Design: Awakenings (2)

Story thoughts:

-Before the game starts, you kill yourself for some reason, or die because of something you did. My current thought is that you get involved in a cult in life, but as you learn more about it, you disagree with their nihilist ideals. However, something happens to change your mind – perhaps your family gets killed, or something roughly as traumatic. Basically, enough to turn you initially to the dark side, but still have a believable possibility of light inside. You then decide to go through with an elaborate cult ritual which ends in your death.

-You are then, as expected, raised by your cosmic horror master, and your latent necromantic powers are awakened by him. You are told by him that you are now bound to his will, and will be his agent on earth. He needs you to free him from his bonds that keep him trapped beneath the earth, as he only has very limited influence on the events on earth from his current situation.

-Your form is that of a being made of magic. Your body and soul have been absorbed and merged by magic, rather than being any conventional sort of undead. Your appearance would be something like a multicolored (mostly dark colors), pseudocorporeal human.

-You are told by your cosmic horror master that you are simply one of many that have taken the ritual – however, this isn’t true. You are special. He only awakened your untapped necromancy potential – usually, he has to imbue the victim with some of his own power – and having done that, your power can grow greatly on its own.

-You make choose to make different moral choices as you progress, controlled by how you have your undead defeat people. Sure, at first you think that the world should be destroyed by your master, but how much pain do you need to inflict on people in the meantime? As the story progresses, you begin to question your feelings more and more as you see some goodness in humanity (at least if you are leaning towards good), and you begin to doubt your mission. Ultimately, you could choose to continue to do his will, because you like the power and like the mayhem. Or, you could choose to defy him, and make him your enemy, and ultimately redeem yourself.

-You master cannot directly see what you’re doing, but you report to him, and other, loyal cultists also report to him behind your back – thus, he can get some sense of whether you’re lying to him or not, but can’t know for sure.

-The gameplay is changed somewhat by how you choose to play morally. First, you can still have your undead fight with you, but you have to tell them to disable, not kill, your enemies – they deal slightly less damage this way, and you don’t get very many resources from the bodies, however, you also attract less attention from other enemies (For example, if this was GTA, your star rating would go up less) – and thus you have to fight less enemies. Certain undead might have certain moves that make this easier than others – creatures that can shock enemies into unconsciousness, for example. You also have undead that can be stealthy, and favoring them could make going “good” easier.

-As you progress in the story, in addition to changing the way that you play the game somewhat, the story also begins to change as you make your choices. You do missions in different ways, obviously, but you can also choose to do different missions – if you want to destroy your master, you can do a quest to get more information from a former cult site in some mountains, for example, which in turn leads to a hunt for an artifact to destroy him. If you want to simply release him, as he’d like, you have to collect a different artifact to complete the relic that could free him. If you want to destroy him and absorb his power, then you could do a mix of the two, but neither would require quite as much effort – the idea is for all four paths to be roughly the same difficulty. If you want to prevent his raising but not take the risk of trying to destroy him, then you hunt down what would be used to raise him and hide it better or try to destroy it.

-Obviously, you can harvest your resources from people, but you can also get corpses and souls from graveyards and the like (morgues?) The alternate resources, such as plants and magical stone, could also be harvested in other, murder-neutral ways.


-Using souls isn’t as evil as it initially sounds. Souls outside of bodies can’t be destroyed, and are by default unconscious in this world – they usually only remain in the world for a short time after their body’s death by default, though they can persist for some time, especially near graveyards and the like. Thus, while you do keep them from going on to the afterlife with your magic, they are not conscious for it, and if they “fall” in your service, the magic binding them releases, and they depart to the afterlife.

-You have to recover some mysterious artifact in order to free your master, the pieces to which are scattered around the world.

-A mysterious (and ultimately very powerful, though that part is hidden) counter/foil to the cosmic horror appears (perhaps a love-interestish female?), and tries to draw you back into the light, or at least, to deny your master. He or she probably appears at the end of certain missions, at least to start with, and just points out the goodness of humanity to you and the like. S/he is the agent of some other force, and in the end, you accept that person’s ideas, or you kill (or at least reject) him or her.

Possible endings:
- You summon forth your horror master to take over the world, as its servant. You become absorbed into its being, and it does its stuff. World ends, everyone dies – or something like that. Final Boss: Mysterious other character.
- You summon forth your master, in order to destroy it. You do so, and save the world. Possibly involving a heroic sacrifice. Final Boss: Cosmic Horror
- You re-seal (or don’t unseal, and perhaps make it harder for the next guy to try to unseal) the monster, so it remains, but so do you, at least in theory. Final Boss: Mysterious other character
- You summon forth your master in order to destroy it, and take its place. Final Boss: Cosmic Horror

Design: Awakenings

This week I'm going to be featuring a game that I wrote up a relatively basic design for last semester.



Title: Awakenings

Premise: You play as a necromancer spirit of some variety, raised and granted power by a horror trapped within the earth. Your initial goal is to free him, but you can choose to disobey.

Gameplay Style:

General style is a third-person action game, with you controlling one person directly, a few people indirectly, and more allies that you can summon but cannot control.

Undead controlling system:

You can possess a single undead at a time. As you do, that undead gains additional health, speed, and power, and you would also have access to certain special abilities that that type of undead can’t usually use.

You summon undead from your reserves of resources (corpses, souls, and other things). When you kill someone and they aren’t auto-raised by whatever you killed them with, you get a certain amount of corpses and souls.

While you do directly control one undead at a time, you also have a party of undead that you can indirectly control by giving them orders, a la Spore or Kingdom Hearts. This posse can only be so big, however, and any more undead that you make are under their own control – a basic ai that kills every enemy in sight. Also, the ones that are directly in your party gain a bit of power, speed, and maybe an extra ability compared to the ai ones, to make being in your party feel meaningful.

Some undead have abilities that instantly raise slain enemies as undead. For example, Vampires that kill enemies with their bite attack raise the enemy as a vampire. These would automatically become basic ai-controlled undead that help you out, but you can’t control.

You can also be outside an undead, but you don’t have a whole lot of powers in that form.


Undead Stuff:

As you progress, perhaps you can upgrade your undeads’ abilities, or grant them new ones, as well as unlock more types of undead. I was thinking that you could start with 2 types of undead for each corporeal and incorporeal, for a total of 4 total. Zombie, Skeleton, Ghost, and Wraith seem good to start with, and unlockables could include (corporeal) Vampire, Patchwork Monster, and Lich, and (incorporeal) Banshee, Shade, and Poultergeist. You can spend experience (gained from, at least, completing quests and beating people up) to upgrade existing undead’s abilities, and to get new types of undead if you’ve upgraded previous ones enough, though the previous ones will still be useful. You could also have more undead in your party as you level up.

Two Main Resources: Corpses and Souls. Corpses are mostly used for corporeal undead (skeletons, zombies) and souls mostly used for incorporeal undead (ghosts, wraiths). These can be harvested from people, obviously, but can also be taken from graveyards. There’s also some specialty resources that can be taken from other places to get special creatures – Magical stone for Gargoyles, certain plants to make into shambling mounds, that sort of thing – perhaps obtainable by side quest. (Rough Example: As you explore a pyramid in Egypt as part of a plot-driven mission, you could also go further down a different, more dangerous part of the pyramid (or a different pyramid entirely), and at the end find the ritual to raise a new type of monster.)

There’s also a final resource, magic, that is needed for everything. Perhaps it slowly recharges over time?

Setting:

Modern. You’d be running around in largely metropolitan areas, GTA style – killing, raising, and completing missions. You’d probably have a home base of some sort.



I'll post the plot Thursday. And yes, I realized that I missed Thursday last week, and that my one post wasn't about genres at all. I'll get there.

Design: Pacing

For this post, I'm just going to do some writing about the idea of pacing in video games in general. As a preface, I'm going to point out where I think some video games fall flat in their pacing - but what works for me might not work for you.

Pacing is a powerful force in any medium - movies, books, and video games all rely on it to keep their audiences absorbed and entertained. But in video games, it's an even more powerful force than normal, as there are many ways to influence pacing, and many ways to therefore screw it up. And if it gets screwed up, then you can bet that you're going to lose some people along the way to your fabulous ending, amazing plot twists, incredible dungeons, or what have you.

I just posted my review of an old game that I really enjoy called Turtles in Time. It is a prime example of pacing done right, in many ways. For one thing, the characters move quickly, and thus can get where you want them to quickly. This may seem obvious, but there are certain games (especially RPG's) where the characters just don't move fast enough, and you feel like it takes you ages to get anywhere. For another, the fights are well-interspersed through the levels - you never have to go far to find one, but the levels are more than just one really long fight. Again, I've seen games screw this up - Teen Titans, for the Gamecube, while largely a pretty good beat-em-up, starts to drag towards the end because the fights take too long and there are too many of them in each level. Another way that Turtles in Time paces itself well is in terms of fight differentiation. True, the enemies are largely palette-swaps of other enemies, but you're always finding new types of enemies with new abilities to adapt to. A game that screws this idea up big-time is Alien Syndrome for the Wii. It takes ages to get to a new type of enemy in that game, and while that is one flaw among several for that game, it is quite significant.

But Turtles in Time only has so much it can teach us. In other genres than just the beat-em-up, pacing is huge.

Take, for example, the RPG. It can screw up pacing in a new and unique way - the story. If nothing happens in the story for too long, the players (or at least some of them) lose interest. The story needs to be long enough to satisfy the gamer, yet short enough to not make them feel like they just want it to be over. This is a similar problem to movies and books, but there are unique problems for video games. They have to balance dungeons vs city/exploration time - spend too much time between dungeons, and you begin to feel like you'll never make progress. Spend too much time in a dungeon, and you get the same feeling.

A game that I can think of that largely manages to pace itself well, both story and dungeon-wise, is Tales of Symphonia for the Gamecube. Its dungeons aren't too long or too short, and they're interesting enough to keep you engaged. There are a few points where the plot fails, in my opinion, but by and large the characters always have an objective, and you always feel like you're making progress towards that objective. That objective also changes from time to time, rather than remaining stagnant like the next game I'm going to talk about.

Which is: Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. The vast majority of that plot is spent trying to find things to get to the next person that might help you to accomplish your final goal. There aren't enough twists and turns - the meta-plot is always "go find people who know about stuff that can stop the bad guys," or "go find stuff to stop the bad guys." Once you finally get around to stopping the bad guys, that's it. There's no feeling of an epic struggle, or fighting emissaries of the bad guys, or even finding out who the heck the bad guys are and what they want - it's just trying to build up your power to stop them.

Now, there are standard tactics one can use to pace a game. One obvious and common one is to give you access to new abilities throughout the game. Most games do this (though, interestingly, Turtles in Time does not) - and for good reason. It keeps combat and puzzles interesting. Zelda and other such games give you new equipment - the bow, the bombs, the boomerang, the Ocarina. RPG's frequently give you new spells or abilities. FPS's give you new guns, RTS's give you new units, and so on and so forth. These tools are great when done well - however, you do run the risk of overwhelming your player with too many abilities or items, and if the items begin to become useless, the gamer feels cheated - I mentioned this in my review of Psi-Ops. A great example of this is the Zelda item from Twilight Princess that lets you control statues - it's only useful when there are statues around, whereas something like the bow is useful in many places. It made me, at least, feel cheated in that I didn't feel like I gained any power from the dungeon, at least not compared to the amount I gained from previous dungeons.

You can also, like I said, overwhelm the character with options - one example of this might be Zelda: Majora's Mask. You get a whole bunch of masks, but it's not really obvious when to use which, and many are useless in all but one specific situation. You can get through the game only using the primary masks, but doing some of the side-quests without a guide would be annoying.

Another tactic to pace a game is to formulate it, at least to some extent. Now while this might seem like an odd thing to say, the point is to give you a set point where you can feel like you accomplished something. This is critical in quite a few games - World of Warcraft is probably the best example of this. As you level up, you gain a bit of power after each level. As you go through dungeons and raids at max level, you can always aim for that next piece of equipment. Another example would be Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals. Its dungeons always have the boss key, and some puzzles that make you feel like you make real progress when you solve them. Zelda, obviously, is another great example of this - the dungeons are always "explore, miniboss, new item, use new item to get to new part of the dungeon, miniboss, boss key, boss." And after each of these steps, you feel like you made progress - keeping you interested in the specific dungeon, and interested in the game.

I think I've talked about this enough for today, but I'll probably revisit it later. Pacing is a hugely important idea in video games (as in many media), after all, and one that entire books could be written on.

Design: Movie-Game

Sorry for the wait, but stuff happened on Tuesday. I really will try to keep a regular schedule to these updates - I'd like this to become a real, solid, ongoing blog by the time people actually start coming here.

Today I'm going to be writing about an idea that I've been tossing around in my head for a while. It's the idea of, effectively, playing a video game that is an interactive movie. Basically, you'd be watching a movie, but you could cut in and adjust things slightly as you progressed. For example, if you just set the controller down and watched the game (pressing A to move through dialogue, perhaps), it would form a cohesive plot - you'd end up getting one of the worst endings, of course, but stuff would happen - unlike most games, where if you don't do anything, nothing at all happens.

To clarify, you'd be able to do things like nudge objects slightly - perhaps hiding or revealing something to the characters. You'd be able to influence a character's decisions - things like deciding dialogue choices in typical games. Or during an action sequence, you could perhaps control a character directly, fighting off bad guys or what not. One potential way to go with the branching paths is that the game goes on regardless - even if you lose, or an important character dies because of your actions, you can continue to see exactly what happens to the rest of the characters. The idea is, after all, that you're controlling a movie - a movie that would go on regardless of what you did. And ideally, you'd be able to cut in and control things at any time - dialogue, action, whatever - you could adjust it as you chose, but as the next paragraph will say, not all the time.

Your ability to cut into the movie/game would be limited - you'd be able to control things here and there, but you would only be able to control bits and pieces, not 100% control 100% of the time. Though it would be interesting to have a game that you could choose just how involved you wanted to be - anywhere from 0% to 100% - but that's a post for a different time. Expect an eventual "automation to the extreme" post - the idea of having only limited control over aspects of a game has always intrigued me, and the idea of letting computers control most of a game is interesting as well. (Sidebar: Reminds me of the game that the Ellimist (of Animorphs) was playing with his friend at the beginning of "The Ellimist Chronicles" - a set of worlds, try to make yours the dominant one by the most subtle means possible.)

So to summarize, the game would have the following qualities:

-Have a plot that would reach a conclusion with no intervention from the player.
-Have the player be able to cut in at any point (though not necessarily for a long period of time) to adjust something - perhaps something physical, like a hidden object, or something mental, like a main character's attitude.
-Have the plot continue even if you made mistakes or "lost" - the show must go on.
-Intricate branchings of possibilities.

Another, slightly easier to justify, perhaps, way to flavor similar powers would be to say that you're a guardian spirit of some sort, sent to safeguard a specific person, or prevent/enable certain events. However, you can only adjust small things or people's attitudes slightly, things like that. This would also allow for a more standard plot progression (assuming that "the show must go on" would be a feature of a movie-flavored thing), in that if you failed in your charge, that would be a game over, and that would be the end of that.

This is just a thought I've been rattling around in my head. Don't be surprised if I come up with more ideas relating to this and post them later.

Design: List of Things Games Should/Shouldn't Have

Originally posted December 18th, 2008 at adamgameapprentice.blogspot.com:

Older Post - List of things that every game should have

And here's my older post for today, though hopefully just as interesting. I'm going to post my "List of things that should/should never be in a game" - though mostly it's things that should be in every game. Here goes:

In a word: Customization!
In another few words: No Pointless Restrictions!

-Subtitle toggle
-Difficulty levels, ideally some reward for beating it on each. (If absolutely nothing else, some indicator next to the save file.)
-(Very) Customizable Controls, savable to profiles
-Independent volume control for sound effects, music, and voices.
-If you have a tutorial, make it skippable unless it is (and must be) plot relevant.
--Good Solution: Have "do you know how to do x?" 3rd wall-breaking text, a la Fire Emblem for GC and Wii.
-If you have cutscenes, make them skippable. Consider giving a "Do you really want to skip this cutscene?" dialogue.
--Good Solution: Psychonauts lets you re-watch cutscenes.
-Text speed customization.
-Postgame content, if nothing else in the form of collectibles and difficulty levels.
-Invertable (seperate) flight/aiming controls.
-Autosave, especially in very level-based games.
-(Never make me run towards the camera. 99% of the time, this isn't a good way to do it.)

RPGS:
-No truly random encounters (a la FF1, Lufia 1, etc - instead do it like Lufia 2 or Paper Mario)
-Whenever you can see the name of an item, you can see what it does (description, probably by pressing or holding a button). That goes for spells, too.
-Always able to see max and current HP/MP.
-Give the main character a default name.

FPS:
-Different sensitivities on aiming
-Team vs mode (divided however you want)
-Weapon sets/toggles in vs mode, including make-your-own weapon sets.

Fighting:
-Tag mode, if it's reasonable.
-Team mode (both types: standard team fights (2v2) if more than two people can fight at once, and 1v1 with each controlling a group of people one after the other.)

Super Minigame Party:
-Create-your-own minigame groups (IE, only these minigames will show up in this play session, not those)

Strategy/Tactics:
-Vs mode! If it's at all feasible. Preferably with some co-op missions, as well.

Escort Missions:
-A "stay here" command.
-Never, ever should they run headfirst at an enemy that you could otherwise get the jump on or avoid.
-In fact, they should never fight except to protect themselves, you, or attack someone you're attacking. And there should be commands to cancel the second two, and run away in place of the first.