  The Sims 3 Looks Rad | 
Posted - 3/27/2008 12:38:27 AM | I absolutely love this "rise of the social single-player game" sort of mini-march I'm seeing occur in the industry right now with games like Spore, Fable 2, and Animal Crossing. With the announcement of The Sims 3 came a great deal of information about what EA Sims felt were the important parts of the Sims 2 and, thankfully, it seems they truly understand what was important about The Sims as a franchise. When it comes down to it, the Sims has never been about house decoration nor has it been about treating your Sim as a digital Barbie doll. These are things that players took and ran with to an extent that I'm not sure Will Wright had intended and, due to this, the franchise ends up with expansions pack which add more accessories and things to add to the Sims' living quarters than they do to enhance the single most important aspect of these games: the player-Sim bond in a world inhabited by other bit-breathing, digital-living Sims.
Casting aside the unnerving amount of joy the player-base gets from torturing Sims -- putting them in a house, making them drink water all the time, and never placing a toilet -- or letting Sims into a new room and then removing the door, the thing that sets the Sims apart from any other franchise is the bond that develops between the player and the Sims he/she controls. Whenever I first started playing a Sims game for the first time my only goal was always to experiment with all of the tools the game offered me. I'd see what kind of things I could design -- houses and Sims -- and I'd see what I could exploit in the game world to test the reactions of the Sims. This generally results in a very poorly-played game, unhappy Sims, and serial-killer levels of dead Sims. Playing the game like this fails due to one simple fact about it: at its core, The Sims 1 and 2 are actually fairly complex strategy games. And one of the reasons the games work so well is that there this weird little bond that the player can develop with the Sims within any given household throughout, as the Sims 2 introduced, the lifespan of an individual Sim from its teeny-tiny diaper-wearing days until it died of, if you maintained its basic needs well enough, old age. And with the Sims 3, the game will now have all members of a neighborhood age together, so that numerous generations of Sims within one household will no longer always be haunted by that tramp Betty who has, at this point in Timmy's life, made out with both Timmy, Timmy's father, Timmy's grandfather, and Timmy's grandfather's friend Jim (who, as chance has it, is also Timmy's current best friend).
One of the smartest decisions that the original game made was to never have any of the Sims speak even a single line of identifiable language. The inability for a Sim within the game to utter the same tired catch phrases, one-liners, and "you clicked me!" bits of dialogue allows the player to continually think of the Sims within a game as far more identifiable and lovable versions of Tamagotchis. Their inherently humanlike appearance and behavior further solidifies the ease of which a player can feel "closer" to their Sims in a way that, say, a particular unit in an RTS can't. The reason that I still maintain such an absurd amount of excitement for The Sims 3 is that, in their announcement for the game, the need to micromanage the aspects of Sim behavior that no one really likes dealing with has been eliminated. There is no longer a need to try and save time by finding an ideal moment in the "Bladder" gauge of a Sim so it can relieve itself without disrupting whatever you have planned. A player will still have to allow a Sim a bathroom break but, now, the player won't have to be consistently reminded that a Sim will, at some point in the future, reach critical mass. Obscuring the more trivial aspects of a Sim's life while maintaining the basic gameplay mechanic should, so long as additional micromanagement reminders aren't added in its place, should make the overall game so much more enjoyable.
The absolute coolest thing about The Sims 3, though, is going to be the way that character designing portion of the game is going to handle the creation of a unique personality for a given Sim. Gone is the pseudo-RPG stat management that went into creating a personality for Sims in the first two games that had a certain neatness value that, for the most part, had no place in a game like this. The Sims 3 is introducing a trait-based personality system that will have players choosing five traits from a pool of ninety-plus total traits. Using these five traits, the game will define the entirety of a Sim's base personality. So, let's say I wanted to create Sim Trent, I'd choose the Workaholic, Talkative, Enthusiastic, Opinionated, and Creative/Logical depending on the mood Real Trent was in when making Sim Trent. These five traits would then define the base personality for Sim Trent and, along with his physical make-up, allow Real Trent to go into Sim Trent's life and play the kind of game that he, er I, think(s) Sim Trent would most enjoy. It's a fantastic way to handle what, before, was an unnecessarily confusing system that had entirely too many gameplay ramifications attached to it.
I wish Games for Windows had the various prototypes that EA Sims had their designers make before starting any serious development on the game up on their website (as it is, it's "coming soon") as that was the primary motivation for this column and for my next design/development project. When I notice it's up I'll certainly cover it if the prototypes end up being as interesting as the three they had listed in their magazine.
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| In Lieu Of Content | |
Posted - 3/25/2008 12:16:53 AM | 
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| Wednesday, March 19, 2008 |
| The Appeal of Real-Time Strategy Games | |
Posted - 3/19/2008 12:37:52 AM | Video games are such a fantastic medium. I just finished playing through Gears of War cooperatively with a friend over Xbox Live and it was absolutely enjoyable, hilarious, and challenging as hell. As a child of the, uh, Manboy Generation? YouTube Generation? Whatever kind of generation I'm a part of, growing up with video games has obviously had a large influence on my life being that I am what some may consider a "hardcore gamer" along with being a game developer, designer, and so on. So, basically, my abnormal interest in games is a well-founded and, I believe, a very beneficial one. And as I was sitting here a second ago working on some optimizations for my near-finished old-school shooter in the vein of classic games like Asteroids and Robotron I realized that, above all else, Real-Time Strategy games remain the genre I most enjoy and love to think about. So many of my favorite games are RTSs that, occasionally, I am prone to ponder what makes them so awesome. This shortly-conceived and hastily-transcribed article is a sort of general, informal monologue about the genre.
One of the reasons that the genre is so immensely popular is that the games that exist within its boundaries lend themselves to an extreme amount of consideration and study amongst the hardcore audience of players. Much like certain first-person shooters like Quake, Quake 3, and Counter-Strike attract a very dedicated group of hardcore players who memorize the layouts of every map and can absolutely thrash even "very good" opponents in tournaments with ease, certain real-time strategy gamers gravitate to specific titles that are particularly conducive to gameplay which rewards a deep, occasionally disturbing, level of understanding of the game mechanics. The game that immediately comes to mind when thinking about the genre like this is no other than Starcraft, which, particularly in Korea, has an overwhelming number of gamers which treat the game like a religion. I've heard rumor of Starcraft tournament stars being likened to the traditional rock stars of American culture. Whether this claim has any legitimacy is unknown to me, as I haven't really traveled to Korea lately, much less a Korean Starcraft tournament.
For me, the appeal of the genre doesn't quite stretch to the hardcore understanding that would lead me into victory in any tournament. My favorite RTS is, without a doubt, Rise of Nations. I feel that this game is the perfect blend of typical RTS research-and-attack conventions while also having a very unique and interesting economy. I was never a much of a heretical fan of the Age of Empires series (though I have enjoyed them greatly) and, for me, Rise of Nations a fantastic middle-ground between Civilization and more action-oriented RTSs like Command & Conquer and Warcraft that Age of Empires slightly missed. In the early parts of the game it was necessary to build up the area your central settlement and explore the continent you were spawned on while also researching your way into the next epoch. At some point, you'd expand your settlement (and this was a necessary step unlike a game of Warcraft 2/3 where an expansion base may not be the best idea) and then start establishing trade routes, building up your borders to ensure a strong defense when a foolhardy opposing tribe thought they could break down your walls and lay waste to your settlement early on in the game. Each game had a truly epic sense of scale as it took you from spears to fully-automatic guns, bazookas, and a staple of any good game: nuclear weapons. The game also had alternate victory conditions that didn't necessarily rely on violence (thought you would, almost definitely, engage in a handful of skirmish). Most importantly, though, this game did not require intense micromanagement for the most part -- though, in the late game, effectively managing all of one's settlements was an absolute pain -- and managed to contain all of its gameplay in a timespan under two hours which, for me, is probably when my attention for any one gameplay session begins to wane.
As I think about it now, the reason that Rise of Nations captivated me the way it did was due to its superb ability to pack all of my favorite things about turn-based strategy games into a real-time strategy game progression. Some games I loved playing an aggressive military game while others I enjoyed playing defensively and researching my way to victory while other times I enjoyed doing nothing but researching my way to nuclear weapons and blowing the rest of the map to radioactive wasteland. What it all boils down to is that real-time strategy games work because they promote a certain level of decisiveness in the gamer that can be reflected in-game surprisingly quickly whether it be related to a research choice and the immediate and long-term consequences, a choice to position a tank in combat somewhere specific or to put extra money into artillery instead of a tech which would boost your economy, and so on.
RTS games are, fundamentally, a microcosm of real-life topics and gameplay mechanics. They contain real-time combat that is dependent on tactics both big picture and instantaneous decision, balancing an economy that must fund both research and military, defense of your home base(s), exploration, and expansion. Sins of a Solar Empire, for instance, is a relatively slow-paced game that has its foundation in a lot of 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate -- why it's not a 4E game has always boggled my mind; I guess X is just in a more extreme segment of the alphabet) turn-based gameplay that puts as much emphasis on economy and diplomacy as it does combat. In the end, Sins is primarily won through combat but the intelligent player is able to leverage a particularly strong economy to form alliances with other players in a multiplayer game who can function as the sword to his savings. Company of Heroes, on the other hand, is a game which is firmly rooted in combat. It still gives players a variety of possible play styles (I like to play infantry- and artillery-heavy) but the reason the game is a success is because it places such a fine point on its combat that, instead of focusing on large-scale economy decisions, the choices the player has to make are now large-scale combat choices -- how to capture territories and key points in a way that, if attacked in the process, will result in the most damage to the opponents forces and the least to the player's. So a player could rush into a point with a single piece of armor and a pair of infantry forces to capture the point while being supported by heavy machine gun fire, mortar shell launching, and the ability to call in a precision artillery strike if a hasty escape needs to be made.
The possibility for a large-scale RTS which manages to seamlessly mix the large-scale issues of research, diplomacy, and economy of a player-driven empire along with the less time-intensive and more short-term rewarding nature of visceral RTS combat is an idea which I absolutely adore. The day a game like this comes about is the day that RTS gamers can have their life-ending World of Warcraft.
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| Asplode! Optimizations and Beta Status | 
Posted - 3/17/2008 1:12:11 AM | At this point, I think that it's fairly safe to say that the meat of Asplode! is finished. All of the primary gameplay is in place, the enemies are all implemented and handled in a state that I'm fond of, and the player controls, responses, and such are all implemented. At this point any more features that I add to the gameplay portion of the game are either polish points or experimental ideas that I may or may not keep as part of the game (a few automatic weapon upgrades, various ideas as to how to handle the score multipliers, and whether or not I'll allow the player to acquire more ships/lives as the game progresses or not). I mean, I still have to add the main menu, restarting/quitting mid-game, and handling option changes dynamically instead of by text file and such, but unless there's something I'm vastly underestimating about this process (I'm not having a fancy UI or anything), it shouldn't take more than two more weeks -- as I'll be gone all next weekend.
That all said, what I'm struggling the most with right is performance. The game runs smooth and excellently for the first two-three minutes but, shortly after the two-hundred second mark, it started chugging something fierce. My first response earlier this week was that it was, obviously, the particle system and its insanely inefficient rendering method where I filled a vertex buffer per-system and then rendered the contents (per-system). I remedied this by batching all of the particle geometry together into a single write-only vertex array/buffer indexed by a static index buffer and rendered all of the contents in a single draw call. The number of particles doesn't generally spill over into a second batch but, even as a worst-case scenario, that's two draw calls total for that. Pictures from that experiment (this actually went really well and I only had one screw-up):
 
That improved the overall framerate a decent amount but it still was, clearly, not the main problem. The only other huge graphical culprit that could have been causing a problem were the vector model rendering routines. When I started looking over the source code I realized that these were the first things I wrote when I switched back to XNA after my D3D10 experiments and the code was absolutely atrocious. I had two draw calls per every model and, on top of that, I was generating data for each of the models from the source XML data whenever a new enemy was created. So, not only was I reading and parsing the XML data but I was generating all the geometry from the minimal data in the XML. It took most of Saturday to sort out all of that and batch the model rendering routines together and, in the process, I made a number of pretty-looking screw-ups:
      
This gave me an enormous overall boost and almost a quarter reduction in the total memory usage of the game by the 250 second mark where, as of now, it's now running about 45-50fps on average (but on my pretty-decent machine). This is an enormous gain from where I was at a week ago, but I still have a number of other optimizations that need to be made. To start with, I'm going to eliminate all dynamic memory allocations made during the course of the game to the best of my ability; I may not be able to account for cases where games go on for a very long period of time but I can, for the most part, account for a hefty majority of the gameplay that most people should see. Luckily for me, I'm a pretty good shoot-em-up player and, I figure, if I make performance perfect for the longest game I'm able to play and then some, I'll be in good shape.
I'm officially declaring the game in beta testing status as of now and here are some screenshots from a playthrough an hour or so ago.
    
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| Annoying Things in Gaming | |
Posted - 3/14/2008 12:31:28 AM | Following my cohort's lead, I'm going to list some things or trends in video games which bug me in some way shape or form.- Poorly-Placed Checkpoints: In games which have a checkpoint save system, the checkpoints are occasionally very poorly laid out; when the player overcomes a particularly difficult/annoying puzzle or makes it through a rough combat scenario not having a checkpoint immediately nearby does not add to the game's difficulty level. All the lack of a checkpoint does is make the game unnecessarily annoying. As both God of War and Ninja Gaiden display particularly well, action games can still be tremendously difficult in situations without resorting to lack of well-placed checkpoints. This also applies to real-time and turn-based strategy games which handle auto-saves poorly. This gripe applies, most recently, to Army of Two's brolicious bro-with-bro killfest.
- Poorly Implemented Multiplayer: The prevalence of excellent single-player games to simply tack on a very horrifically developed multiplayer component just to get the "Online Multiplayer Support!" bullet-point on the back of the box is simply mind-numbing in its stupidity. The time spent making an otherwise enjoyable game feature ugly multiplayer game modes could have easily been spent polishing the actual gameplay and, in the end, making an overall better game but, instead, the importance of the bullet point tends to win out. The Darkness for the PS3/Xbox 360 is a recent example of a game with an innovative single-player campaign but, yet, horrible and dull multiplayer. What makes this particular case so depressing is that the game's engine could have used additional optimization and polish and it would have resulted in a far more enjoyable and well-received experience.
The other side of this gripe is poorly-implemented multiplayer features in a multiplayer-focused game where the actual online gameplay can be a riot but the server browser and lack of necessary social features ruins the overall experience. Battlefield 2, for example, was an exemplary online team-based shooter that was heavily hampered by a pathetic server browser (complete with no-ping servers, filters that only worked when they felt like it, and a server list which would not let the player interact with it while it queried for servers), no in-game messaging or, even worse, no friends list whatsoever. A sore point in my gaming 'career' is Rise of Nations which, as anyone who knows me can relate, is a game I worship from head-to-toe like a beautiful Egyptian goddess queen. The GameSpy-driven online components, though, were so bad that I only was able to play two or three games before I become utterly disparaged and cried myself to sleep for weeks.
- Lack of In-Game Voice Chat: Along the same lines as the above item, there's really no excuse for a team-oriented multiplayer game not having in-game voice chat in today's high-bandwidth laden environment. I mean, I end up in Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, or XBox Live voice chat most of the time whether the game supports it or not but there are still times when I just want to jump in a game with and against a group of random people where I would like to either shoot the proverbial shit with people along with having the ability to coordinate strategies with teammates. I've been playing Company of Heroes a lot lately and it seems like a crime that this game doesn't have VoIP (Voiceover IP) given the complexity of the gameplay. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was released with any in-game voice support as well which, given its action-oriented, team-based gameplay, is nothing short of an atrocity (luckily, developer Splash Damage realized this and has since issued a patch which include very well-done VoIP).
- No Windowed Support: This is a PC-only complaint but, at this point in time, if a game doesn't support windowed mode or, in an arguably worse scenario, is an RTS which supports windowed mode but does not capture and contain the mouse when the window is in focus, I will still play the game but it will not have legs in its gaming lifespan. In all but a select few cases (Company of Heroes being the most notable) I always play a game in windowed mode due to the simple fact that I'm a social butterfly that loves to talk while I play games. If a game doesn't support windowed mode and doesn't support my monitor's native resolution then the result is simple: I will absolutely not play this game. I hate playing games on an LCD that will not run at a native resolution due to the feeling that I'm looking at an ugly, stretched display of the game. And this makes the graphics programmer that resides within a certain portion of my brain a sad, sad panda.
- A Limited Camera: Specifically, I hate Real-Time Strategy games that will not allow me a zoom level in a reasonable range. The 3D Command and Conquer games (C&C: Generals, C&C3, and The Battle for Middle Earth 1 and 2 which used the same engine) along with coconspirator Petroglyph (Star Wars: Empire at War and Universe at War) are particularly guilty of this sin. When I play an RTS and feel hampered by the severely limited maximum zoom level of the game it becomes a major distraction for me while I'm playing the game. In Universe at War and TBFME2 this was particularly noticeable as I was a great number of units (in TBFME2) or enormous units that wouldn't fit on a single screen (Universe at War). I understand that there may be technical limitations to a distant zoom level but do whatever it takes to allow me to play the game at a comfortable range. In the RTS genre, being able to get a decent overview of the battle is absolutely key and being unable to see that at a glance at a decent size -- minimaps don't count -- ruins that aspect of the gameplay. Not all games have to have ridiculous levels of zoom like Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire, though, as Company of Heroes makes up for its fairly limited zoom level by having a completely free camera and a very well-done tactical map.
- Godzilla-Sized User Interfaces: It's very easy to design an in-game user interface (which is what's it called in an RTS; in an FPS it's more of a Heads-Up Display/HUD) which doesn't take up half of the screen. Age of Empires 3 and Supreme Commander both released patches post-release (AoE3 had its patch on release day) which offered the ability to significantly decrease the size of its UI -- this should always be a priority for RTS game designers. If it's absolutely impossible to fit all of the various controls and buttons and bars and icons in a minimalistic UI then allow the user to decide if they can do without certain things. Look at the evolution of the Supreme Commander UI, for instance, on release, after one patch, and in its expansion (and I'd imagine in a patch to the original game). The current UI is a beautiful thing since I can, you understand, see the game.
- Post-Release Support: I can't emphasize the importance of post-release support for games enough. It may be a sad state for PC gaming that certain titles aren't "complete" when they are released but, at this point, games have gotten so complex that I'm understanding about titles that seem to lack a certain amount of polish upon release so long as the developers are candid and open about the problems or imbalances a given game has and what they plan to do to fix them at no additional charge. There are so many games I've played that have been completely mediocre on release but, yet, turned into some of my most-played games ever after some quality patches or even after some fantastic expansion packs. Soldiers: Heroes of World War II and Titan Quest weren't actually all that great until they received some hefty post-release support in patches that added a great deal of absolutely must-have features. Sacred, one of my favorite hack-and-slash-games, become an entirely different game solely because of its post-release patches. Other games, Titan Quest included, also become all-around more enjoyable experiences -- whether they needed it or not -- with expansion packs; on the list of these games I would cite Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, Galactic Civilizations 2, Supreme Commander, Sacred, Company of Heroes, Starcraft, and many others I'm sure I'm forgetting.
- The Rest of the Pack: Here are just a minor list of things which primarily speak for themselves: Bad AI, Lack of cooperative modes (in games which scream for it), Poor endings/ending sequences to otherwise fantastic games, Bad controls, Unoptimized graphics, Lack of system scalability, Unnecessary item collections, Fetch quests, MMO gameplay...
And, really, this list would go on if I allowed myself to think about so many of the "little things" that crop up in games which deserve to be so much more than their tiniest of problems allow them to be. Given the development cost of games, tight schedules, and publisher pressures, it makes complete sense that some games may get hurried out the door before they get a chance to be truly "finished" or polished but, if the platform of discussion is the PC, there's no excuse for a lack of post-release support. The most saddening case of annoying features in games is when someone thinks a particular aspect of the game is an actually a design decision like the use of unbearably limited zoom levels in RTS games...
This was a fun little rant.
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| Asplode! Screenshot Dump | |
Posted - 3/13/2008 1:06:20 AM | Not that I spent recent nights playing stuff like Army of Two, Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, Company of Heroes, Master of Magic, Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, Bully, Ratchet & Clank, Geometry Wars, Everyday Shooter, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, or God of War: Chains of Olympus instead of actually updating my dev journal or anything... But, yeah. Pretty much did exactly that. I've still gotten a bit done on Asplode! every night but, by this point, I'm mostly making various optimizations wherever I can to support the ludicrous amount of enemies and their assorted particle effects on screen in the mid-to-late game. Here's a screenshot dump of shots that would have been attached to journal entries if I wasn't playing so many games lately:
   
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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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