Brief Analysis: Mass Effect

With the passing of the most recent Steam summer sale I have been left with an intimidating backlog, and one of the games on that list that I am currently trying to knock out is Bioware's space RPG; Mass Effect. The concept of the game is appealing to me; a heavy science fiction atmosphere, action RPG gameplay, and a large universe to explore. Back when the game came out in 2007 it was met with critical praise and admiration, especially for its approach to narrative.

I am now playing the game four years later and I am a little confused as to why the game was given such high regard. I have not yet finished the experience, so maybe some of my notes make less of an impact when the experience is taken as a whole (which is often the case for a game that focuses heavily on story). Currently I am playing in hour to hour an a half intervals, since I can only play so much until I get disgruntled by some element of the game and outright quit.

The single most infuriating part of the game design is by far the overly simplistic and uninteresting dialogue wheel component. There are two major issues with how it functions. First, the "good", "neutral", and "bad" selections are always obvious due both to how they are written, but also due to where on the wheel they are placed. This really trivializes any attempts the developers make to have the player's conversational interactions meaningful or interesting. Second, the player's character, Commander Shepherd, will always paraphrase the responses chosen by the player on the dialogue wheel. So, for example, I select for Shepherd to say, "Get out of here! I'll handle this situation." But what he actually says in the game is phrased so differently from this at times that it gains new connotations and sometimes even causes something to happen completely contrary to what the player was hoping for. Unpredictable, random, and even unfair results from player decisions are not bad, in fact, they should be encouraged, but when the player chooses to specifically do something, that thing should happen. Does Mario only sometimes jump when I press the jump button and other times run? No, because in such an unstable system as such the player's ability to make meaningful decisions is hindered greatly.

Most of the dialogue falls flat from just being personality-less and at times unbearably formulaic. While the game must certainly have an extremely large script, taking into account such things as NPCs, quest events, mid-battle chatter, mid-elevator chatter (I am not going to go into technical issues in this analysis since they are more a failure of the early UE3 and the game's first in a series status than bad game design decisions on Bioware's part), and codex entries, there should be plans to approach such ambition properly. The dialogue's inability affects the story and characters, making them harder to immerse in.

And finally, the shooting is just bad and the inventory is unnecessarily tedious to operate. These points I am too lazy to elaborate on.

The sound design, and in particular, the soundtrack, are fantastic however. The synthesized electronic music that features throughout the entirety of the game is both atmospheric and unique. One of  the better moments of the game is just simply pressing "start" on the front menu. A crisp image of earth fills the screen, and when the player presses start a beautiful electronic note chimes as the camera pans to deep space and fades into the menu.

I also like where some of the art direction tries to go. The alien races, while most are humanoid, aren't as embarrassingly dull as the near human races found in other science fiction series (Star Trek in particular is the main offended I am afraid). The environments and the objects within are also pleasant designs, mostly playing off of the clean, white future promised by Apple.

Though I was at first surprised and upset that I had united with my whole party very early into the game, looking back I think it was an interesting and risky move on Bioware's behalf. What if the JRPG tradition of acquiring new party members along the long journey was put aside for a static cast of characters who would all get equal development and screen time thanks to being introduced all in the beginning? Game designers and their games need to be far more open to this breed of subversion.

A Quick Thought From the Dark Depths of My Mind

Since my schedule specifically dictates that I am to be heading to sleep within the next forty minutes, I have decided to make a quick post sharing what is perhaps a whiny and petty thought.

But a thought none the less, right?

What should be the proper way to discuss a game experience with another person, whether they participated in the game or not? Does there exist an adequate vocabulary to share these experiences or is there current dialog just lacking in depth? A lot of times I struggle to listen to other people, friends and what not, talk about their times playing games such as Call of Duty. It can sometimes be painful, even for someone like me who has a deep interest in games and the sorts of stories that come out of them. Is it because most modern video games rely heavily on space, which due to its very nature is hard to put into words? What about how people verbally communicate the happenings of competitive games, such as sports, chess, or Star Craft? Should gamers and game designers look to these communities to see what terms have developed and perhaps borrow a few?

Or maybe I am just sick of Call of Duty...

Human Imagination as the Magic Missing from Major Video Games

Today's post will be a quickie as I talk about some of my thoughts that have led to me formulating an interesting game design concept.

There is an aspect to literature that I believe to be the most beautiful of all. And it is this; each reader develops in their mind their own picture of the fiction, of the characters and universe described. Mere words craft in to being a vivid and personal vision. Every person will imagine a character in their own unique way, based upon the connotations they associate with certain words and their personal experiences with similar imagery. It is magical in the same sense that dreams are magical.

So recently my thoughts have been directed towards bringing this same magic to games and it very quickly (as in 5 seconds quickly) came to me that this very magic had been in use for games since the beginning of history. Particularly, the human imagination had been used in five specific ways:

1. Physical games and board games have always been using imagination to turn a playground's sand into lava and the king piece of a chess board into a living figure of royalty.

2. Early text adventure computer games and their modern incarnation, interactive fiction, use words too draw images in the same way as literature.

3. Video games found on simple hardware capable of only low resolution graphics (ex. Atari 2600) required the player to look at 14 pixels and say, "Hey look! That's ET."

4. Mods for video games will use the assets of the parent game to represent entirely different items or objects. Usually this is done when the mod developer doesn't have the resources to create their own assets to import into the game or when they can't import their own resources into the game. For instance, look at how much of the more scripted community content for Garry's Mod uses default Half-Life 2 assets to represent other objects which they are not.

5. Finally, I'll end with the method I currently have an interest in (since, from what I have seen, it is the least used of all these approaches to evoking emotion); audio only games. Currently there are only two deeply communicative output types that video games utilize; the screen and the speakers (yes, rumble and smell-a-vision also exist, but do not have the fidelity of the two major output methods). I imagine these games relating to radio dramas in much the same way as the text adventures relate to books. I personally only know of two games that use this concept, so I have an interest in developing it further, despite the fact that it might not seem all that progressive.

(The title might seem misleading, but it makes clear very briefly a point I would like to get across.)

So I Have Noticed I Am Terrible at Posting Regularly...

This blog is for my benefit. I become a better writer by contributing to it because it counts as experience. I become a better designer since it requires me to transfer my abstract ideas into words, making them some sort of reality; not a playable reality, but a reality none the less. I gain a heightened sense of accountability, of responsibility, to make sure that my thoughts are of some sort of higher caliber because I am posting them on the Internet in a place where the public can potentially judge them, even though at this moment in time I am almost certain no poor soul has had to wade through all of my tripe.

So to ignore this blog for around a months time (what happened? I don't even know, unfortunately) is really hurting me and my future. But whateves! Right? Wrong! I'm going to try once again to keep myself working hard to write regularly, and this time I am going to try doing this not in the middle of the summer, but in the middle of school. It is actually uncertain whether or not this or boost productivity; it will be fascinating to see.

Everything learned about game development between this post and the previous one is conveniently listed below:

1. Cloning Tic-Tac-Toe is not fun, and regardless of how easy it is to do, it does not inspire one to build an acceptable interface around its system.

2. Avoid any RPG Maker program like the plague. I remembered having fun with these tools in middle school and now, as an older, wiser designer I see that they do nothing but inspire uninspiredness. Strangely enough, they are dangerously simple.

3. Tools, tools, tools. I made an entire sokoban engine, but then discarded it since I wasn't willing (and probably not able) to create the proper level design tools. It will be great, intuitive tools that will save this industry from spending 200 million dollars to produce a game.

4. Are you starting a project by first creating character sprites or drawing the tileset for the second world? Yeah, that project isn't going to ever be finished, thought I'd let you know ahead of time.

5. Working with other people, even one other person, makes all the difference in the world. There is no shame to be had in looking for support in a team.

6. Live, networked playtesting on a server for single player content is an amazing approach to getting player feedback. A buddy and I did this for a small platformer build in a game called Blockland (I will write up a post about this game someday).

Here is to the hope that I might deliver my next post within a weeks time!

A Short Return to Sonic Robo Blast 2

Sonic Robo Blast 2 is a Sonic the Hedgehog fangame; a bizarre and brilliant attempt to take 3D Sonic games in a different direction using the Doom engine. It really succeeds with its momentum based platforming, levels ripe for exploration, and unique and fresh multiplayer. The game has a surprisingly solid community that supports it with custom levels, characters, and entire mods. Seven or eight years ago I used to play the multiplayer quite often and I got into making some of my own levels for the game. Recently I had just released a level that I had made several years ago that I never got around to distributing. Here is what I had to say on the SRB2 forum:

It has been a while since I have posted on here...

This is an older level of mine that I had recently stumbled upon again. I always meant to release it, but for some reason which I can not remember at the moment, I did not (maybe I thought it was terrible, though I would actually say it is just average). Marine Court Zone was basically an experiment map for me, as I used it to learn how to implement custom textures into SRB2. The plan was to use what I had learned for a single player map with the same theme as this one, but nothing really came out of that due to that horrific combination of the forces known as laziness and frustration.

So anyways, enough with the history, here is the map. It is small, given no playtesting, and contains some rather bland textures now that I look back in hindsight (I was using MSPaint at the time). I do like the general style I was going for though; definitely unique for SRB2.

Enjoy!

The download link for the map can be found in the forum thread here:
http://mb.srb2.org/showthread.php?t=36160

To find out more and download SRB2, visit the official website here:
http://www.srb2.org/

One Prototype in Particular

At the current moment I am screwing around in regards to my work in game design. Playing with ideas; seeing where they go and what they can do. Sometimes I will take the next step and quickly whip together a rough prototype that allows me to get a more clear perspective on how the systems work. This is one thing that I have found Game Maker very useful for; I can have a working prototype within a few hours.

Much of this work is really just practice for myself. I am a far better programmer than I used to be (I now use my own collision system in Game Maker that gives me the flexibility I want) because of sitting down and rapidly prototyping my ideas. One prototype dealt with the AI of enemies who existed in a top down environment. This allowed me to utilize and see the advantages and disadvantages of the tricks used by game designers in the past to create AI monsters who are interesting and reasonable to fight. There has to be certain amount of an organic quality to any AI enemies in a game; they must make mistakes and have victories just like the player.

There is a particular prototype I worked on that basically was about expanding the mechanics of the top down combat found in the original Legend of Zelda and moving them into an arcade-y, randomly generated dungeon crawler structure to allow for more replayability. The intricacies of player movement and action are not usually considered by the player (rightfully so, for they should not be), but as a designer it is surprising to find how many decisions are made just regarding how a player should use their sword. Do they stab with their sword or do they swing it? How long does they sword attack last? How much time is there between sword attacks? Does the player come to a stop when attacking with their sword or do they keep in motion? What visual aids should be used to help the player understand the way their sword acts and how it affects the game world? How much damage does the sword do? Does it knock enemies back when it hits them? Can it be used for non-combative purposes such as cutting grass or rope?

These are all questions whose answers can be found in experimentation, one of the greatest assets of a game designer. Test the systems with different people to discover entirely new results, bad or good. If the same system delivers the same results with each unique player, something is wrong. There is no room for play, an essential component of games that is commonly left out of a lot of the more modern designs focused around attaining some sort of narrative quality.

Further Evaluation of this Blog's Function and the Fate of Reconstructing S31

It has been a little over a week since I posted on this blog and since I have quite a bit to say, this will be a rather long post.

First, I am going to write about what I am interested in doing with this blog next. The original idea was to write a medium sized post every day, talking about something I had done related to game development or whatever else that was on my mind that was on the subject. Basically, it was to hold me accountable to pursue my interests more seriously and to train myself to write things down instead of keeping everything held up in my mind. Also, writing is an excellent intellectual exercise and I can honestly say that I do not do enough of it for fun. The purpose of the blog was for me to have a solidified place where I could write about one of my interests. Though I am pretty sure no one else has read this blog, theoretically anyone can, so by making my writing available to the public I am forced to hold up some sort of standard of quality, which I am not sure I have done well. It is almost always a useful method: quality of quantity. Yet my focus was on a post a day, which is not itself an impractical goal, but after a while a mentality of, "Well, I guess I have to write about something today," arises and the fatigue sets in. It is probably because I am extremely lazy and I am a really amateur writer that this is the trap which I found myself captured by.

I now want to shift the emphasis from a post a day to writing when I have enough content to make a quality post. There is still an urgency in my mind to keep myself continually writing, so this nine day break will probably be an uncommon occurrence still (hopefully). The blog is still only about game development, since that is the most productive and interesting thing I will usually want to write about. Plus, I am an aspiring game developer and, well, who knows where this thing can eventually go? So here is to the hope that "The Edifice of Enterprise" continues onward!

Let me change the topic to where I last left off: Reconstructing S31. This is probably going to turn in to a scrapped project unfortunately, joining my collection of fifty something other failed attempts to make a complete game. Why? Well, I said that I had an idea for a new approach to the gameplay of the game. That concept was to have make the game more like an adventure game in mechanics and to basically make the who shipyard a large collection of systems that the player would have to mess around with in order to rebuild the huge robot controlled factory. The shipyard itself would become the main character, having a mind of its own that control the probe that rode along the rails fixing everything. However, there ended up being two problems with this idea that led to me not even investing much time in a prototype. First, Game Maker is not really good when it comes to handling complex, dynamic systems like this that are made of many unique, but often times similar parts. This is because of the way Game Maker handles instances and objects (classes). I can't have instances of an object have different initial values (as far as I am aware of). Each element would have to be coded individually, and while Game Maker has parenting, the pipeline of creating new objects in Game Maker eventually becomes really bogged down and inefficient if one has too many.

Second, the idea never proved itself to be fun. Of course it is different and sort of unique, but it never allowed for the player to be, well, playful. They would click in all the right spots, move to all the right areas, and then at the end they get a pat on the back for winning. There was no room for strategy, improvisation, and imagination in the world I was creating, which was a deep flaw. Making video games is really, really, really hard. This is not hyperbole; it is the honest truth. This difficulty increases when it is a solo project (though some things are actually easier by oneself). I need a strong passion for and belief in my vision of the final product in order to set forth and create a game. I did not have that for Reconstructing S31 once it reached this point.

 And thus Reconstructing S31 is hereby to dropped into the folder on my computer labeled "Failed Projects," joining a large company of friends. On each project I learn something new, so I never have any regrets and it is the same case here. I became a significantly better spriter, programmer, and designer by focusing on this project. I also learned more about myself as a developer and what I should and should not do. It wasn't huge, but Reconstructing S31 was still too big. I didn't have a fun or complete playable prototype at the beginning and I focused to much on the fiction of the game (which still boggles my mind since I am so anti-story in games). These lessons and experiences allow me to grow and gain experience, the most important things for someone who some day wants to make games for a living must do.

So, what will I do next?