Monthly Archives: April 2012

Randomness and Imagined Agency

04/30/2012 – 11:55 pm

The earliest records of “tabletop games” – games that were designed (we’re not counting “wrestling” or other forms of fighting which, while certainly games, often just had rules based on physics or human safety) – were games like Senet and the Royal Game of Ur, back between 2000 and 3000 BC. These games all relied heavily on luck, and were often used in gambling, like modern Blackjack or Roulette.

Today, designers still use the design element of “luck” — or “randomness” — in their designs for various reasons, and not just in gambling games, but in almost every genre you could name. Randomness has a huge part to play in single-player games; in fact, I’ve often said that in order for a single player game to remain a game, it has to have significant randomness (a game, by the way, by my definition, which is a “contest of ambiguous decision-making”. Read more at Gamasutra). Without randomness, a single-player game necessarily breaks down into a memorization puzzle (or possibly an execution/memorization contest).

So I’m totally down with randomness for single-player games. However, when it comes to multiplayer games, randomness is like fire: it can be useful, but if you have even just a little bit too much of it, the whole game could go up in flames.

Multiplayer is sort of the “natural” state for games. In fact, single player games are almost always asynchronous multiplayer games anyway, due to the scoring mechanism that just about every single player game has (again, not talking about Mass Effect here, I’m talking about things that meet my definition of game). If I’m playing Tetris or Civilization, I’m doing it to beat a previously established high score. That score may have been established by myself, and it may have been established by another person. A very literal illustration of this can be seen in a Match Race of, say, Super Mario Kart, where it lets you actually race against your “ghost”: an ethereal, translucent recording of a previous play.

In multiplayer games, you generally don’t need randomness in the way that you do for a single player game. You’ve got another human mind that’s trying to outsmart you, which already provides the ambiguity that’s required to be a game. However, randomness can certainly be okay, and can even be a good thing overall in multiplayer games, when used wisely.

Different Types of Randomness

There are two very distinct types of randomness that a game can have:

Random in Setup: Maps or other game items that are random, but accessible to all players. This kind of random just lays out the game-space, and (if designed properly) should have no effect on who wins.

Examples would be: In videogames, Roguelike maps, Civilization maps. For boardgames, examples would be Through the Desert oases placement, or Puerto Rico plantations.

Random in Execution: Dice rolls or random number generators which determine whether an action is successful. read more »

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Auro Game Design

AURO: Not Taking Skill Trees For Granted

04/29/2012 – 12:37 pm

I thought I’d fill people in a bit on where we are with the AURO Disciplines today. We’ve been in a limited closed Alpha phase that we hope to get out of soon, but while we’re here we have a few really helpful testers who have provided some awesome insight into the abilities as they are.

Some of one of our most active testers inspired me to want to talk about the skill trees in AURO, and how, just as with every other element in AURO’s design, we’re not taking it for granted. Many developers would probably just take the normal “skill tree” approach and not really even question it, but just fill it up with their own skills. I’ve recognized though, that the skill tree model itself has a lot more to it than a lot of developers might realize, and I should be considering every element of it, not just filling it up with skills.

We’ve talked a lot about the vertical trees: the Fire tree, the Ice tree, and so on (if you’d like to learn more about specific spells, we have an old and slightly outdated, but still gives you the right gist article here). It’s always been of extreme importance that each of these trees has a strong sense of identity to them, to give different playthroughs a very different feel and different kinds of challenges. However, there’s also the horizontal element to the trees, which we haven’t talked about. I call them “tiers”.

So, in order to get a Tier 2 ability of a tree, you have to have Tier 1, etc — normal “skill tree” behavior. But what’s interesting here is that we’re really trying to make not just the schools have identity (which at this point is getting very solid). The tiers themselves should have some identity. Currently, here’s what’s going on with that:

Tier 1: Tactically useful, not usually directly useful in and of themselves. They’re only useful when you use them intelligently. Flexibility is most crucial with these spells, and also these should be the most deep spells to use, since they are the ones that will get used the most. It should be obvious (although apparently to many RPG developers, it is not obvious) that Tier 1 abilities should remain useful for the entire game.

Tier 1 represents the first step into a tree. Many players will not focus on one tree, but rather get 2 or 3 Tier 1 abilities, and so it’s important that these Tier 1 spells do a great job of expressing that tree, even if they’re all alone. That way, when you mix the two (say, Elude and Ice), it develops into its own strong flavor. If Tier 1 is weak or lacks identity, players will have to invest more skill points to reach these strong flavors.

Tier 2: Sort of a multiplied Tier 1 ability – similar, but more powerful and often having an effect on “multiple” creatures or tiles. Tier 2 represents a level of commitment to a tree.

Tier 3: This is meant to be the sort of “calmed down”, often passive spell, that’s certainly good, but also meant as a bit of an investment-point to getting Tier 4 spells. Interestingly, we can justify making Tier 3 spells less powerful than Tier 2 spells because of the “investment point towards Tier 4″ thing, as long as Tier 4 is strong enough.

Tier 4: These should be super-spells that really give you a very powerful option. Although they still need to be interesting, they have to be very strong, clearly more strong than getting the first two tiers in another tree combined. They should also be the ultimate representation of the Discipline.

Currently, I think we’re doing alright on this. Guard is by far the least-developed tree, and we’re not going to implement it for awhile, until basically after all the other four are totally done and balanced (just as a matter of work-flow). Other than that, I think we have a little improvement to do, but it’s really coming along.

I think the important lesson here is to not take any mechanisms for granted. With AURO, we’re trying to make sure the entire game is “from-the-ground-up”. I hope other developers will follow our lead!

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Culture Game Design News

The Evidence of Game Shame

04/26/2012 – 11:06 pm

“Good games will get boring whenever another game one ups them, but good music is timeless.” – reddit user

For five years, I wrote about game design over at my old blog, The Expensive Planetarium. One of my most-recurring themes was that of “game shame“: the idea that many or even most of us who play games don’t believe that they are a legitimate interest in the way that films or music are. Game shame, like modern racism and sexism, is never overly spoken, and probably never even consciously thought. Instead, it seeps in between the lines, but it still has a powerful negative effect on our entire world of games. Games are for children, games are disposable, games are empty, games rot your brain.

Obviously, the premise of game shame is completely false, and many will be reading this article thinking that I’m just making something up so that I can complain about it. So, before I go any further with explaining why we need to be rid of game shame, I will provide evidence to show that it is, indeed, a thing.

Games Are Cool When They are Unlike Games

For the past ten or fifteen years, the coolest thing a game could possibly do is look as much like a movie as possible. Since films are the most popular visual media in our culture (other than games), it’s not surprising that some games would end up doing this. First, we had the Metal Gear Solid thing, where there was this long intro with credits rolling over, and voice acting, and all of that. It was quite a spectacle! “Man, this looks so much like a movie”, we all said.

Oh I guess this is a game about looking at this guy?

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Game Design Review

Review Time! “Façade” and “Rune Raiders”

04/22/2012 – 8:17 pm

Hello everyone! We’ll be having some big news in the next week or so regarding the AURO Beta, so stay tuned. A lot of people have begun following AURO on Facebook recently, stay tuned there for news. Today, I want to do a couple of reviews, since my book is finished and I finally have a little time to actually play new videogames!

The two games I’ll be reviewing are an iOS strategy game called Rune Raiders, and a Windows/OSX interactive fiction application called Façade (which I’ll be typing out as “Facade” for the rest of this article so I don’t have to keep grabbing a non-standard character). They have no connection, other than that I played them both today… and one other connection that I’ll make at the end. I’ll start with Facade.

Facade

Personally, I'd have preferred no artwork at all.

If you’ve read this blog before, you’re probably already aware of my opinions on “interactive stories”. If not, I think they’re a terrible idea, in short. I’ve gotten into many an argument online about the matter, and one friend of mine recommended that I try Facade. I had heard about it before, and from what I’ve heard it’s one of the best examples of what interactive fiction can be.

Now, obviously I knew getting into it that I was going to have problems with it, but I decided to really go into it with an open mind, giving it my full attention, and really trying. And that’s what I did! read more »

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Auro Culture Kickstarter

Follow-up: Kickstarter Post

04/08/2012 – 8:26 am

Hi everyone! I just wanted to write a small follow up to our previous post, and quickly make sure our feelings on the matter are entirely understood. It’s clear to me now that I was not coming through as I intended to a lot of people.

We accept complete responsibility for the failure of our Auro‘s Kickstarter. Actually, a lot of comments in the last 24 hours have been exceedingly helpful in terms of us learning the real reasons why it failed. We really appreciate that.
We have no problems with someone not wanting to fund us; even a person who does fully get what Auro is, and still feels that way. We don’t feel as though we’re entitled to people’s money, or any such thing.
The article’s main point was intended to simply be that there seemed to be an unfair hostility towards people even asking for money. I now realize, however, that honestly… it’s the internet. There are always going to be people saying stupid things like “wait are we paying for the game, or your living expenses?!” We shouldn’t have taken this kind of absurdity as seriously as we did.
We’re super happy about the successes that Double Fine and inExile have found on Kickstarter, and very excited to see what they come up with. Mostly, we just think it’s great that they’ve been able to tell the big publishers to go screw themselves — that’s something we can all agree on, I think.

Anyway, please let me know if you have any other questions regarding our positions on these matters in the comments. In the meantime, we’re not sure if we’re going to do another Kickstarter at some point, or perhaps another alternative like Desura alpha-funding. Thanks again for reading!

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Auro Culture Kickstarter

EA’s Madden ’13 Kickstarter Makes 8.5 Million in Five Hours

04/05/2012 – 6:58 pm

Edit: Please note that we’ve written a follow-up to this article, which you should check out here!

The headline is a joke, of course, and a bit of parody of what’s been going on recently with videogame Kickstarters. Successful and famous game developers have been running Kickstarter campaigns recently to make the next big sequel or new game that they have in mind. That’s fine, of course, and I definitely understand the excitement; I myself passed around the link for Wasteland 2′s Kickstarter. If these people screw these games up, at least it will be a sincere, earnest screwup by a game designer who really wanted to make something great, instead of a cynical boardroom checklist screwup by a publisher who really wanted to increase profits from last quarter. The headline of this article should suggest that I am indeed questioning where this is leading, and whether or not a company that just developed a game for Bethesda really was what Kickstarter was made for.

Now, some of our readers may remember that we attempted a Kickstarter ourselves a few months back, for Auro. Sadly, It didn’t make it, and we accept total responsibility for that. We started it off with a very unclear and somewhat “inside-baseball” video, as well as a character design that everyone seemed to hate. When we realized that a lot of these complaints were absolutely correct, we scrambled to respond to it, and created a whole new illustrative video and character design, but it was too late. Most of the people who were going to even take a look at our Kickstarter already had, and had simply been turned off. That’s completely understandable. We don’t blame anyone for not feeling super “donatey” for that Kickstarter. Edit: Some people seem to be not getting this, so before people read on, please read the following: this article is not about how we’re upset that our Kickstarter failed. People not wanting to give us money is 100%, completely fine!

Auro is a game that’s being made by 3 people, on our off time. It’s a game that, all told, will probably have ended up taking us a year to complete because we have to do it on our off time while doing other jobs. Again, that’s fine, and that’s probably what we’ll end up doing, because we really love this game and believe in it strongly.

Double-Fine Double-Standard

So anyway, a lot of new Kickstarters run by large-size, AAA teams are popping up and making millions of dollars. Wasteland 2 has made over two million so far and it still has 11 days to go as of this writing. And everyone on the internet is just leading the charge. Here are some comments from the many, many reddit posts supporting this kickstarter: read more »

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Auro News

Auro Name Change

04/02/2012 – 2:30 pm

Hi everyone! This is just a quick post to let people know that we are changing the name of our upcoming game, “Auro: The Golden Prince”. It’s been a long deliberation process, that all started from my brilliant idea to add the word “Destiny” to the title. “Man, we should totally add the word ‘Destiny’ to the title“, I remember saying out loud once. Ever since then, I’ve been committed to the idea of giving our game a great new name. So I got to work, and here are the results!

AURO: THE GOLDEN PRINCE DESTINY

AURO: THE CRUNCHING GRASPS OF DESTINY

AURO: THE RAUCOUS TUMBLER OF DESTINY

AURO: THE SCREAMING, REELING DISGUST OF DESTINY

AURO: THE DESTINY’S FLAILING HAY-MAKER OF DESTINY

AURO: THE ULTIMATE DESTINY

AURO: THE MANLY SOLDIER

I presented these ideas to our programmer, Ido. His response was, “how about we just call the game Auro“? After making sure he had read the one about the flailing hay-maker, I said that that would be fine.

So, our game is now officially just called AURO.