One of the few dilemmas that isn't particularly shared by game design and novel writing! At least, I can't think many people would judge a novel by its length.
It's undeniably one of the gnarliest challenges I face. How do I create four or five hours of great gameplay from a team of three artists?
Length is certainly a consideration for the BF forumites: Invariably, somebody will play through the demo hour and consult the strategy guide to see how far in they are; then they extrapolate the whole duration.
I've posted many times about how I've tackled this problem. It was the one major issue that came up in the M3 survey tests. I had held the player in the cottage and immediate grounds for too long, and I had done this predominantly with a succession of dream card games (reusable, scalable assets! My saviours!), interspersed with a small selection of other puzzles and inventory item quests, with the odd cinematic/cut-scene or two thrown in by way of narrative development. Once the problem was identified, it was a dead easy fix, dropping one of the dream cards games and opening up the village a little earlier. (Believe me, identifying problems from hundreds of disparate comments is itself one heck of an acquired skill.)
Players would much rather have a game which develops rapidly and offers relentless variety than play a long and repetitive drawn-out game. (My use of the word 'relentless' isn't entirely accurate because we still need an element of familiarity, which encourages us to repeat carefully selected components.) Ideally, that rapidly developing game will also be lengthy, but that's regarded as a bonus. The current top ten stalwart Witches' Legacy: The Charleston Curse demonstrates this well. It's a short game by any standard, with players completing it in around four hours or less. (I'm using control players: those who would typically take five or six hours to complete an iHOG.) And the CE bonus content came in at under an hour. But significantly few people minded. It was a quality game.
Back-tracking is a strange one. Asking a player if she likes, or minds, back-tracking is kind of like asking her how she takes her coffee.
The amount of locations I can use is determined by how much time Ben has to create them. Furthermore, every scene would then need populating, which means that André and Sally would need to be thrown into the mix. There are scant few exceptions, and none have really succeeded: one particular dev team like to drop a maze into the world. These mazes appear to be semi-modular: a set of scenes which have been created from a selection of trees, grasses, and so forth. It's a way to gain perhaps ten minutes of extra gaming from reusable unpopulated background assets. Whilst the time gain from minimal art origination is evident, the problems here are twofold: the scenes all look too similar such that nothing feels as though it is changing; our players aren't renowned for their love of navigation, especially when this is complicated.
Feel the need to clarify my distinction here. Ideally, you need to constantly develop. Whether you're creating prose, or creating a gaming experience, your audience needs pulling along (forward motion), and regular developments are absolutely, definitively essential. (Apologies for the tautology, but I still regard this as my biggest lesson learned.) However, instead of developing, you can simply change. It's not the Bob McKee-approved technique, but it does do the job of sustaining the forward motion. The difference is that, whilst development is inextricably connected to the narrative and moves the audience closer to the denouement, often in the shape of a reveal or reversal (typically knowledge and/or functionality), change isn't so.
For example: In Surface: MFAW, the designer relies on change to move the chapters along. Examine a puddle and a watery face appears. It's a nothing event - one of several repetitious 'surprise' tactics that reinforces the concept of monsters out there - but an event nonetheless. In M4, the player returns life to a generator and statues rise from the ground. The statues allow the player to activate a power node and wake the guardian Seer. (And the Seer, in turn, develops something else, and so on.)
So, to sustain that all-important forward motion, you can develop or you can change. Of the two, development creates the most meaning; but either will keep your audience engaged.
By constantly developing three scenes, I was able to keep the usability testers engaged for thirty minutes from a paucity of art assets. And by developing through a variety of means, I was able to keep the narrative fresh and also spread the art tasks between the three artists.
In M4, I'm reusing every scene. I hold the player in a selection of scenes, developing through puzzles, mini-games, and cinematics; then I open up a new selection of scenes and do likewise. As the world opens up, I begin redefining existing scenes, sending the player back with my white rabbits, and utilizing the player's new knowledge or abilities to create fresh meaning from those scenes.
If you follow the progress on my map, it looks like a Gordian puff adder.
How does the player return to these scenes?
Provided that they are expectant - anticipating something special - the back-tracking is framed by something valuable. But it's still a danger zone. I'm mindful of g@mrgrl's comment:
Margrave: The Curse of the Severed Heart falls just short of achieving true greatness due to some repetitive puzzles and annoying backtracking, but its ambition and effort to break the glass ceiling between hidden object and traditional adventure games is obvious and well-appreciated.
Without hiring more staff, the obvious (and easy) solution to these issues is to reduce the back-tracking and re-usable puzzles, which would remove a sizeable chunk of gameplay. But there are always less-obvious and more difficult solutions!
I built into the M4 world three secret passages. Once the snaking begins, I immediately open up the first passage and the player can 'teleport' instantly (two clicks: first click on passage entrance in scene, which opens map; second click on desired destination, which opens scene) to the other side of the world.
There are many wonderful articles on navigation in games on the interweb. I should've bookmarked some. I'll see if I can find the one with the argument: Why make your character walk when he can run? Why make him run when he can fly?
Maps have historically served a variety of functions in iHOGs. The Thirteenth Skull map featured little detail: it was more of a pretty appetizer and an overview. The Phantom of the Opera map was a more detailed layout of the world, and was designed with navigation in mind. The Surface map is pared down to pure functionality: a sterile network of circles and lines which allow for teleportation to anywhere at any time.
I designed the M4 map as a pretty appetizer, a reasonably functional navigation system (more of an overview), and a teleporter. I am, however, swaying towards full teleportation for the next project. This functionality could oh so easily defile immersion in favour of functionality, but I have plans for marrying the two with meaning..! (Indeed, the network of secret passages in M4 also serves to explain how Uisdean is travelling around the town! My beloved duality.)
Does beauty sustain back-tracking? If the scenes are stunning on the eye, is the player content revisiting them?
Maybe for a bit; but only for a bit. Certainly nothing to be relied on.
I chanced upon Lisa Evans' blog. She's had a couple of stabs at alchemizing her beautiful artwork into a game. With such lack of development or change, or meaningful interaction, and with such slowly paced navigation, note how quickly the beautiful artwork, and the melancholic soundtrack, lose any mastery over the player's experience. And then extrapolate.
With some form of development required at pretty much every moment of the game, the question How? becomes rather daunting.
Showing posts with label mcf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mcf. Show all posts
Sunday, 26 February 2012
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Forward Motion and Immersion Cocoons
Ooh, my counter has hit 10,000. I'm not sure what it actually counts... but 10,000!
This caught my eye - presumably due to its claim to the 'experimental interactive narrative' throne.
Reviews are all acceptably favourable, with the same flaws being flagged across the board.
Intrigued, I followed the pixel trail to the dev's blog.
I have to say, I greatly admire Alexei for what he has achieved and for what he attempted to achieve. And throughout his blog, he references a canoe-ful of the major game design books, so he's clearly studied his craft. Most impressive is the way he's handled the recurring negatives (although you'd have to question his 'I agree' remarks for it's difficult to imagine that the public would give two marsupials whether he agreed with them or not).
Anyhoo, do go and take a looksee.
Sooo... two days from usability submission and I got to play the opening act today. Yep, two days to go and we start the playthrough. Sigh.
We're looking at major pacing issues, placeholder ui components, a HO scene with no HO, yet-to-be-implemented music, sound fx and vo, cursor inconsistencies, obscure leading and no exit button. It's a terrifying shambles.
But the wind effects are smashing.
As I maundered my way through the act compiling pages of notes, poor sweet coder Lucy turned rather pale. I do hope she's hardy enough to weather the approaching storm...
What the playthrough highlighted - or highlit - for me was the importance of immersion, and the influence that controlled forward motion wields over immersion. Every time a placeholder graphic sicked upon the screen, or a series of interactions invoked no aural response, or a line of dialogue came and went before I could register the meaning of its arcane shapes or even when a line of dialogue duelled for attention with the pretty coloured forms of a new zoom window, I was jolted further from the world. I can see the world there, interred in the earthy inadequacies and inconsistencies, and I even get to caress its bosom during those stolen moments of uninterrupted flow, but then she is dragged deeper beneath the soil, rent from my lips by the Valkyries of brokentude.
Silky forward motion is the womb of immersion, and credibility of meaning the, um, urethra. That would likely make sensory stuff the fallopian tubes.
Or, to put it another way, for the player to respond to any of the stimulae laced throughout the game like bear traps, the real world has to be kept apart from her conscious mind at all times. Hiccups within her artificial reality will fracture the cocoon which she willingly builds from the materials we provide for her. If the player isn't immersed, she won't care. It's one thing for me to state mid-blog post that Miss Thorn steps off a cliff, and quite another to immerse you into a vivid and interactive world of ethereal sights and sounds and lead you delicately to that one moment in time.
And that cocoon can be so very easily fractured at every single step.
MCF8: Escape from Ravenhearst came out. As predicted, the public reaction to this strange shaped wheel was mixed.
The two principal bones of contention were the morphing object scenes and the abstention from hints, followed closely by the text-less and user-unfriendly strategy guide, the invisible integration of CE material, the discriminatory minimum specs, and the question of taste, chased up by the omission of puzzles or mini-games.
There are two mechanical differences between a HO scene and a MO scene.
In a HO scene, the player is essentially given the instruction: Find several items in this scene.
In a MO scene, the instruction is: Find several items in this scene... oh, but they're only going to appear every five seconds or so.
You could also read the instructions this way:
HO scene: Find several items. Here's a list of those items.
MO scene: Find several items.
The results were:
* The momentum stalled as the player was required to wait for objects to reveal themselves. (The favoured simile was '...like watching paint dry'.)
* In order to identify items from subtle changes on the screen, players developed headaches or migraines.
I personally didn't mind the MO scenes (although they did appear with a dogmatic frequency).
It's certainly no surprise seeing Big Fish attempting to breathe new life into a tired formula.
It was a marginally risky decision. The bad decision, though, was to penalize the player for misclicking. Select a non-morphing object and a previously discovered morphing object is returned to the scene.
Attempting to find items in a HO scene causes a lull in the forward motion (due to the repetition and isolation), but does not interrupt it for the items are findable at all times.
Waiting for items to appear in a MO scene stalls the game.
Returning items to the scene reverses the flow of the game - just as the author who attempts flashbacks runs the risk of facing backwards.
Yep, we're back to the importance of forward motion - of continuously developing towards, and promising, a satisfying denouement.
Another way to stall is to remove hints. Player noodles, player reaches impasse, player thinks for a bit, player presses hint button and is back on track.
Take the end off that sentence and you leave the player in limbo without sign of resolution.
Curiously, the stalling and the reversing were sustained for longer than expected due to the life-giving nutrients provided by a cocoon wrought of detail and atmosphere - of rain splashing on leaves and lightning burnished upon the Irish Sea. This immersion cocoon was barely even grazed by the bottle opener which was used to move a boulder.
You know that 'instant rejection' faux pas? - that phrase in the covering letter that instantaneously raises a literary agent's blood pressure and hackles..?
Please find attached chapters five and seventeen. I know you requested the opening two chapters, but chapters five and seventeen are much better.
Yes, it's blinkin' difficult taking a sack of nothing and turning it immediately into something riveting and meaningful. But that's one of the skills a decent writer needs. I had the privilege of reading the MCF8 journal a few weeks ago. It was compelling stuff. (The last page was missing and I found myself cursing!)
So why oh why did Big Fish choose to open so coquettishly?
And do you know what they posted in the MCF8 forums?
This game has many chapters with several twists and turns, so you may want to play through more than just the demo before leaving feedback.
Really? You keep all that juicy stuff out of the demo and expect people to assume that the game is going to improve and that they should take your word for it and buy the full game?
Righty, that's an evening of Skyrimming that I've sacrificed for you my lovely maggoteers (or, more likely, for the opportunity to alchemize formless thoughts into barely decipherable sentences to see if I have anything to be concerned about). Are we doomed, or simply at a necessary and inevitable point in the development cycle? In the spirit of forward motion: let's go find out. (Insert ellipsis here.)
This caught my eye - presumably due to its claim to the 'experimental interactive narrative' throne.
Reviews are all acceptably favourable, with the same flaws being flagged across the board.
Intrigued, I followed the pixel trail to the dev's blog.
I have to say, I greatly admire Alexei for what he has achieved and for what he attempted to achieve. And throughout his blog, he references a canoe-ful of the major game design books, so he's clearly studied his craft. Most impressive is the way he's handled the recurring negatives (although you'd have to question his 'I agree' remarks for it's difficult to imagine that the public would give two marsupials whether he agreed with them or not).
Anyhoo, do go and take a looksee.
Sooo... two days from usability submission and I got to play the opening act today. Yep, two days to go and we start the playthrough. Sigh.
We're looking at major pacing issues, placeholder ui components, a HO scene with no HO, yet-to-be-implemented music, sound fx and vo, cursor inconsistencies, obscure leading and no exit button. It's a terrifying shambles.
But the wind effects are smashing.
As I maundered my way through the act compiling pages of notes, poor sweet coder Lucy turned rather pale. I do hope she's hardy enough to weather the approaching storm...
What the playthrough highlighted - or highlit - for me was the importance of immersion, and the influence that controlled forward motion wields over immersion. Every time a placeholder graphic sicked upon the screen, or a series of interactions invoked no aural response, or a line of dialogue came and went before I could register the meaning of its arcane shapes or even when a line of dialogue duelled for attention with the pretty coloured forms of a new zoom window, I was jolted further from the world. I can see the world there, interred in the earthy inadequacies and inconsistencies, and I even get to caress its bosom during those stolen moments of uninterrupted flow, but then she is dragged deeper beneath the soil, rent from my lips by the Valkyries of brokentude.
Silky forward motion is the womb of immersion, and credibility of meaning the, um, urethra. That would likely make sensory stuff the fallopian tubes.
Or, to put it another way, for the player to respond to any of the stimulae laced throughout the game like bear traps, the real world has to be kept apart from her conscious mind at all times. Hiccups within her artificial reality will fracture the cocoon which she willingly builds from the materials we provide for her. If the player isn't immersed, she won't care. It's one thing for me to state mid-blog post that Miss Thorn steps off a cliff, and quite another to immerse you into a vivid and interactive world of ethereal sights and sounds and lead you delicately to that one moment in time.
And that cocoon can be so very easily fractured at every single step.
MCF8: Escape from Ravenhearst came out. As predicted, the public reaction to this strange shaped wheel was mixed.
The two principal bones of contention were the morphing object scenes and the abstention from hints, followed closely by the text-less and user-unfriendly strategy guide, the invisible integration of CE material, the discriminatory minimum specs, and the question of taste, chased up by the omission of puzzles or mini-games.
There are two mechanical differences between a HO scene and a MO scene.
In a HO scene, the player is essentially given the instruction: Find several items in this scene.
In a MO scene, the instruction is: Find several items in this scene... oh, but they're only going to appear every five seconds or so.
You could also read the instructions this way:
HO scene: Find several items. Here's a list of those items.
MO scene: Find several items.
The results were:
* The momentum stalled as the player was required to wait for objects to reveal themselves. (The favoured simile was '...like watching paint dry'.)
* In order to identify items from subtle changes on the screen, players developed headaches or migraines.
I personally didn't mind the MO scenes (although they did appear with a dogmatic frequency).
It's certainly no surprise seeing Big Fish attempting to breathe new life into a tired formula.
It was a marginally risky decision. The bad decision, though, was to penalize the player for misclicking. Select a non-morphing object and a previously discovered morphing object is returned to the scene.
Attempting to find items in a HO scene causes a lull in the forward motion (due to the repetition and isolation), but does not interrupt it for the items are findable at all times.
Waiting for items to appear in a MO scene stalls the game.
Returning items to the scene reverses the flow of the game - just as the author who attempts flashbacks runs the risk of facing backwards.
Yep, we're back to the importance of forward motion - of continuously developing towards, and promising, a satisfying denouement.
Another way to stall is to remove hints. Player noodles, player reaches impasse, player thinks for a bit, player presses hint button and is back on track.
Take the end off that sentence and you leave the player in limbo without sign of resolution.
Curiously, the stalling and the reversing were sustained for longer than expected due to the life-giving nutrients provided by a cocoon wrought of detail and atmosphere - of rain splashing on leaves and lightning burnished upon the Irish Sea. This immersion cocoon was barely even grazed by the bottle opener which was used to move a boulder.
You know that 'instant rejection' faux pas? - that phrase in the covering letter that instantaneously raises a literary agent's blood pressure and hackles..?
Please find attached chapters five and seventeen. I know you requested the opening two chapters, but chapters five and seventeen are much better.
Yes, it's blinkin' difficult taking a sack of nothing and turning it immediately into something riveting and meaningful. But that's one of the skills a decent writer needs. I had the privilege of reading the MCF8 journal a few weeks ago. It was compelling stuff. (The last page was missing and I found myself cursing!)
So why oh why did Big Fish choose to open so coquettishly?
And do you know what they posted in the MCF8 forums?
This game has many chapters with several twists and turns, so you may want to play through more than just the demo before leaving feedback. Really? You keep all that juicy stuff out of the demo and expect people to assume that the game is going to improve and that they should take your word for it and buy the full game?
Righty, that's an evening of Skyrimming that I've sacrificed for you my lovely maggoteers (or, more likely, for the opportunity to alchemize formless thoughts into barely decipherable sentences to see if I have anything to be concerned about). Are we doomed, or simply at a necessary and inevitable point in the development cycle? In the spirit of forward motion: let's go find out. (Insert ellipsis here.)
Saturday, 12 November 2011
Christmas's Children
Continuing a thread from my last post: here's the John Lewis Christmas advert that's reducing everyone to tears. It's one minute and thirty seconds long.
My thoughts on the employment of children as emotional pawns in fiction have changed several times over the last five years or so. They're such easy triggers. I have to confess that I wasn't expecting the young Edwina scene in M3 to move people to tears - rather, I was expecting goosebumps as a prelude to the denouement. I felt terribly amateurish when I learned that I hadn't controlled my players.
I guess children are the embodiment of all that is good, pure and innocent in the world, which gives us a pretty darned powerful default to begin with.
Here's Hemingway's six word flash:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Here are the Man Booker winners.
I'm not counting, but I can see at a glance that a healthy dollop of them, and possibly the majority, adopt the pov of a child, either in first-person or in third limited, either in flashback (recollection) or in present tense (or even both). Certainly I can recount a good deal of short-listed child povs too. (M. J. Hyland's Carry me Down is still a personal fave.) Moreover, it was Anne Enright's The Gathering that made me begin to question my treatment of fictional children (and last year's short-listed Room [Emma Donoghue] was a wholly predictable confirmation). I'd done my share of child cruelty, riding on the wave of child abuse books that were en vogue at the time, but I knew I would always, always make amends before the closing line, and I would avoid anything relentless. Anne's relentless tone disturbed me* - which is as valid an emotional hit as any other - and I vowed there and then (-ish) to find my own ethical and emotional stance. And we mustn't forget the trauma of Torey Hayden's unresolved Ghost Girl.
As such, I refused to allow young Edwina to watch as her father burned to death AND I would only allow such a flashback to occur once I had clearly imparted the knowledge that adult Edwina was just fine.
I'm genuinely haunted by The Darling Buds of May. I simply can't get my head around it. See how I was mentally subverting the plots not so long ago, warping them into drama. That's to say that it really doesn't qualify as drama, does it? (Or am I mistakenly assuming that drama is comprised of the dramatic?) I adore that show, and countless other people adore that show, but my head cannot imagine how I could make such a tepid (I use that word without any derogatory connotations) topography work for today's audiences, let alone for your average gamer. I guess Ico comes as close to the Darling Buds topography as any other game (and hopefully The Last Guardian: see video on right), with its gorgeous environments, bloodless skirmishes, and ethereal soundtrack and ceaseless winds.
That's where I've pitched Margrave 4, and I'm comfortable with that decision...
Could it be, however, that the big money is buried in horror..? Here's the trailer for the forthcoming MCF release: Escape from Ravenhearst. (Those teeth are far too clean!)
*On second thoughts, I think I found The Gathering depressing more so than disturbing. Anne's world seemed bleak and grey to me, in stark contrast to the previous winner, in which Sai inhabited a world of exciting and vivid colours and smells and tastes.
My thoughts on the employment of children as emotional pawns in fiction have changed several times over the last five years or so. They're such easy triggers. I have to confess that I wasn't expecting the young Edwina scene in M3 to move people to tears - rather, I was expecting goosebumps as a prelude to the denouement. I felt terribly amateurish when I learned that I hadn't controlled my players.
I guess children are the embodiment of all that is good, pure and innocent in the world, which gives us a pretty darned powerful default to begin with.
Here's Hemingway's six word flash:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Here are the Man Booker winners.
I'm not counting, but I can see at a glance that a healthy dollop of them, and possibly the majority, adopt the pov of a child, either in first-person or in third limited, either in flashback (recollection) or in present tense (or even both). Certainly I can recount a good deal of short-listed child povs too. (M. J. Hyland's Carry me Down is still a personal fave.) Moreover, it was Anne Enright's The Gathering that made me begin to question my treatment of fictional children (and last year's short-listed Room [Emma Donoghue] was a wholly predictable confirmation). I'd done my share of child cruelty, riding on the wave of child abuse books that were en vogue at the time, but I knew I would always, always make amends before the closing line, and I would avoid anything relentless. Anne's relentless tone disturbed me* - which is as valid an emotional hit as any other - and I vowed there and then (-ish) to find my own ethical and emotional stance. And we mustn't forget the trauma of Torey Hayden's unresolved Ghost Girl.
As such, I refused to allow young Edwina to watch as her father burned to death AND I would only allow such a flashback to occur once I had clearly imparted the knowledge that adult Edwina was just fine.
I'm genuinely haunted by The Darling Buds of May. I simply can't get my head around it. See how I was mentally subverting the plots not so long ago, warping them into drama. That's to say that it really doesn't qualify as drama, does it? (Or am I mistakenly assuming that drama is comprised of the dramatic?) I adore that show, and countless other people adore that show, but my head cannot imagine how I could make such a tepid (I use that word without any derogatory connotations) topography work for today's audiences, let alone for your average gamer. I guess Ico comes as close to the Darling Buds topography as any other game (and hopefully The Last Guardian: see video on right), with its gorgeous environments, bloodless skirmishes, and ethereal soundtrack and ceaseless winds.
That's where I've pitched Margrave 4, and I'm comfortable with that decision...
Could it be, however, that the big money is buried in horror..? Here's the trailer for the forthcoming MCF release: Escape from Ravenhearst. (Those teeth are far too clean!)
*On second thoughts, I think I found The Gathering depressing more so than disturbing. Anne's world seemed bleak and grey to me, in stark contrast to the previous winner, in which Sai inhabited a world of exciting and vivid colours and smells and tastes.
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