Prime Blog

Metagameplay: Alliances

2006-11-29T14:59:00.000-08:00

We had another successful playtest here today. A new player was introduced to the rules and gotten up to speed, which highlighted the need for a printed-out set of rules. As usual, the spectacle of seeing us rolling dice and "using superhuman powers" caused a few other employees to stare with curiosity. Sean was our newbie player who didn't fare well in the long run, but says he enjoyed it. He's a sharp cookie who inquired about a possible application of one of the portal teleport powers, too, so it reaped a benefit in that way as well. During the post-match discussion, it was remarked that Sean basically got the short end of the stick with the random unit asignment. Someone suggested that he would have benefited from an alliance with another player. Ideas flashed back and forth and very quickly a meta-mechanic began to take shape. TDog's concept of a formalized mechanic for creating an alliance goes like this: Any Player can propose an alliance to another player at any time. In order to cement the alliance, the two (or more) parties must have units physically meet somewhere on the board (to set up the secret handshake, if nothing else). From that point on, the Players involved are Allies. At the moment, being allied with another Player doesn't carry very much weight, but it would at the very least allow allied characters the option of relating to each other in friendly ways. In today's match, for example, an alliance with Sean would have allowed the ally's units to utilize the teleportation system that is normally restricted to use only by his own characters. The idea behind this alliance mechanic is that it will create tension and force Players to consider how much they actually trust the other Player. They'll have to consider the worth of sacrificing a turn to send a character to the meeting. Since the meeting is announced publicly, it has a chance of becoming a focal point for the aggression of the other Players. And, of course, there's the chance that one of the Players in the meeting has no desire to ally with you, and instead is looking forward to having you walk right into his clutches. Bwah ha ha and all that. So that's the proposed alliance mechanic at the moment. Further components will have to be devised that make the alliance worth the risks outlined above. Once the alliance is made, there should be some tension involved in deciding when and how to break the alliance (alliances aren't forever), so that will be considered as well.

Snow Day

2006-11-27T10:27:00.000-08:00

Sitting here at home on a definite Snow Day. I'm in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, a city that is not accustomed to getting a lot of snow. Some here and there, but not the 12 to 15 inches that got dumped on us yesterday. So today I am working from home via the marvel of the Remote Desktop. I can enjoy my tea, talk with my sweetie, and still be a productive member of society. Ah, technology, you hath deprived me of a work-free day while supporting my game-designing livelihood! A bit bittersweet, there.

Unit complexity.

2006-11-17T16:06:00.000-08:00

I'm going to review and classify my units on a scale indicating their learning curve. I'm doing this because I'm concerned about the distribution of unit complexity in this game. I'm willing to accept some complexity, but I'd like to be able to identify which units have the greatest chance of going misunderstood and, therefore, underused. I'm going to start with a scale of 1 to 10 as I add in Classes, with Class 1 being the simplest units, and Class 10 being the most obscure. In making this classification attempt, I need to have a baseline for comparison, which in this case is a hypothetical "normal human" as represented in this game. A Normal human has the following stats: Life,7 Move,6 Attack,6 Defense,6 Actions,0 Class 1 - Stats-boosted units, easiest to learn, with the most in common. Once you know the rules of the gameworld, you know how to use these units. Example: Granite, Jackrabbit. Class 3 - Units with powers that interact with or affect any of the common stats. These are built on the foundation of the common stats, and introduce concepts like 'Effect Range' and 'Line Of Sight'. Examples: Caduceus, Railgun. Class 5 - Units with powers that introduce new effects or objects to the game. These effects/objects conform to many common rules, but there are often significant alterations or special cases. Examples: Permafrost(frozen characters have restricted actions, but are not actually stunned), Sere(Flame wall). Class 9 - Units with powers that ignore or alter fundamental rules. These powers have little in common with other units, and must be learned individually. Examples: Gravity(localized rules on movement), Parasite(has unique metarules governing power theft and use). I'm leaving gaps on the assumption that I will reevaluate these classes as I review the existing set of characters. This classification should give me some insight into whether or not I am letting myself succumb to feature creep as I have done in the past. It is important that I have some method of verifying that I am holding to my core design concepts for Lunchbox, one of which is a low to moderate entry barrier for new players.

Can't we all just get along?

2006-11-15T10:35:00.000-08:00

I saw an eye-catching, annoying, and ultimately ineffective commercial last night. Mom comes to the door with a plate of food, knocks on the gamer's bedroom door (with a discarded controller as a doorknocker - nice touch), and slides the food under the door. The voiceover refers to feeding your gamer "who probably won't make the football team". Now, I can't really take issue with the factual aspect of the statement. I can go along with the idea that 'most' gamers probably *won't* make the football team, if only for the same reason that most of many types of people probably won't make the football team: only dedicated football-minded people make the team. I can go the other way and say that most players on the football team probably won't rise to the top of the heap in a currently-popular RTS or FPS. What does bother me is the heavily implied negativity that goes along with the statement. You can see from the look on Mom's face that she's decided to be noble about things. Johnny won't be on the football team, but she loves him anyways. This is just one piece of a generally negative attitude regarding video gaming. A personal anecdote: My wife and I were invited over to the home of our mutual friends to play games for the evening. We ended up playing a game of Scrabble which took about an hour or so. During this time, there wasn't very much commentary or chitchat, as people were being respectful of the effort the other players were exerting. As far as I can tell, everyone enjoyed themselves. I know I did. However I know that if the other husband and I had suggested playing a multiplayer video game, we'd get the rolling eyes, wobbly heads, and tones of voice that say: "Why would we do that? We got together to be social, not play silly games!" Um....

Prime thoughts

2006-11-14T15:28:00.000-08:00

I have 59 characters roughed in now, and at the same time I am re-evaluating whether or not I want to hard-set the number. That might be too limiting, in so far as it will make me reject a perfectly fun game for not having enough characters. Instead of forcing additional characters into the system that people won't use, I should focus on creating an inuitively fun collection of units which are all worthwhile using.

Wage slave

2006-11-13T10:35:00.000-08:00

Working on Lunchbox (my in-development board game) over the weekend, I've got 54 superhuman characters with their special powers. My grand plan is to have 60 for maximum ease of multipleyer games (60 divides neatly into teams for 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 players), so I need at least 6 more. I seem to get inspiration for these powers at odd times, when I'm just mentally ruminating on things that have little or no obvious relevance. I think, after all of this time, that there is now a dedicated part of my brain that watchdogs everything else that I see, do, think, or say. Just a game design/superhuman powers filter that snags all sorts of things as they rattle around in my head or pass by my senses.

Something resembling progress

2006-11-05T12:32:00.000-08:00

*yawn*... *stretch*... Oy, I feel like my creativity muscles are only just getting back into use lately. Which feels odd, since of course my preoccupation with superhuman strategy gaming has continued unabated for, oh... the past decade. That preoccupation has been largely involved with the building up, breaking down, and general tweaking of my own superhuman strategy game, Lunchbox. Having actually managed to drive away one of my best friends through no other agent than my own nigh-incessant chatter regarding various nuances of how superhumans function and how to represent them in-game, I have of late been more tight-lipped on the subject. In my case, tight-lipped means only talking about it for 80% of the time *sheepish grin*. Anyways, since I have the need to blab on it, and since there is at least potentially an audience listening, I'm going to blab on it a bit here when I have the chance.

Long time no see

2006-11-03T09:00:00.000-08:00

Wow, it has been quite a while huh? New job, still doing QA but no longer in "da games industry". Still working on my game, Lunchbox, and I am pleasantly pleased at the pleasing progress I'm making. Summer's over, which makes me a happier person, though the rain does get my sweetie down, I think. Yeah, okay, I'm not used to writing these things... :)

Fun times and special interests.

2006-07-10T12:33:00.000-07:00

My sweetie and I saw the new Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest on Sunday. Altogether a totally worthy sequel. All of the characters I wanted were represented, and I was again pretty impressed with the performances. The effects were very good, and the fight scenes were... interestingly choreographed. I admit to getting a wee bit confused regarding the interpersonal relationships involving the characters, both old and newly-introduced. Some of the character motivations didn't resonante with me as much as I would like, though that may resolve itself better whn I have a chance to watch the movie at home. With no annoying seat-kicking, cell phone texting, and miscellaneous chattering. I did have the good fortune to be able to see the movie in Metrotown's *only* Rear-Window Captioning theatre, though, which helped once or twice when accents got a bit too thick for me to follow the dialogue. And wouldn't you know, that segues nicely into the next thing I have to talk about: accessibility for deaf and hearing impaired. Things used to be worse. You used to have to buy a special Captioning box just to decode the captioning part of a video signal. Not debilitatingly expensive, but a pain nonetheless. Nowadays most television sets will come with CC decoding built right in, and it's not often that something I'm watching doesn't have Closed Captioning. Videogames, however, aren't as advanced yet. Looking through the list of games at Deaf Gamers and reading the reviews, you can see there's a lot more that can be done here, like color-coded text so players can tell dialogue strams apart. But as much as I like to see a thing done really well, I'd like to see more effort in the simple raising of the bad end of the spectrum. The basics of having text that corresponds to what's being said would make many of these D and E-rated games better. Raise them to a B or even a C-rated level, and you'd increase the average enjoyment with relatively little effort. If you want to make it sound official, you can note that this issue has made Ernest Adams' latest list of Twinkie Denial Conditions. :)

Life in Quality Assurance

2006-06-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

With a new day comes a new article. This one gives some insight into what it's like to work doing QA for a games company. The article manages, by way of some extreme-sounding anecdotes, to give a quick and dirty idea what testing is like. I've worked in both gaming and non-gaming QA positions, and I've found it difficult to decide how I felt about the work. Thankfully I didn't have too many illusions that I would be 'playing games for a living'. I understood going in that it would be work, not play. Definitely very challenging, yet at times very rewarding. I've always been susceptible to the romance of 'working in the industry', and that carried me for quite a while. As time went on and the romance wore off, the repetitive minutiae of the work that was required hit me. From the trenches, it's very hard when you're told that a bug you had found simply won't be fixed, for whatever reason. As soon as you're past the obvious bugs, it can take tons of work to discover even minor issues. One thing this article failed to mention was the shift that occurs when special testing tools are removed from the tester's arsenal. When you've become used to being able to use debugging codes, their absence changes the entire experience. Debugging codes allow the tester to focus on the aspect of the game being tested without having to worry about extraneous details. Becoming an unkillable juggernaut with infinite ammunition can be invaluable when it's your job to check that the game's final boss dies *just* as designed with each of the wide variety of weapons. Trying to do that same test without those tools can make this same chore into a prolonged frustration as you repeatedly die before you *reach* the end boss. Even worse, if you remove the ability to quickly jump to the end mission, someone has to actually play all the way to the end level before you can even attempt it. Combine my points with those made in the article, and you're left with a rough and tumble job indeed. I never got *injured*, but a month of 6-day a week 12-hour night shifts has ingrained in me a healthy respect for anyone who has worked in QA in games.

Games are dead?

2006-06-14T09:12:00.000-07:00

Reading an interview with Chris Crawford on Gamasutra and I have to say I disagree with Chris. He seems quite devoted to the idea that there's no innovation in games, unlike books and movies. Depends on how paradigm-setting you want your innovations, I suppose. I look at games from the Independant Games Festival Competition, and there's some very interesting concepts there. Focusing on the Student Showcase, I've tried out Cloud, Narbacular Drop and Ocular Ink, each of which has something new and interesting: -Cloud aims for an emotional response, and it worked for me. Simultaneously intriguing and peaceful. -Narbacular Drop has the 'portal system' which is fascinating. You place portals that warp space, like wormholes. You can look through them and objects (including your avatar) can move through them. This lets you look at things and transport yourself around the world. I found the control system to be a bit rough around the edges and the world was too dark for me, but I have to applaud the execution of the basic idea and the way it twists my perception of space. -Ocular ink has a gestural control system and a truly bizarre setting that had me hooked from the start. This is the game I've played the most, as it was plenty of fun. Sure, these games aren't defining gigantic new markets to be plundered, but really Chris: so what? Hollywood can manage to entertain us with their recycled mush and occasional innovative film. I think games are *already* a cut above, if even the students can produce games with as much creative potential. Instead of berating the industry for being "dead", I like seeing places like Man!festo Games, which seeks to elevate the independant game into a force of it's own. If they can bring more of these creative productions to light, I think that games will survive for quite a long time, indeed.

Testing, I guess.

2006-06-12T23:44:00.000-07:00

Way to dive in, here. Spur of the moment decision, and now I'm blogoported here. Hi. Um, that's all for now.