On ye Creation of Dragones

Once upon a time, I was told that I was going to be working on a neat project involving dragons, and a “create a block, destroy a block” mechanic similar to Solomon’s key.

Dragon Game Prototype

Read on, for the full accounting of how I got here from there, as well as such instruction as is necessary in learning “how to play”.


So. Solomon’s key, but with dragons. Could be great fun! I like dragons! And I like creating and destroying blocks! This could work!

Full of hopes and dreams, I went home for the weekend, and figured I’d give a shot at prototyping what I thought would be a neat way to represent it. “Well,” I reasoned, “Solomon’s key had some limitations about how things had to look. Everything looked square due to hardware constraints. But that was then. Why should I be similarly constrained?”

Thinking thusly, I started trying to make a dragon with some other features. I started with trying to make a tail that actually looked nice.

Several hours later, I had something pretty neat. Problem was, it was too short. So I made it longer. And longer. And longer still. Eventually, I realized that the tail was by far the coolest part of what I had done. But happily, dragons come in many shapes and sizes, at least one of which is pretty much all tail.

So. Slinky, oriental dragons it was!

This was going to be so neat, I figured. We were going to push the boundaries of what a side scroller could be. Why should the main character always fit in a bounding rect? Maybe when CPU load was a problem, but no longer! Now we’re living in the future! Even if I don’t have a flying car, I can still have an irregularly shaped protagonist!

Unfortunately, when I showed the producers in question what I hath wrought, on the following Monday, their reaction was not quite what I was hoping for. When I heard "dragons", I envisioned "slinky oriental serpents, maybe we can push the boundaries of what a side-scroller character is!", and they envisioned "square sprites that spit fire sometimes".

Oh well. They basically said “yeah, that’s kind of neat, but we would really rather just recreate Solomon’s Key…” (They went with square sprites.) Later the whole project was canceled, so it became a moot point. Oh well!


Still, I'm very happy with the effect. (You have to click through the customization screen to see the actual game. It's pretty rudimentary - Arrow keys move left, right, up. Space creates blocks. Holding down space breathes fire or something, which destroys blocks.)

It is very clearly just a prototype at the moment, mostly showing off the fluid snakey motion. I was, however, fairly proud of said motion, so that's mostly ok.

You have to click through the customization screen to see the actual game. It's pretty rudimentary - Arrow keys move left, right, up. Space creates blocks. Holding down space breathes fire or something, which destroys blocks. Having the same button breathe fire and create blocks was in response to a design request that we not go beyond d-pad + 1 button, for controls. It makes it a little cumbersome now, but it still works.

Someday, I'd like to revisit this, since I think it would make an awfully cool side scroller.

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More of my Handiwork

Digging around through some old projects, and found this little gem.

Handwriting Recognition Demo

Working (mostly) handwriting recognition, in flash, using a fairly novel approach! (As far as I know at least.) Read on for more explanation!


Recently rediscovered this old prototype while dredging the depths of my "projects" directory. Funny story about it, actually. It came about, (as with so many good things) over a dare and subsequent bet. I was working on Leapster at the time, which was an embedded system that ran Flash. The neat thing about it was the stylus input, which, since the Nintendo DS was still new on the scene, was fairly fresh and neat.

We (myself and several other engineers) were musing over the possibility of using the stylus as a text input device, but the general consensus was that that wouldn’t be something that was possible with our CPU available, much less making it work in Flash.

Long story short, after insisting that it was probably possible, at least in a general sense, a friend wagered a candy bar that I was full of it.

As fate would have it though, what I was actually full of was flu virus, and I spent the next day (a Friday) home sick. With nothing better to do, I did some digging into the problem, and came up with this neat little prototype, which I proudly displayed the following Monday. (And yes, I got a candy-bar out of it.)

Sadly, LeapFrog was never terribly interested in going this direction, so it remains a fun curiosity that time forgot. Still, it’s a neat approach. It’s not perfectly accurate, but it does have the significant advantage that it runs at acceptable speeds on our poor, embedded flash system.

I’ve also uploaded this document, describing how it works, for anyone curious about the technical details. The short of it is, it basically uses a transformation, which converts the user’s glyph into a unique number which contains some topographic information, and then checks a giant, sorted list, to see if the number matches with anything known. Since the transformation is fairly fast at runtime, lookups are fairly quick.

Anyway. Neat, old stuff! Fond memories! I can still taste the candy bar! (It tasted like Science! And also like Victory!)

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I cast "Magic Missile"!

Missile command. One of my favorite games from "back in the day". This is my attempt to remake it later, and to apply some variations to it. Yet another piece of work done in Flash, which makes it easy to link to.

Missile Commander

Since this is one of the few games that I've actually written to a point that I feel is finished, I can actually do a realistic post mortem on it now.



Overview:
This was intended to be sort of almost a "journeyman" project in game design and programming for me. I basically set two challenges for myself: "Can I come up with enough variations to populate a reasonable number of levels with new mechanics?" and "Can I convince myself to sit down and start, continue and complete a full-scale project like this?" It feels like a success on both counts, so yay!


Specifics:
The basic idea is standard missile command. You protect things on the bottom, by blowing up attackers from the top. Your shots create explosions, and chain reactions can be used to wipe out several things at once. So far, all of this is pretty faithful to the original. What I did to try to spice it up was introduce the concept of "cities".

The player controls up to 4 of them, and switches between them with the keyboard, while targeting missiles with the mouse. While the basic cities are all standard missile launchers, this gave me some neat design freedom to make cities that did rather unique things, in addition to merely launching standard attacks.

I also introduced the idea of each city having its own recharge bar. This worked as an excellent balancing mechanism, since then I could make some cities that did some truly crazy things, but balance them by giving it a long recharge, and forcing the player to cover for it with other cities in the mean time.

The main other direction that I introduced new and neat things, was in the selection of things that would fly down from the top of the screen to harass the player. While I was a bit more creative with player verbs than I was with enemies, I still managed a reasonable number of annoyances. And I was extremely proud of managing an actual, honest-to-goodness boss at the end.

The only other place I did much of interest was in breaking the game into discrete levels, and giving them various goals. I didn't do as much as I could have with this, however, and most levels were basically some variation on "save at least X cities".

One rule I did stick with for levels however, was "one new mechanic per level". I made sure that every level in the game either introduced a new type of enemy, or a new building for the player to enjoy. I think this may have been one of the single best design decisions I made on the project, since it allowed me to ease the player in to new mechanics over the course of several stages. (For example, the game had a theme of "force fields protect you, but are destroyed by electricity" that was built up over several levels of progression.)

General things I think I did well:

• Lots of neat cities
• A fair number of neat enemies
• The pacing was generally good
• The end boss ruled, and was a good top to the game.

General things I think I could have done better:

• The game could have greatly benefited from sound, and possibly a slightly higher framerate.
• Level 10 was entirely too hard. All the levels before and after it were ok, but that one was an absurd spike in the difficulty ramp, for the sake of one neat mechanic/effect I wanted to play with.
• Some of the later levels, the art choice (dark missiles against a dark background) were occasionally frustrating.
• Later levels could also get fairly hard. I think I succumbed to the trap of "it's easy for me, who has been playing it all month!"
• The end boss requires you to wait through too much animation before you actually get to fight him. (It's cool the first time. Tedious on repeated viewings however, and there is no way to skip.)
• Would have been nice to have had a more satisfying ending. It's basically just a "you win!" screen. The battle, etc, was great, but some graphical fanfare would not have been inappropriate.
  

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I like cake!

A postmortem and quick review of some work I did earlier this year.

Birthday Cake

It's neat! It's candle flames! Watch them flicker! It's... one day of work, so don't be too disappointed if it's little more than an effect showcase.


This was a 1-day flash project I did, as part of a birthday for a family member. (I have at least one family member tolerant enough to let me get away with making flash birthday cards for holidays, which works fine for me, being the consummate procrastinator, since they can be emailed...)

It's basically a birthday cake. It's not even much of a "game". Most of the fun is moving the mouse around and watching the candles blow and flicker. The whole thing really is a lot of me experimenting with trying to make things look luminous, while trying to guestimate how candle flames flicker.

As a post-mortum-y thing, this version would probably look quite a bit nicer if smoke or something came up from the candles after they had been blown out. Also, as at least one friend has pointed out, it's thoroughly unsatisfying being unable to blow out the last, big candle.

(Both of these were not problems in the original. In the original, however, every candle blown out released a sappy, birthday wish. This is the de-sappified version.)

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Aquaria Playthrough Diary 8

A brief update, in which I brave the depths of the abyss, learn to bake a truly legendary cake, and learn that the truest love is that which comes from evolutionary selection-pressure.

Played a bit more, and took a break from my repeated attempts to kill the thing hanging on the ceiling in the bubble cave. I hate giving up on it, since it was such a pain to get to, but I'm running out of ideas. I went back to the veil though, and finally took down the giant squid. And hooray! Got a baby pet dumbo squid that follows me around like it thinks I'm it's mommy. (Presumably as some sort of recognition of the realities of evolution? Clearly the results of our battle showed that I was more fit than it's mother?)

I did not emerge unscathed from the squid fight however. I discovered (actually while playing in the bubble cave) that the number keys 1-9 seem to act as an instant “change form” button. Handy! Except... now I can't stop using it. It's TOO handy. The squid was actually difficult to beat without it, really. (Being able to instantly switch between beast form and sun form was invaluable.)

Also took some time to stock up on veggie cakes. (And special cakes! The berry on top makes all the difference!) And reflect a bit on how I do like the cooking system. I also explored a few more nooks and crannies that I'd skipped before, and discovered some neat toys. (Found a recipe for legendary cakes, woo!)

And then, some more time in the abyss. The little dumbo jellyfish is neat here, but really not quite adequate. Back to sun form. Exploring a bit, I discover.... a giant whale? ... Not what I was expecting to find in the ocean depths, (was figuring he'd be up near the veil, actually) but ok. Singing the whale song, I get him to open his mouth, and find a few neat things when I swim into it. Except that there's a little squid who looks like a shopkeeper, who seems to want something. And he's guarding a perl that I need for a different spot in the level. And I have NO IDEA WHAT HE WANTS. It's a little annoying actually.

He just keeps singing the same four, color-coded notes again and again, but doesn't respond when I sing them back. I can only imagine that I'm supposed to remember them and use them somewhere else, but so far, I have no idea where. Maybe it will become more apparent when I explore the abyss further?

I also found the mother of all jellyfish. This is a neat boss. I haven't beaten it yet, but I like it a lot. Unfortunately, at least one thing that has been hampering me is extremely annoying. For some reason, save-game doesn't seem to save your stored-up shots in beast form. This doesn't seem like much, but for the jellyfish fight, beast form is incredibly important. (To the way I'm approaching it, at least.) It's incredibly useful for clearing out jellyfish that are chasing you. And it would be great to be able to attack the center without leaving beast form. (Most beast form shots are superior to energy form, for this fight) But... if you die, they all go away when you continue. And there are very few things in the abyss that you can eat to get more shots. Which means I almost feel like the game is punishing me by making me go travel somewhere and grind by eating squid or something. (A strange thought.)

I'm still in the abyss, but haven't explored all of it yet. Probably play more soon.

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Aquaria Playthrough Diary 7

So, instead of working on my own projects today like I meant to, I instead spent an awful lot of it playing Aquaria. Read on for my sordid tale of cradle-robbing, cryptography and deicide.


After having gained the nature form, I spent a long time trying to figure out where to go next. I explored all the blank corners on my map, but nothing really opened up. Since I wasn't finding any way forward, and I WAS finding an awful lot of writing on walls, I focused on deciphering it. I found enough samples that I can read it all now, and I'm honestly kind of glad I made the effort. It has a lot of nice flavor. (Paradoxically, I'll be annoyed now if there is some power later that translates it for you. Having made the effort, I don't want it to be invalidated by some freebie from the game designers.)

The writing itself ranges from cryptic (“Does absolution lie above the waves?”) to flavorful (“Mithalas beckons you”) to surreal. (“Rainbow soup, my only escape...”) (After reading the last one, with minimal experimentation, I managed to cook up some rainbow soup of my own. Its effects were... unique.)

Eventually I ended back up in Mithalas chapel, wondering if it was where I was supposed to go next or not. And here I have a complaint. I went to fight the boss, but he was different. He used an attack that I'd never seen him use before. (A suck-me-into-his-mouth thing.) Maybe I just missed it before, whatever. Since I was already assuming I had to feed him bloated fish-men, this seemed like an ideal way to make it work. Yup, he didn't like that. So now he gets really mad and starts shooting tons of beams at me, and refuses to eat any more fish men. I have no clue what to do next. After all of my attacks ping off of him, I get bored and chuck a seed his way, from nature form. BANG, he dies.

What. The. Heck.

Ok, so maybe there was some subtle cue that I was supposed to go back there after learning nature-form. And maybe there was some subtle cue that spiky kelp would kill a giant man-shark? If so, I missed both of them. This boss ended up feeling completely arbitrary, like he only died because I happened to have the right power with me and needed to tap him with it.

Oh well. At least I guessed right about what I'd get from killing him. (A form that could bite, and a way to get past currents that are going the wrong way.) The stealing enemy projectiles is a cute side-effect. And I like being able to eat schools of fish for health now. (I really have very few inhibitions about killing sea life, as long as it isn't with energy-form...

Oh yeah. Speaking of sea-life, I wandered through the energy-temple, now that I knew how to open red flowers to find pearls, and fought a boss-blaster. (That had, what sounded like, a creepy laugh.) And after blowing up the giant mother blaster, who was clearly just defending her young, I stole the egg and raised it as my own, with myself as the only mother the poor, kidnapped blaster would ever know. He's kind of cute. I call him “Blasty”.

Later, I went back to the giant nautilus, and repeated the grisly ritual of matricide followed closely by kidnapping. Although the nautilus (“Naughty”) is not quite as useful, so he gets less face-time.

Perhaps because of the macabre origin, Blasty is a little violent. I try to keep him away from the blue jellies, but he's managed to kill 3 so far when I wasn't on time. Also, Naughty had a funny scene where I was trying to ride some giant fish (under my house) and Naughty ran up and smacked it. It was unexpected and rather amusing. I like to imagine that Naughty was jealous.

As a side note, the Nautilus fight was quite possibly the most fun boss battle I've had yet.

I went up to the area in Mithalas that I couldn't get to before from the current, and here I have to admit, was a wonderful, wonderful moment. I could barely see a ghostly form in the room, but I couldn't seem to interact with him. So instead I went over to the middle of the room, because the window had some writing on it. The camera got all nice and zoomed up, and I slowly translated it. “Mithalas drown unbelievers” it read. Disturbing. I turned to go, and THEN the 3 spectral priests showed up to fight. Freaked me out, since they came just as I had decided there probably wasn't anything else I could do and was about to leave.

Next I wandered over to the veil, and I have to admit, here is one of those rare perfect moments. The water surface effect was exactly what it needed to be, and jumping around out of the water is great fun. The map freaked me out a little at first (so big and open!) but after I realized most of it was air, it was a bit more manageable. I found a few spheres of water floating in the sky, reachable by jumping, (It's fun seeing Naija cross land, creature-from-the-black-lagoon style) and I thought the designers had just said “Screw continuity, this will be fun”, but after later discovering the luminarians, I realized that this was probably in-character for the world. Either way I got a nifty sea-urchin helm to wear.

I also found a nice cave full of turtles (yay!) and a not-so-nice cave with a giant octopus in it, that I still haven't figured out how to beat. (Or even hurt.)

Speaking of the luminarians, I wandered over to the sun-temple next. The first (and main) puzzle nearly defeated me. I wasn't sure I had everything I needed to progress, and having been burned once already, I was a bit skittish. The “slide the thing on the water surface” is a neat puzzle basis, but it wasn't clear at all that the crystal-holder could move, so it took a long time before I tried casting binding on it. (After I realized that, the rest of the puzzle wasn't bad at all.) The boss was a pain, but the creepy writing on the wall in his room was worth it by itself. There seem to be a surprising number of races that got blown up by the creator. Given the text I'm reading on walls, I have a theory what the final boss will be...

Also recovered a nice memory of Naija freaking out some guy on a boat.

Sun-form in hand, I started heading towards the abyss. I took a side trip to the Agnassi ruins (or as I like to call them, the seahorse sanctuary) and was very impressed with their architecture. I also liked the whole racetrack element. I spent the whole time wondering what those crystal turtles did. And then when I finally read out the spell on the rock... LAP 1! Start!

I also found some song on a wall with a picture of a whale, but singing it didn't seem to do anything, either where I was, or later, when I found some baby beluga whales.

Marvelous. I finally got 1:17, but not without a little substance abuse. (Hot soups! Racer's friend!) I also fought some giant crab, but I'm not sure if I cheated. I made him walk over my spiky kelp, and he kept jumping up and down on it, and mashing his vulnerable face against it until he died. It didn't feel as epic as some other boss fights. Got some nice crab armor though. I'm getting all sorts of costumes now. (And tons of toys for my cave, too.)

I wandered through a bit of the abyss, and decided that the glowing things in the depths were extremely well realized here. (Especially the ones that swallow you until you get out somehow.) I took a detour to the ice caves, and the ice veil. After some aerial acrobatics, (that were hard enough to be bordering on “Very frustrating”, I found a giant cave full of water bubbles, complete with a boss.

And that's where I stopped. After several tries to kill him, the best I was able to discover is that I can knock him off the ceiling (he's a giant cave-fisher sort of thing) with spiky kelp. But after that, it's not terribly clear what to do next, and so I called it a night. The bubble cave itself doesn't help matters. It's hard enough to get around that it adds a lot of extra time (at least in my case) to every boss fight, just from reaching him. I realize that the bubbles ARE kind of nifty, but after 5 or 6 times of trying to get to the boss to try to fight him, it got kind of old.

I feel like I must be closing towards the end of the game. I suspect I'll find it (or at least a lot of it) in the abyss, or possibly deeper, since it looks from the map like the abyss map might go further down... More later this week, I imagine.

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Aquaria Playthrough Diary 6

More watery pachinko machines of doom! And here was me just talking about Project Horseshoe's use of that term, when what should I discover in Aquaria but... something that can really only be described as such. Read on for this, and more adventures in Aquaria!


More of the kelp forest. And yeah. More pachinko. In this case, it takes the form of some neat little plants that operate much like pinball bumpers. And a whole bunch of them. In a current. I did manage to bounce off of them to get a prize at the top (or bottom in this case) but much as in the case of real pachinko machines, I'm not really sure that it was anything I did skillfully so much as just trying until it worked. Oh well, didn't all that long, and I look forward to seeing what it makes my cave look like later.

So. Highlights:

Learned some more recipes. Thought happy thoughts about how the "crafting" system is set up in this game. I like it a lot. Started learning some vegetarian dishes, including soup and cakes. These are significant because they give me regeneration, which turns out to be an incredibly efficient way to convert leafs I pick up into healing.

Made it to the boss of the kelp forest. Was a little sad - I didn't really WANT to blow up the giant face in the kelp, but apparently there is no leaving until I do. The boss fight itself was fairly neat though, especially with the progression as the boss got "angrier" and started spawning more things, or eventually just went full out attacking.

The cut-scene that greeted me at the end didn't make me feel terribly better either, for that matter. "Once upon a time there were some peaceful, kelp-dryad things that lived and were happy. Later, their god decided he could make something better than leaf-things, and so tore them all to bits. The only thing he left alive was their mother. Who you just killed. Jerk."

On the brighter side, the song I learned as a result almost makes it worth it. Really enjoying swimming around in nature-form, and I finally get to know what those strange blue plants I've been seeing are. And also, a trip to the energy temple is apparently in my future, since now I know what that big red plant I passed in there was. (Apparently they contain pearls?!?) I like making flowers around, and I like being able to make giant spiky pillars. They have been useful so far in several cases.

For one thing, they're unwieldy but effective weapons. I've had good luck boxing myself in with them, or sometimes if I'm especially lucky, boxing in something else. (Or sometimes especially unlucky and boxing them in with me...) Somehow I don't feel quite as guilty poking things to death with my giant kelp death-spines, as I do with blasting them via energy form. Go figure? I still draw the line at jellyfish however. A friend has informed me that the blue jellies seem to be pretty good sources of jelly oil and health, but I still can't bring myself to go after the blissful metroid-like blobs.

The forest-sprite cave was cute. They're weird-looking little buggers, but so it goes. I notice they have a "bed" in their cave, but I still can't figure out the point of beds. Aside from the dreams that showed up at the very beginning, they don't seem to do much. Maybe they recover your health? They always seem to be right next to red crystals though. Oh well, flavor if nothing else.

Some nice flavor-scenery in this area. Really appreciating the art. I was very happy to see that the giant long-legged happy thing was in the actual game, and not just in the cut-scene with the plant-people being torn up. The sunken ship was a also neat, although a bit of a disappointment until I found the secret passage. I still haven't been back to my cave for a while, so I don't know what the treasure-chest-o-bubbles will end up looking like, but one more thing to go look forward to, I guess.

Riding around on Sea-Horses and trying to balance "getting where I want to go" against "singing along with the background music" remains as fun as always. Kudos again to Bit-blot on that, if nothing else.


Speaking of bit-blot, I'm still wondering what's up with their logo when you start the game. Or specifically, what's up AFTER their logo, when we see the nice scene with the birds. And the windmills. Sometimes. And even more infrequently, the dragon. Not sure what it means, but I like it when the dragon shows up.

A bit of metagaming: I found "shark fin soup" which seems to make my "bite stronger" so I'm assuming that I'll find a form at some point that bites things. My initial guess right now is some kind of shark form, possibly learned from the boss of the Mithalas chapel. Since he was a big shark, and all.

I made it to the mermog cave, and then got bitten to death, and realized how far it had been since I had saved last (the forest sprite cave) and decided to call it a night. I like that it is challenging though. (The precision swimming around the spiny sea slugs was fun too.)

Probably play some more tomorrow.

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Linear vs. Freedom Part II: Mutable World

In the first part, I talked about was that the designers of games could cleverly craft their worlds so as to subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) guide players along the intended path.

Now I'd like to talk about way #2: Attempting to change the game world in reaction to the user's behavior.


This is almost never done. Games almost never do it. For the most part, game environments are designed as either static, unchangeable things, or in some cases (roguelikes, in particular) as randomly generated levels that are different every time, but consequently, usually fairly bereft of intentionally crafted puzzles or challenges.

Now, I have nothing against roguelikes. (Some of my best friends are roguelikes!) And the model of the world being fixed makes a lot of sense from engineering, asset-management, and scenario planning angles. The fixed world is nice because you get to draw maps, (which is fun) and means that players can talk to each other meaningfully about where they are in the game. It also means that you know in advance what spatial relationships exist between interesting things, and can manipulate them as needed. (Especially when it's useful to force the player to go through something before seeing something else.)

What I've gradually become convinced of is that neither fixed worlds, nor completely random maps are the final solution. Looking for a moment the pencil-and-paper role playing scene, it is telling that all of the conventional wisdom points GMs away from fixed worlds, or random worlds. (Which I guess are also fixed worlds, but from a different source.) In tabletop gaming, when stories work, it is frequently because the GM carefully adjusted the world, and the order of events, in such a way as to make a better story. The more that is fixed in advance, the less the GM can move around later to make a better story.

This works because good GMs know the same secret that stage magicians do: If you don't tell them what the trick is in advance, then you can change the trick as you go to whatever seems most appropriate. In stage magic, this is usually called a "magician's choice", or equivocation. In tabletop RPGs, it is usually called "good GMing".

In tabletop gaming, this sort of approach tends to lead to highly memorable storytelling and situations. So why can't the same thing be done in computer games? Obviously, the computer won't be able to approach the finesse or creativity of a good GM. But there is no reason that I can think of that a game couldn't adjust the world to make it more fun for the player.

The only places I can think of where I have seen this sort of thing done is in the Mars segment of Adam Cadre's Photopia, and maybe some weird, experimental stuff like Warning Forever.

Consider – When the player sits down, they know nothing about the world you're giving them to explore. If they explore east, and find a shrine where they learn how to double-jump, and then explore west, where they find some caves that require double-jumping to progress, they're likely to say “wow, that was lucky, good thing I went east first!”

But what is to stop the game from putting the shrine what ever place they go first? And the caves wherever they go second? The player doesn't know the map, except for whatever minuscule portions of it they have seen first hand. They don't know what is supposed to be where. Maybe some other player went south first. And found a shrine where they learned to double jump. And went north second, and found some caves where they had to double-jump to progress. Players are used to assuming the world is a fixed entity, but is there any reason that we as designers have to follow that rule?

What if the game, rather than operating on a fixed map, was instead set up as a series of things the PC was supposed to experience? Which the game would put on the map in order, as the player explored areas they hadn't seen yet? It would be sort of a quantum map. Any place the player had explored would be “locked down”. If they went there later, it would always be the same. But any place they hadn't explored yet was undefined until they went there, and the game would fill up the undefined spaces with whatever it felt like the player should see next.

The participants in Project Horseshoe this year described the player's experience as a “watery pachinko machine of doom”, but they seem to be approaching it from the point of view of predicting where the ball will land and how to design configurations to get the ball where it is supposed to go. My thinking is rather – It's a pachinko machine, so the ball is going to bounce off of things as it falls, but there is no reason we can't change the positions of the pegs as it is falling.

This kind of design would give us some fairly powerful tools to craft the flow of the user experience. Suppose that somewhere in the game, there was a boomerang. And there was also a boss, for which defeating it required the boomerang. If the locations of both of these things are fixed, then there exists a chance that the player will try to go to the boss before they have the boomerang, and then either be turned away, or fail. If the locations were mutable though, the programmers could know in advance that the player would have gotten the boomerang before they fight the boss, for the simple reason that the boss and his area won't even show up until the player finds the boomerang.

This could work the other way, too. Say the designer has some neat puzzle in mind, where the player is supposed to see the puzzle, and later find a key, and then remember to go back to where they found the puzzle. Say for some reason the designer wants to make sure that the player finds the puzzle first, before the key. This would give them a way of insuring that, and making sure the user experienced it as designed, rather than stumbling on the key, finding the puzzle later, and going “that was easy, I had the key laying around and it just went right in.”

Usually when games want to deal with things like this, they do it by blocking off parts of the map, often in arbitrary-seeming ways. (“Sorry, you can't leave town yet, the bridge is still under construction.”) This would give the player (apparent) freedom to wander wherever they wanted, and have no need to box them in because they didn't have an item required for the lands beyond.

There are dangers, of course. Player knowledge is the biggest one. If they knew that the game would always give them the “temple of the boomerang” on the 5th unexplored screen they went to, then it sort of destroys the illusion of exploring a world. Also, if they know how it is working, (or are just perverse) they can cause problems by various behavior patterns. For example, what would stop a player from running around and “Defining” the whole map, first thing? You might be able to work out some limitations, but ultimately, it would require some careful design on the part of the programmer to make sure the player didn't “fix” too many locations by looking at them, and thus restrict the game's abilities to place things in unexplored space by reducing the amount of unexplored space left.

Also, it there would have to be SOME limitations or the players could define an infinitely large world by just exploring indefinitely. Due to the constructed nature of it, save-game storage space would probably have to scale linearly, so this would not be especially desirable.

Finally, it would probably limit replay value, since, much like a magic trick repeated too many times, on a replay, the player would realize how it all worked, and it would become less of an exploration, and more about just trudging along until the game decided to trigger the next event. It would remove the illusion that the player could affect the game's pacing. The same logic that makes sure they can't go too far without getting what they are looking for would also make it hard to get it early.

I think a game set up like this could work. And would be an experience unlike anything else out there right now. But a lot of work needs to be done before then, and a lot of problems need to be solved and thought through. But still. Who says the world has to exist before you look at it?

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Linear vs Freedom, Part I: Invisible Rails

Playing Aquaria lately has got me thinking more about player exploration, how fun it is, and how tricky it is to get right without sacrificing other game aspects to. Read on for some random game design musings on walking the balance between making sure the player doesn't get stuck, and letting them feel like they have complete freedom to explore.


It's always been a hard problem. How do you make the player feel like they can go anywhere they want and explore, without worrying that they'll go
somewhere they can't do anything yet, and become frustrated? If you make a giant world with multiple ways to go, there is no way you can ensure the
player will go the way you want or expect. Some of them will go some random other ways, possibly towards obstacles they can't overcome yet.

The usual complaints that this brings out in a user are:

• Why did the game let me go somewhere I'm not supposed to go?


• Spent time coming here and have nothing to show for it.


• Have to spend more time getting back to someplace interesting.

These are things feelings that we, as game designers, usually want to avoid or minimize. Logically, it seems like there are two general classes of solution:

1. Attempt to change the user's reaction to the game world's behavior.


2. Attempt to change the game world in reaction to the user's behavior.

So first let's talk about #1. Trying to modify the user's reaction. This is by far the most common approach taken, and there are several ways to approach it. Most involve attacking these common complaints directly. Here are some solutions I've seen games use:

• Provide obvious in-game clues when the player is somewhere they are not supposed to be. This can range from subtle (jumps that are obviously too far) to heavy-handed. (Voice tells them "I'd better come here later after I can double jump!") If overused, it runs the risk of making the game feel too directed, but does make it fairly unlikely the player will waste much time trying to do something they can't, if the game itself tells them "go do something else for now."


• Related to the above, provide obvious in-game clues for what areas *are* open to the player. A compass that points to open areas, a helpful person who makes suggestions about where to go next, blinking icons on the map, etc. Again, this runs the risk of feeling too linear if used too heavily.
• "Lock" areas so that you can't get to them until you're able to navigate/explore them. Make the entrance to the land of long jumps require the double-jump boots to even get into. One hand, this also gives you a good way of making sure that the player understands some mechanic, by forcing them to demonstrate it to get in the door. On the other hand, this too runs the danger of "feels too linear", since if used overmuch it requires players to explore areas areas in a fixed order, and can give them hints about what is expected of them within.
• Provide easy ways back after dead ends. Examples include things like one-way doors, ledges to jump down from, and free teleports back to one or more fixed locations.
• Provide useful (but limited) general transportation. Make it easier to get from one end of the game to the other. Teleporter networks (sometimes disguised as something else, like horse routes, or sea turtles) seem to be the most common way to make this work.
• Provide multiple rewards in all directions. By scattering enough small but significant rewards around, players can at least feel like it wasn't a wasted trip, since they still got something useful out of it. Legend of Zelda's pieces of heart containers are a good example of this sort of thing.
• Just let them actually go anywhere they want, and do whatever they want. The danger here is that if they can just go to the end of the game, they may skip a lot of your carefully designed content, so using this well requires that the game be set up in such a way that this is either impractical for some reason, or acceptable to the designer. (Good example of this: Fallout. Nothing stops you from going straight to the final dungeon, if you know where it is.)

All of these methods are largely examples of the subtle nuance that is the level-designer's art. They all revolve around crafting the world in a way that guides the player toward the areas that the player is expected to experience next. I like to think of this as the "invisible rails" game model. Granted, in some cases, the rails are built out of game rules (lack of keys or items) and in other cases, the rails are built out of player ignorance (not knowing where to go or what to do) but in all of these cases, the general goal is to make the game world in such a way that the user feels completely free, but is blocked or discouraged if they try to deviate too far from the planned experience.

These approaches have served games well so far, but as the fine people who partake in Project Horseshoe have been telling us, the best stories in games are often the ones that the player feels like they have a play a large part in creating themselves.

This post is already getting pretty long, so I think I'll break it up into separate posts. In part 2, I'll talk about the second, seldom used approach of modifying the game to adapt to the user.

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Aquaria Playthrough Diary 5

Read on for more of my Aquaria experiences! In this exciting episode, I expound on things I like and dislike about the game, while aquiring Phat l00tz

I have started to find some treasures to put in my cave. Found a glowing (and undoubtedly cursed or otherwise infused with evil) Krotite statue, which sits balefully in a small chamber. And more pleasantly, found a giant seed that grew into a gorgeous pink garden thing. Oh yeah, and I found a blue banner from Mithalas last time I swam around there.

As an aside, I'd like to take a moment to express some of the things that I think the game is doing very well right now.

Stuff I Like:
First, I really like the sheer joy of swimming around the lush environments. I really like the various sea-beasts I get to interact with in fun ways. I really like swimming through schools of fish, or clinging to the backs of peaceful leviathans. (Take me away, magic sea turtle!)

I like the amount of variety they've managed to put in the ambient environments. I like how everyplace looks different, and how much obvious care and love went into designing all the areas for me to swim through.

Gameplay wise, I really like the sparse, intuitive interface. (With a possible exception for the menu, which vaguely annoys me for reasons I'll go into later.) The singing is great, and swimming around is easy and fun.

I really like the feeling of exploration. I feel like I can go most anywhere and that there is always a new horizon waiting to be crossed.

I also like the concept of Naija's cave. I've seen it done before, (Suikoden, for example, or Skies of Arcadia or Breath of Fire 2) but the concept of a player base that grows as you adventure is a compelling one. I look forward to seeing how it looks by the end of the game. (Although a minor complaint - I wish I was finding more stuff that actually had a use besides decoration. Decoration is neat, but feeling like you're outfitting a hideout with new verbs is neater.)

I find myself really liking the cooking system here, as well. The idea of recipies that are general is a good one. I like the idea of “any meat + leaf”, and letting you pick whatever you want that is a meat for the first part. The “2 in the field, 3 at a kitchen” rule is nice too. This is one of the nicest crafting systems I've seen in a while and I enjoy it a lot.

Stuff I Dislike:
Things I dislike have to start with the menu. I find it difficult and counter-intuitive in places. Also, dragging food onto Naija's mouth is a little too “cutesy”, and not being able to have the recipe menu up while cooking just feels like an impossible oversight.

I also feel like, while the environments are nice, sometimes I wish they had more “meat”. The fact that swimming and attacking are so easy sometimes works against the game, since getting from point A to point B often just involves swimming in the same direction for a long time, possibly launching homing bullets. And while it's awfully pretty, if you've seen it before, it starts to get old. It's obvious that the designers wanted to address this at least somewhat, since they included the magic warp turtles, but still it feels annoying sometimes

Compounding this issue is that there is a lot of space. There's just a lot of places to go. And while a small percentage of them have new or neat things in them, a lot of them are just there. They do add a nice sense of scope, but they also sometimes feel like a grind to go through. “Oh, ANOTHER lush blue room full of fish to swim to the other end of. Ho hum.”

I realize that I sound inconsistent here. I love the feeling of exploration and space, but feel that the spaces are too big. I think the issue is that they are fun while swimming through the first time, but after that, repeated exposure makes them start to wear thin. And this is a dangerous game for them to get into, since creating a constant stream of new content takes a lot longer for them to make than it does for me to experience.


Back to gameplay:
Anyway, back to today's experiences:

Back in the kelp forest, found a big eel thing I could swim past as a tiny fish, but it lead to a dark cave that I couldn't see much in. All that I found were weird little leaches that for some reason slowly GAVE me health. Still not sure how those worked. But they glowed blue while doing it, so I assume it was intentional.

Naija mused that this place was big, and she was worried she might go feral in it. I guess that's something you worry about when you live in the ocean, maybe? Not sure, but it did amuse me a little.

The leafy sea dragon flew by bombarding me with fire again, but the shield spell let me mostly ignore him, even though he is fairly disconcerting.

I found some sea-slugs with spines though, that feel just downright artful. They are spiky, but they move when you sing their color. And the first batch is positioned next to a bunch of enemies that shoot lots of projectiles. (sea urchins, it looks like, although they remind me of the little crawly things from metroid) And the first batch is colored so that if you sing the shield song, they'll move. Well done! I actually had noticed they moved before I cast shield, but when I renewed my shield later I found myself very impressed with this as a method of tricking the user into discovering a mechanic. Very nice, Bit-Blot! Very nice indeed!

Later, a shark ate me, and I stopped to go play City of Heroes with some friends! Some days you eat the shark, and some days it eats you, I guess.

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Aquaria Playthrough Diary 4

Kelp forest is a win!

A quickish entry this time. Didn't have as much time to play today, and just noodled around mostly places I'd already explored. But click through, to read on about my amazing experience in the kelp forest!

First off, the giant snake-rock-things are great. They look just like normal moss-covered rocks, until you get close, and then they rear up, like some sort off ancient leviathan, and half-heartedly try to bite you. (They don't seem terribly fast. But they're rather big, and neat looking.)

Second - I found a place called the “fish cave”. It is a puzzle. It is great. I was a little nervous, since singing the song on all of the rocks (in every combination I could think of) didn't yield any results. I was a little worried that there was something I was missing that I needed here, but after trying to sing in the middle (and seeing the fish glow) I was able to muddle through it. I really liked that puzzle. Even though I had already guessed the reward, it was still rather satisfying.

Also found a giant turtle, who kindly agreed to swim back to the first giant turtle with me. Back in the home waters! Hurrah!

I took the opportunity to swim around my cave and see if I'd missed anything. Nothing in the cave, but the word on the front of the cave helped a lot towards my cracking of their secret code. Based on the “Mithalas” sign, I knew that the cave enterance said H_M_, and so it was a simple guess that it read “home”.

I swam around and enjoyed the home water area a bit more. I notice now the giant fish directly under home now has some properties I hadn't noticed before. For one thing, I can cling to it, and pretend to be riding, even if I can't figure out how to make him go. But also, sometimes when I sing, his eyes glow with the color of the note. Also, ONCE (when I was opening up a plant beneath him) he came ZOOMING down at me. Kind of freaked me out. (I thought he was trying to eat either me or the plant.) But I haven't gotten him to move again since then, so who knows?

I also finally got around to checking out a back entrance to the energy temple I found a helmet. With some more words written above it. Being paranoid, (and curious) I tried to decrypt them before grabbing the helmet. (Hey, what if they said “face-eating helmet jellyfish” or something? I put nothing past Bit-Blot!) I'm pretty sure they just said “Flesh is Weak” though, which while vaguely sinister sounding, probably still means that it's safe to take. (And gave me a few more letters for my crypto-book!)

I also took a swim through the boss room (using the “I'm a fish!” shortcut) and was pleased to see that his giant stygian corpse was still laying there where I had left it. Nice touch!

And then I saved my game and stopped for now. More soon! I'm starting to really get into this game at this point, and am enjoying it quite a bit. (I think I got a friend to try it out too, after describing it to him as "sort of a cross between echo the dolphin, Castlevania:Symphony of the night, and Loom.")

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Aquaria Playthrough Diary 3

You mean I could do that the whole time?

More rambling thoughs on my continued adventures in Aquaria. In this exciting instalment, I search the wrong direction again, meet limpets and snails, and gradually become a cold-blooded underwater killer. Also, I met a seahorse!

More beyond the fold...

So I didn't have a whole lot of time today to throw at Aquaria, but I snuck in a good 45 minutes during time I probably should have been asleep. When we last left off, I had decided to go play somewhere else, since I didn't seem to be able to get too much further in the Mithalas chapel.

I wandered around for a while in the open waters and tried different directions. Two moderately frustrating things happened. First off, the direction I chose to explore was more or less a bust. I was looking down, and after finding a lot of environments filled with pretty fish, annoying little ramming-squids in shells, and not a whole lot else, I hit a dead end. Every time I went down further, I hit a message complaining about how dark it was. (And to be fair, it was getting pretty dark.) Ok, so I can't explore here any further either. Great. Not that bad, but since I had just come from another dead-end exploration area, it was a little irking.

(While I really like the feeling of free exploration this game engenders, it is awfully frustrating when all avenues of exploration end up busts, and you have to backtrack. I'll probably expand on this later in a separate post.)

The second frustrating thing was really more of a failure on my part. My inhibitions finally went away. The stupid little ramming fish killed me one too many times, and I started going energy form and incinerating them with my mind. I'm not proud of this, and if they didn't follow you practically forever, I probably would have been content to just avoid them. But they chase you a really long ways, and I finally decided, “them or me, I guess.”

Congradulations, Derek and Alec. You've turned me into an underwater killer.

I was feeling a little annoyed at this point, since I didn't have a clear direction, and was irate that the game seemed to be forcing me to do something I didn't really want to do. (The environments are awesome, and I don't REALLY want to blow up their inhabitants if I can help it, particularly with the creepy energy form.) But then a couple of things happened in rapid succession, and the game is full of awesome again.

First: I met these really annoying little limpet things. This in itself was annoying, (although they were very well realized, and it was very obvious from right away just what they did. Nice design and sound effects.) But then in trying to get them off, I spun the mouse around, and made a whirlpool and flung them off. Then, a few moments later, it dawned on me what I had just done: I'd never done that before at all, but it seemed the natural motion for getting stuck things off of me. I found myself wondering “have I been able to do that all along??” (Answer: yes) Well played, Bit-blot. Well played indeed.

Then, I found a cavern full of sea-snails. Which looked awesome. I find Aquaria to be at its most full-of-wonder when I'm just enountering beautiful undersea things that aren't trying to kill me, and that I can just swim around and enjoy, and interact with. (I discovered I could pull the shell off of a snail. And more amusingly, if I let him climb on a boulder, I could carry the bolder around with him climbing around the edges. Kind of high maintenance for a pet, but fun nonetheless. I named him “Pickles” and enjoyed him for a good 5 minutes before getting bored lugging a giant boulder around for him to climb on.)

And then I found a sea-horse. To be fair, I'd seen a couple of them before. They were red, and floated around near things like save-crystals. I'd feared that they were something I was expected to blow up in order to replenish my supply of meat or something. (Which bothered me since I didn't really want to blow them up.) But then I discovered that the mouse glowed when over them, so I tried interacting with one. Naija went up and sort of hugged it. Great work, Naija. You, er... caught it. Well... done.

It wasn't really clear what next. I didn't seem to be able to carry it home, and I couldn't swim while holding it. I was about to give up, when I happened to try singing. (I was going to see if I could use the binding-song on it to carry it around, or possibly see if I could make a shield big enough for both of us.) What happened instead was that he moved.

This, I have to say, was rather neat. I could direct him around by singing different notes. And he swam a little faster than I usually do, and is a little safer, to boot. But more to the point, it was just downright FUN, swimming through areas on the back of a seahorse.

I also noticed at this point that Naija's song is tuned to work well with the music. Heck, in places, you can even almost sing along, or accompany it. I have to say, that swimming through the lush, beautiful undersea locations on the back of a seahorse, while directing it with music, and trying to make the music accompany the background music, is really one of the neater game experiences I've had in a while. So... Well done, Bit-Blot. That was a rare moment.

I am a big fan of any time the game can make something that both new, while still being intuitive enough that the user can have the joy of figuring it out for themselves without having to break the 4th wall and tell them. So to get not one, but TWO such experiences, in rapid succession (spinning whirlpools, and directing seahorses with my song) was pretty good stuff.

I also found a kelp forest and started exploring it. It had a neat sea-spider thing leaving sticky threads around. Neat mechanic! Also, some leafy sea dragon thing showed up and violently bombarded me with glowing green things. This looks like a neat area, and is hopefully where I'm supposed to go next, since Naija hasn't warned me away from it yet. I'll explore it more tomorrow, but it was great to end on a positive note.

Really enjoying the game at this point, and wishing I didn't have to work in the morning, so I could play it some more...

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Aquaria Playthrough Diary 2

My further adventures in the world of Aquaria. I am enjoying the game quite a bit, but I has taken me far too long to find more time to play it. Anyway, my continuing adventures.


Wandering through the Mithalas Chapel.

Wow. They finally managed to make some enemies that I don't mind going all energy-form on. The... not sure what they're called yet, but evil fish men things are passably nasty looking, but the possibility of shared heritage makes me leery of blowing them up. But when I start meeting giant blobs with laser-beam eyes, my compulsions go away. That thing was rather neat looking.

Also, regarding art direction – The red vines that infest places are truly nasty looking. Especially the pulsating fleshy lumps. Nice also with the dichotomy between the normally brilliant blue world, and the evil red vines. It's funny, normally I associate red with danger in this game, which makes me really wonder about the save-game crystals, since they are rather obviously red. Is this just to make them more obvious? Or do Derrik and Alec have some sinister plan involving them?

Also – there is a lot of weird writing around. I suspect it means something, and part of me wants to copy it down, and play amateur cryptographer. I'm hoping that it will become more meaningful later in the game though. Mostly because if it doesn't, the neurotic side of me will probably make me play through most of it again to see it all. Or check the forums, I guess.


I finally beat the 3rd floating glob of eye-lasers. They got progressively easier as I started figuring out what to do. (Answer: Swim in circles around it and spam energy bolts.) And sure enough, they lay a little more guilt on me for blowing things up, in the form of a cut-scene in which Naija bemoans having to blow stuff up, and enjoying it. Well, at least I know it's not just me being overly-sensitive. The designers clearly WANTED it to be a little uncomfortable.

In urelated news, I finally figured out (from putzing with my icon screen) that the strange device I found before was a “Jelly Beacon”, which apparently draws small jellyfish towards it. It is unclear how that helps me. On one hand, making a healing poultice requires jelly oil, but I draw the line at blowing up jellyfish to harvest their oil. If they wanted me to do that, then I humbly submit that the designers shouldn't have made the jellies so harmless and appealing.

So, back in the cursed depths of the overgrown chapel, I seem to have finally made it to another boss. A giant coral shark thing. First impression – these things would be a lot more threatening if I couldn't just turn on my shield and ignore their attacks while I study them. Not that studying seems to help much in this case. I bounce a bunch of his shots back at him, but even though he flashes, it doesn't seem to do much. I try turning energy and shooting him a bunch, but still nada.

I figure out early on that I can use my “tractor beam” song on the floating stinky fishman, but it's not clear what to do after that. I spend some time trying to make the boss eat him by accident, but the only time that seems to work is if he also eats me, so I suspect that this is more the “how to avoid being eaten” strategy than an actual way of damaging him. Wait, scratch that, he will eat me either way, even if there are no stinky fishmen around.

It seems like blowing the stinky fishman up while the boss is near might hurt the boss, but it's hard to tell. The metagamer in me is pretty sure that there must be something I need to do with the stinky fishmen, (since the game starts me with one, and gives me a way to make more of them) but it's not clear yet what that is.

It takes me a VERY long time to realize that I can turn the normal fishmen that the boss spits out into stinky ones by luring them down by the smelly fungus. I suspect I was supposed to have learned this relationship sooner, but somehow I missed it until now.

One other complaint about this boss, from a layout point of view: He takes too long to get to, whenever he kills me. Every time he kills me, I have to swim through a fairly long tunnel to fight him again. Granted, it has a current in it, so I can go fast, and it's moderately pretty (if rather disturbing) but still. It's that much more time I have to spend every time I die. (And I have to swim a bit further, since there is a “heal to full” potion I need on the way, that I can't save after getting.)

Since I'm still not even sure if I'm hurting the boss, this means that it's turning into a fairly frustrating fight. It would be nice if there were a save-crystal right before the boss room, like there was in the energy temple. Or if there were an option for when I died, that it would start me back out near the place I died.

A thought occurs to me. Maybe I'm not supposed to be fighting this boss yet, because I lack some skill or song. Ok, metagame time: Naija said something similar herself before, but it was in a weird place (a save-game room) and I hadn't beaten up all of the eye-laser-blobs yet, so I assumed it referred to them. Maybe what was SUPPOSED to happen is I was supposed to get this message after killing the eyes, to warn me away from the boss? The save-game room appears to be on the same “map” as the path to the boss. Maybe that message plays when you get to this “map” for the first time, if you don't have something you need?

Looking around, it looks like there are no save points AFTER the one-way current. The only save points on this map both have ways to back out near them. I think that means it's time to go explore somewhere else. Or of not, I might as well go wander around while I try to figure out how to deal with the shark.

Design takeaways I got from this experience:

• Shorten time between “player death” and “retry” to as low as possible.
• Give very clear feedback if something is not harming something. (Megaman 2 still has, in my mind, one of the best. “tink!” sound, and bullet ricochets away.
• If the player is not going to be able to continue, tell them. And if they ignore it, tell them again periodically, in case they're like me and too thick to get it the first time. (Maybe every time they fail?)
  

On my way out, I pass by the ruined tablet that (apparently) proclaims this to be the city of Mithalas. Screw it. I'm starting to keep track of which letter is which. Assuming the tablet does say Mithalas, there are enough characters, and the A repeats in the right place. Notebook started.

Moving on... I meet swordfish for the first time. I discover that they don't like me. I also discover that if I'm towing a big rock, I can hide behind it, and they bounce off and get hurt, and I laugh. I also discover that if I drag a big rock through a school of fish, it kills them and turns them into fish oil. Who knew rocks were so useful? Somehow I feel less bad smooshing fish with a rock than I do blowing them up with my mind.

More exploration later.

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