Archive for category design
Design roundup #3.
Posted by The Management in design on March 11, 2010
- Robbing Gods – An interesting article on The Escapist about the thematic aspects of Thief: The Dark Project and how they fit into the title’s atmosphere and gameplay.
- Bungie Publications – Various papers on Bungie’s development of the Halo series. Lots of interesting info outside of game design per se, but also some good AI breakdowns.
- Movement Mechanics in “The Legend of Zelda” – A fairy detailed article on Link’s moveset in the original game and its sequel, and another example of why Nintendo’s games often just “feel” so good.
Pop-up videos and love.
Posted by The Management in design on February 27, 2010
Although I enjoy creating games more than anything, occasionally I ponder what it’d be like to focus on critiquing. If I were to take that path, I have a couple of ideas for “hooks” that could potentially set me apart from countless critics and reviewers. One such hook is (was?) the format of a Pop-Up Video.
The idea is simple enough, although time consuming. Still, it’s a sure fire way to stand out from the crowd, and Ben Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation has certainly shown the benefits of a unique format. Also, the iconic imagery used to convey opinions and trivia in Pop-Up Videos can be extremely preferable to actual voice recordings.
And with the advent of YouTube’s annotations, Frank Cifaldi of Lost Levels has created his own version of the concept:
Obviously it’s missing the visuals of Pop-Up Videos, and there’s a bit of a data overload for the length of the clips, but it’s still good stuff.
The videos also repeatedly mention one aspect of game creation that’s widely recognized but rarely discussed in detail: “the love.”
It’s a nebulous term, and seeing how it’s been a while since I’ve suggested any definitions, I figured it’d take a shot at it.
One of my personal favourite loving touches: the plant enemy from DraculaX. It's not a boss, yet it's only encountered once in this semi-secret room along the way to the secret/alternate exist from Stage 1. It's completely optional and there's no prize for defeating it, but it greatly enhances to the atmosphere.
The idea of love in a videogame usually boils down to the romantic notion of a developer so passionate about a title that he surmounts countless hurdles to put his personal stamp on the creation. It’s the extra sprite that’s encountered just once in the game, the playful dialogue between minor characters only accessible upon subsequent replays, an alternate special move for a boss that only appears on the hardest difficulty, etc.
These loving touches don’t carry a lot of bang for the buck. They’re easy to miss, they’re rarely duplicated, and they usually have a minimal effect on the gameplay. If they’re planned ahead of time, they’re often the first elements to get cut when the realities of budgets and schedules rear up. It’s not easy to place any actual value on them, and when removed — or simply not implemented — their absence doesn’t seem very detrimental.
In short, they’re the opposite of the typical bullet-points that can go on the back of a box.
The ability to manually bake bread in Ultima VII was far from a requirement in the game, yet it's often used by its fans to exemplify its rich setting.
Somewhat contradictorily, though, they can easily become the most memorable parts of a game. They’re what can set it apart from other titles and make it special to the player, and, in the grand scheme of things, matter a whole lot more than the number of levels or weapons. That alone warrants a definition:
loving touch, n.
- An element of a videogame that’s largely inconsequential and easily overlooked, but one that often represents quality and resonates as a unique and defining feature.
What are some of your favourite examples of “the love” in a videogame?
Framerates do matter.
Posted by The Management in design on January 6, 2010
A while ago I was reading up on Starblade, one of the first commercial polygon-based games. What really struck me about the game was just how smooth it was compared to its spiritual successor, Starfox (granted the above links are YouTube videos that don’t accurately reflect framerates, but the differences are still quite noticeable).
It’s an extreme case, but one that nicely demonstrates the importance of rendering speeds.
Despite having animations that consisted of only 2-3 frames, many classic games ran at 60fps. This granularity helped to smooth out movement, including Mario's beloved jump.
Of course no one ever complains about games being too smooth, but the debate of 30fps vs. 60fps continues to pop up. What’s more, the 60fps side keeps losing ground, often to the argument that humans can’t really detect more than 30 frames in a single second.
And that is completely untrue.
It’s an inherently flawed statement as humans are not digital machines. The human brain is always on, always receiving input. Light hits our eyes as a wave, and the information it carries is almost instantly transmitted to the Visual Cortex. The brain analyzes this data, focusing on changes brought on by motion and fluctuations in intensity. Displacement is interpolated via motion blur and identical input is discarded to avoid extraneous processing.
The “decoded” image is further analyzed by various parts of the brain, but the overall process — as complex as it is — is quite fast and versatile. Much faster than 30fps. Faster than 60fps, in fact.
So where does the myth of 30fps come from? Well, film and TV for the most part, but the framerates of those media are not analogous to those of videogames. Others have written extensively about the topic, so I won’t go too deep into it. What I’d like to talk about, though, is why high framerates are important to games.
The Unreal Tournament series has been known for letting its players set very high FPS benchmarks.
As a preface, different titles obviously have different requirements, and some suffer more from a low FPS than others. Also, the reasons for Insomniac’s decision to move away from their 60fps standard were completely understandable, if a little painful to accept.
With that said, here’s why I think high framerates are important:
1). Granularity
The framerate of a game is usually directly tied to the processing of its logic. As a result, action games that run at 30fps cannot have the same granularity of movement as those that run at 60fps. This might not matter much for turn-based strategy titles, but it makes an awful lot of shmups technically impossible to do at lower framerates.
2). Input Lag
Games are inherently an interactive medium, and as such the response times for input need to be virtually instant. On the hardware side this is rarely an issue, but a stuttering framerate can reduce the response times and greatly detract from the overall experience (especially in “twitch” titles).
3). Consistency
30fps isn’t bad, but what most people fail to realize is that it’s often the “ceiling” measurement, i.e., the best case scenario. Unlike TV and film, games are dynamic, and the processing required to render any given scene can fluctuate quite significantly. As a result, 30fps games actually tend to run at a rate of 20-30fps. These sort of inconsistencies can be very difficult to avoid, but they’re much less noticeable with higher benchmarks.
Motion blur at its finest.
4). Motion Blur
Motion blur is the biggest reason TV and film get away with smaller framerates. The phenomenon of motion blur relies on the human brain’s ability to stitch together a series of blurred images into a single, smooth animation. Until fairly recently, games had absolutely no motion blurring, and even these days it doesn’t have quite the same effect. The reason for this is that post-process blurring is not always accurate, and in many cases purposely exaggerated to create a distinctive visual effect.
To properly accommodate for all these factors, a high framerate is a must. And when it’s there, it creates a certain synchronization between the player and the game; a smooth flow that more developers should strive to achieve.
The elegance of Continuity.
Posted by The Management in design, games on December 12, 2009
Every once in a while, I check out a batch of interesting-looking Flash games. Most of them lose their charm after a few minutes, but here and there an occasional gem crops up. Continuity is one of these gems.
The game’s gotten plenty of publicity so it doesn’t really need my attention, but I did want to talk a bit about its execution. Combining platforming with a tile sliding puzzle is a clever genre-mashup, but it’s Continuity’s overall package that grabbed my attention.
The first level contains only closed off tiles, with one tile cleverly serving as the controls layout, and the other taking the role of filler to keep the tile sliding mechanic consistent.
The visuals are sparse and abstract, but also very clean. Two music tracks accompany the action, one in the platforming section and one in the tile sliding section, and a quite a few sound effects are used for feedback. Level progression follows a nice, gradual curve, and every time a new concept is introduced (e.g., switching tiles in mid-jump or using multiple keys), the complexity of the layout is scaled back.
And then there’s the interface.
When I first saw screenshots of Continuity, I was half-dreading switching from keyboard controls to mouse controls every time I wanted to move one of the tiles. I pictured dragging the cursor to the appropriate square, clicking the mouse button (or worse yet, holding it and physically sliding the tile), watching the tile glide to its destination, moving the cursor back to the tile with my character, once again clicking the mouse button, and finally going back to the keyboard-controlled platforming.
The empty spot is in the center, and any of its 4 adjacent tiles can be slid into its position at the touch of a button.
But no, Continuity surprised me with yet another elegant design decision. The spacebar toggles between the platforming and the tile sliding, while the arrow keys control all movement. This includes the player avatar during the platforming sections, and the tile sliding during the puzzle sections.
The platforming is fairly straightforward with the left and right arrows dictating direction, and the up arrow serving as the jump button. Keys and doors are also picked up/activated automatically, removing the need for any extra input.
The tile puzzle uses the arrow keys as well, but in a slightly different fashion. At any one time, there are a maximum of 4 tiles that can slide into the single empty slot. If the player wants to fill the gap with a tile that’s underneath it, he simply presses up and the tile slides into its position. This creates a new empty gap, and the arrow keys get re-mapped to its adjacent tiles.
Some of the later levels employ rather complex tile-edges that make for numerous valid combinations.
It’s an interface that’s custom made for the requirements of the puzzle section, and it’s very intuitive. The player never has to select the tile he wants to manipulate either, which speeds things up quite considerably. This is especially important since Continuity’s gameplay requires lots of tile sliding.
I don’t think a lot of people take notice of such things, but that’s the way it should be; if it works well, it shouldn’t really stick out. It did for me, though, and it made me spend a lot more time with the game than I do with typical Flash offerings.
Then again Continuity has the polish and depth that many similar titles lack, so that shouldn’t be too surprising.
Design roundup #2.
Posted by The Management in design on October 30, 2009
Things are really hectic here, so it’s a perfect time to take the easy way out by posting some more links!
- Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation – A really interesting article with some hard-data on social cooperation and how to encourage and maintain it at various scales.
- No More Wrong Turns – A great overview of the tools that any level designer should have in his/her toolbox.
- Imaginary Friends – MMOs might already serve as stand-ins for many real-world social interactions, but here’s why parasocial interactions can be very important for single player games (especially dating sims and titles with episodic content).
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About
Hi, my name’s Radek Koncewicz, and I work as a videogame design consultant. I'm also the creative lead of Incubator Games, a small development studio I started with a few former coworkers.
I think a lot about videogames, and write a lot of it down too, so I figured why not make it public?
If you'd like to contact me, drop me a line at themanagement@significant-bits.com.