hero yet they would beat up all the townsfolk in order to become powerful enough to beat up the character who was supposed to be the big bad guy, even though he generally didn’t do anything bad in the game.” — Richard Garriott 316 F or some years, while I was still an aspiring professional designer, I wanted someone to tell me what the official format for a design document was. I knew that Hollywood screenplays had a very precise format, and I figured there must be something comparably rigorous for design documents. What sort of information is it supposed to include? How should it be laid out? What format should it use? Only recently, after numerous years as a professional, did I figure out the big secret, and it is one that I am happy to pass on to you in this book. Yes, here my years of experience in the gaming industry will impart on you the precious information. There is no format! Everyone who writes a game design document just makes up their own format! Have you ever heard of anything so incredible? Whenever I have asked people what format I should be using for a particular document, they invariably answer “well, you know, the standard format.” No one really knows what this mythical “standard” format is, yet all refer to it. In the end, as long as it communicates the nature of the game effectively and in sufficient detail, whatever you hand over to the people who will review your document will be regarded as the “standard” format. There is definitely a certain type and quantity of information that belongs in a design document and which must be included for it to be useful, but there is no standardized form you must use in documenting that data. Certainly within some companies, especially large ones, there may be an agreed-upon format that all of the in-house designers must use for their documents. Your design document will end up standing out if it diverges too much from other design documents in the industry. It makes sense for you to get your hands on every official design document you can, just as you might seek out practice exams before taking major standardized tests. Optimally, you will be able to obtain some docu - ments that were used for games that were actually published. Or, at least, you will want to review documents written by designers who have completed and shipped games. This is hard to do, since gaming companies are fanatical about protecting their intellectual property and do not want to reveal how chaotic their internal development may be, but see what you can find. The Atomic Sam design document included at the end of this book is a good one with which to start. A design document is all about communicating a vision for a game, for map - ping out as much information as possible about how that game will function, what the player will experience, and how the player will interact with the game-world. Organizing and structuring all of this information into appropriate sections is one of the key challenges in writing a good design document. Again, many companies may prefer their documents in a format different from what I describe here, and you should certainly organize your data in the form desired by the people for whom you are writing. If the development team is familiar with navigating design documents written in a specific format, you should mold your data to fit that format. Chapter 17: The Design Document 317 [...]... over the entire document Game Mechanics The Game Mechanics section is the most important part of your document It could also be called the “gameplay” section, since it describes what the player is allowed to do in the game and how the game is played By describing what sort of actions the player can perform, the Game Mechanics section defines the game itself As a result the Game Mechanics section is... player’s choices and the game mechanics Pictured here: SimCity 2000 design document for a strategy game like Civilization or a software toy like SimCity could describe all of the relevant gameplay in the Game Mechanics, AI, and Game Elements sections Since the levels in these games are randomly generated anyway, there is not much use in having a Game Progression section However, if the game in question is... not every game has levels, and so your Game Progression may not break down so easily into self-contained units But most games have stages of some kind Try to determine what the stages of your game are, and break down your 336 Chapter 17: The Design Document Game Progression into these stages For example, the original arcade game Centipede has a series of waves the player plays through In that game, once... to write a Game Progression for Centipede (which would not need to be very long at all), one would want to break it down by waves, clearly delineating how the game changes from wave to wave Some games may not need a Game Progression section at all For instance, a Free-form strategy games such as the SimCity series will not require a Game Progression section, since what happens during the game is entirely... of your gameplay, using the key parts as outlined in your focus What features of the gameplay are most central to the game and will be most instrumental in making gamers want to play your work for hours and hours? Of course, you should not focus on features that all games have (“Project X includes the ability to save the player’s game at any time!”) but rather on features that will make your game stand... II The core game remains the same, and it is the core game you are documenting in the Game Mechanics section It makes sense to introduce the player’s different capabilities in the same order someone playing the game for the first time would experience them For instance, start out simple What are the most basic moves the player can do? Say you are working on a game where a player controls a game- world... weapons found in the game- world until later in the document The specific weapons represent instances of the functionality you describe in the Game Mechanics section You can think of it in the following fashion: many different games could be made from what you lay out in the Game Mechanics section For instance, the design documents for the Thief games follow a nearly identical Game Mechanics description... hours Of course, not every game has levels, but 332 Chapter 17: The Design Document nearly every game has game elements Whether these elements are the various types of foes the player fights in Robotron 2084, the different sorts of special buildings that can be created in SimCity, or the different blocks in Tetris, the game elements need to be listed and detailed in the Game Elements section Now that... good many pages focusing on the more general game mechanics and artificial intelligence capabilities of your game, it is time to move on to specific content Remember that you kept the Game Mechanics and AI sections general enough that one could make many different games using them These sections may even remain relatively unchanged for a sequel, should your game have one But the enemies, NPCs, objects,... The programming team will want to read the Game Elements section in combination with the Game Mechanics and AI sections to get a full understanding of what the game will be expected to do (Of course, ideally, if the 334 Chapter 17: The Design Document Game Mechanics and AI sections are thoroughly written, the programming team should not have to look at the Game Elements sections at all.) Keep both the . group of hard-core gamers try to make a game that the mythical casual gamer will enjoy, they end up making a game they themselves do not like very much, and that the casual gamer does not care. allowed to do in the game and how the game is played. By describing what sort of actions the player can perform, the Game Mechanics section defines the game itself. As a result the Game Mechanics section. the story line, levels, and gameplay dependent on each other, strengthening each as a result. Players enjoy games because they enjoy the gameplay, not because the games are accompanied by long,