Author: Jason

People and Absolutes

Gaming

One of the things that makes blogging about game ideas difficult at times is the level to which other people will misconstrue what you mean.  Take, for example, my Monday post about procedurally generated content (PGC).  Almost every conversation that I had throughout the day with people on that subject jumped to the level of Love, which is a game that is using primarily PGC for its entire game.  For me, however, my intent was only for the rapid generation of content that would require a minimum of tweaking to sit alongside hand crafted content.  Have the PGC engine whip up a huge city of a hundred blocks, and then zip back in and touch up the buildings, even replacing some with entirely hand built ones.

One of the arguments was actually someone insisting that PGC will NEVER be used, and that games needed to be 100% hand crafted, all the time, forever and ever.

Whenever I see things like that, I’m reminded of a friend of mine, let’s call him Bill.  Bill loved EverQuest.  He played it five or six hours a day, minimum.  He spent most weekends, from Friday afternoon until 3 a.m. Monday morning playing.  When we dragged him out of the house, he talked about playing it.  He encouraged other people to try it.  And then one day, he decided he didn’t want to play anymore.  Not only that, but no one should play.  The game was destroying our lives and ruining our futures and every minute we put into the game was a minute wasted.  I’m pretty sure he broke and burned his original CDs.  Instead of EQ, Bill started up Kung-Fu, which was awesome.  He practiced every day, and all weekend.  When not Kung-Fu-ing he was talking about Kung-Fu and how everyone should be doing it.  Well, until he decided he didn’t like Kung-Fu anymore…

Another great example of people going to extremes: try entering into a discussion of MMO features and suggest that you’d like to see more benefit to grouping.  People will proceed immediately to claiming that “forced grouping” (an MMO Myth, by the way) is terrible and that eliminating solo play is bad, regardless of the fact that you might even be saying that solo is a perfectly viable way to play the game but you’d just like to see grouping have some advantage beyond “not playing alone”.

As with most things in life, moderation is usually best.  There is a time for everything, an appropriate amount of everything.  Game design is no different.  Every idea is worth considering, and not as an absolute, not as “the way”, but as a tool, a flavor, one thing among other things that can help you.  PGC has a place in gaming, and different companies will use it in different ways.  I’m just waiting for some game to come out, blow people away with their awesome design, and then for the devs to come out and explain how PGC had a large hand in it.

Of course, if that happens, the gentleman above who was insisting PGC had no place in gaming will probably start insisting that PGC needs to be used for every game, always, forever and ever.

Left 4 Shaun of the Dead

Gaming

Like Left 4 Dead?  Like Shaun of the Dead?  Want to play Left 4 Dead in the world of Shaun of the Dead?

Well, you might one day get the chance on the PC version of L4D thanks to the Left 4 Winchester project.  It almost makes me want to get a PC version of the game.

Are You Ready for the Cloud?

Random Thoughts

If you listen to the pundits of social media and other new frontiers, and especially if you listen to Google, the future is the Internet.  The future is Cloud Computing.  This isn’t a new idea, of course, but just the latest iteration on one branch of computer advancement.  In the beginning, computers were expensive, and big.  Because of that, there developed two schools of thought:

  1. Work on making computers cheaper and smaller so everyone could have them.
  2. Leave the real computer giant and expensive, but find a way for people to cheaply access them.

Out of the first branch, you got the home PC.  Out of the second branch, you got the mainframe and the terminal.  Lots of people like to think of mainframes as being a dead technology, because since everyone can have a PC on their desktop, who needs a giant computer that does everything?  Well, lots of companies still do.  Even with advanced in chip technologies, there are still some very large mainframes being sold, and people still connect to them with terminals, or at least terminal emulation on a PC or a thin client.  I worked for a number of years at Norfolk Southern, and putting PCs in a train yard out in the middle of nowhere was just begging for vandalization and theft… but, put a cheap thin client terminal that does nothing but connect to the network and the mainframe, theft goes way down.  Until I got into programming, I made a pretty good career out of working with 3270 and 5250 and all the things that went with it.

But Cloud Computing takes things a step beyond the old terminal/server paradigm.  It abstracts, and it makes the terminal more generic while connecting to many servers.  Think: web browsing.  If you are reading this, then your terminal (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc) is connecting to my server.  Later, you might connect to Facebook’s server, or CNN’s, or any number of other servers out there.  The one thing that Cloud Computing wants to retain though, is the idea that nothing is stored on the terminal.  Google is a strong proponent of this.  With Gmail, and Bookmarks, and Docs, and Calendar, and many of their other products, they want to take all your files and all your work off your PC and put it on the web, where you can get at it with any terminal.  In fact, Google is going so far as to throw their hat into the ring, not just with their Chrome browser they put into beta last year, but with a full blown Operating System intended to be the window you see the Internet through.  Some people, after seeing the announcement of the Google OS, jumped right into the “Game On Microsoft” mindset, like Google was planning on trying to take down the big cheese.  But John Gruber wrote an excellent write up of putting the Google OS into context.  The fact is, all Google wants is to make a netbook style PC that boots quickly, connects (wirelessly) to the Internet, and gets you all of your apps and documents in the Cloud.

Personally, I’m fully behind the idea.  I have a laptop that I hate using.  The reason is because its battery lasts about 2 hours, however, every time I turn it on that’s easily 5 minutes, and it takes around 2 minutes to get out of hibernation (longer if I put it to sleep with a few applications open).  Its bulky, its hot, and if I’m away from a power source, I really only end up getting about an hour or so out of the battery if I’m using it in short spurts.  That kind of performance is why devices like the iPhone and blackberries have become popular, much longer battery life to be able to jot down notes or check emails on the go.  The only reason I have not yet gone down the mobile device route is that when I write I still prefer a full keyboard (or at least a compact keyboard like the ones you find on a notebook or netbook).  So a netbook that boots faster, runs cooler and utilizes the battery well is exactly what I am looking for.

But, as the title questions, am I ready to ditch my desktop for a workspace in the clouds?  I stopped saving bookmarks to my browser years ago, mostly because it was annoying to have a bookmark in IE but not Firefox, or at home but not at work, and most programs to sync them up were annoying to use.  I still use Outlook for email, but I’m just about ready to plunge into Gmail, especially since my webhost offers a deal where I can have all my domain email addresses be handled by Gmail.  Plus, it finally came out of Beta recently. (snicker)  I do use Google Docs for a few things, but I’m not totally sold on putting all my files out there, especially the ones I want to be sure that no one sees (get your mind out of the gutter, I mean design docs and other things I’m writing).  Recently, I’ve stopped playing most PC games in favor of web based titles, and with the exception of Free Realms and Battlefield Heroes, they’ll all run in any compliant browser.  Even so, I think I’d be perfectly happy having a desktop sit in the corner just for games while having a netbook for all my other tasks.

I might not be ready to sail among the clouds just yet, but I think I’ll get there soon enough… how about you?

A World as big as the World

Gaming

One of the things I’ve always dreamed of in an MMO was playing in a truly enormous world.  For example, if I were to play (or make) an MMO for a zombie apocalypse setting, I would want the world to be so large that even if I had millions of players, it could be as sparsely populated as you might expect a horror themed zombie game to be.  Of course, players could choose to cluster, for safety and companionship, but the possibility to walk for miles and miles and find no one else needs to exist.

The problem is that taking the time to build that world would be too much.  And that is why this has me very excited.

The CityEngine by the people over at Procedural just floors me.  Lots of people will tell you that hand crafted games will always be better than a procedurally generated one, and in one aspect they are right.  If your goal as a game maker is to tell a story, a narrative, like a Halo game, or Dead Rising, or any other traditional PC or console game, then yes, hand crafted content is the way to go.  Your story demands it.  But in an MMO or other Virtual World type game, where the players and their interactions are the real story, and your setting and lore are just a sandbox for them to play in, procedurally generated content done well is, in my opinion, the far better choice.

Thanks to Critical Distance for the link.

Movie Round-Up: July 10th, 2009

Reviews

Bruno:

Did you like Borat?  If so, you’ll probably like Bruno.  Personally, I can’t stand Sacha Baron Cohen.  To me, he’s one of those people who has really funny ideas, but then his execution of them is too long, to the point of become uncomfortable and losing its appeal.  Perhaps that is his intent.  In an event, I won’t be going to see it.  I can only hope that this movie doesn’t produce as many quotes as Borat.

I Love You, Beth Cooper:

Beth Cooper is the head cheerleader.  Denis Cooverman is the invisible nerd who has alphabetically sat behind her in many classes for many years.  And he decides that since he spent all his life not talking to Beth Cooper, that his valedictorian speech at graduation is his last chance to do it.  He also uses the speech as a platform to air a number of other unsaid grievances from his high school days, and the rest of the movie follows the consequences.  Beth and her two best friends show up at Denis’s party (which is just Denis and his best friend Rich), Beth’s military school high strung boy friend shows up, and Beth and Denis and their friends run off together.  Really, there are no surprises here.  Denis is the sort of guy for whom high school sucked and the end of it is the beginning of his life, and Beth is the sort of girl for whom high school rocked and the end of it is leaving her with nothing.  Throughout the night, Beth becomes real for Denis and he has to ease up on the dream image he has built up over the years, and Beth comes to see herself through his eyes and that maybe life after high school won’t be so bad anyway.  The movie is full of crazy happenings and funny moments, and I enjoyed myself all the way through.  Perhaps I Love You, Beth Cooper isn’t worth a full price ticket, but its definitely worth a matinee.

A Difference In Gaming

Gaming

Occasionally, the group of us who played on the E’ci server in EverQuest will get to waxing rhapsodic about the “good old days” and how EQ was somehow “better” than more current games.  Usually discussions like these can be dismissed as a “first love” problem, where the game that got you in to MMOs it always remembered better than it was and nothing later can give you that same rush.  But, we’ve had these discussions often enough that most of the first love elements have begun to drift away and we’ve gotten more into specifics of design and approaches to game elements that were “better” back in EQ than the direction that later games went with it.

I’ve often tried to put my finger on exactly what the difference is between EverQuest and World of Warcraft, but I always seem to fall short.  This most recent time around though, I think I have hit upon a comparison that really does encapsulate the differences between the two games and makes clear which game a person might prefer based on their tastes.  So here goes…

EverQuest was like going camping or going on a road trip, while World of Warcraft was like a theme park.

In EQ, you were dropped in the world, there wasn’t much lore or story before that and you wandered around chatting with NPCs and fighting monsters.  There were quests, but often they required some reading and figuring out, and they’d take days, weeks or even months to complete.  You sort of did whatever you wanted.  At first, there was nothing in the way of tiers, that came later, and in the very beginning there wasn’t even any level gating.  When the Plane of Fear first opened there was no level 46 restriction.  I saw my first dragon raid when I was level 30, though I died quick and wasn’t itching to get back until I had more levels under my belt.  And there were people… like when camping there are other sites or on a road trip when you stop at diners and other places… and if you kept going back to the same places, you’d run into the same people, and if you all wanted to do the same stuff at the same time, you had to share.

WoW, on the other hand popped you into the world staring at an NPC with a giant punctuation mark floating over its head.  From that first moment you are following the designated paths, doing the designated tasks, and if you leave the path, you’d often find there is nothing there.  (Not always, sometimes you find some little treasure trove of mini quests or a random NPC in a hut put there on a lark by some developer.)  You have to be this high to ride this ride, and everyone gets a turn.

For me, every time I have ever gone camping or gone on a road trip, they made memories that stuck.  If this were that sort of post, I’d regale you with the story of going camping with the Cub Scouts and a few of us wandered off and found houses, and there was this girl undressing in the upstairs window… There is a lot more to that story than just some boys almost seeing their first real live boob, and maybe I’ll tell it some day, but the point is that I remember it.  And I remember EQ, because all the choices were mine and I went anywhere I wanted, and even when the game did point me in a particular direction it still felt like it was my choice.  When I go to Six Flags or some other theme park, I might remember the people I went with, or a general feeling of how I felt on certain rides, but lots of the details are gone.  WoW feels like this.  I remember the first time I entered the Plane of Knowledge in EQ (and that is years after the game launched) and what I did and who I was with as we explored, but the details of the day I entered the Burning Crusade or started my Blood Elf?  Gone.  Mostly from WoW I remember going from punctuation to punctuation, walking into towns and seeing a sea of punctuation which meant I would be busy, but very few of those punctuations stick out.  But from EQ, I recall details of days sitting in the Plane of Storms or The Overthere, pulling and grinding mobs, and chatting with people, and leading a group into Kaesora or the City of Mist or Kedge Keep, running from Qeynos to Freeport.  I know I led groups into the Scarlet Monastery, but for the life of me I can’t pluck out any details of what we did there beyond “we completed some quests”.  I went to the Deadmines and plenty of other places, but I don’t recall much of what we did.

Of course, not everyone is like me.  There are those who love and remember theme parks the way that I remember camping and road trips.  People for whom EQ was a neverending grindfest of wall sitting that blurs together, while WoW was a carnival of instances with their favorite group of friends and they can tell you stories about every one.  But it boils down, I think, to the difference between camping and theme parks.  When you go camping you have to make your own fun, but when you go to a theme park someone has designed the fun for you.  EQ more easily let you do what you wanted (even if it was boring and sucked), while WoW had its fun laid out for you, and its up to each player to know what sort of experience they are looking for.

I wish more games were like camping.

You’ve got red on you.

Random Thoughts

News comes trickling out of Valve about Left4Dead 2.  First up is the addition of a cricket bat for full on Shaun of the Dead style zed killin’.

Cricket bat goes 'bonk!'
Cricket bat goes 'bonk!'

Also, it seems that Valve is looking in to linking the two games, Left 4 Dead and its sequel, through multi-player maps/campaigns.  I sure hope all this works in the 360 versions, because I’d love to essentially have the choice of eight characters when messing around with my friends instead of just four.

Stop! Socialize!

Gaming

Back when I played EverQuest, I often described the game as a chat server with a D&D style game tacked on to it.  This felt right because most of the game could be played without paying specific attention to the graphics.  Most of the action happened in your chat window.  People talked, the NPC text scrolled by, even damage output was all in this little window (until they allowed you to customize the UI, at which point I shoved all the damage output into a tiny window that I barely paid any attention to so I could focus more on the chatting).  With World of Warcraft they put more of combat into the hotkey bar, made you care about refresh timers and started dragging your attention away from the chat window.  They even eliminated the wall-sitting exp grind and forced you to keep moving around, so you had to actually watch the screen instead of just waiting for the puller to get back with a mob to fight.  In Free Realms, the mini game design requires so much attention that I find myself playing for an hour and realizing that I haven’t been reading the chat window.  I complain about not being able to find my friends in Free Realms, but to be perfectly honest, they might have come on and sent me tells, but I missed it because I was too busy chasing NPCs or looking for quests, or in mini games where I’m too busy playing a game to be watching chat.

The progression of MMOs that I am seeing is to get people more involved with the game, but less involved with the people.  In order to socialize in Free Realms, I have to actually stop playing and stand around.  In EQ, progression and socialization could happen (did happen) simultaneously.  And we won’t even go into the fact that I have not once grouped with anyone in Free Realms, even when I’ve wanted to and tried, it just doesn’t seem to be something people care about… or maybe they simply aren’t seeing my area chat asking for a group because no one is reading.

One of the best things about the Xbox 360 is the built in voice chat that works by default in all games.  If you play multi-player, you can chat with the other players.  It would be nice if MMOs could integrate voice chat more fully since they are taking our eyes away from the chat box and using our keyboard more for play than talking.  Ideally, a game would have some sort of spacial chat, similar to the way “say” worked in EQ (and other MMOs), so people within a certain distance would hear you.  That way when you were hanging out with your group in a dungeon, your group hears you, and when you walk in to town you hear players within an X foot radius, approaching people you want to hear, moving away from people you don’t.

I’d love to see it happen, because the current trend of having to choose between playing and socializing is killing my interest in their games.

The Postman

Random Thoughts

This weekend I got my first job to level 20 in Free Realms.  Postman.  To be honest, I would not have thought this would be the first, but grinding postal jobs is relatively easy.  Unlike cooking, it requires no supplies, and unlike pretty much all the other free jobs, you can just sit at the mailbox and play the mail sorting games over and over.  Throw on top of that a star bonus, and I went from 14 to 20 very quickly.

The reason I chose to focus on Postman was because I wanted to create a guild, and you have to be level 15 in some job to do that, and Postman was at 14.  My next closest was Brawler at 10 and Chef at 9.  Adventurer was also at 9, but that job is the longest/hardest to level since you have to actually run around discovering stuff.

So, anyway, with my Postman job at 20, I created my guild. <and what army>  Initially I was going to go for an alternate spelling, like calling it the “anwatt army” or “ahnwot army”, but in the end I decided just to go traditional, so now in game I appear as “Jhaer Buegren <and what army>”.  If you haven’t gotten it yet, its a play on the idea of when you say you can beat someone and they retort, “Oh yeah? You and what army?”

Of course, I am the only member of my guild, because my friends list is STILL empty.  I just can’t seem to get online on the same server at the same time as the people I know who play.  Perhaps in the future this will change.  If you are playing Free Realms and want to join, let me know and I’ll look for you.

In the meantime, I’m still grinding out quests trying to see if I can exhaust the free content.  Sanctuary is getting pretty bare, and I’ve put a large dent in that area with the hedge maze that I can never remember the name of… the real trick is making note of the repeatable quests.  No offense to the game (or any game for that matter), but repeatable quests are rarely designed to be truly repeatable.  Sure, you can do them over and over, but the quest text often doesn’t lend itself to explaining WHY I can repeat it.  If you have lost something and I have found it, seeing that you’ve lost it again and I can find it again is particularly lame.

The freeloading continues…

Get to da Choppa!

Gaming

I know I promised zombies, but I lied… you get this instead…

I signed up for and am participating in an online game design class.  On our first day of “class” (which I actually read a couple days later), part of the reading was an example to show you that making a game is not a Herculean effort.  Simple games are exactly that: simple.  What follows is the game I designed in less than 15 minutes.

Get to da Choppa!

Welcome to the jungle!  You are in the thick of it, and something is after you.  But if you can be the first to the helicopter, you can survive.

Supplies:
26 Game Tiles – 1 “Start” tile, 1 “Choppa!” tile, 14 blank “Jungle” tiles, 2 “Tunnel Entrance” tiles, 4 “Lose a Turn” tiles (tangled in vines, stuck in mud, broke through bridge, and lost my way), 2 “Advance 1 Space” tiles, and 2 “Retreat 1 Space” tiles.
12 Opportunity Cards – 3 “Cover Fire” card (Advance another player 2 spaces), 3 “Decoy” cards (Advance yourself 3 spaces), 3 “Rest Up” cards (Do nothing this turn, next turn move 5 spaces instead of rolling), and 3 “Frag” cards (Cause another player to lose a turn).
1 Six-sided die.
12 player pieces (green plastic army men if you have them).

Game designed for 2 to 12 players.

The Rules:
The 26 tiles are placed in a pile, face up, on the table.  The 12 Opportunity cards are placed, face down, on the table.  Each player chooses a playing piece and roles the die to determine play order.  Highest first, roll again to break ties.  The “Start” tile is placed on the table and all playing piece are placed on it.  Starting with the highest rolling player, each person in turn will take a game tile from the tile pile and place it on the table so that it connects to the previous tile.  The game path can turn left and right, however when a tile is placed it must only connect to one other tile.  When tile placing is complete, and the last player placed the “Choppa!” tile, you should have a board that takes 25 forward movements to complete.

Beginning with the next player in the rotation, each player draws an Opportunity card from the face down pile.  Do not show your card to other players until you play it.

After each player has drawn a card, the game moves into the Movement rounds.  If the player is on the “Start” tile, they must roll the die.  A roll of 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 allows the player to move their playing piece forward that many spaces.  If they land on a tile with an action on it, they must adhere to it (Advancing 1 space, retreating 1 space, losing their next turn, or moving to the other end of the tunnel).  Tile actions “stack” in that if you land on an “Advance 1 Space” tile and doing so lands you on a “Lose a Turn” tile, you lose your next turn.  If a player rolls a 6, the player believes they have been spotted and hides, not moving that turn.

After the player has moved off the “Start” tile, on their turn they may choose to use their Opportunity card instead of rolling the die.  Any player moved by an Opportunity card onto a tile with an action must adhere to that action.

The game ends when a player “Gets to da Choppa!” and leaves the rest of the players in the jungle.

—–

My first prototype of the game was as basic as possible.  Sticky notes for the game tiles, more sticky notes (folded in half to hide the sticky part) for the cards, a die and some army men.  If I am inspired, I may make a “better” prototype and post some pictures.

If, my dear reader(s), you are so inclined, feel free to make your own copy of this game and try it out.  I’d love feedback on how it plays.  I feel it might need more special tiles, or some other game element to spice it up.  If you do play it, please come back and let me know how it went…