Posts Tagged video
Design Roundup #6
Posted by The Management in design on March 28, 2011
- Skynet meets the Swarm: how the Berkeley Overmind won the 2010 StarCraft AI competition – A fantastic writeup about a Starcraft tournament that pitted custom AI’s against each other.
- Misadventures in Roleplaying – The anti-walkthroughs of IT-HE are about as fun as QA nightmares can get. They’re great at exposing how games work under the hood, but they also tell some great game-stories (such as building a bridge out of corpses to reach a typically inaccessible area).
- Applying the Elements of Design and Principles of Design in Level Art – A quick, visual-aid filled tour of various level design lessons.
Segues
Posted by The Management in design on November 20, 2010
Videogames are filled with transitions: loading new levels, initiating scripted sequences, obtaining special powerups, etc. These are often accompanied by the familiar wipes, fades and cuts of the film industry.
The effects themselves mask pit-stops necessary for resource (re)allocation. The segmentation also creates a natural variety and lets developers work on separate parts of the game that are only later stitched together.
In short, these transitions are functional. However, they are not smooth.
segue, n.
- A quick and uninterrupted change to the player’s avatar or surroundings that often facilitates new gameplay.
The above definition is rather nebulous, but it’s based on a simple concept: a smooth flow keeps the player immersed. Segues do this by removing the awkward parts of transitions that break immersion, namely disorientation and helplessness.
Some of GTA IV's more hyperbolic praises were attributed to its seamless world and the ability to carjack any vehicle...
Disorientation can take place quite easily as the camera cuts to a different point of view, or a different scene entirely. All of a sudden the player is expected to parse the change — to keep up with the fast-forwarding presentation — while filling in the gaps. Humans are quite good at this, but it’s a somewhat taxing effort that’s easy to get wrong.
Helplessness is strictly rooted in ignoring player input. Videogames are inherently interactive, and taking away control to show a transition strips the player of engagement. Plus, it’s never fun to wait on a loading screen.
Of course many videogames are quite abstract, but for the most part the medium tries to simulate various facets of the real world. There are no “bumpy” transitions in everyday life — aside from maybe losing consciousness — so it makes sense to limit them in videogames as well. That’s not always possible, but if the choice is there, it should be an easy one to make.
...while Fable 3's most common criticism seems to be its anything-but-smooth hand-shaking minigame.
As hardware, technical design, and production methodologies have advanced, so has our ability to implement segues. Vehicle sections now take place in the same maps as on-foot action, level geometry gets dynamically streamed in, scripted sequences play out as the player explores the environment, etc. These are almost universally praised as they make for some very memorable moments, but smooth transitions have been around for a long while.
Here are just a few of my favourite examples:
1). Spy Hunter’s Boat Segments
Spy Hunter was famous for giving players the ability to drive into the back of a moving truck. This was done at full speed without any camera wipes, but it wasn’t even the game’s greatest segue. No, that honour goes to the car-to-boat segments.
These had the player race through a dockside garage only to emerge in a different vehicle without slowing down for a second. It wasn’t the most realistic transition, but like many moments in Spy Hunter, it perfectly emulated the craziness of action-movie sequences.
2). Metroid’s Morph Ball
The Morph Ball has been a staple of the Metroid series since the inaugural title, and has always been an excellent example a segue.
Turning Samus into a diminutive sphere is effortless and presents the player with an all new moveset. The morph ball’s abilities also grant the player new options for combat and exploration, and switching between the two modes is quick and easy (even in the somewhat underrated 3D sequels).
3). Lost Odyssey’s Intro
Lost Odyssey’s FMV opening depicts a dark and epic battle. As the presumed hero fights his way through the ranks of bizarrely armed soldiers, there’s a brief pause in the action. The camera pans around, and a menu pops up! All of a sudden the player is in the game, and it’s waiting for his input!
There’s a slight hitch here, but it’s barely noticeable and makes for a fantastic intro. Sadly, the rest of Lost Odyssey is a veritable catalogue of awkward segues.
What are some of your favourite examples of smooth (or bumpy) transitions?
Design Roundup #5
Posted by The Management in design on October 31, 2010
- Valve Publications – I’ve raved about Valve’s design tips in the past, and there’s more to be found here.
- Bow Before The Worm Slayer – Will Hindmarch’s Escapist post on how low-cost, text-based achievements in Lord of the Rings Online facilitate player communication.
- Evaluating Game Mechanics For Depth – Mike Stout’s article on gameplay depth, what it really means, and how it can be increased without relying on aesthetic tricks or worrying about redundancy.
Framerates 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.
Design Roundup #1
Posted by The Management in design on August 28, 2009
Whenever I sit down to write an article about some aspect of game design, I always do a bit of research first. Often I run into works that already cover the topic, usually more extensively than I would have, so I scrap it. That doesn’t make these existing pieces any less valid, though, so I’ve decided to periodically highlight them.
Also, there’s a lot of information out there that isn’t specifically aimed at videogame design: neuroscience, prose, psychology, etc. Articles that discuss these topics can still be quite useful for a designer, so I’ll try to include them as well.
- An Easy Way to Increase Creativity – The concept of creativity is somewhat ethereal, but this Scientific American article goes over some concrete techniques for “thinking outside the box.”
- Yomi Layer 3: Knowing the Mind of the Opponent – David Sirlin’s excellent piece on predicting and conditioning one’s foe in competitive gaming.
- Intelligent Brawling – Tom Smith’s Gamasutra post on the more subtle mechanics of 3D brawlers and how they influenced the production of Nihilistic’s/THQ’s Conan.
About
Hi, my name’s Radek Koncewicz, and I'm the Creative Lead of Incubator Games, a small development studio I started with a few former coworkers.
I think a lot about videogames, and when I find the time, I post those thoughts here on this blog.
