Freedom

Watched it?

One of the topics du jour (and it's been a very long jour) centres around the idea of handing control to the player: rather than removing the player from the game, relegating her as a passive bystander whilst a cut-scene/cinematic plays out, devs are attempting to allow the player to create her own outcomes.

First problem here is that the player probably isn't a brilliant storyteller; ergo, give her free reign and she might not come up with something as emotive as a good writer.
Would she rather accept an amount of passiveness in order to be fully moved, or would she prefer to do her own thing at the expense of a memorable experience?
In the Aeris' death climax, the player is allowed to navigate to Aeris (choked), and then to fight the Jenova creature. Both outcomes are fixed, but the player is given the illusion of free will for a time. However, give her the choice of whether to fight or not, or whether to give Aeris the watery send off or not, and there's a chance that the most powerful emotional topography will be defiled... unless her actions, whatever they are, lead to an equally powerful, albeit different, resolution. And there's problem two: in this case, the writer still controls the narrative flow, but now has to create lots of narratives. A game like Mass Effect, where the player is allowed to make many important decisions, is really presenting the player with hundreds of narratives, each one controlled, and the player simply hops along a complex hierarchy of predefined plot points.

Problem three is simple, and is connected to problem one: If you allow the player to define her character through the choices she is making, this needs to be reflected in the consistency of the outcomes. If you've prepared a scene in which the character must rescue a child from the clutches of a beast, but have allowed the player to define her character as a child-hating coward, then all credibility is lost. (Reminds me of the 'Is character plot?' debate :o)

The latest Mystery Case Files game, The Thirteenth Skull, had a stab at a solution. I knew it was coming: I had been chatting with our Producer about some of the techniques I was planning to use in M4, and we touched upon NPC (Non-Player Character) interaction. She suggested that there would be interesting developments in this area anon. I was all excited, wondering how the mighty MCF team would handle this multiple-thorned problem. The results were ultimately disappointing.
Player interacts with NPC through dialogue box; player selects one of three questions; NPC answers question; player asks next two questions; NPC answers them too; fourth question appears in dialogue box; player asks it; NPC answers it; next stage is unlocked.
None of the choices make any difference to the immediate outcome, or even give the illusion of doing so. Furthermore, the only real choice the player could make was in which order to ask the first three questions, and the order in which they were selected was irrelevant.
In a standard cut-scene, the player is entitled to press the skip button in order to progress rapidly through the scene, or to skip it entirely. Thirteenth Skull's approach to NPC interaction appears to me to be little more than a substitute skip: player has to negotiate their way from one end of the cut-scene to the other, and does so by clicking lines of dialogue, rather than clicking on a skip button.
Still, the idea of masking mechanics does appeal and I have a selection of doves secreted inside my own pants...

Will likely undress this iceberg some more very soon.

In the meantime, here's Agro's death from Shadow of the Colossus.
Note the valedictory buck, a brilliantly subtle movement, which transforms the scene from a simple death to an act of sacrifice!

Aeris' Death

Having a little tete-a-tete with Nadia Oxford over on gametheoryonline which you're welcome to follow. (I say 'follow', although such public discussions do tend to degrade or dissipate rapidly.)
For those who never experienced the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII, I've exhumed it from the youtube vaults for your emotive pleasure. It truly was a seminal inspiration and, to this day, remains one of only two gaming moments to 'manipulate' me to tears. I'd say that's a true accomplishment, and that the attainment of such a degree of emotional attachment is a noble and worthwhile pursuit, every bit as valid in games as in other media. However, others may disagree.

So take out those handkerchiefs and enjoy.

Essence 3

I wanted to share this with you!
One of the most rewarding parts of my job is shepherding the art team. It's brilliant having such talented artisans around me.
Now, if I were to leave them alone with the design doc, they'd go off and produce wonderful work, like Ben's first concept for the arcades above. The scene does everything I required. Functionally, it has a foreground window; it has a navigation point up a staircase, and another through an arch; it captures that evening sunlight, with the long shadows; it is built from the overgrown ruins of a long-dead civilization; the vegetation is authentic given time and place. And, of course, it looks splendid and has a good vibe.

And this is where the writer comes in!
Huh?
Sure! A half-decent writer will be practised in rooting for the essence - the mot juste - of a moment. If I'm moved by a view, what precisely is moving me, and how? Oh, I'm quite sure this isn't just the reserve of the writer, but in my experience a half-decent writer is usually a safe pair of hands for sourcing the soul of a scene.

It took a while, I'll confess. There's usually some moment of realization (what the heck is the German loan word for that? It'll come to me in a very ironic moment). Just as with the writing (check out my coastal moods post), I riffle through lots of pix, putting to one side those that make an instant impact on me. Then it's a case of studying those selected pix, looking for commonalities - or, indeed, differences - between them, wrestling for the essence - the heart of the emotional response.
When the essence is decanted, the instant revelation is rapidly superceded by a feeling of foolishness. That's how it goes.
So Ben and I made more of the hanging vegetation, ruinified the scene some more, and... took out the sky.
It's incredible! Try it! Try adding or removing the sky from any receptive project you have to hand. Compare your emotional responses to the top pic, and to our revised concept below!
Add to that scene the ambient music and sound fx - the occasional woodland bird song - and the visual fx - butterflies, and/or branches swaying in intermittent breeze - and you have somewhere cool to hang out.

As ever, please respect all copyrights and do not reproduce without permission. Then I can continue to give y'all sneak peeks!

Poetry Challenge

March the third!

Okay, one-and-a-half days remaining 'til we submit for vigorous and rigorous testing.
I'm just about on top of it all now.

You can imagine the workflow: everyone sits staring at me, waiting for sketches and designs and lines of dialogue and puzzles to manifest at my fingertips; then environment concepts go over to Ben and puzzle designs go over to 3D Raul; then illustrations radiate to Reb whilst Mr Chant uses placeholder graphics to build the puzzle code and Biggsy wrestles to make music based on my impossible descriptions - make it sad but happy and airy, like wind, but more pathos and mossy, make it mossy and old like Tomb Raider, with a bit of weirdness, but not such that it suffocates the pathos, and echoes like in an endless cavern, if endless caverns have echoes, if not then like a wooden space vessel whooshing through a bit of space that facilities whooshing.
And when everyone's busy, the headphones go on and I settle into bits and pieces of dialogue and misc stuff. (I'm currently listening to Seetyca's Nekton Falls!)

Here's a good 'un for you:
One challenge I set myself was to write a poem.
First, it had to be very short, as there is little tolerance for lengthy dialogue. I figured thirty words or less.
Second, it needed to include the words soul, heart, rain, shadow, and fire. These words are necessary for the dream cards puzzle.
The poem would have been composed by a lonely blacksmith, lamenting the loss of his wife, destined to live for hundreds of years all alone. So it needed to be soused in longing and sadness.
If you're so inclined, give it a shot.
If not, consider the nature of self-imposed frameworks, and consider the person who claims that writing is easy and recognise that it probably is in their undisciplined and sprawling vision. :o)
I'll stick my solution at the bottom.

I love Reb's pic (at top of post)!
She's really captured something special!
For me, puzzles and mini games are as much opportunities for subliminal impressioning as they are means of generating 'fun'. (There's a good few blog posts in that single word; know that I'm using shorthand here :o) After all, we're considering the player's experience as a whole!
When adding extra material, my first question is Where?
(Imagine that you need to slot a specific scene into your ms. It's the same thing: its positioning is crucial not just to its impact, but also to any damage it might do to the established narrative.)
For our extra Hidden Object Scene, I chose to develop (and, by proxy, postpone) the meeting with the lonely blacksmith, Oban.
Next, I needed to find a Where?
We had suggested a wooded area, and it was easy to open the trees a little and create a clearing with a shrine. Super! Hidden Object Scene in shrine!
And central in that HO, I wanted a photo of Oban's family, surrounded by candles and pebbles and other shrine-y things, all of which lend themselves characteristically to the HO mechanic.
HO's are wonderful places to hold a player - ours usually play out for between three and five minutes, but often substantially longer. There aren't many other places in the game where it's possible to root the player for such a measure of time. So player searches for hidden objects, all the while absorbing Oban's sadness, spending time in the company of his lost family, feeling his heartache. So by the time she actually meets the chap, there's already a preconditioned response.

Better crack on. Need to finish the dialogue for voice-overs, amend hints and strategy guide, and keep an eye on the clock!

Grant me peace
In the shadow of death
Where our hearts beat like rain.
Grant me sleep
And the fire of your breath
'Pon my soul once again.