FF7, dungeon crawling and racing

Here’s another warm-up exercise. The design is coming. I’m making it larger than I originally planned. This is a good thing. I plan to have it up in the next few days.

Inspired by: _speed_

Racing games are cool because they are mesmerizing. I love being drawn in and put into a trance. There is such a constant need to put yourself into the perfect position. You are circling a middle line of perfection as it moves forward – you with it.

Racing is about finding that line and always getting closer to it. Not to mention that that line is constantly splitting and shifting. You never quite know where it is. Stay with it for a while and you’ll learn its patterns, get a clear vision of where it is and how it moves.

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I want a game that lets me do anything I want. I want to type on a keyboard, click lazily with a mouse watching my men do things for me. I want to switch between hardcore action and relaxed reading and thinking at any time. I want to suit the player’s mental environment.

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Inspired by: Dungeon Dashers

Managing a party of dudes is awesome. I’m watching this “let’s play” video of a playthrough of the opening sections of a game called “Dungeon Dashers,” from the TIG devlogs.

Stabbing skeletons is archaic and still fresh. I like the sound of bones crushing, blood spurting. I like seeing gore. I like completing the mission and hearing that ding. I like being successful.

The battles are interesting. The most interesting part is managing your party, getting used to each of their abilities, having to think about how they interact, what their strengths and weaknesses are, how they can be used (in battle and out of it).

I want to be able to call my minions to me. I also like how the story blends with the mechanics. Each scenario has a little story that goes with it that helps provide context for the battle.

I like PC games for their detail.

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The issue I have is with how everything in this world works. Why am I living with my father? I am here to help him, to help myself. For whatever reason I left Waterloo not to start my company but to live inside the pain of my problems. I didn’t want to be able to escape from them, and I have been living in shame of my inability to express that since.

I cannot leave because my mission is to figure this problem out. This game is supposed to bring us together. It is supposed to solve all of our problems. I can’t cheat my way out of it.

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I want this game to be like FF7. I want to make players feel the way I felt when I played that game. FF7 made me feel like a hero. It blew my mind. It was so deep and rich and demanding. It had an opening sequence that just rocked me. I was intoxicated by it. A full FMV that starts off slow, introduces a character – Aeris – pans through the city, follows an awesome moving train, then “fades” into gameplay.

Then Cloud jumps off the train and it’s time for battle. We’re already in a rush. The characters are already calling us forward. We are already part of a movement. God I was entranced. FF7 expected that you keep up, that you were ready for such an adventure, that you could handle and appreciate that. That’s what I liked most about it. It was mature.

The moment when I attract a girl goes like this. She’s talking some bullshit and I’m just ignoring that shit, thinking about how she really feels. At some point I just treat her like she is, for what she really is. She feeds me crap and I just ignore it, look at her like she’s beautiful and interesting for her most natural qualities, like the crap is just fuzzy reception, and she drops the shit. She just stops because she knows that I know that she’s better than that. Then we engage. That’s the moment where attraction starts. She suddenly sees me as an individual and we can relate for real.

FF7 is like me and I’m like the girl, 11 years old and girlish. It doesn’t ask me what I want, or wait for me to catch up. It just assumes that I am the way that I am, that I can match whatever it expects, then it just runs with it.

It is amazing how quickly you can grow in that type of situation. When you’re around someone who knows that you’re better than you’re currently behaving, who believes in that, then you grow into that person almost instantly. The experience is so gratifying and calming. “I _am_ this way.” I want people to feel that way when they play my game, like they are the best version of themselves, and that the game didn’t give it to them but they gave it to themselves. The game just reminded them how to do it.

“I’ve always been this way. I know now. I just forgot.” That’s how games can make you feel. Oh yeah, just like another person. Books are about the world. Games are about you.

 

challenging shooters

Here is my design warm-up for today. It is an extension of my thoughts based on reading these two articles:

• How Call of Duty is making us Dumb
• Red Orchestra 2 Dev Interview
  

Games are hard to play. I love Call of Duty (COD). I loved Modern Warfare 2 (MW2). I was losing my mind by the end of that campaign, my sister sleeping on the floor beside me in my beanbag chair. That night was on Christmas Day. She received MW2 and I got shit. But I was 25 so wtf do I care… (cry).

My sister and I controller-swapped on hard for a while. Then we put it on medium, she zoned out into dreamland slowly and I played. I played one more level, over and over until completion. Yeah! ….

Big screen tv, awesome sound. My sister sleeps like a rock, that you can press like a noise-making teddy bear to get a token sound out of. Though she’s usually low on batteries so the sound is garbled.

Players want their minds blown. They play shooters because they are aggressive. They love the compeition. Life itself is a constant competition. We compete for attention, respect. We want our wives to love us, our parents, our children. We want a slight boost in the workplace, around women we’re thinking of courting and getting rejected by.

We want to feel alive and stimulated. When I kill some guy in COD I’m not just removing a model from the digital world, I am asserting my authority. Who gives a shit about that guy? No one, not even his mother who probably doesn’t exist, but I give a shit about how I play. I want to succeed not for digital rewards but for the mental freedom I get when I overcome my mental barriers.

Life is often a series of challenges. We want to say something funny, we want to elbow out that jerk to our right – fuck that guy – and we want to remain stable. We want to trust in our abilities enough so that we can plan our future, so that we believe that we can go out and do what we want and feel what we want, because we can conquer the challenges before us that would prevent us from doing and feeling otherwise.

COD gives that battle a palpable form, without consequences. It lets you ramp up to a state where you are fighting the world without it threatening to shut you down, without it forcing you to gamble with something precious first. The game is a test-bed for your own abilities, and it gives you representations of many of the different kinds of elements present in a challenge in reality.

We shoot to kill. We kill to improve. Shooters are a way to assert ourselves to ourselves. Combat, struggle, self-control, mastery of the mind. Shooters gives you a sense of what it is like to be in control of yourself out in the world. They actually give you some of that control too.

The reason people don’t play hard shooters is because they are discouraged by them. They don’t shoot to fail. They shoot to win; however, they shoot to actually win. The pleasure of winning comes from the idea that you can conquer problems in your own life. Winning a fake battle is better than losing one, but winning a real battle is even better.

You have to train players up. They start as skill-midgets. They are way down there on the skill and courage scale. They fucking suck. What is wrong with those guys? Your job as a designer is to raise them. They need a cycle of understanding the purpose behind their journey. They act, are challenged, learn, then succeed.

You give them a taste of success right away. Even when there is no “obvious” challenge in a game the players are still challenged by their own expectations. They don’t know what to do to succeed, so to be rewarded for any success is liberating for them even if only a little. So you can give rewards for nothing and that is fine. Then you reward them for a little more, and build up the ability to challenge them greatly and expect them to return for more.

wolves in the forest

I’ll be finishing the first design iteration today. I’ll share the process I used to get there after I share the design. The process will take some explanation to make comprehensible and I’d like to do a semi-decent job it.

In the meantime here is a warm-up exercise I did yesterday. I just start writing down an idea and go with it until I’m tried of brainstorming.

Also I’ve been doing a lot of overhead stuff, like monetization strategy, details on the design process, research into some of my inspirational areas – tv, what I want out of the game long-term, how I plan for the “collaborate on the game across the web” details to work out and so on.

I want people to play my game because it will be fun. The experience will be diverse and emotional. Ideas will spring out of the screen. The player will have an intense journey. They won’t know what hit them.

The biggest goal – no a goal – is that the player can express him or herself. She can create a unique experience. She can dance and be intense. She can explore like in Zelda. She can conquer bosses and design weapons and strategies. She can recruit friends.

Deus Ex: Too Human: the game taught me how cool stealth is. I already knew but hey, I can always learn stealth again. I like sneaking around guys, though I hate having to try a level over and over again. Waiting without any consequence -other than to restart a boring mission (monotonous) – is bullshit.

Stealth is fun when you have to deal with the consequences. That’s what makes stealth exciting. Every moment changes your perception of what will happen if you get caught, what you need to do to not get caught, and whether you will be caught. You also have to plan your escape strategy.

I loved camping and sneaking up on people. I have a distinct image in my head of hiding in the bushes. I really enjoyed that. Campfire, smoke, darkness, walkie-talkies. Friends around the fire. Strangers. Prowling, stalking, searching. Hiding in the bushes with a friend. Finding the group with a friend. Being lost in the wilderness. Not knowing if you will ever be found. Being scared.

I love being frightened. God game development is going to be difficult. If I can get all of my main emotions figured out maybe I can determine the core mechanic that needs to go in to deliver those emotions. I really can create a great game.

Believe in yourself. I want a new kind of game. I want it to blow minds. I want it to be mature. I want it to be smooth. I don’t want it to be bullshit. How many games are complete bullshit, not respecting my time at all.

I need to stitch ideas together. Level design: go. Legend of Zelda. Dungeon. Oh shit.

3 enemies. Each one pushes you in a different direction. Based off of 3 animals. You have the bear, the wolf, and the jaguar. The bear is just a bigger, slower, wolf. The wolf, the jag and the bison crew.

The wolf stalks and plans and works in a team. The bison are more defensive but will challenge you if you encroach on their turf. The jaguar is sneaky and limber. It can use the terrain to its advantage.

The jungle is important because it is difficult to navigate, even between two points that are totally obviously connected. Mountains in the distance, water nearby, creaks and streams, pebbles, roots, underbrush, clearings, meadows etc.

Each animal has strengths in each environment. Your job is to go from each area to area, back tracking and learning the environment, trying to find safe passage, get the right supplies and skills to defeat the enemies.

Going one place gives you courage, or peace of mind, or whatever. Going somewhere else gives you intellect. Each environment affects your state, also provides for different biological needs. You get hungry and thirsty. You need to rest. You need variety and safety and a balance of sunshine.

You need protection from mosquitoes. You need to wipe your bum. You need to eat, a balanced diet. You need to wash yourself. Most importantly you need to learn to hunt, to be stealthy, to walk in each terrain effectively.

As you master things, your environment, your body, you gain the ability to take down the serious animals. At the beginning the animals just kill you. You are afraid of the threat of beasts. Their images haunt you. You hear a sound and must fight a wolf or at least your fear of one.

A wolf sound is made or the area darkens. You become afraid and run. You are judged on your success. You gain courage and skill. The player gains skill too.

Animals and the forest. Zelda is about many different challenges spread out in a maze. The player has to backtrack a lot, to gain knowledge, to use items, to unlock greater access to the dungeon, then eventually have a showdown with the boss.

I don’t want my player to die. I will put death in but it will be infrequent. Instead the player will lose things. He can become injured, his psyche can be damaged, he can lose his health. Most encounters don’t happen with the animals directly.

In reality animals will kill you, at least the ones I’m using. So encounters have to be minimal or the player has to be overpowered, or can re-spawn like crazy. I want minimal death and a lot of fear. But I also want a lot of interaction with the animals.

I will solve this problem in two ways. First we have the “images” of animals. Since this game depends on the defeat of creatures the player character will always be focused on this. He wants to kill them but he doesn’t want to put himself in harms way unnecessarily. So we need “half” encounters.

Spirits aren’t cool for many reasons. I’ll have little versions of the big animals. A little wolf can act like a big wolf but isn’t a wolf and should not be killed and is less dangerous. The player plays with these to build up his skills.

An actual battle is long-lasting. When you fight a wolf for real you go all over the terrain you already know.

Actual mechanics. I want a lot of air. I want something like climbing trees. I want lots of terrain. I want all the control to be centered on the character’s body. So he doesn’t use a lot of tools. He relies on strength and finesse, like the Prince of Persia or Mario.

He can climb, grab, jump, slide, swing and so on. He can fall and get hurt. Moving from point A to B is always a task. Basic traversal is challenging especially at break-neck pace.

The main goal is running. Normally the player wants to get into a good position. Attacks themselves are limited and drawn out. When an attack happens everything slows down and is blown out, maximized.

The question becomes how can the player get into an optimal position so that his next encounter with the enemy goes well? He wants to get a slight edge by injuring the opponent, changing his opponent’s trajectory.

There are slight mental state changes in the opponent with each encounter. After each state change a new realm of possibilities open up. The player must find the best way to exploit each state by using the environment to his advantage. He should have a lot of practice in each environment that he chooses to battle in.

A battle lasts about 5 minutes. The most important parts are:

• getting to point B (from A) competently
• choosing point B well

So there must be several types of terrain, that each combine well with others, and there must be a lot of variety in their traversal.