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 have been working on TaxiCity since the end of January, but between getting the project rolling and the Olympics I haven’t had much time to update the site. This ends now!

TaxiCity is a Silverlight game created using open data from the City of Vancouver and the public Bing Maps API. Our team is working with Microsoft Government and David Eaves to create an engaging and interactive display of freely available data. In the game players will play as a taxi driver in Vancouver, picking up passengers and delivering them to key landmark locations in the city. Real world geometry creates the game map and the route tracking services provided by Bing will be used to guide the player to his/her destination.

Along with the game we are creating a generalized Silverlight game engine which we hope to release under an open source license when complete. Our tools for converting the open data into a game world will also be released so other citys or regions could be added in the future.

We are tracking development on taxicity.ca, which contains weekly builds of the game. Go check it out!

In collaboration with Global EESE, a student team at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver, BC has been working on an interactive simulation. The simulation intends to make vivid some of the future scenarios developed by Global EESE. The experience takes place in a 3D environment where the player is presented with a familiar scene set in the present day and a future scene set in 2032.

The future scenario manifests the worst outcomes of the present scenarios. Within the 3D environment are a series of characters with whom the player can interact. Through these conversations the player learns of the characters situations and perspectives on the environment. As the conversations progress the player makes certain decisions, influencing the characters to be more aware of the environment and potential risks. If the player successfully convinces the characters to be more aware they create a positive change in the future. The player can move between the future and the present as they complete puzzles and conversations to see the effects of their choices. When the game is completed a montage depicting the future sums up the consequences of the players choices.

The simulation was built in the game engine Unity using traditional game design methodology combined with the research and work of Global EESE.

The team at the Centre for Digital Media consists of artists, game designers, writers, and programmers.

My Role:

Our initial project assignment was to create a “vivid” and “human” representation of scenario data compile by the Department of Energy. To meet these needs I worked with our lead game designer to create the concept of Precipice. Officially I held the role of Team Lead on the project, but I also assisted in a number of other areas in addition to scheduling the project and integrating the work of team members.

A key component of our game is the dialogue engine which display the comic panels in sync with audio clips and text. We originally purchased a pre-built dialogue engine, knowing we did not have time to start from scratch, but it quickly became apparent we had needs that would require lots of customization. As the most experience coder on the team, I worked with the designer and art team to create the comic layout system and modify the dialogue file format to speed development of our specific product.

One of the greatest challenges on this project was the sheer amount of content we had to create, and I utilized my visual art skills to assist the art team in keeping on schedule. Working with our writing team, I designed all of the in-game posters, bulletin boards, and narrative artifacts such as the newspapers. I also created a number of the comic panels, following a style guide created by our art lead.

The last major component I created was the User Interface for tracking as players progress and displaying text on the screen. We had initially wanted a minimal UI, but through play testing it became apparent we needed more feedback in our game. Since everyone else was still working hard on getting content finalized, I took on the task of designing and coding the UI.

Precipice was an ambitious project, we started with global scenarios and distilled that information down into one 3D Café and 400+ comic panels in two time zones. Due to the level of skill and dedication the team brought to the effort, we were able to complete all major features and deliver a product the client loved without having to work significant overtime or extend our schedule. There remains, as with any project, many good ideas left on the cutting room floor, but I am proud of what we accomplished.

[Download]

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]

Vale of Tears is a small game I made with Matthew Hanns Schroeter for our Game Design class in Fall 2009. We have a very limited time to make the game as the focus was on testing the product. I did all of the coding and menu/background art, while Matt did all of the character design and animation work. We pitched the game as follows:

In a dystopian 19th Century England, a novitiate of the Second Order with the passion for spiritual life is gifted with the ability to fly from the darkest areas of inter-natural communication. Left to test her strength of character against a ravaged landscape littered with temptation and sin, she must return to the cloister to prove that everybody – no matter how evil they are, can be saved.

The player assumes the control of Sister Clare, guiding her through the air to dodge and absorb helpful spirits who can be helpful.  As she collects spirits, the sanctity of the cloister is re-enforced against the assault of evil. In the end she faces a minion of hell in a true test of her virtue.

We set out to make a game so dark and ridiculous that the serious subject matter could be taken lightly. I am not sure if achieved our objective, but the simple gameplay is entertaining for a weekend, and I enjoyed putting it together.

[Check it out]

Suzy’s Curtain Call is an interactive storybook about the life and death of a young girl. The project was created for my first Visual Story class at the Centre for Digital Media during the Fall 2008 term. Suzy’s Curtain Call was the first time I took on the role of Producer in my graduate studies. I pitched the initial concept of a ruined carnival as the death-world for a little girl and formed a team around the idea. One of the biggest challenges of the project was the amount of art assets and the difference in style between the two artists on the team. One of my major responsibilities was working to integrate the two styles and ensuring characters and locations were recognizable when transitioning between the cut-paper look of the memories and the painted look of the death-world.

All of the memory art assets were created using hand drawn images which were then torn and scanned into Photoshop. I assisted in layering, coloring and finally assembling the individual objects into the scenes. For a number of the memory scenes I created the background image and edited the music selections.

The complicated art production process took far longer than we had originally estimated, causing the whole narrative to come together only at the last moment. I really wish we had been able to test the experience earlier because the final product is a bit confusing on first viewing. Small details we spent hours designing are not even noticed by users because we didn’t set them up correctly.

That said, of the team projects I have worked on, this probably reflects my own personal style the most and I am proud of what we accomplished. I hope someday to take the assets from this project and create a more interactive game experience.

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