| Thursday, February 28, 2008 |
  Video Games Need a Divorce From Hollywood | 
Posted - 2/28/2008 10:54:38 PM | It seems like it's time for the video game industry to grow up and realize that it needs to start producing games with the idea that the experience they provide to gamers is one wholly unique to the industry. I finally saw There Will Be Blood earlier this week and, after witnesses the absolutely mind-numbingly fantastic performance of Daniel Day-Lewis I came to a fairly obvious realization: games will never provide an experience as fulfilling, captivating, and, most importantly, truly captivating viewing experience as a movie like this.
I don't mean that a game will never have the ability to provide a thoroughly enjoyable, thought-provoking, and memorable experience. The primary distinction that needs to be conveyed is that, in their current form, video games seem to be handling their narratives in a wholly unoriginal form. So many video games released for both PC and consoles over the last year try to present what is, quite honestly, a mundane story with adequate voice acting in the same form as a movie may try to present a story: through non-interactive cutscenes. It seems absolutely insane to me that, as advanced as games have become, the industry still has yet to get past the idea that the only way to present stories is through heavily scripted scenes. I understand why the desire to force players to sit through a noninteractive or unskippable cinematics; developers put an absolutely ridiculous amount of time into developing their games and planning out their storylines and so on. So much work that it seems crazy to make the storyline in a game subtle or completely optional. But, by that same token, I know a great number of gamers who simply skip past any and all cutscenes that show themselves in any game.
There are, basically, two categories of games when narrative is the topic of discussion as far as I'm concerned: abstract storylines and concrete narratives. I consider games which place the game front and center as a game with an abstract narrative. These are games where, for the most part, there is no requisite story or the gameplay defines the player's interpretation of a story. A game like Geometry Wars, for example, has no real story whatsoever. In my experience, and I'm not making this up, I tend to make-up completely irrelevant storylines to complement the gameplay; I'm destroying the crap out of these geometry blights upon my galaxy. For what, you may ask. To this I respond with whatever mood I'm in for that day: for destroying my similarly geometric self's rights, for destroying my convex homeworld, for taking my harshly-edged fiance captive. I do this completely subconsciously and it's something that I never would have realized if a friend of mine hadn't mentioned this game during my midday rant about the same topic as this column. A more concrete example of an abstract narrative, in my eyes, is a turn-based strategy game like Galactic Civilizations, The Sims, or Civilization. There is, in fact, an entire set of storylines which surround any given game in these titles but, for the most part, the meat of the narrative occurs as I dictate it. I have a home world and I expand but, yet, there are the teal race of wobbly-armed balls of goo who are attempting to prevent me from helping my race to survive the depths of space by positioning two giant space ships around the planet I had my eye on. A planet with fertile soil and a friendly atmosphere. I need that planet and these teal bastards are trying to stop me. Why? Who knows. They probably do, but I can make my reasons up as I play. These events occur in-game without any necessary exposition whatsoever and no particularly keen observations on my part, but the narrative is there, whether I care to excavate its meaning or not.
The other type of game is one with a definite narrative. A game with a very well-defined and fleshed-out game world set within a unique or special universe all of its own. This could be a game like Bioshock, Half-Life, Starcraft, Diablo, or Lego Star Wars. These are all titles which present a particular storyline set amidst interactive gameplay. These types of games definitely have a place in the industry as experiences wholly unique to the medium but, in my mind, I would love to see some more chances taken with the narrative expositions. Bioshock, Half-Life, and Crysis are the closest and best examples I can think of that help to bring the industry closer to the kind of definitively interactive types of gameplay/narrative that video games should be representative of. The most important story in Bioshock is not that of the player's dealings with Atlas and Andrew Ryan; no, the most important story is the one presented by the scenery of Rapture (Ken Levine understood this as he indicated in his GDC presentation). In Half-Life 2 the most memorable experiences for me are not being given objectives by the NPCs, it's seeing Alyx's face as she is impaled by a Hunter in the beginning of episode 2 and attempting to take down a Strider for the first time in vanilla Half-Life 2. I don't give a crap about whatever dull story Crysis wanted to present; I was more interested in trekking around the landscape exploring the crevices of the island.
Why should players ever have to completely pause and be stripped of their controls so that a writer can impart his words as voiced by generally poorly acted lines? Video games are the only medium which can present stories in such a dynamic and interactive manner and, yet, we seem to be bound by the conventions of Hollywood.
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| Sunday, February 24, 2008 |
| The Asplode! Mid-Project Hum | 
Posted - 2/24/2008 2:29:31 PM | This post may seem filled with tired material that I've covered before in my dev journal, but a coworker told me to start posting my development entries on the newly redesigned company-created blogging site JoeUser so, short of reposting every single dev entry there I went with a summary post in the form of a mid-project hump entry.
One of my design mantras -- and I use the word 'design' loosely -- is that while coding the game I keep things as simple, quick, and efficient as possible. As one might guess, this can become problematic at times. Less so in the implementation of routines and ideas so much as it is the necessity of shooting down some gameplay mechanics that, while fun, would defeat the purpose of such a simple Robotron/Geometry Wars knockoff. And, really, that's all I'm hoping to accomplish with Asplode!.
When I started the project my sole goal was to see a game through completion. I never expected to enjoy doing more development-related activities once I got back from a day of work filled with them as much as I am but, since I am, I figured I would take it to the next step. Once I finish with Asplode! I'm going to move onto a slightly more ambitious game idea that, in concept, seems like it could be a lot of fun. Of course, the first step is to actually finish the current game before getting too carried away with thoughts of "the new hotness." This has been the turning point of most of my projects in the past (it also has a tendency to carry into more general areas of life, but that's unrelated): something new comes along that, in my head, has so much more potential to be fantastic that there's really no reason to continue with what I was doing. The Grass Is Greener on the Other Side Syndrome. Yes. I suffer from it and a general case of activity/project-related ADD and it has a tendency to get in the way of attempting to get across the mid-project hump.
Fortunately, knowing myself like no one else can, I knew this would happen eventually, so I braced myself for the "oh, new shiny thing!" problem to come around and instantly gave myself the necessary self-encouragement I needed to get back to work after a week of procrastination: Asplode! is simple, it will only take another month to finish, and it's enjoyable for me to play every time I launch it to test a bug-fix, feature implementation, or whatever. This was very much a game I made for me to enjoy and a sort of cheap little labor of love that, when it's finished, should be a fun little game for some others.
Another fairly important reason I found for finishing Asplode! is that, if the next idea is the "winner" I think it is, getting all of the experience and feedback I can from the current project is a necessity for moving forward. I am, traditionally, a graphics programmer more than a gameplay programmer or game designer (despite being a "hardcore gamer") so it will be useful to hear what people have to say about this game once it reaches a playable state or, since it's already very playable, a distributable state. Getting some feedback about the basic mechanics, the "feel" of the game, the overall aesthetic and so on will prove invaluable when starting my next project. I'm also interested to see how my use of XNA will turn out when it comes time to start giving the game out to people; I'm told that setting up a decent installer will cure the PC distribution fears I've been having lately and, now that Microsoft is turning part of Xbox Live into an XNA-centric YouTube sometime this summer, it will be interesting to see how 360 distribution works out.
All-in-all, in the end, I'm enjoying my time spent developing the game and, despite its simplicity, the game itself. The fact that the game is incredibly easy to get into (and with no fancy tech requirements unlike a lot of graphics demos I've made in the past) and understand is also an appealing idea to me, as I've made clear in a recent article. Though, most importantly for me (as the developer) is the quick turnaround for the project. I started work on the game in the middle of January and, if things work out as I think they will, it should be feature-complete sometime in March. Once it's finished I can move on to the next project which will take a bit longer to develop but, still, should have a relatively speedy turnaround as well. I like that. And now screenshots of one enemy being spawned in a circle:
   
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| Tuesday, February 19, 2008 |
| I'm Fairly Certain | 
Posted - 2/19/2008 12:43:30 AM | I quit out of Team Fortress 2 tonight at 9:30pm because it seemed like a good time to get some work done. I ended up playing Audiosurf immediately afterwards for an hour. Then I looked at code, did some completely mundane coding tasks on Asplode! that should have taken me about five minutes. I'm tired. I blame the completely screwed-up sleeping schedule on Asplode!, of course.
I did manage to upload a video, though. This is a large 12MB file given that it's less than thirty seconds long, but I'm slowly learning how to record and compress videos, so take pity.
I am also seriously reconsidering my use of XNA when it comes time to start my next game. My ideal method of distribution, much like my praise for casual games in my last entry, is to make the downloading and executing of games I make as simple as possible. With XNA I have to have people install the XNA redistributable and, if that doesn't work, the .NET 2.0 framework. And I still have, to this day, only had about three people (of the polled eight-nine people) get the game to work without the XNA Game Studio installed. I'm told this distribution hassle is greatly eased by just creating a well-made installer but, really, this all seems like a greater hassle than it's worth. I'd just as soon go back to C/C++ with OpenGL just to ensure that execution is as simple as possible for the greatest number of users.
Don't confuse me with someone that actively seeks the opportunity to use OpenGL. I love DirectX. It's treated me well these last five-six years and I have no real yearning to switch to OpenGL but if it helps my idea for a far easier distribution method then I'm all for it. Kinda. Multiplatform DirectX would be far nicer.
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| Sunday, February 17, 2008 |
| The New PC Gaming | |
Posted - 2/17/2008 11:03:14 AM | There have been a startling number of PC-Games-Are-Dying sort of statements coming out lately, the latest of which coming from Cliff Bleszinski of Unreal Tournament fame. This statement no doubt related to the poor sales numbers of Epic's own Unreal Tournament 3 and Gears of War PC. I suppose it's worth noting that Gears of War PC was released almost a year after its 360 version and its relatively high system requirements may or may not be a contributing factor in its sales numbers.
  
Of course, there is certainly a point to be made here regarding the kinds of sales numbers that PC versions of games see in relation to their console counterparts. A Gears of War PC to Gears of War 360 comparison is fairly meaningless, but a Bioshock 360 to Bioshock PC (800,000 in its first month to the PC version's 80,000) or the order of magnitude difference between the 360 and PC versions of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (383,000 for PC and 3.04 million for Xbox 360). The low PC sales numbers were attributed to rampant piracy by Rob Bowling, the Community Relations Manager for developer Infinity Ward. Although the percentage of users playing pirated copies of the game was never given, it's safe to assume that Bowling's claims were well-founded. A number of companies have attributed poor PC sales to piracy in recent years but, unless there's a vast, overpopulated colony of pirates somewhere that I'm unaware of, if every PC gaming pirate had a change of heart and bought a copy of the game they were previously pirating, I would wager that the total PC sales for a game still would never touch the enormous console sale number.
This, in my mind, is due primarily to a changing PC gaming climate. Video games are becoming increasingly mainstream as is evidenced by a single game like Call of Duty 4 selling over seven million copies across all of the platforms it was released for. The PC is, however, becoming the dark horse platform when multiplatform game releases are the topic. When you switch the topic to something like Massively-Multiplayer Online games there is a different case to be made, what with World of Warcraft's ten million subscribers and the continually high sales of The Sims month after NPD-counted month. Does this trend mean that all PC games should become MMOs and life strategy games? Well, as the sea of dead MMOs would all scream up in one blood-curdling yelp: no.
PC-exclusive games still have a very well-defined place in the world of video games. As a platform, the PC has a lot going for it that consoles can't compete with. For one, it's an open platform that doesn't have to have patches and content packs monetized as a necessity (though it can be if the publisher or developer wishes). As another, it has the benefit of an incredibly wide and varied user base. While I don't have numbers to back the forthcoming claim up, I would say that more people have computers of some form than they have current-gen video game consoles. These computers probably don't all have DirectX 10- or even DirectX 9-capable video cards, but they're all capable of playing games. When I was growing up, my mother was an absolute solitaire fiend. She played the game so often and so much that even my best score (and, as gamers go, I'm no slouch) would have been scoffed at by even this most nurturing of figures. Standard Windows games like Minesweeper, snake, and so on and so forth are basic computer terminology for people. Even if the mention of World of Warcraft falls upon deaf ears, the mention of computer solitaire or minesweeper should get an ear perk.
Yes, I'm advocating the idea of the Casual Game as being a genuinely good sign for PC gaming. Despite what some people might say about the single-person development teams or the garage developers being dead and such nonsense, there is still a very strong place for small development teams within the scope of casual games. A good game mechanic is a good game mechanic; people of all ages and gaming proficiency recognize this as a truth, whether they can put it into words or not. Bejeweled, for instance, is loved by anyone with a pulse. There's something inherently addicting about it. It's nothing that hasn't been done before in some form whether it was a tabletop game like Connect 4 or a Genesis game like Columns. It didn't even have to be the first to think of the game mechanic, it just had to be the first to do it well and make it as easily-accessible as possible. And who's say that a legitimately fun game can't be made out of this simplest of mechanics? If you say something in the negative to that claim, then Puzzle Quest would love to meet you out back for some words. The ease of accessibility is something that Garage Games is taking to heart with Instant Action as well; they already have a combination of games available along with a forthcoming Tribes-like title that by no means should qualify as a "casual game" so much as it should a "fun game" with a unique distribution method.
And none of this is to say that big, complicated PC-exclusive games should be abandoned, because they shouldn't be. The point that is consistently echoed by gamers in response to "PC Gaming is Dead" variety news is concise and simple: if a PC game is good, people will buy it. This is not a cardinal truth, of course, because there are always truly excellent games that fall completely under the radar of all but the most well-informed gamers. A few recent examples of this are Ironclad's Sins of a Solar Empire, Crytek's Crysis, and CD Projekt's The Witcher. All three of these games are fairly niche titles, with Sins being a mixture of 4X and Real-Time strategy gameplay and The Witcher being a herald back to Baldur's Gate 2 with a very mature, morally ambiguous, fairly chauvinistic RPG. Crysis is less niche in its genre so much as it is its appeal in the current gaming atmosphere; it's an adrenaline-fueled first-person shooter with a very high system requirement entry fee. These three games have all received critical praise while also proving to be surprisingly strong sellers -- though, it's a bit early to give a definite commercial judgment to Sins since it was just released a couple weeks prior to the time of writing.
  
In the end, the "PC Games Are Dead!" type of articles seem more and more like the reactionary and ill-founded claims that they are. The concept of PC gaming ever dying is just a vacuous concept; so long as PCs remain a common fixture in the lives of so many types of people, PC gaming will live. It may evolve and shift forms as time goes on, but a good game will remain a good game.
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| Thursday, February 14, 2008 |
| An Open Letter to Sony | |
Posted - 2/14/2008 12:44:27 AM | Your stupid PlayStation 3 has made me lose three days worth of productivity. I hope you're happy.
You're all standing over there on your high horse yielding your Everyday Shooter sword complete with a Super Stardust HD shield atop your Warhawk shouting something about your "Uncharted: Drake's Fortune!" You smug bastard.
I'll overlook the fact that I think you were raped by your parent; I know a broken seal when I see one. I was told you were new. Your shell looks new, that's for sure. But your input device, once I had the feel of a separately-purchased new one in my hands, felt so tainted by the hands of another man. I have nothing, of course, to point fingers with -- aside from my actual fingers -- though, so unless more evidence to your foul play arises then you're safe. And I love you. You cruel, time-sucking succubus.
xoxoxo,
Trent
PS. Fuck Gamestop. Fuck it straight to hell.
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| A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left | 
Posted - 2/8/2008 1:09:23 AM | I'm most certain that this week has felt longer than it should have felt. On the plus side, we (as in Stardock) did release Sins of a Solar Empire; a game which, aside from the occasional pre-release testing and feedback, I had no part in developing. This fact does not deter Shacknews members from congratulating me on an "excellent game," though, despite my attempts to rectify the notion that I had any part in it. One particular user said:
Quote:| Not only do you get an awesome 4x RTS, but you also keep Mittense employed, and ensure his continued addiction to crystal meth! |
While another said:
Quote:| Purchased. Take the family out mittense. (Congrats on the game btw) |
Had I only known years ago that taking credit for a game's development was this easy, I would've started falsely pimping my name for various sure-fire hits years ago. On a more serious note, though, go buy Sins of a Solar Empire now so that I may pay off my student loans then pay for food for my scrawny self. Seriously. I'm 6' and 150lbs. Feel bad for that to the point where my student loans will magically disappear. Into thin air. Like the monetary debt equivalent to pixie dust. Or cocaine in a mob den.
This isn't begging so much as it is emotional blackmail.
Asplode! has seen a decent amount of development this week at the expense of sleep and, what is most likely more noticeable, my mental well being. When I originally envisioned the asplosion combo idea for the game, I had thought of it as a huge chain reaction of enemies where each enemy in the chain would set off its own explosion which would instantly kill any enemy in a certain radius -- an idea which I now realize I probably acquired from the audiovisually superb Every Extend Extra Extreme. What I realized after going through all the code setup for the necessary routines to execute this vision is that it would, almost entirely, defeat the purpose of the game I was actually in the process of developing. It would actively hurt the meth-inspired twitch gameplay to which I so dearly aspire to achieving. After careful spontaneously-occurring reconsideration I changed the combo system so that every pentabomb would set off an asplosion combo (and no other enemy could). The real point multipliers, then, would become exponentially higher (2^x) for every pentabomb in an asplosion combo. So if you happen to get a particularly high point enemy or two in a combo of four pentabombs, you're looking an 8x multiplier on top of whatever constant point multiplier you have as a player. Every enemy involved in a combo will also emit a shockwave to serve as a visual indication that they were part of a combo; I will enhance this later with some score-based text indicating the results of combo as well, I think.
Aside from the combo stuff, I've also implemented a basic score display along with tweaking a lot of the various particle effects. Here are this week's screens (with the last pair being the most recent):
    
And, finally, one of my absolute favorite game journalists, Chris Remo, has either left or been fired from his gig as Editor-In-Chief as Shacknews after his three year stint where the site has grown from a list of links and screenshots posted throughout the day to a very oft-updated site with a ton of resources, "heart", and original content. Over that time it has become my most-visited and most often read gaming site and his departure (in whatever form it took) from the site and, potentially, from game journalism as a whole is particularly saddening. So, here's to him. And, if nothing else, game journalism still has a beacon of hope in the ridiculously talented and personable Jeff Green.
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| Tuesday, February 5, 2008 |
| I Can Has... | |
Posted - 2/5/2008 10:17:39 AM | 
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| Mosane Pi | 
Posted - 2/4/2008 1:24:17 AM | One of the nicer aspects of finishing school -- because, really, there aren't very many (huge amounts of loans, lack of hundreds of college girls when spring begins, the near-excessive amount of social camaraderie, etc.) -- is the amount of "free time" that doesn't change every week or two. When I get home from work I can generally rely on the fact that I have the rest of the night to do whatever. And while the overall amount of time I have open is generally decreased (it's hard to tally up the amount of time spent doing homework during school), the reliability that there will generally be at least three solid hours of time every night. This temporal reliability is one of the reasons that, for the first time since I finished my book five years ago, I can see myself actually finishing a project which, in this case, is none other than Asplode!. In honor of this fact, I unleash the first public video of it at its incredibly early and barebones stage: Asplode! early gameplay (and the base directory if you don't want to click the 3MB WMV directly).
The song in the clip (that I didn't realize would be picked up by the recorder) is from Rez. The inability to move outside of Pi/4 angles for the ship is something that will be relegated solely to keyboard controls and, for that matter, will be rectified whenever I get a way to hook up my 360 controller to my PC. The gameplay at this point is fairly simple as I have yet, until an hour or two ago, to start on the pentabomb-trigged asplosion combos but, yeah, that's the game at its current state after almost three weeks.
This weekend I got the Kamikazygon (which will get a "Meet the ____" post eventually) tracking character movement. This was something I implementing the same evening that I added the model to the game but, in my consistently-exhausted state, could not get working correctly until Saturday morning when I realized that I was never updating the player position so the little fella' was always homing to the world origin. I also implemented a simple scoreboard, enemy scores, enemy health, and bullet damage. All of this took me about a half-hour, all told, and the rest of the surprisingly little time I spent on the game over the course of the weekend was spent on coding two different background types and laying the framework for the asplosion combos. The majority of the weekend was spent playing Burnout, Rez, and, the new addition to the game lineup, skate..
The first background that I added was a simple one: a number of randomly-sized, alpha-blended quads (about five-to-six hundred of them) that would light up when in a certain radius of the player -- this effect has been toned down slightly since the video so it would be more of an ambient one than a visually distracting one. Here is the result:
The second background visualization that I attempted was going to be a slowly-fading pulsing circle that added a spike and color change whenever an enemy was killed. Before I went to too much trouble with the specifics I wanted to get a basic test with an every-so-often spike occurring just to see what the pulse looked like in-game and whether it was too distracting or not. By the time I got to the iteration you can see in the fourth shot, I figured it was a bit much for the game that, while stylistically jiving with the experience, did not visually match with the rest of the game the same way that the quad background did. I do think that I will use the pulsating circle of spikiness as the protagonist of a future game though (without a doubt). Here is the evolution of that:
   
And, finally, I realize that these entries aren't exactly the bastion of interesting development chronicles -- they end up being more development logs. This is an unfortunate side effect of my choice to write them when I'm fairly tired and feeling particularly uncreative/mundane/McCain. These are, though, the best times chronologically in the day for me to actually write them, so this is, sadly, a trend that will continue save for the most superimportant or awesomelyinteresting entries. Those get my full attention and creativity. They get them because they're special.
And if you have a Wii and you haven't purchased No More Heroes yet, then I hate you and everything you stand for. I don't have a Wii. I know I would like this game. If you refuse to buy this well-developed, superbly-designed, and downright stylish game, then you're not fit to own a system which is foreign to such levels of excellence. Shame on you. You're filthy.
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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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