Grounded: A Portal 2 Level, Part 3

Evenin'! This round is going to be all about the playtesting that I did for my level. If you haven't yet, check out Part 1 and Part 2 to get up to speed! Or don't! I'm not your real dad! I can't tell you what to do!

...Anyway, the playtesting I did for my level was incredibly helpful. Mostly because it pinpointed exactly why the level was so incredibly terrible! That allowed me to go in and exorcise all the terribleness from the map with relative...still difficulty. Well, without further ado, here are my fantastic playtesting notes:

The people I had playtest my level had very similar reactions, making it easy to pinpoint what needed changing. My biggest tweaks were in regards to conveyance.

• Washing off the paint
• Since it wasn’t utilized this way in the game, people weren’t used to the idea that they might need to wash paint away to reveal a puzzle element. One tester told me that he assumed that the water was just there “in case you needed it later”, and didn’t think to use it on the paint that was already there.
• I took a bit of a risk here. I wanted to make it more clear that you needed to use the water to wash off the paint, but I also didn’t want to make it incredibly obvious. As one of the more novel parts of my level, I wanted it to stand out. So, I opted for more subtle hints at it, relying mainly on the fact that, pretty soon after the level begins, there’s nothing you left to do but use the water. Since I assume players know how water works, I bet on everyone at the very least trying it once they ran out of options. This could actually be a good thing, as the surprise of the “well, guess I’ll just try this” being successful could create a memorable moment.
• Changes I made:
• Made the water in view as soon as the player falls into the room rather than behind the player
• Put a subtle spotlight on the area of the paint-covered wall that needed to be washed
• Made the only portalable wall in the main room facing the paint-covered wall
• Changed the cracked panel underneath the paint (to be broken with a bomb) to a more obvious texture
• Used a type of paint that would serve no purpose in the level and put it only in places where it was easy to discern that it was unneeded for its own mechanics.
• This would have been easier to convey through narrative, but I recognized early on that I would not have enough time to create the narrative aspects that I had originally planned and had to adjust accordingly
• Bombs!
• Initially, there was a button very close to the player when they fell into the room. This button would launch a bomb downwards into a deadly water pit, landing on top of a floating, portalable platform.
• My level has a whole lot of breakable platforms and surfaces, and it became clear through watching all the testers that I needed to convey the breaking-things-with-bombs theme of the level. Players took a while to realize what could and could not be broken.
• Changes I made:
• As mentioned above, the first thing I did was make the breakable wall tile more obviously different from the rest. It still matched, but was much more cracked and broken. I didn’t want to go with something like a huge bullseye, because it was definitely a moment where I wanted to player to feel clever.
• More grates! I added a grate to the initial drop into the level that breaks underneath your feet (unintended bonus: it causes damage to the player, turning the screen red and bringing even more attention to it! Also, when you land, the gibs fall around you.) in order to introduce make the idea of breaking surfaces more prominent.
• I also added a grate directly underneath the bomb dropper. This was one of the more important changes I made. The end goal of the level is to break open a grate back into the vents on the ceiling by sending a bomb through a tractor beam. I was finding that this wasn’t clear enough to the players, so I added an identical grate underneath the bomb dropper, which the first bomb would break.
• I then noticed that players weren’t actually seeing the bomb break the grate is it was above their field of vision. So, I added both a spotlight and a beam light that shine down from the bomb dropper a couple seconds before a bomb is released. As a bonus, this also made it look a lot cooler.
• Instead of having the bomb immediately fall into the pit of deadly water, I left the floor over it, allowing the first (well, second) bomb to break the floor and reveal the water below, along with the two portalable platforms inside it. In addition to bringing more attention to the breaking stuff, it also brought attention to the pit and the platforms inside it.
• I left one breakable platform in without making it obvious: the platform that holds two of the turrets in the “closet” room. I left this in because there are multiple ways to solve that room, and the surprise of the breaking platform was just too good to take out.
• The bomb button!
• I spent more time tweaking this than any part of the level. As I mentioned before, it was originally placed very close to where the player drops into the level to incentivise using it early. The issues with the button were that it needed to be somewhere where it was easy to use, clear, and in full view of everything that it needed to be.
• At first, from the location of the button, players couldn’t see the platform the bomb landed on. So I moved it closer to the actual bomb dropper. But then the bomb dropper grate was even more out of their field of vision, making players less likely to see the grate being broken.
• Also, at that location, it took players too long to get back to the closet room, preventing them from seeing the actual effects of the bombs that they were sending there (they could still see the aftermath, of course, but it made it hard to tweak portal positioning and took away from the satisfaction of seeing things blow up).
• When I introduced the block-button for changing the direction of the tractor beam, it had to be very close to the location of the bomb button while simultaneously being in a location that gave the player time to place a portal underneath the exit grate immediately after pulling the bomb through the tractor beam portal, then pull the box off the tractor beam to send the bomb back in the right direction. This was way too hard for players to finesse and subsequently didn’t feel like the intended solution.
• Changes I made
• After moving it back and forth around the floor of the main room, I decided that I would change it more drastically. I decided to put the button on top of the divider separating the two sides of the room (the divider wall + the water pit cut off the player from the other side of the room, which was the side with the exit grate). Since the floor now didn’t give way to the water pit until the button was first pressed, this forced the player to see the other side of the room before seeing the floor. This exposed the viewer to the angled portalable panel behind the divider wall early on. This was an essential surface for getting the bomb into the tractor beam and I found that players weren’t noticing it early enough.
• Placing the button on top of the divider wall also forced players into a better view of the break-away floor when they were pressing the button, as the only way to get up to it takes the player in a direction the points them toward the bomb-dropper and floor.
• This seemed genius to me until I realized that once you pressed the button once and jumped down to get to the closet room...there was no easy way to get back to the button, making the closet room far more difficult.
• My first attempt to fix that was to put some physics boxes on top of the wall that the player could take down to make getting back up to the button easier once you’ve already done it once. This was an awful and terrible idea.
• My final solution worked out quite well: I decided that the quick moving back and forth from the button to wherever you’re placing a portal was not fun, and the layout of the level prevented any sort of optimal position for the button. So, I left the button on top of the divider, as I found it did work well to get players to see all the elements of the level. I then added some lights to illuminate the button, making it a more obvious desirable target from the get-go. The biggest change was to make the button only require one press, which set the bombs to release at even intervals constantly for the rest of the level.
• Since the button only needs to be pressed once, pressing the button also turns off the spotlights on the button and then makes the button explode because seriously nobody liked that stupid button. Also, it made it clear that it was no longer needed by the player. Killed two birds with one explosion! As a bonus, everybody likes explosions. So three birds, really.
• The tractor-beam reversal button
• A lot of the problems with this button tied into that horrible bomb button which has already been dealt with. But it had some of its own problems, too. The button was required in order to reverse the direction of the tractor beam, allowing a bomb to travel backwards through the portal, then out in a different direction after the player has placed a new portal.
• This required too much very quick and accurate portal placement for players.
• Changes I made:
• I originally doubled the speed of the tractor beam to avoid boring the player when it needed to be used to spread white gel around the level. However, when reversed, it was far too fast, giving the player very little time to place a new portal and reverse the direction before the bomb hit the tractor beam spawner. I didn’t want to make everything slower, as that would create a lot of tedium. So, I made the button change the reversal speed to 1/5th that of the forward speed, but kept the forward speed intact.
• I moved the button to the side of the room with the exit. This made it much easier for players to perform the portal switcheroo, as the location for the exit portal was close.
• Since the button for switching the direction of the tractor beam was in the main room and accessible before the player could even activate the tractor beam, it was confusing. So, first I made it into a cube-only button. Since there are no cubes in the main room, this clued players in to the fact that they weren’t supposed to use it yet. In addition, I put it in a dark corner of the room that gets lit up only after the tractor beam has been activated, making it clear when it becomes important.
• The exit
• It wasn’t clear enough to players from the get-go that the end goal of the level was to get up out of a grate similar to the one you came in through on the other side of the room.
• Changes I made:
• As previously mentioned, I added more breaking grates and walls into the level to let the player know that it was possible.
• I shined a strong spotlight down from the exit shaft, making it the brightest thing in the level. I also made it flicker erratically, drawing attention to it and leaving a brightly marked area on the floor beneath it.
• The closet room
• In comparison to the relatively large and open area of the main room, this room was meant to be a contrastingly claustrophobic room, containing the white gel dispenser, the tractor beam, turrets, and frankencubes.
• Initially, it was just a mess. It had two rows of shelves on either side, and the top shelf held three turrets each. The bottom shelves held nothing, but were slightly longer than the top shelves, allowing the player to hide underneath them from turret fire. This was stupid and no one realized that they would be safe under the shelves.
• In addition, the room was simply boring and if you did manage to get past the turrets, involved just a button press.
• Changes I made:
• This room ended up being quite successful, giving the player a lot of creative freedom in solving it.
• I took out a turret from each side, leaving 4 total. This gave the player far more time to react.
• The white gel dispenser now turns on immediately upon opening the door, allowing it to be used in solving the room.
• The bottom shelves were a different (portlable) texture than the top shelves, and one of them was fallen and at an angle. This allowed the player to shoot either white gel or bombs (or both!) up at the turrets, which also gave more portal access to the room, allowing solutions involving chaining white gel through portals, shoot bombs at the other side, or throw frankencubes through to knock down the turrets.
• I added a bunch of portal boxes to the intact first shelf, blocking the initial view of the tractor beam from the doorway. I did this as to not distract players, as otherwise the tractor beam emitter and the white gel would be revealed simultaneously. This made the white gel the initial focus, as intended. It also added a lot to the cluttered aesthetic of the room, and added a bit of mystery to the objective.
• Debris
• I originally had some decorative debris throughout the level, but most players were distracted by it and spent too much time making sure that none of it was needed for the level, so I took pretty much all of it out.
• Exploits
• A couple players discovered some tricky ways to get over the dividing wall in ways they weren’t supposed to, so I closed all those up. I made sure to still leave room for experimentation and creative solutions, so I only took out the unintended things that were too trivial and easy

So yeah, lots of changes. As always, testing and iterating is the most important part of design! Oh and here's a picture of the button exploding:

Ha!

Boom! That's right, nobody likes you, button! Get a real job!

Here are some more early button placements:

Just chillin' here in the middle of the room for no reason. Don't mind me.

Hey guys just peekin' out to see what's up. Oh, what's that? You can't really see me at all? And if you press me from the front you'll get blown into a deadly water pit? No, don't worry about that. Working as intended.

Almost there! Too bad that once I'm pressed the first time and the ground in front of me is destroyed, there's no way to get back to me! ha! suckers!

Final (for now...) button placement. Sweet, sweet button harmony!

• • • •  

Grounded: A Portal 2 Level, Part 2

Greetings! Last time, I talked about the concept behind the Portal 2 level that I'm working on. Now it's time to get a bit more into the process.

First things first: Hammer is hard. Okay, well, not that hard. But for an amateur, it took me longer to get used to it than I expected (though it did happen, and now I feel like a pro intermediate!). This required me to scale down my initial design a lot, at least for my first run at the level. I decided to take out the narrative completely for the first version, as it got in the way of making the actual puzzle design as good as it could be within the time-frame I had to make it. I still designed it with the narrative concept in mind, so it won't require an overhaul to add in the narrative in the future.

I came into this project with very little knowledge of Hammer, but within a week I was feeling pretty confident in my abilities. The hardest thing wasn't figuring out how to use the program itself, but figuring out how to figure out how to use the program. With programs like Hammer, there's always more to learn. I started off with some basic tutorials to get me acclimated, then looked for other tutorials on specifics. That kept getting me snagged, especially since most of the tutorials online are videos and take some time to get through.

What ended up helping me the most was finding a community level that had a lot of the aspects that I wanted in my level, then decompiling it and reverse engineering its features in Hammer. I had two instances of Hammer open at a time, one with my level and one with a completed level. This ended up being a much faster way for me to learn, as the context was directly related to what I was doing and I could look at specific little parts instantly. I got proficient enough to start figuring things out on my own, which is an incredibly rewarding feeling.

My canvas!

I decided to start out by using the in-game Portal 2 level editor to create a basic layout for my map, which allowed me to spend more time on the actual mechanics of the level. It was incredibly easy to export it to a Hammer file. The only issue I ran into is the fact that everything was modular. Every single square of the walls was its own brush, so I had to clean it out and simplify it.

Cubes... cubes everywhere.

I realized that my ideas for puzzle elements weren't enough to make a level. I needed a more cohesive, high-level design idea to really get things going. I came up with two basic themes to shape my level around: juxtaposition of size and allowing for creative problem solving. As you can see in the layout, The main part of my map consisted of a very large room attached to a very small one. I called the small section the "closet", and one of the main themes became taking things (mainly white gel) out of the claustrophobic closet and spreading them around the large room.

Soon, I had basic, playable level. Well, it wasn't beatable...but it was playable! The next step, of course, was to playtest it...

"Supporting" in Guild Wars 2

It's true that, in Guild Wars 2, there's no such thing as a dedicated "support class". But it's also true that a player can individually try to "support" in specific encounters, and the game doesn't do enough to reward that. This isn't specific to World vs. World, either. "Supporting", in the more literal and moment-to-moment sense of the word, is possible in GW2, and it's much more dynamic than the current trope of pigeon-holing "support" into dedicated character classes whose job it is to heal players and use crowd control on enemies.

Why WoW's New Talent System is Better than the Old One

I just got World of Warcraft's new expansion, Mists of Pandaria, a couple days ago for the age old reason that my friends were playing it and I didn't want to be alone.

I've yet to experience any of the post-level 85 content, but I absolutely love the new talent system.

Grounded: A Portal 2 Level, Part 1

I've been working on a Portal 2 level in Hammer for the past couple weeks. But before I get to the Hammer bits, let's talk about the planning for my level!

My original idea was very narrative-based. After I came up with the overall story/theme of the level, I set about thinking of ways to make the gameplay elements support the narrative. Being a student of moment-based design, I also came up with some key memorable moments that I wanted to accomplish. Here's the document I came up with:

GROUNDED: A PORTAL 2 LEVEL

Concept:
Player falls through a floorboard of a test chamber into the “bedroom” of the “surly teenager” personality core, has to find a way through the dirty, disorganized room, cleaning it up along the way.

Key Features/Moments:

• Voiced surly teenager personality core (maybe have to carry it around?)
• Allusion to a teenager’s dirty bedroom
• Use water to clean off gel “stains”, revealing important puzzle elements
• Cleaning up, then dirtying it again to get out

“Hey, what the hell? Haven’t you ever heard of knocking?? God, no one respects my privacy.”

“I was about to clean that up, I swear. Just before you got in here I was thinking about how I was about to do that.”

“What’s the point of organizing my panels? They’re just gonna get messed up again anyway!”

Puzzle Step Ideas (not necessarily in order):

• Water pipe showing through exposed wall
• player breaks it (how?)
• use water to clean floor (how?)
• somehow reveals the next step
• something written on the ground?

• The “collection” -- a “closet” full of “unopened, mint condition turrets!”

“They’re gonna be worth so much one day! ...I mean, they’re already worth, like, a lot. But they’re gonna be worth even more! ...Technology gets more expensive with age, right?”

• accidentally get knocked out of their boxes, have to get past them (to turn on the water, maybe?)
• LASER DEFENSE SYSTEM! (one laser on the ground level across the floor)

“Oh, right. Humans can jump, can’t they. Well how was I supposed to know there’d be a human down here?? It’s been really good at keeping the frankenturrets out.”

• boxes were never on the turrets, core blames frankencubes
• • • Frankencube “cockroaches”

• crawl out from behind something (a wall panel?) like pests

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Those guys. Ugh, don’t get me started. Impossible to get rid of. I mean, I tried everything. Well, I tried one thing. We have an arrangement now. They can live in my room as long as they DON’T TOUCH MY STUFF! I’m lookin’ at you, Jeff. Yeah, that’s right. Hobble away. They know who’s boss.”

“I called the exterminator core to come take care of them, but since the neurotoxin dried up, it’s come to light that using neurotoxin was pretty much the only thing he was good at."

• Have to use them to block the turrets in the closet?
• • “Painting the walls” with gel

• White or blue? Leaning toward blue

“Yeah, my room needed a paint job anyway. Blue is perfect. It’s like, the color of my soul. ...Which is blue. Because it’s...wet? I dunno, man, I’m not a color psychologist!”

• Needed to bounce...something. Cubes? Player?

• “Flooded Basement”
• Broken floor reveals death water below
• Fill it up with debri to cross?

• Getting out through the ventilation shafts
• Lots of bouncing, maybe faith plates?

As you'll soon see, I make some pretty drastic changes to the actual level, but having this initial document make it a lot easier to create a cohesive design.

The formatting is being really annoying, so we'll just pretend that those inconsistently bullet points are there for...flavor.

Retrospect: An Interactive Story Experience

This was a project in which I and and four others were tasked with creating a non-linear, interactive story in just five weeks. After much deliberation, my team decided on my idea, which we ended up calling Retrospect. My idea was to create an exploration of what remains between two people after they have been apart for an extended period of time. Specifically, I wanted to create an experience that mirrored and examined the effects of selective memory and confirmation bias on our perception of people.

The final version is available to play below (it had some lag issues last time I tried it, so you might have to be a bit patient. I'll try to get it hosted elsewhere as soon as I can.):

RETROSPECT 

-- Spoilers beyond this point --

The experience centers around a young man. It begins with the man walking down a hallway alone. He looks up and sees a girl. Time slows down, and he is transported to a white room filled with floating photographs, each representing a memory of his past relationship with this girl. The first memory shows the breakup of the couple, indicated that they were once and are no longer together. After that, a new selection of memories is shown (randomly selected). These memories each have three versions: one where the man remembers the positive side, one the negative, and one the distant/apathetic. There is no way for the player to tell which is which aside from very minor hints from the photograph that represents the scene. Each version of the scene does not change the actual events, just how they are remembered. Once one version of a memory is viewed, the other versions black out and are no longer selectable. The player is not aware that each memory has three versions.

After the player views several of these memories, they are moved to a second screen of the remaining memories (the ones that weren't randomly selected for the first batch). The difference is that now, the version of memories that they viewed the least of on the first screen (positive, negative, or apathetic) is removed, narrowing down their choices to the two that they picked the most of before. Again, the player is not aware of this. After viewing several more, they are moved to the final screen, containing one of three memories based on the previous memories that they viewed. These three are separate and only have one version, each representing one of the three perspectives very clearly. After that, the player is brought back to the man in the hallway, who reacts in one of three ways to the girl corresponding to the final memory.

The game was intended for multiple playthroughs, with subsequent playthroughs after the first making the player gradually aware of what was going on in the experience. I wanted people to come out of the first play feeling a certain way about the relationship between the two people, only to be shocked by the different versions of memories they had seen a certain way before shining a different light. I wasn't trying to make any kind of clear statement with the experience. I just wanted people to think about what goes into the way that we remember things and how easy it is to skew our own perception of people and events.

For this project, I served as the project manager, concept designer, script writer, film and audio director/editor, music composer/producer, and game/interaction designer. I learned a lot of valuable lessons about time and resource management. We had to cut out or simplify a lot of our ideas in order to make the project feasible. Being forced to make the best product possible with extreme limitations is a frustrating, incredible experience. As much as I contributed creatively and artistically to the final product, that was the most valuable thing I took out of the project.



I, of course, extend my eternal gratitude to the other members of the team. It would have never been possible without them, and even if it were, it wouldn't have been half as good.

ARCHIVE: Forced Grouping and Community in MMOs

note: any post that starts with "ARCHIVE:" is something that I wrote either for an older blog or in some other location, but deemed worth of copying over to this.

In the various MMO forums in which I spent an unhealthy amount of my free time, I've come to notice a trend in arguments about grouping. People are constantly arguing for and against more group content. While grouping is an integral part of all MMOs, I think there are two types of games in this regard: The type in which community is created through necessity, and the type that community has to be forced upon. There are upsides and downsides to both, and they're pretty much mutually exclusive.

Steam Story

A piece of terribly photographed concept art by Xue Au

About a year ago, Paul Murray, the now head of the Northeastern Game Development Club, pitched a game tentatively called "Steam Story" and said that he needed more people for certain roles in development. One of them was a writer, so I decided to go for it. I got in contact with him and showed him some of my writing, and he decided to bring me on as the head writer.

By the time I got in, there was already some basic story and character design done. One of the first things I did was to propose my initial thoughts to Paul about the design that was done so far and what I thought the story could be. Unfortunately, the game had to be put on indefinite hiatus, as the scope of the game was far too large for a group of active college students without development experience to take on. That in itself was a good lesson to learn, but the project also gave me a lot of experience with thinking and writing about game narrative.

Here is the document that I wrote to discus possibilities for Steam Story narrative design:

Tone? This is something that's going to have to be decided fairly early. Based on the backstory and the two different takes on the beginning, it seems to be pretty unclear. I think that simply choosing between "light-hearted" and "more serious" is too general of a distinction. 

The term "light-hearted" has some sort of playful and lackadaisical connotations, which I find, in games, often translates to "boring and lazy". I just tried to think of some examples of games that go for the all-out light-hearted tone, and it was surprisingly difficult. Probably because most of the games that do that aren't very memorable. Unless your story/world is something incredibly unique, making the story "light-hearted" just ends up making it seem like the story is not that important to the game, which is something that players will recognize almost immediately. 

Some might cite games like the Zelda series as being a successful take on a light-hearted story, but, when you think about it, Zelda games aren't necessarily that light-hearted. And they certainly are never light-hearted throughout the entirety of the game. The Zelda games use a light-hearted tone as a setup. It juxtaposes with the darker or more serious parts of the game so well that it makes those parts even more effective and memorable. 

One way to make a game sort of light-hearted without making the story hard to care about is to give it a satirical edge. I think this could potentially work really well for SteamStory. It's mixing all these different well-known themes and styles together in a really clever way, but it's going to be hard to make the vastly different nations and such not feel...manufactured. I worry that it will feel like it's just trying to appeal to as many people as possible by throwing all of this stuff together. Someone at game dev club mentioned "steampunk pandering" during your presentation. I personally think that steampunk is pretty much just awesome always forever, but there are some important things to take from his comment. Not necessarily about steampunk specifically, but about any style. The more you throw in elements of a very specific style into something, the harder it is to give those elements a collective depth and substance. The more "steampunk-y" it is, the more it'll seem like a world created for the sole purpose of being steampunk, rather than a believable, naturally-evolved world. It's certainly not impossible to make a world like this believable, but with the wide variety of stylistic elements that are intended to be included in SteamStory, making Welt feel natural will be an incredibly difficult undertaking that will not really be worth the effort. (p.s. the name "SteamStory" doesn't really help to discredit the "pandering" argument. I know it's not super important right now, but it should probably eventually be changed if you aren't super attached to it.)

Now, I'm definitely not saying that the world should be changed. I love the idea. But, if you want the story to be taken seriously, something is going to have to be done to get around these problems. Making the story satirical is a perfect loophole to allow the world to remain manufactured without that having a negative impact on the story. Now, satire is definitely more of a scale than a solid definition. There are many different levels of satire. It is entirely possible to create a story with satire that is still very serious and meaningful. It is also totally possible to make the story more of an outright comedy. For examples, think of the difference between...well, the first things I can think of are the TV shows The Daily Show and True Blood. The Daily Show is very comedic, upfront satire. True Blood was (before it started taking itself WAY too seriously, which is a common problem with satire) a satire of supernatural fiction that still had a serious story within it. Subtle, self-referential and self-deprecating humor, if executed well, is all it takes to keep a story from becoming annoying unbelievable. 

If you definitely don't want ANY satire at all, there's still options. What I'd suggest in that case is to give the world a lot more mystique. I know there's no magic, but mystical doesn't necessarily equal magical. Keeping a consistent mysterious tone about the world allows a player to allow for much more unanswered questions. It seems counter-intuitive, but actually leaving out more details can make the story more immersive. I've seen it done really well on several occasions. Take Bastion for example. We hardly know anything about what's happened to the world, and we're slowly given tidbits of information throughout the game. But the story maintains its "you're not supposed to know what the hell all this is and that's okay" tone throughout, and makes the lack of knowledge a part of the story. Another great example is Bioshock, which is as much about discovering the world of Rapture as it is about the character’s personal story (it’s also a big reason why Bioshock 2 wasn’t nearly as good. Yeah, the story was well-written, but the world was no longer mysterious and exciting.).

One of the most important lessons I've learned in story telling is intended to be specifically about dialogue, but holds true through all parts of storytelling, especially in games: A player will never imagine bad dialogue. What that basically means is that it is not possible for something that is left to the imagination to be bad. Shove bad exposition down a player's throat, and he'll always remember it as being bad. Subtly imply something, and they'll fill the rest in themselves. Most of the time, people won't come up with a concrete idea to fill the void...I've found that people’s minds doesn't usually work like that. What happens is that the player will create a sort of nebulous cloud of ideas to fill in the blanks; they won't know the details, but they'll know the feelings that are tied to it. And, if given enough information to feed that nebulous cloud of imagination, it'll never be bad feelings. The risk with this is, of course, not providing enough information, or not providing that right kind of information, in which case the player will just be frustrated and confused. 

Another less obvious example of this being done really well (for me at least) is Phantasy Star Online. It had hardly any exposition at all: you're sent on a ship to find another ship that was supposed to find a new planet to colonize and has since stopped communication. You find the planet, and there are signs that people were once there, but there are no signs of human life anywhere. The story is fleshed out through recordings of one of the members of the first ship that you find scattered about the planet. The visuals were also used to spark the imagination and provide story clues. As PSO was meant to be an online game in which people repeated content often, I don't even know if the development team even really intended for this to happen (if the horrible story from the sequel is any indication, they didn't even realize they had done it), but it really worked for me. I was an explorer! My mind was constantly racing about what could have happened to these people and what had caused the native creatures on the world to become so hostile. Honestly, if any of those questions were answered (I think some of them were), I don't even remember what the answers were. But it doesn't matter, because it was the mystique that kept me interested. The success of the TV show Lost is almost entirely due to this. However, they made the mistake of taking the mystery too far, to the point where everyone was just pissed that they never answered anything and kept introducing new mysteries...then they ended it horribly. But I won't get into that.

If this is the route that you think we should take, then some changes will need be made to the story. First of all, I think that Thomas should not be John Malakov's son. Or, if he is his son, he shouldn't know it. It gives him too much status, power, and knowledge right off the bat. The biggest issue, though, is that if you want the story and world to be mysterious and unknown to the player, it has to be to the main character as well. It won't make sense if our character knows so much about the world and we do not, so it will make this type of story impossible. 

In addition to this (and this is for either type of story, really), there should be much less dialogue in the opening scenes. Save the long conversations and speeches for when we're already invested in the game. I've played countless RPGs (most recently, lots of action-RPGs released for Android) that bog down the beginning of the game with a huge amount of dialogue and exposition, and it's always a massive turnoff. This is more important for a mobile platform such as Android, but I think it holds true for all platforms. You want to get the player into the game as soon as possible. Even if the player has the patience to wait through all the boring dialogue and exposition, they probably won't remember all of it later on. A quote that's often used for screenwriting that I think is useful here is "Enter the scene as late as possible, and leave as early as possible". Think again of Bastion. There's no introduction to the world or characters. You're thrown in just as the Kid is waking up and you have no idea what's going on. That's what makes it compelling! It's building a connection to the character right away because you're both confused and discovering something together.

It's too bad that we had to stop development on the game, but I'm now working on another game with Paul that is much more realistic in scope. Hopefully someday we'll be able to revisit Steam Story.

ARCHIVE: On "Realistic" Graphics

note: any post that starts with "ARCHIVE:" is something that I wrote either for an older blog or in some other location, but deemed worth of copying over to this.

I see a lot of people arguing back and forth about the merits of "realistic" graphics versus more stylized graphics (such as in Borderlands), and the main reason I see people arguing in favor of the "realism" graphic style has to do with immersion. The arguments make sense; something that looks realistic is easier to relate to than something that seems unreal. It's easier to suspend your disbelief. However, there is a glaring flaw in that argument.

ARCHIVE: On the Importance of Jumping in an Online Game World

note: any post that starts with "ARCHIVE:" is something that I wrote either for an older blog or in some other location, but deemed worth of copying over to this.

For me, jumping has nothing to do with the practicality of being able to jump over objects (it's a nice bonus, though).

The ability to jump is about freedom. It's not like an emote (a static animation unaffected by the surrounding area). There are a couple games I've played where the jump has been more like an emote and it has defeated the purpose. Real jumping in a game proves the existence of gravity in the world you are inhabiting. For example, if you jump while moving down a hill, you'll stay in the air longer (emote-like jumping wouldn't do this).

Jumping is important to me because it makes the world feel more like...well, a world. It prevents me from feeling like I'm glued to the ground. The existence of gravity and the existence of real space outside the confines of the ground increases my immersion. It's a strange phenomenon, admittedly, but, for some reason, jumping is crucial to my feeling of freedom in an online world.