  Mechanics 4: Integrating the UI | 
Posted - 10/27/2008 9:41:03 PM | Interfaces of all sorts are one of the most game-specific features of any entertainment medium; there's never an ammo counter on-screen when watching John McClane do Die Hard thing or a health indicator attached to Forrest Gump's forehead in his movie -- that would be ridiculous. Yet throughout the history of the gaming industry UIs or HUDs are featured in just about every game; it's not a question of whether or not to have a HUD in a game so much as it's a question of what kind of graphics should comprise the HUD, what should be featured on-screen, how big should the health bar be, or how translucent should the minimap be? A couple of games released this past month have realized: wait, what?
Ubisoft Montreal's Far Cry 2 is a game that takes great pride in its consistent usage of the first-person perspective to keep the player as immersed in the fictionalized portrayal of an African warzone. With a tap of the heal button the player's in-game character will, if his health is low enough, look down at his body and find a bullet wound; if that's the case, the animation continues by having the player character pry out the bullet with players or, in some cases, with his teeth. If the player's wounds aren't bad enough, a mere injection into the character's forearm will do the trick. Yet, despite such animations the game still reverts to showing an ammo counter or health bar if the player's health is in the process of increasing/decreasing (or alarmingly low), same with the ammo counter. Presumably, this is because Ubisoft Montreal could not figure out a way to properly convey this information in-game, but what they did figure out is how to convey locational information through an in-game map and GPS transmitter. When the Map button is pressed, the game's player character will whip out a map and GPS transmitter (shown below) and the player is tasked with finding his location on the in-game map and swapping between various "zoom levels" (shown in-game as separate pieces of map paper) to determine his position and plot his course of action to an objective.
  
When I was playing Far Cry 2 last night, I realized that my malaria pill bottle was running on empty and I only had an unknown amount of time (not long) before my malaria would flare up again and I would be completely unable to calm the attack. To get more pills I had to get a mission for a certain game faction and complete it -- the pills would be the reward for completion. Not only did I not start the mission yet but I was nowhere near the building where my contact for the mission was. I high-tailed it through the forest, attempting to bypass any checkpoints filled with hostile Africans. Once I found a Jeep, a car with no mounted machine gun, I realized that the only chance I had to not die in the middle of nowhere was to speed straight through the jungle to my contact without making any stops whatsoever. So, there I was, I had my map out trying to navigate the twists and turns of the road while simultaneously trying to find the best route to my contact. I sped through checkpoints, ran over a hostile or two, and adjusted my intended course all while balancing my focus on the road and the map that I had to take my eyes off of the road to accurately read. After a few minutes of this, I reached my contact and, as it turns out, the mission was a simple two-or-three kilometer jaunt to a veterinary clinic to deliver some passports. Malaria pills acquired.
EA Westwood's action/horror game Dead Space proved to a number of people that more daring user interface design decisions could work almost flawlessly even when a player is put under the pressure of numerous tentacle-waving mutants running at him. With the exception of the main menu, credits, and the options screen (and, arguably, the in-game store), every screen and interface element in Dead Space exists within the game world. The player's health bar is represented as a number of bars running along the player character's spine, the stasis bar is represented as a semicircle grafted upon his suit, and the ammo counter on weapons is shown as a holographic screen that floats near the gun. When a player brings up his inventory the entirety of the screen appears as an in-world two-dimensional graphic plane filled with the necessary information; this screen rotates and floats with the characters movement (the same holds true for text logs). Audio logs appear as a small spectrogram that turns translucent when the player aims while still listening to the audiolog and follows the player's movement. There is not a single interface element, other than the store, which pauses the game or requires the player to relinquish his controls.
  
The most remarkable aspect of Dead Space's in-world interface is how the system reacts to a non-standard player location. There are a few instances in the game where the player character is "grabbed" by an enemy and the player is unable to move the character's body. A player can still enter "aim mode" and see the reticule -- it's normal placement adjusted given the nonstandard location of the player character -- and, although aiming is vastly more difficult given the stress of the situation and the unfamiliarity with the reticule changes, the player can still blow the tentacles off of monsters despite being handicapped. Dead Space's UI allows for such a quick and drastic change forced upon the player which any other game would have had to deal with in more conventional ways inherent to a prototypical first-person or third-person shooter interface. The end result of the UI changes andthe short amount of time the player is given to react to the circumstances allows designers to, in a way, create a "quick-time event" in their game that doesn't rely on cheesy, out-of-place timed button presses but, rather, actual player adjustment and decision-making.
Both Far Cry 2 and, to a far greater extent, Dead Space took some chances with their user interface design ideas in ways that most games never attempt. And, while the user interface innovations aren't solely responsible for this, my personal experience with these two titles has me already claiming these games as two of the most immersive and intense game experiences of the year. Heads-up displays and user interfaces, in general, are such an unrealistic and occasionaly flow-breaking feature in games that it's a strange phenomenon to have such well-designed games get released in such a close proximity. Typically, a game like Dead Space would have players pause the entire game world while a player would be fiddling with his inventory or trying to figure out where on the map he was and where he would need to go next. The removal of this laborious menu work results in a more cohesive game experience that allows a player to become more focused on the game world and les focused on the annoying lagtime in between loading a menu, finding what he wants, and exiting back out of the menu. In games like these, breaking a gamer's flow is one of the least-desired outcomes of the game experience.
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| Mechanics 3: Achievements | 
Posted - 10/20/2008 9:50:22 PM | Everyone likes candy. Diabetics or people on a strict diet may nay-say such a statement but, for the rest of us, a bit of candy here and there is a little treat composed solely of sugar and happiness. Achievements in video games are similar class to a piece of candy. Players can gain achievements for beating a level in a normal progression of the game, beating a hard boss without using certain items, completing an entire playthrough of a game without dying, or, in the case of the recently released Mega Man 9, beating the entirety of the game five times within twenty-four hours. Once these achievements are earned, gamers can wear them as a nerdy badge of honor for others to gaze in awe upon. Or something. When done correctly, achievements are a source of positive reinforcement that encourage forms of player behavior or, better still, can foster an entire metagame with the potential to drastically increase the amount of time players can get out of a single game.
As far as the nonexistent history books on modern game designs goes, the originator of "achievements" as a term and systematical categorization of gaming accomplishments began with the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, the 360's online system/marketplace. A "gamer score" is displayed prominently for every Xbox Live player profile (see mine at the top of this page) and points are added to this score whenever an achievement is unlocked during the playthrough of any given game. Microsoft's system allots 1000 gamer points (G) to any retail game and 200 points to any game distributed through the Xbox Live Arcade Marketplace. A typical achievement, then, has anywhere from 5-50G attached to it and when it is unlocked by a player's in-game exploits, a box pops up saying that an achievement has been unlocked. And, in a majority of cases, this elicits a very positive player reaction. Achievements have become such a mainstay of the Xbox 360 that there sites that are dedicated to categorically listing every achievement for games. For some gamers, the concept of having a high gamer score is important enough to some gamers that games are played solely for the purpose of getting easy achievements.
Achievements serving as one of the foundations of Xbox Live created a very unique situation for what are, essentially, a loose system of decorations over in-game accomplishments that gamers were previously doing just to say that they were able to do them. Back in the days of Final Fantasy VII gamers toiled over nigh-impossible boss encounters like Ruby and Emerald weapon that were, in the context of the game, completely and totally optional. Not that I was one of those people, but I was. The Xbox Live achievement system, then, reinforces a metagame that gamers have participated in since video games were created: competition is fun and, in single-player games where there was no form of competition against other human opponents, people got creative about aspects of a game that could theoretically be used as competitive set pieces. Born from this desire for competition are encounters like Emerald and Ruby Weapon and, lest anyone forget, speed runs.
Such forms of competition and accomplishment are simply out of the picture for more casual gamers and there isn't a person in the world who doesn't enjoy the feeling of an accomplishment. As a result of the success that the Xbox Live achievement metagame, other developers have implemented their own in-game achievement systems. What's more is that other developers have learned something that Microsoft hasn't (or cannot): achievements can be more than a pop-up message box. The recently released Saints Row 2 rewards players with tangible in-game objects when he/she completes optional minigames; for instance, base jumping a certain height will yield a permanent invulnerability to falling. Unlimited ammo for Uzis and pistols are rewards for other diversions in the game. Team Fortress 2 gives players access to entire new weapons once a certain number of achievements (for the classes that have them) have been met; these achievements are also permanently stored in a player's account in a pseudo recreation of the Xbox Live achievement system.
The goal in both of the above scenarios is in line with the widely-understand concept of achievements: positive reinforcement for gamers that doesn't alter the base gameplay in a negative way. No developer wants players to run through their games a single time then ship the game back to Gamefly. Achievements have, in part, made owning a single-player-only game more enjoyable due to the increased replayability that some gamers find within achievements. Earth Defense Force 2017 rewards players who beat the game once for each difficulty -- but does that mean that players are forced to perform those tasks to fully enjoy the game? Of course not, but there is a widely-recognizable "badge" to those players who choose to do so.
  
The problem with achievements tend to lie in games which encourage negative behavior in multiplayer games. The first example that really stood out to me is one in Halo 3 where an achievement is unlocked for getting a triple kill with the sword. This isn't an inherently bad idea but, in practice, there are people running around in team games with swords trying to end up in an uncommon scenario where they find three enemy opponents in a row to kill; such behavior isn't really conducive to, say, a team game of capture the flag. There are Team Fortress 2 achievements which reward Medics who play unnecessarily offensively in games instead of focus on healing (which is what the class is typically needed the most for).
The Halo 3 and Team Fortress 2 examples are negligible in their importance but they do serve a useful point in that game designers should rely on achievements as a certain kind of psychological reward for players. Games are, first and foremost, a form of entertainment. Achievements are a form of positive reinforcement to gamers in spite of whatever challenge they may be facing as a result of the game design; they're not typically a tangible enough incentive to completely negate the frustration of a player who has died one hundred times, but they are a nice piece of candy to be distributed without compromising the integrity of a design. Of course, a game could always follow the Ninja Gaiden 2 example with its "Indomitable Spirit" achievement which is unlocked once a player has died and continued his/her game for the hundredth time.
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| Mechanics 2: Choke and Capture Points | |
Posted - 10/13/2008 11:13:22 PM | The Battle of Thermopylae is a battle in ancient history where the Greek forces led by King Leonidas used the pass of Thermopylae to funnel the Persian army, hundreds of thousands of troops deep, led by Xerxes into a small pass where 300 Spartans (and Thespians, Thebans, and Helots for a total of about 2300 troops) were able to inflict a great deal of Persian casualties vastly disproportionate to the number of Greeks over the course of several days. The battle represents a classical example of the strategic use of a geological choke point as a means of gaining a tactical advantage over a number of adversaries. Video games have relied on choke points and other points of interest, such as capturable points and flags, as an integral design mechanic and, as such, have served as the primary influence for a number of popular games and mods over the course of the last decade.
id Software's Quake was a game which started the age of user modifications such as Threewave Capture the Flag (capture the flag! grappling hooks!) and Team Fortress (yes, that Team Fortress). Threewave's level design popularized a very symmetric map design that forced a red and a blue team to compete using speed, power, and intricate knowledge of the maps that matches took place on. Team Fortress popularized the idea of having gamers choose from any number of "classes," all of which had their own benefits and drawbacks, to play a violent capture the flag match across maps designed using the concept of player bases being connected to each other by a very deadly choke point where a good majority of the player-to-player battles took place on. The strangest aspect about both of these mods is not how their game types differed in some basic mechanics but, rather, how each was designed around the same mechanics: capturing another team's flag in a level designed around a series of choke points (the flag room in each base and the middle of the map where the red and blue bases were connected).
Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source serve as the best examples of a level design methodology which focuses on choke points and capture points (bomb sites) as a means of enforcing teamwork (three popular map layouts are below). When playing maps where planting and detonating a bomb are the focus there are is always the choice of one of two bomb sites where a bomb can be planted. There are, generally, two or three entry points for each bomb site and each of these entry points are typically narrow hallways or areas of very low visibility for those attempting to storm a bomb site. In order to succeed in a match, the terrorists have to be able to split up their team into a decoy squad and a bomb planting squad and convince the opposing team of counter-terrorists to take the decoy bait while the bomb planting squad can plant a bomb and setup their forces to defend all bomb site entry points. The other alternative, of course, is to have an entire team rush a single bomb site and hope to confuse the opposing team and kill them all but most maps in Counter-Strike are designed to give the bomb site defenders a tactical advantage in both visibility and cover. When terrorists invade a bomb site they are generally required to all pass through one hallway into a wide open map segment or antechamber which, by the nature of being less confined, gives the advantage to the defenders.
  
Where Counter-Strike influenced tactics using a series of confined rooms and hallways, the Battlefield series presented strategic and tactical options to its players on a vastly more open scale. Battlefield 1942, Battlefield: Vietnam, and Battlefield 2 all presented players with a very large toolkit of weaponry, vehicles, and air support as a means of dealing with the intricacies of a map that presented the indoor confines of miscellaneous structures, small towns, and, most often, the great outdoors with only terrain to shield a roving infantryman. The level designers at DICE, developers of the Battlefield series, created the maps of their games under the assumption that littering the landscape with a handful of capture point would be enough to create venues for battle amongst its online player base as each of the two opposing teams on a given map fight for dominance of every single one of a map's capture points. With Battlefield, DICE took the wide-open gameplay of games like Tribes and, basically, changed the "capture the flag" gameplay style to be more of a "capture and hold a bunch of flags" that moved a team ticket counter in a tug-of-war fashion that, after a certain amount of time, awarded victory to the team who was frequently able to hold the most points. At the time of its release, the wide-open planes-against-tanks-against-jeeps-against-infantry gameplay of Battlefield was revolutionary and created these huge team-versus-team conflicts that lay vivid and powerful in the memories of the players lucky enough to play in a full server of friends.
It is from games like Counter-Strike and Battlefield, along with historical battles like that of Thermopylae, that we see more games being released over the last couple of years that put an increased focus on points and the tactical situation in which they are placed in. All of Company of Heroes' maps, like the one below, are designed around a number of resource points that are used to collect resources passively while the game occurs. The stars on the map are capture points that are the primary item of importance in a game; similar to the capture points in Battlefield, these points in Company of Heroes determine the rate at which a team's ticket counter ticks down to zero -- the first team to hit zero loses. Almost any battle in Company of Heroes revolves around these points and their location on the map reflects their importance; they are typically placed on or near very tactical locations on a map such as a bridge in the middle or on an island-like landmass that can only be accessed through bridges.
DICE's latest game is the undoubted culmination of a point-based game design where a map's choke points double as its points of interest. Battlefield 1942/Vietnam/2 proved that players flock to the entire area surrounding a point of interest but if a map have six or seven capture points and sixty-four players (thirty-two per team) each point ends up attracting a fraction of a total player-base for a map and that, as a game design, ends up becoming a flaw in the overall experience. The progressive capture point format of Battlefield: Bad Company, where only two active points of interest are accessible by the entire player-base at a given time (and they're relatively close to each other) allows a match to be a consistently focused experience where both teams are honing in on a set pair of objectives. Instead of thirty-forty players being required for a good game like in the old days of Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield: Vietnam, Bad Company provides a high level of intense combat even if games are limited to seven-eight players per team (maximum is twelve-versus-twelve). It's worth noting that Bad Company executes this design while maintaining the relatively large map sizes that are a "trademark" of the Battlefield franchise; which goes to show that it's possible to provide a very focused gameplay flow amidst a large game map with a well thought-out design.
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| Mechanics 1: Randomness in Strategy | 
Posted - 10/6/2008 9:38:10 PM | A real-time strategy game is, by definition, a game where players are forced to make strategic and tactical decisions in real time. As the game industry grows, the real-time strategy genre has narrowed its focus to a very specific type of game that does little to force players to consider an over-arching strategy as comprised by numerous tactics. Instead of allowing a player's large- and small-scale decisions to adapt and change as events in a given skirmish unfold, RTSs just make players think of resource usage (I have X, I need Y, and I get Z/minute) and basic army composition. Everything else in the span of a game flows from these two mechanics into what is, typically, one large battle near the end of a game. Relic's Company of Heroes changes this design and, as a result, makes its real-time strategy gameplay into a more dynamic and far less predictable experience that forces a player to make harder decisions more frequently.
It's a commonly-held tenet in real-time strategy games that when an enemy unit is right-clicked upon that death befalls it after it takes a certain amount of damage from units that deal a specific amount of damage every few seconds. Blizzard's Starcraft is practically built around a very definitive combat model that follows a rock-paper-scissors methodology with very consistent unit performance results. The micromanagement that occurs within battles in Starcraft has nothing to do with centering an army around a well-covered/fortified position or ensuring that when your Dragoon attacks that his bullets will hit the right part of the enemy siege tank; instead, cover is just determining if a Protoss melee unit is in range of a bunker filled Space Marines and any hit a Dragoon lands on a Space Tank will do the same amount of damage whether it hits the armor-heavy front or the weakly-covered rear.
  
The design team at Relic took a far different approach to the combat in Company of Heroes than any of Blizzard's efforts. Every part of the game map has a cover value attached to it that, when right-clicked upon, will serve as a hint to a squad of units as to how they should interact with their environment (ie, crouching behind a wall of sandbags or ducking under the lip of a crater). Under this design, two squads of riflemen with the exact same stats can face off and reach a dramatically different outcome depending on their cover situation. As an example, Squad A may be crouching behind two layers of sandbags (heavy cover) while Squad B attempts to take their position from an unfortified open road (no cover or, worse, negative cover). Since the only difference in this sort of encounter is each squad's probability of landing a successful shot (modified by their cover) on an enemy it is, theoretically, possible for each squad to kill each other at the same time. In practice, it may take Squad B three-to-four times as long to eliminate Squad A was it would for Squad A to wipe out Squad B.
The design becomes more complicated when tanks and troops wielding bazookas, panzerfausts, and panzerschrecks join the fray inhabited by the rifle squads above. Unlike rifle bullets, large projectiles in Company of Heroes are a very prescient danger that visibly travel across the screen and violently collide with in-game entities and structures. If a rocket launcher is fired and hits tangentially to a tank's front or side armor it will take minimal damage (or, in some cases, deflect off and hit a nearby structure). If that same rocket hits the lightly-armored rear, though, the take can sustain heavy damage along with a busted engine or armaments. And if that same rocket, or tank shell, hits the layer of sandbags that Squad A was hiding behind in the above example then a player can say goodbye to half of the squad along with the sandbags that were covering them.
While designing the game, Relic must have known the endless amount of abuse that these rockets could wreck upon map structure and players alike because they added a very heavy degree of variation in how a rocket could be launched or tank could fire. The developers of Company of Heroes completely violated the unspoken tenet of real-time strategy and, as such, when a player chooses to attack a target using his Tiger tank there is a chance that a rocket may completely miss a target and hit another enemy, fly harmlessly into the distance, or deflect off of a stray tank trap into a player-controlled building. A player can position his Tiger in such a way as to make a direct attack far more likely but there is, in essence, never a guaranteed strike from a rocket or tank.
  
The change from a fairly predictable combat design to a very visceral, dynamic battle engine is one that Relic handled to great effect but does such a degree of randomness in combat scenarios do anything to cheapen the "strategy" involved in the game? A fervent Starcraft or Command & Conquer player would be quick to point out that the lack of consistency from game to game would prevent a game like Company of Heroes from ever being considered for competitive play at a pro gamer level. That is a definite possibility, of course, but more realistically what Company of Heroes does is to provide a far more strategic gameplay experience as a result of the surprises that occur in the middle of the game. The game design provides the mechanisms by which a player with a less grandiose army can, by utilizing both cover and more intelligent rocket infantry positions, overcome a larger set of forces. And when such an upset can occur in the middle of a game that encourages tactics across numerous encounters it offers the chance for another reversal of fortunes later on. And that is the kind of strategy that can adapt and change over the course of a game which allows randomness in its design.
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| Octreegasm | 
Posted - 10/6/2008 1:03:13 AM | I assumed that it would be in poor form to have every single object in need of collision detection on a frame-by-frame basis to have collision tests performed against every object in the scene aside from itself I figured that now would be the time to add some form of spatial partitioning to my XNA engine/library/framework (Rawr).
With that in mind I looked around for some articles on writing an octree component and stumbled upon a really rad demo by Fabio Policarpo. I then adapted that to my codebase, edited the code as I, in my infinite ignorance, saw fit to do, and then added some rudimentary rendering functionality to the octree to provide what I assume will be a much-needed graphical visualization (in the future).
Anyway, it looks like a squishy death array of lasers.
While I'm at it, I present Cubegasm progress in the form of a failed rim lighting experiment:
 
As it turns out, six-sided, twelve-polygon entities don't look so hot when lit. I also present bullets:
 
And incredibly uninteresting class diagrams (only parental relationships; no containment ones):
  
For the record, working on Asplode! was so much easier. Anyone who says that 2D is harder than 3D is a dirty, blasphemous liar. No one says that, though. Because they are smarter than me. Not that I said that either. I think.
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The entries in this journal have all been posted, along with many more, at mittens' personal site at www.polycat.net.
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