Category: Gaming

I’m a gamer. I game.

That Which You Must Do

Gaming

Time is running out. This describes both my entry for the February Blogs of the Round Table, and also the subject of my entry.

Turning Over a New Leaf: (We’re trying something new with the topic this month, so please read carefully.) February’s BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month’s Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the original game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.

So, despite two people already choosing this one, I’m taking Living Epic’s entry on Oedipus.  Only, I’m just stripping a couple ideas out of it and mixing it with a few thoughts stolen from other games and hopefully producing a design that is unique.

What I’m stripping out of his design is in two parts.  First is the idea of a fixed timeline.  Now, this isn’t new to games.  Anyone who has played Dead Rising has dealt with this: the helicopter arrives in three days, exactly, and if you aren’t there you get left behind.  But what makes this different in the second idea: that you are not the main character of the main story.  Imagine if Dead Rising wasn’t about Frank getting on the helicopter in three days, but that someone else had to be on the helicopter, and Frank didn’t matter.  In Roger’s Oedipus, you don’t play Oedipus, or even one of the other named characters in the play.  He has a fixed timeline where some version of the story will happen even if you do nothing, but you can affect the outcome by participating.

My game based around these two elements is set in a medieval world.  At the beginning, you choose a character, of which several will be available, ranging from the village drunk to a member of the city watch, from a peasant farmer to a wealthy noble.  Each character has a brief story in which they are introduced to the other people in their immediate lives, shown how little they matter to the world around them, and informed of the upcoming coronation of the new king.  The old king died, and his son, just eighteen, is set to take the throne in three days.  Just as the player finishes the introduction of their character, a haggard old wizard appears before them.  “There isn’t time,” he says, “but time is all we have.”  He reaches for the player and upon his touch a burst of energy flows from the wizard into the player.  The wizard’s voice fills the player’s mind, “There exists a fragile balance, and there are things that must be done.  The boy must become king.”  The wizard dies and the player is given access to The Timeline.

What the player learns is that they have gained the ability to affect time in two ways.  Firstly, they can open the whole timeline and send themselves back to any decision point within the game, even all the way back to where the wizard lays at their feet.  Second, in a Braid-like fashion, they can reverse time backwards at any time, up to a few minutes.  Like it is used in Braid, the purpose of the second ability is to let a player quickly be able to undo immediate actions.  Did you punch a guard when you should have hidden from him?  The purpose of the first is to be able to jump all the way back to any major decision point (quest objective) and proceed from there, wiping out everything you’ve done since then.

There are stories going on around the player, events that if the player doesn’t interfere will happen on a schedule.  If a player chooses, they can ignore the entire rest of the game, follow the boy who is to become king around, protect him from any plots against him, and win the game in the most boring way possible.  Or… the player can explore the whole city, undertaking tasks and quests and unfolding smaller stories.  Periodically, the wizard’s voice will tell the player of an event that must happen.  “The chef should cook the chicken.”  It is left open to the player how they get the chef to make chicken instead of the steak dinner he is planning.  You can steal the steaks.  You can buy the spices from the spice seller before the chef can get them.  Physically threaten the chef?  Each character (the drunk, the noble, the peasant, etc) will have different avenues available to them for each puzzle.  With any event that does not directly stop the boy from becoming king, failure doesn’t lose the game, but simply puts the player down another avenue.  For example, if you don’t stop the chef and he cooks the steaks, later you might get an objective like “The steak might kill the boy.”  In this case, you can either prevent him from eating the steak in some way, or try to discover why the steak shouldn’t be eaten and make sure the steak is safe.  In addition to the main storyline, each player character will have their own stories.  Perhaps the farmer peasant wishes to marry the butcher’s daughter.

The game ends with the coronation ceremony.  No matter who gets made king.  The prologue of the game will be crafted out of the successes, failures and choices you made along the way.  If the boy becomes king but you didn’t reveal the conspirators, he may not be safe.  If you are the noble and you steal the steaks from the chef, the drunk is blamed and is thrown in prison on charges of theft.  Did you leave him there?  Did you admit to the theft to set him free?  If you’ve played Marvel Ultimate Alliance, you’ve seen this sort of thing, as at the end of the game the “future” is told by the Watcher based on the results of your game and all its optional quests.

And there you have my idea… an open, sandbox type world, with personal and external story lines, all of which happen on a fixed timeline, and the end of the game is built out of what you did during the fixed time.

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Dice Games

Gaming

I’ve been thinking about game design a bunch recently.  Most of it is MMO related in a “What kind of MMO would I really want to play?” sort of way as I mull over all the reasons why I have lost interest in pretty much all the MMOs on the market right now.  But outside of that, I’ve also been thinking about dice games.

A post over on Wil Wheaton’s blog reminded me of the game Button Men, and it got me to thinking about games I could make out of the giant bag of dice that I own.  (Dragon*Con, I went to a booth and bought a bucket of dice for like $20, its all in a Crown Royal bag now.)  So, as I’m thinking about what I can craft out of my dice and other things around the house, I got curious about the existence of other dice games.  In my searching of the Intertubes, I found tons of games that use traditional 6-sided dice (some that use many many of them), but very few that actually made use of 4-, 8-, 10-, 12-, and 20-sided dice (the rest of the tradition role playing game set), and that is what I am after.

I’m going to keep working out some ideas of my own, and maybe even post them here.  But in the meantime… know of any good dice based games?  Let me know…

The Next LEGO Adventure

Gaming

When I first saw and played LEGO Star Wars, I was stunned.  It was just such a great idea.  Sure, it was tied in to a product, but taking the Star Wars LEGO sets and allowing players to run through the story of the new Star Wars movies was inspired.  Then Traveller’s Tales followed it up with LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy and it was also quite awesome.  Having now also played LEGO Indiana Jones and LEGO Batman, I have seen the full arc of their evolution in this particular medium.  From here, looking back at the first LEGO Star Wars, I can see how the non-verbal LEGO humor has grown and made later games even more enjoyable.  And with LEGO Batman they advanced in their storytelling since they were no longer adapting from a movie script to a game, but creating their own stories.

So, given that I love these games, I get disappointed when conversations of these games turn into listing all the other movies and superheroes that people wish they would turn into a LEGO game.

Personally, I think that Traveller’s Tales has “been there, done that”.  LEGO Batman showed that they could craft their own stories when given characters, and I think I would rather see them evolve if and when they make another LEGO game.  Rather than saying “Ooo! LEGO Superman would be awesome!” like most folks (and it could be, don’t get me wrong, and given that Warner Bros. bought Traveller’s Tales, a string of DC Universe inspire games might well be coming), I look instead to LEGOs lines of products and imagine what game I’d want to see crafted out of LEGO sets with little or no existing back story.

When I think of the next LEGO adventure, and what I would want to spend my hard earned $50 or $60 on, I’d much prefer to tackle a new genre all together.  We’ve had the Star Wars space opera (twice), and we’ve had the 1930’s adventure, and we’ve had the modern spandex superhero… next, I want to see them tackle fantasy.  They could still inject their humor, poking fun at Lord of the Rings and World of Warcraft and other popular fantasy realms and elements, all while building their own lore of humans and dwarves versus trolls and skeletons.

That, in my humble opinion, would be awesome.

Yar’s Revenge

Gaming

Today is the Superbowl, which in recent years (about as long as I can remember) is little more than a program about advertising that gets repeatedly interrupted by a football game, and given that I present you with a comparison of advertisements.

This is why I game…

… this is why I hang my head in shame…

VGC: Beyond Good & Evil

Gaming

This month I decided to join in with the Vintage Game Club.  Every month they pick a game to play, and while they play it they discuss it.  Their choice this month was Beyond Good & Evil.  I obtained my copy to play through the GameTap service since I already pay for that, making the acquisition of this game easy and with no additional charge.

So, I’ll be playing this and chatting along with the VGC.  Come join us, or at least come read along.

Revisiting Travian

Gaming

Back in October, I reviewed my experience with the web based game Travian, and now that I am no longer going to be playing it, I would like to say just a bit more.

If you decide to play Travian, bring friends.  If you don’t have friends to bring, make friends, fast.  And if the friends you bring or the friends you make do not play seriously and begin immediately amassing power and strength, dump them and get new friends.

That may seem a little hardcore, but it is pretty much true.  Travian is a PvP game.  Building cities takes more time than conquering cities.  So if you don’t join a big alliance and start conquering other people, other people will start conquering you.

So, to that end, while I said previously that I wouldn’t be playing the game anymore, I won’t… but I would consider it if a big group of people were planning to play it and let me join in with them.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

Gaming

I realize this game is not new.  I even got it over a year ago, but I am just now getting around to playing it and I think I broke it.

My understanding is that if you play through the story of the game as designed, it will provide a moderate level of difficulty all the way through, perhaps even getting harder toward the end.  However, I didn’t do that.  I played through the first section of the game (immediately switching my team out for the West Coast Avengers inspired team of Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Spider-Woman and Iron Man), but once I got to Stark Tower, the first HQ and mission hub in the game, I went exploring instead of taking the next mission immediately.

One of the features of the game are the Comic Book missions.  These are short (20 minutes max) training simulation missions that you discover while playing through the game.  However, they do also give you six of them to start.  Because they are given to you, there are no rewards for these missions.  You don’t unlock extra gear or suits, but you will gain experience and cash while playing them.  I played all six (and I had to repeat one because I fell about three hundred points shy of getting the Gold level on it, so I actually did seven missions).  The result of this detour was that when I went to do mission number two I wasn’t level 4 or 5 like a player should be when going through the story missions alone, I was level 14 or 15.  For the next two story missions I ripped through them like a hot knife through butter.  I take enemies out in two or three hits easily, sometimes less.  Boss fights are a breeze as I am doing 60-80 points of damage with one of Moon Knight’s special attacks (he’s my favored character on whom I dump all point spending and the best items).

I’ve just moved from Act 1 to Act 2, Dr. Strange’s house, and I am hoping that maybe the game will get a tad harder.  We’ll have to wait and see.

But, this brings up a discussion of game design.  The question is, did the designers put in the training missions expressly for the purpose of giving players who can’t progress in the story a place to play and level up a bit, or is this leveling path I have discovered unintentional?  I would like to think it was intentional since it can be extremely frustrating to get stuck in a game, however since I managed to get 10 levels in just a few missions, I think they may have misjudged them and made them too rewarding.

Of course, I may have also broken the game design through my method of play in that I am dumping all my power and money into one character and treating the other three members of my team as “additional damage”.  So many years of playing MMOs with the tank/healer mentality leaks over in to every game I play.  I can’t blame that entirely, though, as mathematically and logically it makes sense to play this way, if defeating the content is your goal.

In any event, despite the game being “easy”, I am still enjoying playing it.  And that’s the important thing…

Illusions the Game

Gaming

The first Round Table of 2009 is as follows:

Putting the Game Before the Book What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first? In a time when bits of Dante’s Divine Comedy are being carved out and turned into a hack-n-slash game, I find myself longing for intelligently designed games–games with a strong literary component–not merely literary backdrops. So rather than challenge you to imagine the conversion of your favorite literature into games, I challenge you to supersede the source literature and imagine a game that might have tried to communicate the same themes, the same message, to its audience.

So, anyone who knows me well knows immediately what book I picked, but as fast as I picked that book I also ruled it out.  My first thoughts were of how impossible it would be to make a game that illustrates the same message.  I then spent several days trying to pick another book, another piece of literature, something else… but it was a fruitless search, and I knew that in the end I would have to accept the challenge and try to design a game with the idea that it existed in the same place as the book had the book not existed.  I racked my brain looking at computer games and card games and board games and schoolyard games and everything I could think of to craft my game out of, and it was then that I realized that it didn’t matter.

First, allow me to introduce you to the book, which I feel is one of the finest if not the finest piece of literature ever written, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach.  The story is about a man who decided to get away from the life he had and trying to figure out what live he wanted by getting in a biplane and taking up barnstorming (flying around, stopping at small towns and offering to take people up while you do turns and loops and whatnot for a small fee).  This man, Richard, has an unlikely meeting with another barnstormer, Donald, who is the Reluctant Messiah of the title.  Richard is a man escaping the world because of all the restrictions in it, and Donald is a man escaping the world because the people refuse to see it has no restrictions.  Donald teaches Richard that the world is nothing but illusions, that anything is possible and that the only limitations anyone has are the ones they insist upon themselves, and the only things that really matter are entertainment, learning and other people.

For our game, let me start by paraphrasing a quote often found on the back cover of the book:

Here is
a test to find
whether your mission in game
is finished:
If you’re playing,
it isn’t.

If Illusions were to be a card game, it would be like Mao, only it isn’t just the dealer who knows the rules and unveils them, everyone participates.  If Illusions were a schoolyard sport, it would be like Calvinball.  In fact, if you look around, other variations of the “make up the rules as you go along” game exist for pretty much any medium.  Even MMOs have their sandboxes (Second Life, etc), and even in more rigid MMOs (World of Warcraft, etc) the game itself has no defined end and it is up to the player to decide under which conditions they consider the game to be “finished”.

Of course, getting people to want to play a game that has no rules (but potentially has all rules) is tough.  Without the rules, most people won’t know what to do, and whether they realize it or not, their dislike of the “game” is probably tied to its similarity to “life”.  The game is what you make of it, as much as life is what you make of it… and that is the point.  In whatever form the game were to be presented, a player could easily make up a rule that allows them to instantly “win”, however the question isn’t whether or not they won but if they enjoyed it, if they got something out it.  Maybe by throwing down the “I win” card in the first round they do get something out of it, they smile, they laugh, and yet if they do it enough they might find that no one wants to play with them anymore, which itself is an opportunity for learning: if you want to play with other people, other people have to have the opportunity of winning.

As you make up and play with new rules, you discover how they affect you and those around you, and you can find which rules lead to the most fun in the game, for everyone, and those are the rules that you will end up keeping around.

Back in High School, a group of friends and I would play cards at lunch.  On days when people were angry at stuff we sometimes played Egyptian Ratscrew (though we used the F-word instead of “screw” because we were teenagers), but that could lead to much pain, so more often than not we played Mao (mentioned above).  And while one guy was the one who brought us the game and the initial set of rules, each dealer was allowed to craft their own set, as long as they named it (so that players could file rules learned under a heading for later play).  We had tons of fun making up rule sets and yelling at others when the rules that were made stunk (the lunch monitors had to drop by and ask us to quiet down at least once a day as we got into heated disputes).  In the end, the rules that stayed and made their way into every dealer’s set were the ones that made people laugh, even when they forgot the rule and got penalty cards.  By the time we crafted the master rule set that we settled on (called “Neo-Einteinian” if I recall correctly), players no longer cared if they won or lost the game, they just loved playing it, and to me that should be the goal of every game.

So, as you can see, I deviated from the stated purpose of this month’s Round Table as I didn’t actually design a game for my book, but I think that’s because the fundamental message of the book is actually the fundamental message of game design in general.  The creation of any game is an exercise in the game of Illusions.

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Fast versus Slow

Gaming

One thing I have found in a few places in comments about the new game Left 4 Dead is disappointment that the zombies are fast zombies instead of slow zombies.  Sure, Dead Rising had slow zombies and it worked fairly well, but then again it was also an entirely single player game with a storyline that lasts for many many hours of game playing time.  Each of Left 4 Dead’s scenarios can be completed in about an hour (more or less depending on your difficulty setting and the people you have chose to play with).  I’m not sure I’d want to play Left 4 Dead in a story that lasted for twenty hours of play.  I mean, the story as it is is “four people wound up hiding together and have decided to make a run toward [insert possible rescue destination here]”, and it works for the time it takes to play it.  Dragging out a single run to rescue for twenty hours would likely be horrendously repetitive and tiring… just like Dead Rising is if you choose to just hang around for the helicopter, killing zeds and run none of the missions and stories (heck, even with the missions, sometimes Dead Rising is kinda dull… but I still love the game).

But could a Left 4 Dead style game work with slow zombies?

I think it could, however, it would require a number of mechanics changes.  For one, little piles of ammo, guns and grenades would be out.  As would the unlimited ammo pistols.  We wouldn’t have to remove guns, but we would absolutely need to slim down the supply of them.  We’d also need to add in melee weapons, real ones, not just pushing zombies back with your gun, but bats and shovels and other things.  Each melee item would have a power rating and a weight, swinging one would cause you to get tired.  The more you swing, the slower you swing, unless you rest up.  These things combined would allow for the encounters with slow zombies to be more tense.  If you have unlimited ammo, you can just shoot them all and walk your way to the end (if you have never seen the remake of Night of the Living Dead, one of the major changes from the original is Barbara actually putting to use the idea of “they are just so slow, you could walk right past them” and she leaves the house on her own with a pistol and walks to safety while everyone else dies inside the house), while the “tired bar” makes you sometimes choose to use your limited ammo over your melee weapon in order to survive.  The game would also need more “monster closets”, because as is Left 4 Dead avoids the monster closet by having hordes of zeds randomly show up climbing over fences and whatnot.  In order to maintain a level of creep and dread with slow zombies, you’d have to play up the idea that meeting them in large numbers is dangerous by occasionally forcing the players to deal with large numbers of them… open a door and wham, twenty five zombies are in that room you need to walk through.  Oh, and all zombies must be killed by removing the head or destroying the brain, shooting one in the leg just makes him limp when he walks, shooting both just makes him drag himself along the ground.  Did I not mention you’d need to watch out for zombies pulling themselves around at ankle level?  In fact, the game might be more focused on avoiding the zombies instead of Left 4 Dead’s plow through attitude.

While fighting slow zombies might still be made fun, I’m not sure that playing one could be.  You’d stumble around, you’d be slower than the players, and your only method of attack would be to get close enough to grab at them and bit them.  And if the players shot off your legs, you’d essentially be spending the entire rest of the map dragging after them with little hope of catching up.  However, without the obstacle of the special infected running around and keeping the game entirely co-op, you could have infection.  A player who gets bit is infected.  They will die, and they will become a zombie, how fast that happens depends on how badly they get hurt.  The game would have no health bar and include no healing, so that even the infected himself couldn’t warn his teammates.  So the other players in co-op would need to decide… shoot the infect guy now or wait until he turns?  Sure, killing him now makes you safer since you don’t have to worry about him turning, but killing him now also means that you are going to be short one gun or club as you move forward.  You start the game with four and it tunes for four, so if you have to off one of your own, you are down to three playing a map tuned for four.  Or two on map for four… or all by yourself.  To ease the sting of that, I’d probably keep Left 4 Dead’s survivor closets where you can recover a fallen friend, and from map to map within a scenario all players would get put back in.

Slow zombies in a first person shooter could definitely work, but it wouldn’t be the same game at all.