February, bloody February

This was an interesting month.

My goals were far from achieved, but as with all worthy failures, I think I learned a ton more than I would have had I succeeded (and done the smart things. :P) 

As a designer, I always have all sorts of off-the-wall ideas of crazy insane things that I've never seen and just wonder if they will work. While I think this creative curiosity is healthy for anyone who wants to be a game designer, it's dangerous for someone who wants to WORK as a game designer. Ideas are cheap, and worthless. That may sound harsh to many, but I guarantee to you that any game designer, working or otherwise, has hundreds of ideas just floating around. I guarantee that any professional game has an army of people behind it with a backlog longer than you can imagine. Ideas are great, but implementation is what separates the dreamers from the doers. With this in mind I made a decision fairly early on that I was going to make a platformer game. 

The purpose of this was to force myself into an environment of focusing on implementation and prevent myself from getting too experimental  I think it was a wise decision, but i think my handling of it crashed and burned. If you've ever done any looking at game maker, you've seen that there are hundreds of "engines" out there for all sorts of game types, and platformers is the most common. People have, essentially, mastered the systems underneath platforming games. This is a good thing, it allows for people interested in play, mechanics, and design to get involved without spending too much time digging around in things like coding collision or figuring out how to work with gravity. 

It's also something that I, very stupidly, decided not to take advantage of. I'm not sure if I was thinking "oh, it'll be easy" or if I was just getting a kick out of the coding aspect, but I decided that I was going to code my own engine. I don't regret this, as I learned a ton about coding and how the Game Maker Language works. But, I definitely feel like it was a bad idea from the perspective of operating on a limited time frame and my desire to try and focus on the design aspects. I ended up spending more evenings trying to refine player collision versus spending my time trying to figure out how to make interesting situations/obstacles for the player to deal with. I basically spent the month as a coder with designer on the back burner. 

I did learn some very valuable lessons as a designer though. First, and most obvious in retrospect, is to avoid duplicating work. Doubly so if it's something you don't fully understand or aren't highly experienced at. Had I taken one of those platformer engines and focused on just building the player epxerience within that engine, I think I would have come out with a much more desireable product in the end.

Anyways, on to more designery topics. Easing into complexity was a big thing I struggled with in this month's project. I think there's a certain appeal to the fantasy of "everything is normal and BOOM SHIT GOES NUTS!" but in practice that's a lot more difficult than it sounds. I started this project throwing in all sorts of obstacles and abilities right off the bat. Partly because I wanted to test them out, and partly because when most of use think of games, we think of them as completed pictures versus a lot of tiny pieces. It's important to make it clear to your player what they are supposed to be doing. When I dropped my player into a room with guns shooting, enemies jumping at them, and pitfalls of death, it became instantly clear that this was too much too fast.

After changing to a more smooth introduction, the game felt a lot better. Let's look at my first room. (I know, my collision blocks are an eyesore)

Starting the player in a position where you have one tiny block standing in your way, it's easy to come to the conclusion of "i should hop over that". And you just tought your player something valuable. Next I gave a jump two blocks high, "OK, I can jump that high. check".

 The next jump worked out pretty well. You can make the jump from two different positions. I wanted a few buddies try this jump out and saw a lot of interesting responses. Most people tried the jump from Point A first. Where it got interesting is when people failed. Some tried to jump against the 3-high wall a few times, few decided to try from point B (which is easy), but most immediately rushed back to point A to try again. They become, almost instantly, fixated on this one minor goal, that they completely ignored that there was a much easier way right there. They failed at least 3 times before looking for point B. The ones who stuck it out would eventually get it though. I expected them to stop once they got it and pause for a second or say something, but none did. This makes me question the concept that we need to shower our players in rewards to get them to do anything.

 I had a few ask me if it was possible to make it. I found this really interesting.  Specifically when the people asked me if jump A was possible. I think being a video game, when presented with a jump like that, most people naturally assume that a game would not give them an impossible task. I noticed the people going for jump A were a bit more active gamers while the people who went for B were the more casual camp. I suppose games have trained group A that they should seek out the greater perceived challenge even with a lack of any form of reward? I'm not sure, but i found it interesting.

From there, the level forces you to back track to get the disc to open the blue door, then to do this again. What I liked here is that the A group, upon seeing it a second time, seemed to lose all determination to get the jump. They've done it once, so they knew it was possible, and that they could do it, but it wasn't until the second time through it that they realized there's an easier jump there, and they kind of had a "damnit, whatever" moment and went for jump B.

Anyways, I've talked too much about a single jump. :P

The second room I introduced hazards  Originally I just had a "ramp" (I never got the character running up a ramp to work, which is already coded in tons of platformer engines... grrrr) where green balls of slime drop from the blue circle and roll downhill. Simple enough, just jump over the green things. But I found that some people didn't immediately realize that they were hazards  I was a bit surprised here honestly, assumed knowledge would lead me to believe that stuff rolling at you would be bad. But it (apparently) wasn't readable. So I added a second "slime dropper" thing a bit earlier that just dropped slime from the ceiling. People immediately recognized this one, nobody got hit by the falling slime. This could be a question of graphic fidelity, if they were spikes would people have let the rolling slimes hit them?

With this set up, I was able to more clearly communicate the slimes as bad. Then giving the player a bit of a corner to jump out of stalled the player long enough for them to see slimes rolling down the ramp as well. After adding this nobody had any question as to what was going on.

BAH! This is no good, I fear that going through this thing room by room is going to make this blog post way too long. While I would like to talk about the next room introducing projectiles and teaching a player how to use duck, but I fear this is getting lengthy already, and that I need to wrap this up.

Conclusion
Overall, this is a huge failure as a game. But it was a huge learning opportunity for me as a designer. I've learned a lot of things that I will never repeat. And obtained some interesting perspective on level design and player behavior. I think that I may revisit this one after the year concludes, as I really enjoy the idea of a platformer and trying to make that interesting. I've got some concepts for an aesthetic and some further room puzzles and stuff that I'd love to try out. But when operating on such tight time tables, I fear I just went *WAY* out of scope here.

January...

January was actually pretty good to me.

I started a bit late, so I felt a lot of pressure working on this one. As I mentioned previously, I hadn't actually found out about the 1GAM community at all until about half way into febuary, I actually started this under the inspiration of someone else where I work.

Anyways, let's talk about the game I made for January.

Concept: 
Anyways, the idea for the January game was a really simple strategy game. The core idea was that your offense and your defense are linked in the form of your units. I wanted attacking to feel risky, where by attacking, you are leaving your bases vulnerable  Once defeating an enemy base, of course, it's now a player-owned base. Next I wanted to make upkeep and maintenance of your forces important. I decided on letting the player build a network within their bases, allowing them to move resources around rapidly versus waiting for bases to churn out soldier naturally. This also allowed for a base that was locked in by friendlies to still serve a purpose and still be part of the game.

Aesthetics: 
Originally, I wanted to do a cellular theme, where you were controlling an army of cells/bacteria/viruses,etc. I played around with art assets i could find online (remember, I am NOT an artist), but I couldn't really find anything that felt right. I decided to make it pixel art characters. I wanted to build out a campaign where you start with tribal characters and your bases were huts, then the next level of the campaign you were moving into the bronze age with rudimentary weapons, then into the iron age, and so on. All the way up to the future. The core game itself wouldn't have changed, but each "time" had a small upgrade that it would add as the game went on. Eventually you'd be able to upgraded bases, soldiers, use player activated abilities, etc.

But that ended up being a bit too ambitious for a 30 day project and my development skills.

Implementation: 
For some reason, I envisioned the game as something that would work on phones. So I, very intentionally, kept the control scheme as simple as possible. In a lot of ways, this actually helped me out. It served to keep a lot of feature creep in check, and kept me trying to think of ways to do things that would fit. It basically kept my ideas reeled in an my focus pure. For the sake of being in development, I attached the functionality to "transfer" soldiers to the right click, so in it's current state, it couldn't work on a touch device, but that was done to allow me to separate out all the functions and see things happen in isolation, I never got around to move it to Lclick.


The map was never intended to be the map. It's extremely basic, there are a series of neutral bases with the player having one base in the corner and the AI having it's own base in the opposite corner. I basically just needed a test bed to see how things worked. Which ended up being the one and only map I had. Since I realistically had no idea about the time investment needed to make even an insanely simple game, coupled with the fact that I'd never done anything in gamemaker before, and the fact that I was just flying by the seat of my pants the whole time, there wasn't time for more maps.

Most of the functions weren't too awful to implement  although with even the little that I've learned up to this point, I can tell you that the code, scripts, animations, etc are all horrible. There's a chasm between code that functions and good code that's elegant, functional, and efficient. Mine BARELY functions. As I mentioned, I initially wanted to stay out of code, but I quickly found that to be impossible. So any coding that I did end up doing was pretty begrudgingly done, as I move further into this whole 1GAM thing, I'm getting more comfortable with code and hate it less... but I still don't like it.

Transferring was probably the most exciting part. It took me a couple days to figure out how the heck to make it work, but once I did get it to work making your soldiers to zoom around felt pretty good. It's one of those things where on paper it seemed like a boring mechanic, and in implementation it's not amazing or anything, but I though it felt pretty good. Moving around the map and having your soldiers zoom around feels pretty cool. Getting that short burst of super speed, and seeing your soldier zip around the map definitely made the mechanic feel like it was actually somewhat important. The management of the player network of bases is probably the thing that I feel like worked out the best. Of course, it ended up making the game extremely easy, but that's OK.

I'm not sure that having one-way transfers was really a good idea. It was actually harder to implement unidirectional movement than it was to enable bidirectional, at least with the way I put it all together. There's also no way to undo a road. I did this intentionally as I didn't want network management to be haphazard, but it ended up limiting the players ability to be reactive to a situation  I'm still not sure if that's good or bad, do I want players to pay for their mistakes that gravely?

Conclusion:
Overall, I'm actually pretty pleased with January's game. It's insanely simple, and I don't think it's fair to call it anything more than a prototype, but I think there's a lot of potential here. One of my goals of the 1GAM thing, is to build 12 prototypes and then next year see if any warrant coming back to and further developing/polishing. It's way too early to say, but I definitely can see how this prototype could be further expanded in a million ways. In addition to the fact that this is the first thing I've ever made in this software, and that I went into this with no friggin idea what i was doing, I have to say I'm alright with it.

Honestly, I'm just happy that I was able to make something. Anything. Anything at all.  :P

If you want to check it out, you can here : https://www.dropbox.com/s/khttvmqdkafmkal/takeover.exe 

I realize that it's an exe file, and that scares a lot of people. That's ok, if you're not willing to click an unknown exe, I can't blame you. But if you REALLY want to play it, and REALLY don't want to mess with .exe's, give me a hundred bucks, and I'll buy the HTML5 export module. kthx. :D

There's a lot more I could talk about, rudimentary AI (and how it can stomp your face in if you don't put in decision making cooldown), the upgrades I wanted to include, working with game maker, how difficult it is to get feedback from friends, etc. But I feel like this post is already getting too lengthy, and I'm sure those more general topics will be revisited over the course of this year.

Next time, I'll talk about the February game, and what a huge failure it's been and how boring it is!!! Stay tuned.

I almost forgot about this thing!

Well, here I am again.

I had almost forgotten about this thing! hah.

I guess updates first. It's been quite some times since I've written anything here. The most pressing update, and the reason I remembered I even had this blog, is that I'm participating in something called 1GAM. Over at http://www.onegameamonth.com/ It's a pretty interesting little site that challenges people to make 1 game a month for a whole year.

I actually decided to do this long before I found out about the site, and the community. I made it through my whole January project before discovering this community.

Anyways, to go along with my whole "year of game dev" I decided that I should be documenting a lot of what's going on this year. It's pretty important for me to be able to identify my struggles, pitfalls, successes, and all of that stuff. Which, of course, led me to the idea of starting a blog when I suddenly remembered that I already had one!

SO! Let's talk about some general observations.

First, how this started up. I found the gamemaker software free on steam and decided "what the hell". The original idea here was to try and keep my barrier for entry as low as humanly possible. I wanted to try and avoid code if at all possible, and to be able to focus purely on the design and mechanical aspects of the game.

That didn't work.

At all.

I've come to accept that I need to know some coding if I'm going to work in the digital realm. There's really no escaping that. It's good, and it's bad, but it's the truth. One one hand learning how code works, and programming logic, and all of that is of major value. As computers and internet make our world smaller, knowing how to function within software is increasingly valuable.

I've already learned *SO* much, it's really kind of surprising. To be quite honest, I have no clue how translatable the game maker language (GML) is to another, more advanced, language but I figure any experience can't really hurt me. I've always been able to decipher code and reverse-engineer it to figure out what's going on, but never before have I really had to think long and hard about generating code.

I find that most of the logic and math is actually fairly easy for me, it's finding the functions and formatting that is a huge pain in the ass. Of course, I'm typing this from a position of "I've only attempting extremely simple development" so I could (and likely will) end up eating those words in time.

While coding can be troublesome, where I'm struggling the most is with Art.

I am not an artist. I have very little skill with art, or patience with it. I realize that art is absolutely a learned skill. Having gone to art and design school and being forced to "do art" a lot, I know that the more you do it, the better you get at it. But I don't enjoy it.

I love mechanics, systems, how things work together, I love to sit down and figure out how things work. I'm often highly inspired by art and art itself can cause me to flood with ideas on how I can factor that into systems or what neat things I could do with it. But generating art is... simply not my bag. baby.

Anyways, I'm going to be trying to update this more often now that I legitimately have something to talk about. I'll write in a bit on my January game and do a post-mortem of sorts, then later I'll do some writing on the February game and what a disaster it's been so far! :D

WoW for One - Quests and the Journey

Today I want to talk about wow as a single player game. A friend of mine brought up some thoughts on quest design and his opinions about it. Our conversation resulted in a realization that this facet of the game is one that I hadn’t taken the time to explore deeply enough. I have multiple loremaster characters, and I’m positive I’ve done every quest available at least once, but had I really sat down and looked at the system? As the existence of this entry suggests, I decided to do exactly that. I’m not quite sure how to feel about my findings, sometimes overanalyzing something can make you hate it, other times it can make you appreciate it more. While I need some more time to decide how I feel about my opinions, I’ve decided to share the opinions themselves here with you all.

I hadn’t really noticed it before, but looking at WoW as a single player game really feels like it is on rails to me. What I mean here (for the not-into-hip-lingo folks) is that the game moves on a pre-defined path almost on its own. Think of a game where you ride in a car and someone else is driving. That is “on rails” the path is pre-defined, the car will get to its destination on its own, and you’ll get out at the end of the pretty trip. It’s a ride at that point, it’s on rails. Let’s take a look at what I mean here.

Let’s start up a new character together shall we?


From the get-go there are a few things I don’t like here. First the scroll bar on the quest, Is that needed? It feels like an instruction book for a quest here, should I really have that much text to tell me to go talk to someone? What if I don’t want to talk to this person? I can’t decline the quest, nor can I “X” out of the quest dialogue in the upper right corner of the quest window. OK, ok, so you really want me to take this quest, I’ll bite.

Being as this is the first quest in the game, I think it’s fair to be a bit forceful and keep the experience controlled and directed. So let’s move on to the quest itself “It’s time to begin ya trainin’ Ceejjay. Speak with Ortezza to the east” OK! That’s cool for a newbie. The quest tells me where to go and who to talk to. (I originally did this in the Orc starting zone, and they (brilliantly, I might add) made sure that the completion NPC is already on your screen and 15 yards behind the guy you’re talking to, further enforcing this act and behavior of questing to a new player. “Oh, that guy now has a gold question mark. OK, I get it!” But no such luck here in Sen’Jin.) A fitting way to start my character, to get me involved in the world, to make sure I understand what’s happening and what I should be doing. If you didn’t read the whole quest, then you’re also given an objectives area to make sure that it’s crystal clear. Additionally, the npc talks to you in a chat bubble, a quick three lines of chat that gives me an idea of what’s expected of me.

This is a great way to start out the game. I’m given a task or a purpose right off the bat. As a new player, or someone new to a zone, this helps me to make sure I’m getting off on the right foot. Early in someone’s game career or in a new area, the rails serve as a great way to get me involved. It’s a system designed to give guidance, which was a relatively new thing when WoW was released.

At the time that wow was originally released the majority of peoples’ experiences other MMO titles was HUGELY lacking in narrative driven play. In fact it often felt like the game was working against you most of the time! Questing in EQ was borderline torturous, not only did you not have clear indications where to get quests or turn them in, you had to hunt quests down by emoting guards. A quest was a hugely difficult mystery solving adventure that was far more difficulty than it was worth. In FFXI the questing aspect was reserved for very momentous occasions and often times put you into a situation of “You need to figure this out on your own” much like EQ did.

It was natural and brilliant for the designers of classic WoW to explore this system. They recognized that typical MMO play operated under the mentality of a sandbox style game “It’s an online persistent world, let people do what they want. Let them really make it their own!” as opposed to idea of a guided experience. The WoW designers saw that by building a quest system to guild the players through the world, they could make the game far less frustrating and make it open to a larger audience. Additionally, this continually gives people a sense of something to do, something to drive their behavior and something to keep people playing. For it’s time, the development of the quest system in WoW is one of the greatest advancements in MMO play to this date.

OK! Now we have a little back story, but here we are seven years later. WoW has been the long standing king of MMOs and has continued to raise the expectations of the genre. (Yes, seven years later, I’m still a huge WoW fan and play every day.) Undoubtedly, quests have grown over these past seven years. So let’s go check out one of the newer quests. Oh goodie, our little hunter is all grown up now, so let’s grab a level 85 (max level) daily quest!


That looks pretty familiar. I know it’s a quest simply by the interface, the exclamation mark, the accept / deny buttons (the scroll bar… ggrrrrr). These things all have stayed rightfully consistent through the game and leave me with no questions in my head that I’m getting a quest. Let’s look at the quest itself. I get a bit of background as to why I’m doing what I’m doing, and an objective that tells me exactly what I need to do for the quest.

At this point, as a max level character that has presumably done a fair number of quests in my day, I feel like the system is a tad insulting. OK, so insulting might be a bit extreme, but I definitely feel like at this point I’m capable of a little more than needing a step by step instructions to tell me what to do. Where is the play in this? Where do I get to get involved and make decisions? From this quest specifically I’m given a little bit of wiggle room as I can slay any 7 invaders, but I’m still given clear step by step as to where I am to go, and what I am to do. This system works great for leveling up, or going through a zone with the story in-mind, but I feel like it’s essentially taking a lot of “the play” away from us as max level characters.

The quest system in wow has great potential to grow, but that’s exactly what we need it to do. Grow. A quest feels far more enjoyable if I’m able to play an active role in deciding how to tackle the obstacle at hand. Instead of giving me, a level capped player, a step by step blueprint as to what to do tell me the end result you want and let me figure out the steps on my own. Giving me even a little bit of play makes the whole task feel far more unique and personal, even if my decisions or my choices are only impactful in appearance.

A great example of this would be the hunter quests “Steady Shot”. This quest gives a bit of background saying “You already know how to fire an arcane shot. Good. But doing so depletes your focus. To gain your focus back you will need to switch to a second type of ranged attack. I can teach it to you.” The explained functionality here is key to the quest itself. It’s attempting to give you a very basic knowledge of the mechanics of the hunter class and how focus works. But it does so in such a way where I’m practically reading an instruction manual. Why not let me figure it out a bit. Give me a debuff that reduces my focus by 10 a second, and tell me to not let my focus fall to zero over the next 10 seconds. That makes the situation feel a bit more pressing, and gives me the option to figure it out on my own. Being that this quest is immediately after getting a new ability the solution is pretty obvious. But the obviousness of the answer isn’t what makes it feel good, what makes it feel good is that I connected those two dots by myself. It’s a game, I want to play it. I want to be given the tools and the means then the freedom to work the issue out on my own terms.

I think this “hyper instructional play” is one of the bigger reasons why a lot of end game players feel that questing is tedious and dull. Nobody drops you in front of a barrier without telling you “HEY! You should jump over this!!!” I can figure that out for myself, thank you. If you give me a problem or a decision to make and I figure that out on my own, then suddenly things change from you delivering an experience to me into the game and I creating an experience together. Now to be clear, a lot of this isn’t exactly appropriate for starter zones, in the interest of making the barrier for entry to WoW as low as possible, asking people to figure out complex situations in the first 10 minutes of play is going to cost you more players than it gains. But at end game levels, where people have already put in a large amount of time and effort making the assumption that your players is intelligent and competent could allow the quest system to be much more robust.

I look back at so many of the quests from the past, and the quest “The Relic’s Emanation” stands out for me. Was this the most fun and entertaining quest ever created? Not a chance. But the quest did a lot of really important things in my opinion. It gave you a task that focused on the results first and foremost. The quest didn’t tell you the answer, It simply said “Become attuned to the relic”. It never said “go click blue, then blue red, then red yellow green, etc”. It asked you for a result and gave you a rough idea how to do that. What makes this shine for me was that the play itself allowed you to define how you were going to resolve the situation. It was a fairly simple Simon style game, but the pattern did not simply tack on a new color at the end, and they provided no in-game method for tracking the pattern being given. Some people created an addon, some people were able to memorize the patterns, some people sent themselves whispers, while others used a notepad next to their computer. The point was that the quest asked people to develop their own solution, and most people came to their own solution on their own terms. The quest asked for just a little more than simply following a play-by-numbers system that’s laid out in front of you clear as day.

Thinking about this, there are a near infinite number of tools that could be added to the quest system to make it more robust:

• Decisions - Why not give me more decisions to make while questing? How about a quest that says “Our troops are hungry, give us some food.” And that’s it? Have any item that a player can eat be an eligible turn in for the quest. If someone is hungry and I’ve got 200 roasted chicken in my inventory that seems like a reasonable solution to me. It also let’s me to inject a little bit of my personality into the situations my character is participating in. Let’s say I play a Tauren, I’m not so sure I am comfortable with slaughtering an animal that could a distant cousin simply to feed you. But hey, I’ve got some berries!
• Bonuses – All quests that have a baseline expectation. Why not give bonuses for going above and beyond? The quest above would work great “My troops are hungry, anything will do, but roasted quail has the most nutrients!” if I turn in berries, awesome the quest is completed and I am rewarded. If I bring the guy roasted quail, then I get a slight boost in my reward. The players leveling or questing for profit could use the bonus if they find that valuable, while those seeking achievements or in a hurry could just completed and move along.
• Timers – We see a little of this in quests today, but I think more timers could add some urgency to play. Again, using the example above “My troops are starving to death! Get us some food asap. Quail is the most nutritious, but anything you can get us will help!” A situation of people starving to death is most assuredly one that I would think is time sensitive.
• Stop making me read – So much can be explained through play and behavior. Let’s stick with the starving army theme. How about I have to pass by a large number of “starving grunt” npcs as I approach a quest giver. These grunts die and respawn fairly quickly, they mutter as I walk by “I haven’t eaten in a week” or similar phrases. Give me enough queues that I’m guaranteed to see enough to paint the picture. This could change the quest description into something short and sweet like “Bob sent you to help? Look around, my men are dying. Get me some food! That will help.” More importantly, it would tell me the story and potentially make me WANT to help, without having to completely stop my play to sit and read for a minute. After 3000 quests, that can add up to a huge amount of time spent just reading and not actually playing the game.

The quest system could be taken even further. How about decisions in quests lead to branching questing paths within a zone or narrative? Anyone remember the quest in Mount Hyjal “A Bird in Hand”? This quest gave you some options on how you wanted to interrogate the harpy. These were fun and made me feel like I had a little control over my characters disposition. But the big moment came at the end of the quest, I was given a choice as to if I wanted to kill the harpy or let her go. This was an exciting decision! I thought to myself “oooh, what will this choice change?! Does this impact my follow up quests?!” I remember asking my friends later “did you kill her?! What happened? I let her live!” Sadly, I came to find out that it only changed the follow up flavor text. Why couldn’t there have been two different follow up quests? If I killed her, give me a quest to dispose of the body. If I saved her, give me a quest to put her into witness protection and ship her to barrens where nobody would be the wiser. Then the split paths could reconvene into a quest that basically told me “Well, now that we’ve taken care of that situation, let’s move on.” This could result in multiple branching paths and develop into a system where people genuinely feel that their experience was somewhat unique. As long as the number of completed quests and the rewards remain consistent, things like achievements stay consistent and nobody gets any form of in-game advantage. On top of that, think about the replayability this could potentially add to people who love to play alts, or people who are super interested in the lore.

I want to see max level characters talking to each other at end-game about their paths to max level. I want to see the surprise as they say “Wait, a quest to kill the demon guy? I befriended him and got all sorts of info on the demonic inner working from him, you killed them all?!” Even with the extremely limited options presented in front of us now, I still see people get excited when talking about quests after the fact. I can personal vouch that I’ve had at least 5 hilarious conversations based around choosing your admirer on “The Day that Deathwing Came: What Really Happened”. This very simple choice, even being purely cosmetic has created situations where the majority of people I’ve talked to about it felt that they were in control of the narrative.

By its nature, questing is a process that is most commonly equated to leveling. Quests are designed around the progressions through zones and through levels. This leaves us in a position where, as one-time experiences, we eventually run out of quests. Introduce the daily quest. This is a system that allows for specific quests to be repeated once per day. Initially, I was extremely excited at the possibilities of this system. I love the idea of being able to go back and do things that I enjoyed again! Quests like “Vigilance on Wings” or “The Restless Brood” are great examples of this. These were really high-profile quests that broke my normal questing routines and gave me a tweaked experience that was different and unique, being able to relive these experiences felt great!

Dailies though, have taken on a different purpose. I feel like it’s not about “re-experiencing awesome situations” as much as it’s now the questing experience for max level characters. Dailies have become the premier way to farm a reputation at a controlled pace, or to give high level characters reasons to go back into areas that they haven’t been in a while.

The most recent Max Level daily questing hub is The Molten Front. This area, as a whole, I felt was pretty disappointing. It felt like so much of a grind. On some level this was undoubtedly intended, as this content needs to stay relevant until the next content is released. But the act of obtaining 150 marks of the world tree when I’m only capable of obtaining 12 a day feels like a cheap and transparent way to artificially extend that life cycle. Additionally, it makes the idea of doing this on alts or two years down the road on a max level character who’s going back to see what they missed a painfully dull experience. I'm all for having content with replayability and that is fun to play again and again, but the key to this is that the content is FUN to play again, not that I'm forced to play it over and over.

Nearly every person I’ve talked to who completed the Molten Front fully has said “Ugh, never again.” I’m not attempting to say that dailies do not have a place in end-game here. But personally I felt the systems used in Isle of Quel’Danas felt a lot more future proof. Experiencing the event and dailies during progression was exciting and rewarding, opening the island up yielded new things to do and kept people motivated to see what’s next. But going back and doing that rep grind again on an alt is nowhere near as time consuming as it was when the content was relevant. The island as a whole is now fully opened up and ripe for a new character to come in and experience all of these quests immediately. While potentially unintentional, this also helps to reinforce the growth of a character. As a character becomes more powerful, they should be able to complete old content more easily. It makes sense for a level 80 character to be able to blow through level 70 quests easily.

While I didn’t care for the gating or the repetitive quests, The Molten Front has some amazing storytelling and lore going on. The feeling of a constant battle back and forth was well executed, and being able to see progression in the environment as you play is something I hope to see a lot more of! But having to put out the fires or destroy the temple every single day only to unveil the exact same 5 quests got to be pretty frustrating. If the system included a few of the bullet points above, I feel it could have felt a lot more dynamic. Additionally, while I’m happy to get you the marks you need Mr. Malfurion, didn’t I just kill Rangaros the other day? I seem to recall some of the older raid instances dropping items that could be turned in for reputation gain and helping to expedite the grind a little bit. It’s not that any of these quests on their poorly designed on their own, quite the contrary, most of them are quite enjoyable as singular quests. But even a great quest loses its luster after doing it 30 days in a row.

I’m not saying that every single quest in the whole game should be an epic and grand undertaking, that would make simply playing the game exhausting, especially for someone who plays only casually. I want a certain amount of heavily guided questing. There are times where we all just want to relax and not be forced to figure out how to play a game, or be asked to have the manual dexterity of a teenager to button mash through some horrible gauntlet that makes a mockery of my nowhere-what-they-used-to-be reflexes. But I do feel like the system itself has become somewhat self-defeating. People are so accustomed to questing on rails that they stopped putting any mental effort or thought into a system. Now, after years of “play by numbers” the system requires so little from us that any effort put into the system feels frustrating and defiant.

I suppose the heart of the issue is summarized well by Shepard Book from Firefly “The journey is the worthier part.” I’m all for rewards, and helping me get to my destination. It feels great to finally get to your destination. But in doing so, let *ME* make that journey worthy. After all, the destination is nothing but an excuse to take the journey. Give me opportunities to actually play the game, and to work some things out. Let me feel like what I’m doing is personal and unique. If I’m sharing the same experience as everyone else, at what point does the game become nothing more than an interactive movie? Give me the tools and the opportunity to make my own personal story.

Deus Ex

I just finished my second play through of Deus Ex Human Revolution.



If you haven't played Deus Ex at all, it's an interesting FPS/RPG hybrid that focuses around player choice and narrative in a near-future setting riddled with computer- human enhancements or “Augs” for short . It's a lot of fun and I highly recommend you try the game out, it's well worth every penny.

But, just as even the prettiest of gems has flaws, even great games have their issues.

The game focuses around the possibilities of choice. The ability for you to play the game how you want to play. You can be a stealthy fast-talking hacker, a rocket-launching tank on legs, or anywhere on the spectrum between the two. This opens up a lot of options in the game as to how you decide to tackle situations or approach opposition. While this translates into a great and enjoyable situation, it is not executed without issue. In nearly all situations you are presented with the overarching decision of "lethal vs non-lethal" or Metal Gear Solid vs Quake.

This theme plays a lot into level design and your character growth. Every area of the game seems somewhat formulaic in its design, there's the open corridor with tons of enemy opposition for the Quake players, and additionally there are multiple side paths through vents, elevator shafts, and ladders for the Solid Snakes out there. The problem here is that these options are not at all equally rewarded.

Let's look at the first area in the game, there are a few guards outside of a building, and your goal is to infiltrate said building. First and foremost is a little tutorial on stealth and takedowns. Let’s pop around the corner and shoot the guard. Look at that! A “Man Down” experience bonus, 10 free XP.


What if I’m even better and pull of a headshot? – An extra 10xp for marksman.


OK, let’s try it again with a “lethal takedown” (basically sneak up behind him and kill him sliently). Ooh, Man down again, and Expedient for a total of 30 xp! Nice.


Now let’s be nice and not kill him, just rough him up a bit and knock him out. What’s that? Man down, Expedient, AND merciful soul for a total of 50 xp.


OK, ok, maybe I’m jumping the gun, maybe these are just little bonuses. Let’s complete the area shall we? Let’s go down the corridor, killing everyone and waltzing in the front door. I get a 200xp bonus for “getting things done” and end the area with a total of 640 xp. Let’s assume I headshot everyone and bump that up to roughly 700 xp.


Now let’s be sneaky, let’s not combat anyone and go the long way around up through the roof. Oh, what’s that? A bonus for taking the long way around? Don’t mind if I do, that’s a free 100 xp.


And finally, once I breach the building through the roof and the vent, I end with Getting things done again for 200, and ghost for 500. Ending the area with a total of 1210 xp.


That’s almost TWICE what the lethal paths would have given me. At this point, it feels to me very much like that choice has already been made for me. In a game with RPG elements, the accrual of experience is king, giving me two options sounds appealing, but when one option is clearly so superior, where the real choice in that? Not to mention this voids any concept of Risk vs. Reward. In fact I'm actually rewarded for NOT taking risks. Clearly I feel like the non-lethal and stealthy style of play is favored and the desired way to play. This is completely ok, if you’re playing metal gear solid or a game based on stealth, but this game is based on choice.

The same concepts seem to apply to other aspects of the game as well. Look at the hacking mini-game, it's a fun little game that encourages quick thinking and quick clicking.


But it also provides boatloads of experience over the course of play. I have the codes to this door/safe/computer, sure. But if I open it with a code, sure the door opens but I’m left with nothing to show for it except access to whatever.


But if I hack the door I'm looking at bonuses from data stores and experience points for the simple act of hacking.


Oh look, 50 xp. This doesn't include a hack with data stores, which there can be multiple of, that can give up to 500 additional xp each.

Again, I felt like this choice was pretty much made for me. Why couldn't hacking simply give hacking related items (stop worms, nuke viruses) and no XP bonus? Or using the door code would give me an equivalent bonus to reward my exploration and reading of pocket secretaries?

The game has a great theme of trying to juggle Adam's humanity. This theme is so central that Eidos has included it in the title of the game and the TV commercial. I love that Eidos is attempting to tackle such powerful themes, but again it feels like much of the choices surrounding this theme are absent. Take a look at this penny-arcade comic :


That's exactly how I felt while playing the game. I'd spent hours trying to preserve life, trying to avoid hurting anyone, to be a genuine humanitarian. The first boss fight was exciting; I couldn't wait to see how I could get out of this situation non-violently. Turns out, there wasn't any way. I could shoot him with the stun gun a good 20 times sure, but in the end the cut scene took away any sense of humanitarianism. He died, and there was nothing anyone could have done about it. Why couldn't I try to talk my way out of the fight? I've got this awesome CASIE mod that pretty much lets me hypnotize people into doing what I want. I'm an expert hacker, why couldn't I try and find some solution that involved remotely hacking his augmentations while running around hiding from his huge machine gun? There were so many options, none of which were available to me. In fact, I'd argue that cut-scenes in general hurt the game. Any type of forced dialogue from the cut-scenes was inappropriate for the character and the values that I had been building and holding dear.

For all of the attachment to the character the game begs of you, I felt relatively little connection to the world. Visually, it’s gorgeous. But the world itself doesn’t seem to have much of a pulse. There were droves of nameless “hobos” or “punks” hanging around the game that provided little more to the game than just someone in my way. Seeing a character with a non-generic name told me, clear as day, that they were used for a quest at some point or had nothing more to offer than a repeated one liner about how they hate augs. I would have liked to have seen a bit more character from these npcs, maybe a few could be doing more than standing in the same spot and chatting for 20 hours.

After seeing Detroit the second time it was nice to see that the world had advanced, but rest assured those punks were still standing around that barrel by the apartments doing absolutely nothing. Add a little spice to the world, give every npc a unique name, make me wonder if they are important to the story later or wonder if I missed something. Make me want to talk to them, make them move around a bit, make me believe they are human.

At this point, I feel like I've just complained about the game’s short comings. I do feel there are a lot of really great things about this game that should be noted and rewarded.

The cover system, for starters is great. The decision to pull out of first person into a third person cover was excellent. We’ve seen games in the past that try to use a “lean” system or some jarring camera tricks to give first person the feel of cover, but I found the hybrid perspective to be comfortable, functional, and fluid. Aiming from cover could be difficult at times, (not sure if it’s just the pc version, but my aiming reticule often just disappeared for a couple of hours.) but with the use of zoom it became possible. Moving around while in cover felt efficient and effective. I never felt that I was caught or seen through no fault of my own. If I got spotted, I know exactly why and exactly where I screwed up.

I really enjoyed the stealth play as well, I felt proud when I was rewarded for not setting off any alarms, or not being seen in any way. Sneaking up behind people and using a takedown felt really good, and the stun gun is probably one of the more enjoyable and rewarding weapons I’ve used in a FPS in a good long while. I was pleased when the game rewarded my exploration and my crawling through vents or hacking computers (though, as mentioned before, I feel the other method of play should have been rewarded as well).

All in all, the game is loads of fun; and I really enjoyed both play-throughs. Any game that has taken 60 hours of my time over the past few weeks, I must give it some credit. It’s definitely worth a purchase if you’re on the fence in any way, but at the end of the day for a game that heralds choice so highly, I feel like a huge number of those choices were either made for me or taken away from me.

Why I do it.

I get asked a lot "Why do you want to be a game designer?" this isn't as easy a question as one would assume. It's one of those questions that when asked out of the blue, I was often stunned by the sheer absurdity of the question. I would think to myself "Duh! Cause it's my dream job." or "It just calls to me." Even the ever-famous "Why wouldn't I?!" This question often left me Speaking in undefinables. Recently, I've decided that it's time for me to really sit down and figure out how to describe it. How to break it down and present it in a way that is understandable and conveys why I feel so strongly about the subject.

Before I can even begin to explain it, there needs to be some background. What are games about to you? Are they about wasting time? Are they about having fun? Getting together with your friends? No matter why you play games, the core of the relationship between you and games is likely related to the experience. No, not experience points like in an rpg game, but the experience of playing the game.

Games are a unique medium. They focus around controlling and defining someone's interaction in a way that causes them to make decisions. They make you think. Some games ask you do to this on an instinctual level with quick decisions and reactions, while others ask you to think slowly and come to a decision after considering as much as possible.

I think it's important now to define the difference between an experience and a stimulus. Music is mostly a stimulus. You can listen passively just sit back and just enjoy it. It requires nothing from  you as a listener to enjoy it. Many people find themselves being more engrossed than simply listening, and become involved with the music. This is where music tips from a passive stimulus into a true experience. People rarely experience music when heard on the radio on the way home from work, but when going to a concert, or making the music yourself, or even when that perfect song plays at the perfect moment it suddenly changes into an experience. These experiences are what stick with us as humans. Humans innately remember experiences, feeling, and moments.   

Games don't give you the option to allow them to be stimulus. They require your interaction from the onset. The game provides you with a stimulus through feedback and your reaction is required, this is what makes games one of the most powerful media in the world.

Couple these game requirements up with the ability to share this with another person, and you've suddenly created something far larger and more powerful than a single interaction. You've created a communal experience. This communal experience is something that transcends cultures, languages, and personal differences. It almost becomes a universal language to anyone who's touched the game in any way.

This is the beauty of interactivity. It creates experiences. It doesn't provide you with an. You can't passively consume. It doesn't work unless you're a part of it. I remember in college hearing about how art is defined by the reaction, emotion, or feelings that it creates to its audience. I remember talking about the Mona Lisa's eyes, and how people felt that her eyes followed them around the room. Or how the Sistine chapel makes a person feel like they are looking up into heaven itself. These are more than simply pictures or paintings because they make you interact with them. They make you feel something.

Games do this innately as they require interaction to function. They do this without the need for language or art, but through rules and mechanics. Think about chess for a moment. Chess is a fairly straightforward set of mechanics and rules that has been enjoyed by millions of people for well over a millennia. Two people plucked from different times, languages, and cultures could be placed at a chess board opposite each other and would be perfectly comfortable interacting playing the game. This can be seen in modern gaming communities too, whether it's global tournaments, mmo games, collectable card game gatherings, or the high score board for a single player puzzle game.

Games act as a common language. The game is the interpreter, the referee, it can even be a player at times. A game is a template for an interaction. An interaction is the basis of an experience. This experience, this shared experience, is what drives me to design games. Can my template illicit a pleasurable experience? Can I deliver an experience that someone will remember?

Modern games are more capable of this than ever before. The integration of technology and social availability allow designers to create experiences that are more realistic than ever and widespread enough to reach millions of people simultaneously. The MMO market is booming for these reasons. Today this communal experience can be shared with millions of people in real time. Despite the different languages and regions, every single person in an MMO is connected.

This is why I design. To be part of creating these universal experiences. Games deal in experiences. And their designers broker memories.

A Cataclysmic Failure?!

Before we get started here, I want to make a few things clear. I love wow, and I love Cataclysm. I think that cataclysm is the best expansion Azeroth has seen. If you're gone back and re-experienced the old zones, then you know, they are better than they have ever been. Questing is more fluid, logical, and enjoyable than any blizzard has delivered yet. The questing and leveling really shows off how much blizzard has learned over the last 5 years. This leads to the first issue with cataclysm though, and that is the perception of new content.

I was talking with a former guild mate the other day. He has quit wow and moved on to rift. Immediately hooked i started asking questions. I opened with the general and broad "why did you quit wow?" he immediately answered "Because blizzard is trying to steal my money with cataclysm." Of course, being so interested in games and design, the conversation went on for a good hour after that. What I walked away with was that his perception hinged around his opinion that "Blizzard is out of ideas and too lazy to give us new content." And being out of ideas left blizzard in a position of "ummm... redo old stuff!" This was an angle I hadn't thought of before, and decided to spend some time pondering.

After some internet searches, and some simple word of mouth, I found this opinion to be a fairly common one, much more so than I anticipated. The wow population is fickle and can be difficult to please, but one thing that gamers universally love, is new stuff (of equal or improved quality). In the eyes of the developers all of cataclysm is new. All of the zones are new, the cities are new, the dungeons are new, and the gear is new. But in the eyes of a player, they see "go back to all the places you've already been." Where is the wonder in that? where is the discovery, the amazement, the marvel? Yes, there were new zones. Yes if you took all of those new zones and put them in their own area, it could be a new continent. But the problem is the presentation.

With burning crusade we stepped through the portal into a whole new world that brought mysteries unseen in Azeroth to light. With wrath, we traveled to a whole new continent controlled by one of the greatest evils and most well-known characters from Warcraft lore. And with cataclysm we.... went back to where we started. We went back to Orgrimmar and Stormwind. Back to a world that we've been away from for years. It's kind of like after high school you go to college in a bigger city, then you go to grad school in an even bigger city, then you finish and come back to your small hometown. Sure, you're different, and the town is different, but it still feels like the same old place where you grew up.

Now, anyone who's leveled a new character at this point is crying foul. Saying that the world might as well be new as it's so drastically changed from what it was, and how it's better than it's ever been. And they are absolutely right. It is. The new leveling flow and quests are some of the most fun I've had with the game in a long time. The problem is that the majority of the player base, or at least the player base that's likely to leave, aren't keen on going back through and leveling a new character. Even if they do, with so many alternative ways to level (dungeons, pvp, quests, archeology) there isn't a boatload of incentive to do all of these things. Most people I know who level alts now-a-days do it by afk'ing in town and wait for dungeon queues to pop. Why? because it requires less effort. Never underestimate a gamers ability to travel the path of least resistance.

For most at this point in the game, leveling isn't an issue of speed or efficiency or even honest enjoyment. Nearly everyone I know who's leveled an alt in the past few years, has done so with the intent of playing it at max level. "I want to try tanking as a warrior." or "I think warlock could be fun." These are things that I hear a lot. Coupled with the general mindset that you are only playing a fraction of the class until your max level. When people think about experiencing a new class or trying a new class, they are framing their thoughts around max level. I've never heard anyone say "I wonder what leveling another class would be like, going through the same stuff I've already done but now standing 40 yards away!" Now I can't speak for everyone out there, with tens of millions of players, anyone who thinks they can is just lying to themselves. So I'm confident there are people who would love these types of things, but I don't know any. And the ones I do know, went back for loremaster after being max level.  

This problem could have been mitigated somewhat with the inclusion of a new class. A new class that starts at level 1. The new class would have caused players to roll this class in droves, and while many of them may level it up through dungeons alone, anyone who's interested in getting to end game as quickly and efficiently as possible is going to be questing. So not only are you driving people to go through all of the questing and new-old zones, you're giving them an exciting reason to do it. This could have worked with the introduction of new races, but by allowing level 80 characters to race changes from day one, there was really no reason to go back.

So let's say you do go back. Let's say you don't want to dungeon crawl to max level, and you want to experience all of the new content. Well, you're in for a treat. You get to experience the best storytelling, questing, and level flow that the MMO Market has ever seen. Your first sixty levels are going to be packed with fun and enjoyment as you tromp from zone to zone living out the stories of the cataclysm and partake in the rivalry between the horde and the alliance. Then you get the pleasure of walking through the dark portal to a mysterious new alien land. A place where the horde and alliance are suddenly working together against... someone? Burning Crusade plays very differently from the rest of the world, anyone in the know is familiar with illidan and his journey, but it's not present enough through leveling or questing to make it clear to anyone who hasn't lived it already. I don't recall a quest even mentioning the name "illidan" until getting into shadowmoon valley, meaning someone could potentially level through all of outlands without ever knowing why they are really there or who they are hunting beyond the generic thought of "bad guys". This is not to say that it's impossible, if you've an interest in lore and are willing to do even a little research, the story comes out. And it's a good story! But it's not told through the game and the play.

Walking through the Dark Portal has become a jarring experience. You get 60 levels of fresh new content using all the tricks and experience that an army of game designers have spent years honing. Then you step foot into a magical land where the questing flow and storytelling is radically different. You've spent 60 levels learning about the cataclysm and the strife between the horde and alliance, but on Draenor that doesn't exist. Who is Deathwing? The people in outlands likely have no clue. (of course, the astute player will now bring up netherwing ledge, but that was all optional and a brand new questing player would likely not even touch that area)

So you've finished up Outlands, now it's time to move on to Northrend! A whole new continent that looms in the north. A frozen waste land where the scourge are launching their assault. Northrend is definitely a step up from Outlands. From the moment you step foot into Northrend, you learn about the scourge invasion and Arthas makes quite a few appearances while leveling through the zones. Northrend also makes a major effort to keep questing interesting and changing. From the vehicle system, to the improved level flow, to a player leveling up now, Northrend would feel much more cohesive and fluid.

Now, this all makes total sense to people who've been with the game for years. Outlands is 3 years older than Azeroth now, of course the content is going to be continually getting better and better. But for a new player, (one who rushed out and bought this awesome expansion after hitting level 60) This must be insanely confusing. I say this because my mom recently made that exact transition. She called me up and said "howcome hellfire sucks?" I chuckled and explained the wow timeline to her, to which she understood and replied with "Well they need to redo this too then, cause it's not nearly as fun." And she's right.

It's no secret that the wow player base has been going in the wrong direction lately. And I personally believe that the perception of recycled content is a huge part of the issue. I know when I first stepped into ZG I said to myself "oh god, I'm back here again." And yes, it was different than in classic wow, but different is not the same as new and shiny. As my former guild mate made quite clear when I asked "So would you feel different if Shadowfang were in Gilneas and the dungeon was named 'Assault on Gilneas' with different names and models?" to which he replied "Absolutely, at least then I'd feel like my Christmas gift wasn't the same bike old with a new coat of paint."

So has blizzard backed themselves into a corner? With the leveling flow being heavily disrupted between 60 and 80 and the recycling of old content? I don't think so, not fully at least. With 4.2 around the corner I think the designers have ample opportunity to give the end game loads of new content. As long as they keep making it new and shiny, rather than just a new coat of paint.