Introducing (And Releasing) "Crawl"; a First Person Adventure/Action RPG

Crawl has occupied most of my development time for the entire past semester. It started as a basic project for a game design course, but I decided that the idea had enough potential to fully flesh it out. Whether or not that potential was indeed realized can be brought into question.

Each time I release a game I always say I am done with Game Maker, and this time, I am super duper serious about it. Really. I will be going out with a bang with this engine, pushing it to its limits in Crawl with complex three-dimensional environments and timing based battle systems.

Though I do have a lot to say about the development of this game, I do not currently have the will to say it; this project, amongst other circumstances, has sucked the life out of me and I would rather not dwell on the experience of its creation for while. Maybe someday in the distant future I will be able to force myself to manifest some sort of postmortem.

Crawl competes with The Pac-Man in scale. It contains 32 large, unique stages, has something like two dozen enemy types, boasts nine "verb" powers, and has a narrated (though awful) script. There quite a few secrets in there as well. The game itself is a first person adventure-action RPG game, if I had to describe it in classical terms. As the title foreshadows, the game takes inspiration from retro dungeon crawling games. However, though it shares the tile-based movement and perspective, Crawl is very much its own game. The final design might have turned out a bit too simplistic, since I tried to cut much of the crap that comes with the RPG genre.

My hope is that at least some people out there will be able to extract some enjoyment out of this. Going forward as a developer, I have a few options in front of me, all of which are looking pretty neat. First, I ordered an Oculus Rift devkit. It might be a while until it arrives, but I have always been super fascinated with virtual reality and I have plenty of ideas of what to do with it. Second, I am going to (for the fourth or fifth time) try to teach myself Blender and hop over on to Unity as my new engine of choice. Having learned much about 3D design from creating Crawl, I feel that I am now ready. Third, there might be a chance I get involved in a mod project of some sorts. I will see about that one. I chose not to take up an internship this summer break because I am a terrible, lazy person and I feel that I do not yet have the software engineering experience to get one. Hopefully these other projects will suffice to keep me from sliding down the slope of sloth.

By the way, here is the horribly recorded and cut trailer for Crawl:

Crawl Trailer: WATCH CRAWL TRAILER!

Oh, and of course, the link that allows one to download the game.

Crawl Download: DOWNLOAD CRAWL!

What is this? An update? An update that involves a new game?

I believe I underestimated undergraduate work. When was the last time I even posted something on this blog? I could check, but I really don't have the time. This will be brief.

I made a new game. It is called JBan. This time, I used Java. It is Sokoban with a cool color scheme and an included level editor. Nothing horribly special; this is simply a school project I needed to finish in a time span of three days. For my first video game programmed in a real language, it is okay; it certainly works.

Get it here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/jban/downloads

Someday, perhaps when summer manifests, I will further elaborate on the far reaches I have been drenched in for the past several months game stuff wise. Things look bright; the last project I was talking about is on hold, but not dead, and in about a month from now something else pretty big will be released on this site.

Prepare.

What I Am Doing Is Not New In Theory; But In Practice, It Makes All The Difference In The World

"Theory" is the wrong word to use, but I think it approaches the idea I am trying to convey. I am not proposing any radically different systems as part of my method of implementing character and narrative into a game. Instead, my intentions are to simply change the way designers think about the problem and how far they go to deal with it. Based upon my current thoughts regarding my solution to this, I see that I am taking an element that is rarely thought through and complicated, and extending it into something far more meaningful and sophisticated. I have already mentioned that there are games that do make considerable progress in portraying characters tied into the game itself, and even some of those games allow their pieces to change (though not by the characters development, but rather the player's whim of "free will").

I like to think of what I am developing as analogous to "RPG Elements." What does it mean when it is said that a game has RPG elements? It is a fairly new term and it says that a game uses a complex, dynamically changing and growing statistical/computational number system to determine the outcomes of certain moves. For the layperson, it means that the player levels up with experience and when they shoot things numbers come out of them. But in all honesty, RPG elements in this spirit have in many ways always existed in games. The Legend of Zelda does not count numbers or give the player experience points, but the code still defines enemies as having a certain amount of health, Link's sword as doing a certain amount of damage, and heart containers giving Link more and more power. The Legend of Zelda is has basic RPG elements and does not even know it. The same realizations can be had when observing the code of many shooters and action games.

Just as "RPG elements" can bring out a certain depth in a game's mechanics, what I would think of as "Character elements" can bring out a certain depth in a game's narrative. In that sense, what I propose is not new; it is an extrapolation of what already exists in the most simplest form. Because of this nature, it can be applied to pretty much any game imaginable. I believe that this quality makes this development far more useful and revolutionary than what would simply be a simulation engine for story-telling.

Hopefully I can develop better rhetorical devices to describe the ideas I am reaching at.

How to Write the Protagonist or Protagonists of a Narrative Focused Video Game

Does the player interact with an narrative heavy game by controlling the protagonist? Games in the past have had many different approaches to the idea of protagonist. In some, the player directly controls one character.  In others, such as RTS games, the player commands larger groups of characters to accomplish different tasks. Role-Playing Games will often task the player with managing a small party of heroes. And in some games, the player doesn't control characters at all; tycoon games usually have a player manipulating a corporation that then interfaces with AI people. For a game with a focus on narrative and character, which method proves itself to be best?

The question goes even deeper than simply asking who the protagonist is; it makes the designer have to decide how much control is handed over to the player and of what kind. Does the player simply write the story, controlling the decisions and actions of all the characters, or do they only act as one causal agent? And if the player has reign over the main protagonist, how much room does that provide the designer to define the character at all? Does the designer create a doll house or a novel? Would creating a sandbox for role-playing truly create the best experience?

I have my doubts.

 Frankly put, outside of total simulation I do not find the idea of handing over the entire character to the player appealing for narrative purposes. The best example of this happening in video games can be seen in western role-playing games. For instance, at the beginning of an Elder Scrolls game the player creates an entire character from scratch which is then dropped into the role of hero. While it works (even though most people went through Skyrim guiding one of the most contradictory characters one could possibly imagine, it was not so much an issue that it detracted from the overall experience), I would say that it fails to create the proper amount of drama and narrative magic to really be seen as a reasonable approach unless the player is of the minority who sticks to a strict regime of role-playing consistency. The writer will always be better than the player when it comes to creating characters that fit appropriately in the fiction.

So, if the writer holds the power to creating the protagonist, is the player left to having no agency and being filtered through a linear plot that takes little advantage of the properties games have to offer? Of course not!

This is a problem I want to solve. Does the player determine the decisions of the protagonist, or does the personality of the protagonist determine those decisions? Which answer conveys more character? A player given the goal of obtaining victory and optimizing their path towards such will not make dramatic decisions in these situations, especially since they are so disconnected from the emotion of the fictional situation. A character's personality will lead to that character making particular decisions that in turn affect the game. 

Essentially, my answer is that the player does not enjoy themselves playing the the part of the character, but rather the character and the game are two separate entities, both dynamic and prone to change, and in constant influential relation to each other. Some titles have already started to explore this idea, but it needs to be developed further and stripped of the violence of current games.

And Now Back to More Important Things: Why I Have Chosen the Web Browser As My Next Platform

I am not particularly fond of browser games. Granted, I spent a lot of time playing them in my youth, but as I grew older the less seriously I took them. There was just something about downloading an executable file; a game located directly on the hard-drive seemed to offer so many more possibilities than a web game. They looked better, they were less bug prone, and they allowed for modification. Today, though, it seems as if many of these shortcomings have largely been overcome in the browser game space.

The ways in which browser games are developed are many and varied. Flash, Unity, Java, HTML5, Javascript, and other tools all provide their own advantages and contribute to the variety of web games. For all of my previous projects I have used Game Maker as my primary development environment, a program that creates stand-alone executable files that must be downloaded. While it has served me well, I feel as if it limits the potential audience I could reach. Finding a link to a download, waiting for megabits to travel across a pipe, placing the .zip file somewhere on the hard-drive, and then extracting the game files presents quite a barrier. Anyone can open a web browser and direct themselves to a website, and with the Internet becoming increasingly faster, this process delivers no pain.

Though I am not completely acquainted with the bounds of the technology yet, I also suspect that browser games are far easier to create as cross-platform. In the two times I competed in Ludum Dare, I often found players vehemently upset that they could not play my games on a non-Windows computer. Surely this is a valid complaint, and one that, when addressed, would benefit all parties involved.

Not only does using the web as my platform allow me to access a far larger audience, but it also pushes me out of my developer comfort zone. I cannot create games using Game Maker forever, and browser application development seems like a reasonable path to pursue.

There are other interesting possibilities in regards to making a browser game, but I will need to give them more thought before fleshing them out in text.

That Day Has Come: The Pac-Man Has Been Released!

I decided over the weekend to pull this behemoth out of limbo and share it with the public. My consciousness can now rest.

All this and more awaits. The Pac-Man indulges itself as a tribute to both the original game and the variations of it made throughout the years. With 70+ unique stages across ten different worlds, The Pac-Man provides a challenging arcade-adventure experience filled with contrived and uncontrived surprises around every corner. With a new system for how ghost AI operates and a large amount of interesting game elements, this is Pac-Man unlike ever before: it is The Pac-Man.

Download the game now at the IndieDB page: The Pac-Man On IndieDB

Interesting Parallels Between Characters and Environments

I have been taking rather extensive notes on my current thoughts regarding the project I have embarked on completing, but there is one idea that seems to stick out in poignancy that would like to write about here. That idea is the comparison between characters and environments.

Most video games today are extremely environment-centric. The game's content is broken up into spaces called "levels," or the game takes place in one large, cohesive space which is called an "open world." Game development teams have level designers and environmental artists; the level designer plays a major role in determining how the player interacts with the game while the environmental artist plays a major role in how the game reveals itself to the player. For pretty much any game of any genre (platformers, RPGs, point-and-click adventure, racing, first person shooter, real time strategy) the most essential mechanism of control and interaction intends to move the player through 2D or 3D spaces. This mechanism is so universal that controllers are built around it; analog sticks, d-pads, and arrow keys are all abstracted controls that are designed specifically to maneuver an object in geometric space. Players explore and interact with the environment.

I decided early on to not focus on a player interacting with a plot; it felt to aimless and if it were made to not be so the results would be odd and definitely not what I am currently looking for (though perhaps interesting to use in a game or two that justifies the idea). Rather, my attempts at subversion focus on characters; as Chris Crawford talked about games simply being about things, and if they wanted to evolve further emotional and narrative depth they would have to be about people. But what is to be done with characters? They are simplifications of people; all the meat and none of the fat. Looking at how games have handled characters in the past, chess plays the role archetype. In chess, there exist several unique types of pieces each with their own attributes. Each could be labeled by letter, number, color, or symbol and the player would have just as fine a time enjoying the possibilities to be found in the rule set. But instead, the traditions labels each piece with a character. The piece which takes the smallest steps, is most abundant, and whose loss is not to be cried over is given the character of the pawn. The most important piece on the board, that which if killed ends the game, and yet is not very powerful in its own right, is given the character of the king. And that most powerful and influential piece, second in importance to the king, is given the character of the queen. And so on. Good usage of characters in games shows a connection between characteristics and function.

But is this going far enough? Compelling, rounded characters are not static entities. They change and they grow. If a game connects character and function, and yet character changes, must not function change as well in proportional fashion? Maybe I am getting at something; maybe I am not.

If a game is to focus specifically on characters, what would it look like? Well, there are many games that seem to focus specifically on environments and I have already explained what that looks like. Players explore and interact with the environment as their primary action; I shudder to think how much time I have wasted in my lifetime commanding my avatar to walk forward and to watch them march on and on as the artificial hours of game time pass away.  What if a player were to explore and interact with the characters as their primary action? What would that game look like? Would not that be a true "social" game?

How do humans explore environments? They use their limbs, in cooperation with physic laws, to maneuver through it. Is this the same way environments are explored in games? Of course not; homes are not filled with VR gerbil balls and full-body touch sensation suits or neuro-communicative computers; they are filled with game-pads, keyboards, and mice. The technology to build the simulation is either unreasonable for the average man to own or completely non-existent. Instead, technology allows for the creation of not simulation, but rather abstraction. When controlling a character in a video game, one experiences an abstraction of exploring a space. Developers have become extremely good at creating these abstractions and making them interesting to interact with.

The majority of work done in an attempt at improving the connection between game and narrative via interaction falls under its own weight; it has all favored simulation over abstraction. Of course though, simulation is far closer to actual human experience and thus is far easier to visualize. What about a game that allowed the player to explore and interact with characters through some sort of abstract mechanics?

To bring this idea into fruition; that is my goal.

(And dialogue wheels/trees are not the form of abstraction I am looking for).