Misc: Rambles: Game Design

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LAST UPDATE 03/06/01 13:38:54 NZL

RECENT STUFF:

03/06/01
Added "sneaking"

SNEAKING

As a child, I played a game where one person was a guard and another was a spy. The spy had to complete an objective without being seen. From about the age of eight, I have knowen that sneaking, spying, evading capture is the best kind of game.

This rule extends to computer games. Everyone I know agrees with me that the most fun moments in games are usually when you are hiding in a shadow as a guard walks past. It is fun when you snipe someone in the head, and they fall down silently. It is fun when you throw a grenade into a sentry post and take out the soldiers. But it is much more fun when, armed with the Dragon's tooth sword, you are running up behind a flame-thrower carrying MIB, trying to get to him before he hears you or turns around. At the last miniute he spins, calling for help, and raises his weapon. That there is one of the most exciting moments of any computer game.

I don't think that a regular first person shooter can ever be as fun as a sneaker. The fear of getting caught is one of the greatest fears that humans have, in games especially beacause in games death is so boring and not frightening at all. Even if the concequnces of getting spotted are small, there will never be anything as frighening as the trooper suddenly turning, and yelling "I've got movement!"

HEALING

Just a short one. In Deus Ex, Warren Spector wanted us to have concequences for our actions. But he left out one of the most central concequences of any action game. He continued to use a system which had been invented for arcade games and was never discarded.

Health. In nearly all games, healing is instant and easy. In DX, a medbot would heal you completly in a click. You could get a healing augmentation so you wouldn't have to carry around medkits. Damage was not really a problem. it was like tiredness, or reactor temperature. If you let it get too high then you lost, but you could bring it up to the brink and it wouldn't matter because you could easily restore it.

Imagine if throughout the DX game there was no healing. Or, you could only heal very occastionly. Movie characters often have to go for a long time without a healing break, but they might get all patched up one or two times in the film. This would be a good system. You go without healing until you have completed something and your character goes back to base, perhaps with a medical facility.

Everything we used to do without thinging would become far more serious. Do you try and stop the bar fight where you might injur yourself? Do you take a pot-shot at the thug before running? No longer could we run at any foe we knew was weaker than us, and expect to survive for long.

Now we would have to think before we shot. We used to fear nothing less than death, but now every fight would have concequences. Every encounter would be though out.

THIRD PERSON AND FIRST PERSON

I recon that 1st person is the way of the future. We want to see out of our character's eyes, see enemies firing at us, we want to be the hero. One advantage of a 3rd person view is that you can see your character. For example, you can see their wounds and tell how damaged they are.

But what game designers forget is that you can see yourself. Even in first person, you should be able to simply look down to see your chest and legs. Your arms are very easy to see too. So how come in FPS we are invisible to ourselves? We cannot see our feet. Although we see our hands holding a gun, the hands don't really belong to us. They make no attempt to move objects. They don't react when we are hurt. Whether we look up or down, they are slammed onto our view.

We will never really feel 'in the game' if we view the world as a camera with a pistol infront of it. Strap a camera to a real soldier's head and see what he sees. We need to be like that.

KILLING THE COMMUNITY

What happened to all of the Dark Forces 1 modifications when jedi Knight (Dark Forces II) was released? Basically, they were trashed and the mod community started again on the new game. When we get Unreal 2, all the Unreal mods will be thrown out and we will all start again on Unreal 2 mods.

Lets imagine what would happen if we lived in the perfect world where all modifications, levels, skins, everything could be ported easily to new versions of games. For a start, games would accumulate far more user modifications. While they wouldn't all be good, some would be and reviewers would help us  to find them. A game with compatibility for previous mods could actually use them for advertising, and include them in the first release box.

Image the box of Unreal 3 - "Featuring over 1000 weapons, 50 multiplayer game types and seven single-player campains". And the designers might not even bother making weapons and levels themselves - They could just build a better engine, ask the community to upgrade the mods, and then sell them all.

Maby in future, all games will be partly made for free by the gaming community. People are crazy enough to make things like Counterstrike for free. Maby everyone will be a level designer and Epic's only job will be finding the quality levels and putting them in a box.

Or maby not.

STUPID STUFF

I hate stupid stuff. Including this list.

Some stupid stuff:

(1) In Deus Ex, I found a manhole. I clicked on the cover to move it off the hole. It slowly slid up, then accross the concrete. I then clicked to close the cover, then ran away backwards. I was five meters away from the cover and somehow it was still mysteriously closing itself. You should move manhole covers with your arms. You should see your arms moving them. When you run away, they should not keep moving. This sounds like common sense, but FPS designers seem to think that players in fact are always armed with telekenesis. They also believe that the average renegade scientist can carry ten guns and that whether you are a storm-trooper or a droid, you always have the same plain human hand when you hold a blaster rifle.

(2) In sneaking games (Deus Ex, Thief), to make the game playable the enemies have to be incredibly blind, deaf and stupid (dumb?). They must not look around but only stare straight ahead. They must not hear footsteps from more than a metre away. When they do hear or see you, they must after a minute decide that "it must have just been a shadow!" even if you have killed on of their friends.
At the moment I can't think of a better way to make sneaking easy but there must be some way. Suggestions?

(3) I hate being a walking tank. Getting shot should kill me. At least, I should have the same health as the enemies. To give me the advantage which allows me to win, I shouldn't have extra health. It should be more subtle: Faster movement, better aim, enemies which yell before shooting.

(4) Choices: I don't know about anyone else, but I am a nice person. When I can either say "Actually there's a raid coming some time this week, you better watch out." or "No, nobody followed be." I find it difficult choosing the second choice when the first is obviously the right thing to say. If one answer is better than the other, the choice isn't really much of a choice at all. When you are presented with an option in a game, the pros and cons of both paths must be clear.

(5) I hate cheap excuses for stupid game stuff. For example: "When your ship is destroyed, the rebel base may beam you out and into a replacement ship. This is expensive, so it can only be done three times. However, if you prove yourself to be an especially valuable pilot by obtaining 1000 points, you will be awared with an additional rescue." Translation: You have 3 lives. 1000 points gets you an extra life. Deus Ex did this quite a bit.

(6) I am bored so there is no more writing here.

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