With both Dead Space 2 released and Dead Space 2: Severed announced I have been thinking a lot about potential side-projects for my suddenly free evenings. Going through the processes of defining what sort of game I would make got me thinking more about my overall design philosophy and I hope to record a few of those ideas here.

The first goal in all of my designs is a sense of discovery or wonder. I owe a lot of debt here to Steve Gaynor’s blog, particularly his post Play. He lays this out better than I could and so I just refer you there. Through this sense wonder the player becomes invested or engrossed in the world. By creating a universe of logical if not realistic rules it is possible to facilitate this discovery.

The second goal is that of theme.  All good works of art have a theme or intent behind the creation. The creator doesn’t always have to spell out the theme, or there could be several interlocking in the work, but through themes and symbols we find meaning in art. This is something video games do very poorly and rarely. I would like to create a game that take the very simple theme of growing up and becoming independent and run that through all parts of the work. Thus not just the player will grow, but the world will change as time passes and characters within it will react to the both of these changing forces. Fable tried this but got lost, it became more about just providing choice, with no focused theme. A strong central theme should tie narrative, context and gameplay together. This would be a core part of the mechanics and the narrative. Ultimately the theme of the game should impact what the player does, how he/she does it, and what it all means.

My third goal does not stand solely on its own, but rather informs a few other design ideas. This is the concept of narrative density and creating a space where each distinct section has significance. I view a game like King’s Quest or Quest for Glory as much an open world as many modern sandbox games, just with a better content / square foot ratio. The potential of most MMO games to create a living, breathing world is hurt significantly by how spread out and hard to navigate the world’s are. If the narrative was compacted down into a smaller space where the player could interact with it better, the existing content would be more effective. This has gotten a bit off track, but I think things can be brought back to a point. Here we go: To create a living space it must be filled with characters and activities. A believable world is not a few hot spots of activity filled with empty space between like in most modern sandbox games. Since budgets are limited and content hard to create, using a small town location where every shop or house can be interacted with creates a better effort to reward ratio.

The forth goal is player choice. Now everyone wants this, but not everyone means the same thing by it. In my case, I think the player should be allowed to play the game as he or she sees fit. The player doesn’t need to create a character or a world or collect items or whatever for there to be player choice, it is in the mechanics that choice really matters. This is not to say that I am against narrative choice, I think that is more the narrative reacting to situations where the player has made mechanical choices. The idea here is that the virtual world has a set of rules and in each challenge the player is allowed to reach the goal using whatever means the world provides. There doesn’t have to be more than one solution (or resolution i suppose), but there needs to be more than one way of getting there. Ideally this all happens within the same family of systems like in Deus Ex or Vampire Bloodlines, but I don’t think that always has to be the case.

I hope to develop a better understanding of what I want from mechanics design by prototyping a few game ideas in the next few months. At the very least, expect this list to get refined and expanded in the future.

I was a speaker this year at the Vancouver Game Design Expo on Jan 24th. My presentation covered what I have learned about using horror effectively while working on Dead Space 2. The raw slides are attached here as a PDF. I will be doing future posts which will go into the topics covered in the presentation, but in more detail than I was able to fit in 30 minutes.

[Download PDF]

At the tail end of last term we entered TaxiCity into the FTW Competition. A few weeks ago the announced the finalist and to our surprise TaxiCity was nominated in two categories! Now all the votes have been tallied and we are walking away with the award for best student application, which really is awesome. The winner of best open data application and the overall competition, Find-A-Home, is far more complete in execution than our project., though I feel our concept is a more unique use of open data. TaxiCity really has garnered a lot more interest than I think any of us expected when the project began, and I hope it continues in the future.

In many cases, a rich narrative is created by having a complex main character and focusing on the intricacies of that person’s journey. Supporting characters will occasionally have depth, but more often than not are just a part of the evolution of the main character. The films I have screened for CG&FN recently fall into this category, Heaven and Dog Day Afternoon are both very focused tales, with the world as a backdrop for the main characters. This focus results in a story with a narrow breadth, but expansive depth, much like a well.

For static media this system works very well, the audience needs a character to follow and become invested in, change is easier to show when you are following an individual. With few exceptions (the films of Robert Altman comes to mind), most films and books do not feature an ensemble cast. In contrast to film, this approach does not work for most games because the main character is not fully under the control of the narrative. Creating a protagonist which the player does not exert some level of control over pulls the attention off of the player’s input and thus undermines the value of the interaction. A solution which RPG designers have long used is created a world filled with character, each of which has a relatively small amount of narrative. This creates a narrative that is very broad, but not particularly deep at any one point. There can be the same or more narrative volume, but less concentrated into individual characters.

Unlike the well of narrative above, this structure looks more like a lake in which the player can swim around. This encourages exploration and by placing narrative content within characters out of the players direct control, we avoid limiting the player actions to do world-building. Another advantage of this approach is that this narrative content is optional, providing the depth for explorers and not getting in the way of other players. This is not to say all games should use this structure (many of my favorite games do not), but when paired with the funnel concept of my Narrative Leeway post, I think this forms a good basis for creating an open-world narrative experience.

I think this is generally understood intuitively by those working in the games industry, but explicitly  categorizing successfully approaches is the only way to gain the understanding required to move narrative in interactive media forward.

]]> http://www.altereddreams.net/writing/narrative-volume/feed/ 0 http://www.altereddreams.net/cgfn-2010/the-story-of-bungie/ http://www.altereddreams.net/cgfn-2010/the-story-of-bungie/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:21:04 +0000 Seth Marinello http://www.altereddreams.net/?p=1113 This week for CG&FN we will be looking at the history of Bungie and playing Marathon 2 LAN. Specifically I will be talking about the role narrative has played within Bungie’s games and in the community built around them. Bungie has always engaged with its fans and created experiences deep enough that people remain engrossed long after the game is released. The same can be seen in Blizzards games, though they do it through continually refining (and thus enhancing the depth) the gameplay of their titles, rather than through narrative like Bungie. Being a Bungie fan in the late 1990′s was almost like participating in an ARG. I find it interesting that Halo 2 had one of the most successful ARGs to date.

Further Reading:

• bungie.org - bungie fan site
• Marathon’s Story – analysis of marathons story
• Pathways into Darkness – the predecessor to marathon & halo

Downloads:

[Marathon 2 for OS X] [Slides]

Jimson and the Jazz Crabs is a simple adventure game created in the classic style of Sierra On-line. I started this game because I needed a project to keep busy while looking for a job after graduation. The game character Jimson is based on one of my roommates in college and the Jazz Crabs were inspired by a song titled “Jazz Crabs” by You Say Party! We Say Die!. The game was created in Adventure Game Studio since it would allow me to get right down to making the kind of a game I wanted.

Originally I began this project just to keep busy and entertain my roommates, but people who don’t even understand the inside jokes seem to enjoy the game. I stopped development when I first moved home, but one day I had an idea how to complete a quest line I’d been stuck on and sat down to add it into the game. A few days later I had finished the game and had a some friends test it out. Taking their feedback into account I streamlined the game so it made more sense and released a final version. I have to say the feedback from my initial version was key, without that I am sure many of the people who have played it since my final release would have gotten frustrated and not completed the game.

[Download] [Walkthrough]

[Link]

Newtonian Drop is a physics-based Source-Mod. Players navigate a science research center where they interact with with objects powered by the Havok physics engine. The intent of the project was to create an interactive illustration of basic physics principles.

The mod was created by a team of 5 students for our Building Virtial Worlds class.

I was primarily responsible for combining, texturing and polishing the individual exhibits into a single coherent environment. The greatest challenge of this project was the lack of fidelity and control over physics in Half-Life 2. The physics objects work well for the fast paced gameplay of death-match, but values such as fiction and gravity are not editable from within the level editor. This greatly limited which concepts we could successfully illustrate, but I feel the final product demonstrates the value of our original vision.

[Download]