Friday, the final day of GDC, the day where the lack of sleep and effects of constant walking finally start to kick in. But there is still much to be done, and much to absorb, so instead of letting it get the best of me, I made my way to the third floor of the west hall to attend the first talk of the day, arriving early in order to score a decent seat. I’d be attending Starcraft 2 Lead Designer Dustin Browder’s talk on designing an eSport.
A common question from fans and other developers when looking at Starcraft 2 is, why are there so few units? Browder’s answer is succinct: eSports. But why? What makes designing an eSport significantly different from designing any other sort of game? When other real time strategy games on the market support far more than 3 civilizations or races, and often times dozens upon dozens, if not hundreds of various unit types, does Starcraft 2 favor a mere 3 races and a handful of units? Clarity and simplicity are the key factors.
Unlike a traditional game, an eSport is going to not only have players, but audience members as well. What’s going on, on the screen, needs to be fun to watch. To that end, the relationship between units, and what is going on in the moment to moment needs to be visually clear, and mechanically simple. These goals provide unique challenges to the artists and designers respectively. The awesome ultralisk of the zerg swarm, towering above a tiny marine in concept art, must be scaled down to be a comparable size, not only for pathing and gameplay reasons, but in order to make it clear what is going on, and to not allow the ultralisk to obscure large numbers of other units. Browder jokingly lists clarity as the reason the artists hate him, noting that often times, cool special effects and awesome models were sacrificed for clarity’s sake.
From the design perspective, simplicity provides a constraint for designers but also a challenge. Like the haiku of poetry, constraints on time and mechanics can often bring out the best in design, but on a multi year project, the constraints of an eSport model can be taxing on a design team that craves complex systems. Keeping the unit number down is a necessity, the audience needs to be able to understand what is going on regardless of their experience playing the game. If the audience needs to play the game for hundreds of hours, or even dozens to understand the action, then you’ve probably failed as an eSport. Clean, simple and parsable, these are the key concepts that Browder repeatedly pointed out during this portion of the talk.
Browder transitioned into some best practices, citing the teams’ approach to early development. They focused first on moving and attacking, seeing just how much content they could create with those two mechanics. This time was spent focusing on statistics and AoE sizes, the game without any abilities. The team discovered that quite a bit of content could emerge from simply adjusting a single variable like speed. The example given was the relationship between terran marines and zerg banelings. The initial relationship between these mid ranged infantry units and short range kamikaze units favors the baneling, who can close the gap and explode dealing massive damage to clusters of marines. With upgraded stim packs, the marine can increase their speed and rate of fire, destroying banelings before they can close, and outrunning them. But with upgraded speed the banelings can once again come out on top, closing the gap even against stim’d marines. Without adding additional units to confuse players and the audience, they were able to create quite a bit of gameplay with only 2 units. Browder champions the approach of depth in simplicity, telling his audience to create mechanics that have many uses but function in primarily the same way.
The next topic on the table was micromanagement, generally speaking modern RTS games tend to focus on macro, or micro, but rarely on both, in order to provide a more streamlined user experience. Browder insists, and I absolutely agree, micromanagement is incredibly important to create compelling gameplay that is both watchable and skill based. In an eSport, skill has to be the deciding factor, sending masses of units to their death against one another with no room for player skill to change the outcome is boring and predictable to watch. What about the rush? “I’ve made games that crush the rush. All you’re doing is delaying the fun.” Browder wants players and viewers on the edge of their seat from the first moment, not from five or ten minutes onward.
Most interesting to me, and I absolutely felt this playing the campaign, was the eSports design approach’s effect on the single player aspects of Starcraft 2. The units that were kept small for multiplayer had to be the same size in singleplayer, mechanics had to be largely the same, otherwise players would be overly confused and the game would become needlessly complex. With the singleplayer though, the team was free to add additional units that did not make the cut for the heavily balanced multiplayer campaign. In the end though, the team had to cut ties between the two, as constant balance changes for multiplayer were making it increasingly challenging for the singleplayer team as they had to constantly re-balance their levels to fit the new changes. Despite cutting ties regarding stats and balancing, the eSports design approach to the overall title had far reaching effects on art, level design and even narrative.
Were you at the session? Did you find any great takeaways I missed? How do you feel about the eSports approach? Leave a comment.
I started off Day 4 with a look at Dead Space 2′s visual analytics tool “Data Cracker.” The session was given by Visceral Games’ Ben Medler. (@benmedler)
The Data Cracker team was given the task of creating a visual analytic tool at very low costs, and decided to approach the problem using entirely open source tools. The back end of the tool they would create would be fairly straightforward. It would collect data from games running on EA servers pass it through ETLs into a MySQL database and then visually represent the information in Data Cracker.
The tool was originally designed to help balance multiplayer matches by collecting data on what enemy units killed players more often, what objectives were taking the longest, what objectives players could regularly capture successfully and which they could not, etc. A very important part of any analytics tool is the representation of time, the design team should be able to look at the data, implement changes, then come back to the data and see the changes that occurred easily. If your tool can’t easily compare this data, fix it so that it can.
This is where a lot of analytics tool builders get it wrong, you’re going to need to work with the design team from the beginning, find out what data would be useful to them, not what you think would be useful to them. Collecting unnecessary data is just going to waste everyone’s time. You need to be ready to work with the design team at regular intervals and iterate throughout the course of the project. Data Cracker was visually built to fit into the style of Dead Space. It makes the tool more visually pleasing and easy to use. Better usability meant the design team used the tool more often, and was able to get the information they needed quicker, and parse it better.
You’ll have to excuse the above picture for being rather blurry, but I think you can get the idea. Data Cracker is a sleek, Dead Space 2 inspired tool, a far cry from the standard gray on gray, belongs in windows 95, appears to have been made in visual basic tool that we usually see. I think it’s immediately apparent to anyone even from this blurry image how it would be a much more pleasing experience to interact with this tool than most. A better interaction with the tool means you’re going to retain more information.
As with anything, the earlier you design the tool, and the more often you iterate on it, the stronger the tool will be in the long run. Data Cracker became such a strong tool using this approach that other teams at EA have started adapting the tool for use in other games, and the Dead Space 2 single player team modified and used the tool for their own purposes. Medler spoke briefly about the pervading sense around the conference that Analytics (a popular topic this year, what with social games and all) are sucking the soul out of design. His answer was this: “Analytics do not take the soul out of your design.” Let design and analytics work together and improve gameplay. “Embrace it.”
Were you at the session? Did you find any great takeaways I missed? Do you have any strong opinions on the topic? Leave a comment.
Immediately following Iwata’s keynote I stepped into a session on dynamics by LucasArts’ Clint Hocking.
Hocking believes that one of the most important near term questions for developers “How do games mean?” Until we have a consensus about “how game can mean at all, we are just wasting words [trying to define meaning.]” These were the ideas that Hocking began his presentation with before segueing into an analogous concept in film.
The Kuleshov Effect. If you’re not familiar with it, you should be. The invention (or discovery) of this effect helped filmmakers understand “how film means” by assembling that meaning from the way the images are cut and edited. If we hadn’t figured out how film meant, we wouldn’t have any structure to create harmony and control emotional noise. Film would not be in the state that it is today. What does this have to do with games? We have yet to have our Kuleshov moment, the true discovery of how games mean, but Hocking suggests that we are almost there, citing that there are generations of gamers searching for meaning, if it happens at all it will happen soon (we can hope.)
Hocking goes on to suggest that games mean via their dynamics and that dynamics can be understood using a system, MDA (mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics) which manifests as or is interconnected with RBF (rules, behaviors, feelings.)
With any good structure for analyzing and building on any kind of medium, one must be able to look at past examples and see the structure appear and it’s fundamental level. Hocking went on to use Spelunky as an example of MDA appearing naturally, citing a quote from Derek Yu as he talks about the game unintentionally breaking it down into mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics.
Mechanics and aesthetics Hocking suggests are created entirely by the developer but that a game’s dynamics represent in some way the forfeit of total developer control in the favor of the player’s story, which may differ from what we expect or intend it to be. Hocking brings up a variety of examples from personal experience, most notably, Far Cry 2. He tells the story of two players, one of whom played the game as if dieing once was a permanent game over, one of whom went through by the seat of their pants creating as much trouble as possible. The point here was that while both players may have experienced the game in two different ways, authorial control partly in their hands, the meaning is still clear in both cases. Briefly Hocking brought up Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants, a famous example of unstated meaning being incredibly clear.
One potential meaning of the game is shown in both cases. In case one the player staunchly commits to not falling into chaos, and in case two, the player was constantly consumed by chaos. What if the aesthetic of Train were superimposed over the mechanics of Tetris? Instead of stacking abstract blocks, you were piling prisoners into trains headed for concentration camps? The dynamic would absolutely change for the player, how they play would impact the story told and the meaning of the game is altered.
Hocking ended on the note that: understanding how games mean will control the development of our understanding, analysis and brain structures parsing ability of the topic. Just like structures for film making, and structures for story telling, once they develop they can be expanded upon, and are not necessarily meant to be followed slavishly, but the ability of structures like these to be internalized and passively affect the way we think is powerful and important.
Were you at the session? Did you find any great takeaways I missed? Do you have any strong opinions on the topic, do we need a Kuleshov moment?
Day 3 was the beginning of the main conference, and of course that means a much more crowded Moscone Center. I shuffled my way into the Nintendo keynote after breakfast and narrowly escaped having to sit in front of a pillar. Not long after, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata was welcomed on stage. (If you’d rather just watch it yourself than read my brief overview, you can check out the whole keynote @ Nintendo.) Opening with remarks about the difficulties the current industry is facing overall, Iwata quickly shifted in to nostalgic musings as he noted the significance of 25 years of GDC and the current age of the industry. The next ten minutes of the keynote were filled with anecdotes and stories about Iwata’s early days at HAL Labs, and his experiences with Miyamoto and Nintendo at the time. Stories about an age where developers roles oscillated and rent was always up in the air. (Today’s Indies?)
Back to today, Iwata spoke about the exponential growth in the cost of producing AAA games. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, Iwata also noted that the gaming population has increased exponentially as well, citing a variety of figures and charts. One such figure stating that there are currently over 160 million active gamers in the United States. (Just a few more than when Iwata was back at HAL Labs.) One can’t help but figure social games into the picture of this rapidly growing landscape, but Iwata was quick to note that though the term “social games” is used liberally to describe games on outlets like Facebook, that social games have existed far longer than any of these social networking services, suggesting that we delineate between the two. I tend to agree, though feel that it’s gone far too long now for it to change easily (see: serious games.)
Iwata insists that we as game developers (and entertainers) not ignore the decades of social entertainment we have provided before the advent of social networking, citing social appeal as the “must have” (the phrase of the day) of games, an appeal that no other medium embraces as a cornerstone. Iwata touched briefly on Mario noting that his success is based on his constant evolution, but that games like Pokémon which change only marginally from title to title (implied, not spoken), can create success merely from compelling social experiences.
So with Nintendo in such a strong position, what are Iwata’s keys to success? Universal appeal, constant improvements, inclusion of a social aspect and an expanding audience. HAL Labs’ Kirby sold 5 million copies (far more than the expected 27 thousand), primarily because the game did not follow the current industry trend of making more and more difficult games that players could often not complete. Fast forward, Iwata was promoting the 3DS as the next “must have” because of the console’s universal appeal and social content. To talk more about Nintendo’s plans for the console, Iwata welcomed Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America’s President and COO, onto the stage.
This segment was primarily devoted to 3DS specific announcements and topics, I’m going to break them down quickly. Netflix (Summer), AT&T wi-fi hot spots (10,000 to start in may), Nintendo to support developers with 3D, hints that 3D video recording will be available, eStore to include: TurboGrafx 16, Game Gear, Game Boy, 3D classics, game promotions, 3D movie trailers and original games (may). With announcements out of the way Iwata made his way back on stage, promising to talk about new games.
The first new announcement was that the Super Mario Galaxy team was hard at work on a brand new Mario title for the 3DS. Next up was a brand new trailer debut for The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. The new trailer had the game looking more polished than ever, but for me the most exciting part was seeing new bosses that weren’t reinventions of old familiars.
With an announcement and trailer out of the way, Iwata switched back to talking about the industry at large. A sense of craftsmanship and iteration are becoming more and more difficult to achieve in the industry with bigger budgets and earlier lock-downs on design decisions. Developers are becoming more specialized at the expense of not being able to see the entire project for what it is. Iwata continued to speak, concerned that the current direction of the industry would make it hard for many game developers to keep their jobs. “Game development is drowning.” 92% of mobile content is free, or sold at extremely low prices. “Is maintaining high value games important or not?” Iwata asked the audience.
Iwata was insistent that “we at Nintendo are game developer’s first, hardware manufacturers second.” Uniting himself with what are traditionally seen as major competitors, Iwata noted that smart phone companies generate profit from quantity, while Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft generate profit from quality. Iwata then promised Nintendo will continue to defend quality over quantity approach. Offering advice to game developers that the central appeal of our games must be immediately evident and hook the player in the first instant. The keynote ended on innovation, cited as the most important ingredient in any successful game. Nintendo’s motto, according to Iwata, is “Is there something considered impossible that we might make possible?”
With so much buzz this GDC centered around social(networking) games and mobile games, it was impossible not to feel a sense that a battle line had been drawn in the sand and on the very first session of the main conference. In seconds the Twitters and the good old fashioned talkers were ablaze with a back-and-forth about whether they agree with Iwata, or even what his speech meant. My analysis is that the talk was a call to arms and a warning to AAA game developers. With consumer expectations on pricing lowered, quality will be more important than ever in order to convince a customer to pay the full price for a game. If the AAA market cannot provide quality experiences that differ dramatically from what is available for free or $0.99, many game developers will lose their jobs in a market already overflowing with unemployed and new talent.
The warning perhaps to developers on the other side of the fence is that if social and mobile game makers continue to make quality experiences for little to no profit, they could be destroying the very industry they wish to be a part of. I felt a bit out of place for a long moment because I have no idea which side of the line I am on. On the one hand I am currently an independent developer, on the other, I’m looking for a job that pays salary and would like to be working for a AAA developer.
So what’s your take on Iwata’s talk? Is my view only subdued because of my unique position somewhere in the middle of the battlefield?
Learn Better Game Writing in a Day? Alright, you’ve got me interested, I often write in the games that I work on, why wouldn’t I want to do it better? I can’t make a compelling argument against this obvious lead-in question, so let’s move on to the session itself. (Especially considering that the day up until that point consisted of waking up, showering and walking there, entirely without breakfast or any other important events.)
The talk was given by Evan Skolnick of Vicarious Visions, Lead Writer on Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2. As always you can check out my original LiveTweets of the session at @designerdougm. Skolnick set the tone as soon as the session began: “Write tight, effective and serviceable content. Attempting anything beyond that is a distraction and a disservice. Gameplay is King.”
I think that this is true for any genre or title, no matter how important narrative is to the core concept. As writers we often feel the misguided urge to write what is essentially a book or a screenplay, but we mustn’t let our minds wander. We are writing for games, and that’s something very different from script or novel writing. With that said, genre to genre what is required for writing in games can and does vary widely. Skolnick urged his students-du-jour to keep in mind the player’s tolerance for story based on the genre we are working in.
Skolnick’s first points focused on the do-nots and the why-do-nots of game writing. We were not going to be left in the dark without a light though, he went on to pass us a torch. Story, as we all know, is conflict. Without confict, there is no story, it’s a simple concept, but an incredibly important one. Thankfully, gameplay is conflict too. This means that even though story and gameplay don’t always get along, they are not in complete discord.
Regardless, however, of any impact gameplay has on narrative, the narrative must stand on its own two legs. We as game writer’s must learn to write good fiction, not just serviceable content. The first step towards becoming an excellent writer is understanding the rules that many thousands of years of our predecessors’ work have already established. Aristotle’s three act system has stood the test of time and can still be seen almost involuntarily appearing in almost all fiction. And of course Aristotle’s three act system includes setup, conflict and resolution. Adapting the story arc to grab our player with a scene of raised tension at the beginning of the narrative can also be a great way to catch and retain our audience. We are quite literally fishing for our audience with a hook, a hook that is equal parts compelling gameplay, and equal parts compelling narrative.
Just as important to any modern fiction writer, Campbell’s monomyth structure was the next topic of discussion after a short coffee (and muffin) break. Skolnick quickly reviewed the character archetypes of the monomyth: the hero, the mentor, the henchman, the shapeshifter, the trickster and the villain. Now if you’re not familiar with the monomyth (sometimes referred to as the hero’s journey) structure already, I suggest you google it. That’s going to be a much more helpful exercise than me trying to recap the whole thing here.
These archetypes are something to keep in mind and inspire the way in which we create characters. But it is important to remember that not all characters are (nor should they be) entirely archetypal. Many characters will often perform multiple roles as outlined in the monomyth structure. Some may perform a role not accounted for in the archetypes. Relying too heavily on sticking to these archetypes can make your story formulaic. They merely provide a structure that should be internalized in order to give us a strong sense of the roles of our characters, whatever they may be.
Beyond the character archetypes provided by the monomyth structure, Campbell also drew up a narrative event structure that can be seen in almost all good works of fiction. The first stage, the ordinary world, is rarely developed in game narratives, as gameplay often relies in conflict, which is generally not present in this idyllic world. Another rarity in game narratives is the refusal of the call to action by the hero. Reluctant heroes are rare because players are rarely reluctant to accept the call to adventure, that is why they’re playing the game after all. When your character’s wishes and goals diametrically oppose your player’s that is generally going to cause a disconnect, when your goal should be helping your player identify with your character. Just like character archetypes, the narrative structure should not be followed slavishly.
Dramatica was the next topic touched upon, albeit briefly. From what I gathered from the few moments it was mentioned, it’s a tool that someone analyzes your script and gives you some kind of analytics on the overall structure. If you’re interested, I recommend you check it out yourself.
One thing some writers may be reticent of acknowledging is that players do not want to be told the narrative, after all, they are players not readers, listeners or viewers. Players should play your story, if you can’t figure out a way to let them play it, then show them. Only if you can neither let them play it nor view it, then and only then, should you tell your player the narrative. Regardless of the format you should keep in mind the power of your target platform, the player’s brain. Don’t drown them in so much exposition that they can’t parse it. Stick to what they need to know. Players don’t appreciate being beaten with a cudgel of exposition, in fact, suspense is a powerful ally for any writer, don’t front load your narrative.
Speaking of suspense… foreshadowing. It’s a great tool when not beaten to death. Skolnick introduced Chekov’s Law, which states: “If act one opens by mentioning or showing a shotgun over the mantle that gun must be fired by the end of the story.” This idea is often called planting or seeding. Plant an idea in the player’s mind, and then bring it back later in the story when they have all but forgotten. This prevents the event later in the story from feeling too contrived, or from coming out of left field. If something is going to be important later in your narrative, introduce it early, if you don’t the player may be left in disbelief, feel you the storyteller’s hand, or worse, be overcome with a sense of deus ex machina. The player should never be in such disbelief that they think about you, the writer, or feel your hand.
Coincidences are a part of life, but they are often frustrating for the player. If you seed your coincidences earlier in the story, they won’t be coincidences. Even more egregious than coincidences out of left field though, is having your player’s character perform actions during cutscenes that they cannot perform during gameplay. This will frustrate and knock your players out of the experience. Particularly if your experience is already brittle, and your experience can easily become brittle if you stretch it too thin. Bigger is rarely better, often small-scope narratives are the strongest. If the universe is at stake in your narrative, you’re going to have a lot of work not ripping huge holes in it.
Whether your character’s universe is at stake or their love life, the antagonist’s story must stand up as well as the protagonist’s. The antagonist must have truly believable motivations. Just like the hero, all characters that appear in the story for longer than a moment, should have their own individual character arcs with a distinct beginning, middle and end. Developing their arc is important, but over-developing their story is even more important. Once you’ve over-developed their story you’ll be able to better define their voice. It’s important to note though, that you need not give the player all of that over-developed content, in fact it is probably best not to.
What should your character’s voice sound like? Nothing like our voices sound. Your characters should not talk the way people talk, they should talk the way we wished people talked. If you’re having trouble writing brief, compelling dialog that sounds natural (but isn’t) try listening to real conversations, transcribing and editing them for brevity and style. As important as the voice of characters are, actions are even more important, games are action, they are about verbs. Identify unique emotions games can elicit (like guilt) and work them into your narrative, that will only make the experience stronger.
Skolnick shifted gears at the end of the session, from a general overview of narrative design principles to their practical implementation in games. Addressing from experience, his work at Vicarious Visions, where the narrative team consists of an in house narrative designer and lead writer. Skolnick championed the team structure, noting that it gives the lead writer more time to write, while still keeping the writing in lock-step with the rest of the development team.
In order to replicate voice overs early on and streamline the workflow of implementing VO later on in the project, the narrative team used text-to-speech to act as a placeholder. By using this approach, problems with too much exposition, or too little can be identified, and later on when the VO is recorded, implementation is as simple as file replacement. Despite their team’s success, Skolnick offers up that “no game writing plan survives contact with the dev team.” As such, it is often a good idea to mark your narrative elements by level of importance. By marking the importance of these elements, passes through in the case of needed cuts would be more straightforward, and ensure high priority items are hopefully never cut.
The session came to an end, and with a great deal of fantastic takeaways I was more than satisfied with another great all day session. A college level narrative course in a day, infused with great takeaways specific to our medium, and a case study highlighted with personal experiences. It was absolutely a worthwhile experience.
Were you at the session? Did you find any great takeaways I missed? Feel free to leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you. I hope if you’ve made it this far you’ve enjoyed the ride and will be taking at least a few nuggets of wisdom with you!
Today started off with a hearty breakfast, which was important, because tutorial sessions are long, all day events. Which is why I advise to those of you who may attend GDC in the future, or for those of you who have but have not yet attended the first two days: pick a tutorial you are fairly positive you will get something out of.
Takeaways are the currency of every session, the loot. If you are not taking notes, be it on Twitter, or one of those notepad things, you’re doing it wrong, or you’re not at the right session for you. Thankfully, as it turns out, Level Design in a Day: Best Practices from the Best in the Business was chock full of loot. So I have to give shout outs and thanks to all of the talented Level Designers who gave the talk: Jim Brown (Epic Games), Joel Burgess (Bethesda Softworks), Forrest Dowling (Irrational Games), Ed Byrne, Neil Alphonso (Splash Damage), Matthias Worch (LucasArts) and Coray Seifert (Arkadium), thank you guys for a great session!
I’m going to attempt to recount the session using my notes with a focus on takeaways. You can check out my original live blog of the session on Twitter @designerdougm. I’ll be recounting topic by topic. If you’d like to see the entire twitter discussion on the session, you can check out #LDinaDay.
Un-Scaping the Goat. Ed Byrne spoke about developers tendency to use Level Designers as scape-goats and more importantly, why and how to stop it. In general we designers are the easiest scape goats! Why is that it? “[Our] work is the least tangible and the least transparent and most occult.” Level Designers are especially vulnerable to this because they are the last ring in the chain. We often fail to consider that the reason a level is not fun is because of failures elsewhere.
Shifting gears for a moment Byrne talked about what actually makes a level fun. Suggesting that level designers “grow fun.” Specifically that iteration is the “formula for fun.” And I have to say I absolutely agree. Find what is fun in your design, strip away things that get in its way and iterate, iterate, iterate. When you’re done iterating, iterate some more. If there’s one thing my time as a designer has taught me it’s this. Get your mechanic working as early as possible. The more time you have to iterate on it the better the game is going to be, plain and simple.
The other major concern aside from how early you can start iterating is how to increase the frequency of your team’s iteration loop. Byrne suggests that the keys are “tools, time, talent and trust.” After that, you should make sure your level design pipeline is blazing fast, avoid anything that needs to be compiled to test changes. (Thanks Unity!) With great tools your level designers will create more content than you need, you can take what is fun and the end user experience will be better for it.
What about the future of level design? What’s the next great tool? Byrne predicts collaborative level design is the way forward. Multiple people working on one level simultaneously. I have to say my mind immediately went to Halo 3′s forge mode, and all the great times I had with fellow designers creating mayhem. I totally agree, our industry is about collaboration, multiple people working on a level, making changes quickly, together, building and testing means fast turn around and quick iteration, resulting in stronger designs.
Shifting back to scape-goating, level designers need to remember that if something isn’t working out as you’re building your level. If a mechanic isn’t fun for instance, you should pass that up the chain the same way you would if you encountered a bug. If you don’t say anything, it really will end up being partly on your shoulders. Good communication is just as important as talent and speed. Another suggestion: if you feel like your teammates don’t understand your work flow, or just feel like they don’t understand what you do at all, have them do it! Have them take some time and build a small level.
They’ll have a chance to see what goes into building a level, and maybe understand it better, which can only improve your back and forth in the future. Better communication means less scape-goating and more importantly, a better end product and quicker turnarounds. Hopefully going for a turn down level design lane will help your peers understand that a WIP level must be viewed as a concept, not a product, the same way anyone views WIP art or WIP game systems.
“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” It’s true, unfortunately, players in general are not going to notice good level design. Your purpose is to make it so they do not notice your design. If they’re consciously aware of your presence, your hand guiding them, or ironically, the lack of your hand guiding them, you’ve done something wrong.
We took a short coffee break and afterward Forrest Dowling (Irrational Games) talked Encounter Building. Perhaps one of the strongest takeaways for me in the entire session came almost immediately into Dowling’s talk. He suggests a taxonomy for breaking down encounters into four steps. Those steps are plan, execute, improvise and regroup. Why such a strong takeaway? Our industry is young and often lacks standardized language and terminology. More than this, though, having some sort of language to talk about concepts specifically gives our thoughts (or at least my thoughts) structure. Viewing encounters in these terms changes encounter design in my mind from something borderline arcane to something parse-able.
Now, having structure isn’t going to make you instantly better at something. A great writer is a great writer whether they’re consciously considering the structure of their story or not. But giving names to these oscillating stages of an encounter is certainly helpful. And oscillating is the key word here, these stages do not necessarily happen in this specific order, nor must they only happen once in an encounter.
Dowling made the suggestion to all designers to play up the moment of improvisation, stating that these are the most memorable moments for a player. Force the player to move, change the gamespace, do something to push them out of their shell. But more importantly, keep in mind the variety of shells your game offers the player. That is, keep in mind the styles of play available. If your game allows for multiple play styles, all of those styles need to be supported. It’s alright to create paths where a player’s style is useless, but those need to be paths that the player consciously chooses to go down, forsaking a path that would’ve supported their style of play.
After a lunch break we moved into a Question & Answer session where the panel took questions from the mic and from Twitter. It was a general consensus amongst all panel members that the most important thing for a level designer to do for their portfolio is to show finished work, and to show the steps taken to reach that finished work. Show documentation, concept art, maps, whitebox, final assets and of course, use video. Though there was a bit of divergence between some members over whether it was better to show breadth or depth. Some members suggesting to focus only on one aspect of design and kick ass at it, while some suggested, particularly for junior designers to show a breadth of design skills.
This is relevant to me, and I think I left with less of a clear idea than I came in regarding this topic. Personally I’m a generalist specialist, my soft skills are my strongest, and I’m not really sure after this question whether applying for a level design position I should play up my generalist nature, or do more specific level design work and show that off exclusively. But I did get a decent tweet out and it was the first tweet to be answered in their Q&A. I asked: “would you rather see U3 maps in someone’s portfolio with U3 assets, or levels with whiteboxed totally self-created assets.”
They got the question right away and there was a good back and forth. Though they all agreed that personally they’d rather see whiteboxed levels, as often the people doing the hiring are not level designers, they can mistake whiteboxed levels (we talked about it in scape-goating, the industry has a hard time overall seeing WIP levels for what they are) for unfinished levels, seriously damaging your chance to get noticed.
So what was the answer? Show both. And this is something I supposed I foolishly had not considered. They went as far as to suggest, that if possible, allow someone playing to be able to toggle the detail meshes on and off, so that they can see the level as is. Grab with the pretty, then use the whitebox to show off your design. You are a designer after all. Great suggestions, and some serious motivation for me to go back and rework some of my portfolio.
Some other topics came up, namely skunk-works as a way to fight burn-out, and the idea that survival horror and shooter design are similar in many ways. There was also a lot of Dowling downplaying his breakdown of encounters, conjecturing that it really only works for shooters, which Coray Seifert and Joel Burgess in particular disagreed with. I am definitely behind their disagreement, I feel like those concepts apply perfectly to any genre with encounters, and that encompasses most genres.
Joel Burgess (Bethesda Softworks) spoke next about Level Design for Open Worlds. He opened with a picture of a couple on a tandem bike and explained: that image is us and the player, we’re inviting them into our world to co-author their experience. No matter how obviously we telegraph to the player where we want them to go, they will always do what they want. We have to realize this and let go, to get over ourselves. Don’t beat the player over the head, they should never feel our hand.
We need to know our player, to see the game through their eyes. There are many ways to guide the player without being too egregiously obvious. Landmarks is a great way to guide a player in an open world. Keeping in mind that not all land marks need to provide content, sometimes it’s best to let landmarks provide that function and that function alone.
You might place a very large tree in the center of an area, so that the player can see it from far away, they’ll be drawn to it. From here, make visible smaller, local landmarks that are content. The tree can serve as a hub, when the player arrives they won’t feel like they were too obviously guided to the next key area, but they will now be close to nearby points of interest (POIs.) Motion can also suggest direction to a player, motion like streams and rivers. Burgess went on to suggest that we not forget aural guidance. Noting that (truly) we often fail to use sound to guide the player. And I agree, too many a time have I played a game where I’ve had to look at a map to find a blacksmith, why can’t I follow my ears to the sound of metal being struck and hammered?
Burgess then spoke directly about experiences from Fallout 3, noting the importance of considering your world’s POI density, ensuring that at any given point in the world, there are adjacent POIs providing various levels of content. In that same vein he notes that traveling between point A and point B should always lead the player past POIs. Don’t allow the player to become bored, don’t create a walking simulator, give them distractions, things to do if they so chose along the way. Distract them.
Regarding POI density, Burgess suggests during your vertical slice stage to establish general mapping of your POI density, and to find a metric that works, and then extrapolate that to the large map as you expand. A fantastic idea, and really the way any part of design should work moving from vertical slice to finished product. The final nugget of wisdom though came in the form of a quote: “The main character in an open world game is the the world,” develop the player’s relationship with that world. This is the absolute truth, words of true wisdom.
On the other side of another break and some talking about Brink, Jim Brown (Epic Games) spoke about What it Means to be a Level Designer. And if there’s anything more inconsistent in the industry than the language we used to describe arcane design practices, it’s what is expected out of various positions (especially level designers) from company to company. Brown attempted to tackle that problem by proposing four archetypes based on various companies job descriptions: structure, encounters & documentation, collaboration, and accessibility.
The first example, structure, comes from Ubisoft. Stating that a level designer is to 1. Implement the game rules and mechanics according to the game design guidelines and 2. shape the game and player experience according to an appropriate learning curve. Encounters & Documentation was pulled from Zenimax, suggesting that a level designer must 1. be responsible for design and integration of encounters and scenarios and 2. conceptualize, create and maintain detailed game design documentation.
The collaboration model was taken from Brown’s own studio, Epic, stating that a level designer must bring together the work of a talented team of modelers, texture artists and gameplay engineers and combine them in a way that is compelling and fun. He rounded out his set of models with the accessibility approach taken rather uniquely by Bungie, which states that a level designer must 1. make the second-to-second gameplay experience as accessible to as many people as possible and 2. work with sound, effect and animation artists to make in-game cause and effect clear to players.
Each approach taken by each company to the idea of what a level designer is tends to be a unique set of skills and rules. This makes it hard to hire a level designer, and hard to apply as a level designer. All we can do to improve the situation is to keep an open dialog on the topic, and hope some standardization arises in the future. For now, level designers, we’ll just have to be resilient!
And so the session came to a close, leaving my personal hunger for inspiration and knowledge satisfied, but providing a healthy yearning for answering important questions in the future.
Were you at the session? Did you find any great takeaways I missed? Feel free to leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you. I hope if you’ve made it this far you’ve enjoyed the ride and will be taking at least a few nuggets of wisdom with you!
Today began (and concluded) my journey to the holy city of San Francisco.
I have flocked here with my fellow game developers to observe the high holiday of GDC. Having observed last year at the lowly level of “Main Conference Attendee” I am looking forward to attending tutorials in the coming two days before the conference begins. I’ll be attending Level Design in a Day: Best Practices from the Best in the Business tomorrow, I can’t wait to sponge in some wisdom.
I managed to grab my pass and bag-o-swag tonight before the pre-registration closed (a half hour before to be precise) in doing so I foolishly looked over my session choices (as the registration PC suggested I do) only to be kicked out of the registration process from a time-out. So I hurried through after that and must have missed the text fields for nickname, twitter and job title! If you’re an attendee or ever plan to be, don’t do this! I feel like an idiot, and am seriously considering paying the lost ID fee for a new one.
I’ll be taking every opportunity throughout the week to live blog @designerdougm. (My personal twitter so expect random irrelevant silliness and food pictures!) That being said, live blogging only goes so far. So I’ll throw up my notes, pics and compiled tweets on here as often as I can (hopefully at the end of every day.)
If you’re looking for bleeding-edge moment to moment announcements or something like that, you’re definitely in the wrong place. But hopefully I’ll have some interesting tales to tell and takeaways from the coming sessions. Or at the very least some interesting pictures.
Until then!
You’re a girl? Yeah right, and I’m the King of Stormwind. Just get back to tanking.
You members of the fairer sex that have played games online have almost undoubtedly run into this scenario more times than you care to recall. Someone infuriatingly not believing you are the gender you claim to be. It may have even happened over voice chat. The pea-brained player on the other side of XBOX Live; that you just head shotted, actually jumping over the possibility that the reason your voice is feminine is you are, in fact, a female and straight to the assumption that you’re a nine-year-old boy.
The kicker is, of course, that if you actually manage to convince anyone that you are a real, live, in-the-flesh female; you’ll likely find yourself at the but end of numerous sexual jokes and petitioned by every other player for online relationships or nude photos. Of course this is entirely dependent on the maturity of a game’s player-base, something World of Warcraft and pretty much anything on XBOX Live are not exactly touted for. I’ve known women to sequester themselves behind giant beefy male avatars, revealing only to those closest to them, their true genders just so they can, you know, play the game.
The two faced approach of “girls don’t play games” and “send me nude pics” is as old as online gaming. At one time, the former statement was not far from the truth, females were a veritable rare-spawn in most online communities. Still often considered a minority, a minority that would prefer nothing more than to no longer be a minority. And that is why analytics provider Flurry’s new report featured on Game’s Beat is laden with some very welcome statistics.
The title of this post is obviously hyperbolic, women of all ages play games, despite the stereo type. What is most interesting is that, at least in the realm of social and mobile gaming, women actually outnumber their adult male counterparts. We’ve all most likely heard similar stories by now. All the numbers telling us a few years ago that if you include the audience for Bejeweled and all of it’s variants, the average gamer is actually a woman in her late 30s. These new numbers show us exactly what any social and mobile company on the bleeding edge already knows, the number of women gamers is trending upwards.
What does this mean? Well in the short term, I’m sure it means more pandering games targeted at the female audiences as companies try to get their cash grab on. In the long term hopefully it means a more diverse industry (we’re on our way) and perhaps even an online environment where female gamers won’t be met with incredulous disbelief simply for being female. Wouldn’t that be something?
[Comic: Women of Unreal]
[Chart: Venture Beat]
Media comes in a great many shapes and sizes, ranging from completely passive to wholly participatory. Entertainment media has long been passive; I am of course speaking of books, movies, plays and many other forms of media we have actively sought out and experienced for entertainment for as long as our generation and many previous generations can remember.
Games on the other hand; perhaps the oldest form of entertainment, have only recently; thanks to a technological shift, come into maturity as a medium capable of the kinds of emotional transference we often associate with novels and films. Make no mistake, games are about verbs. Long our de facto industry mascot; Mario, can be seen jumping. After all, that is what Mario does; he jumps. Jumping on its own may not have a profound emotional impact or be capable of making an intense cultural statement.
Yet games have made statements, games have appealed to emotions, to argue otherwise would be reveling in ignorance. Emotion is subjective, and even if you yourself are incapable of being brought to emotion by a game, that is easily paralleled to someone being unable to be brought to an emotion by a book. We would not say that because a specific individual has never experienced an emotion brought on by a book that books are incapable of generating emotion in the reader.
Grand Theft Auto is rarely seen for what it is, a European game developer’s satire and critique of American culture developed through human stories that take place in the criminal realm. Instead it is often used as the favored whipping boy of politicians and devil-criers in an attempt to condemn an industry they know nothing about. Games are often criticized for being nothing more than participatory mindless violence regardless of the content or narrative being told.
One could stop here and argue that the fact that games; a medium about verbs, often focus on violence, has more to do with innate human drives than the immaturity of any given industry or its developers. After all, some historians believe that war games actually predate the construct of war itself, but that is an argument to be saved for another day. Instead I intend to address a very specific issue; a very specific verb that our culture often shuns when it appears in the context of a video game.
Romance. Pictured above the third entry in Kiniro no Corda a series we are very unlikely to see on shelves in America any time soon. Not only is it unlikely we will see this specific series, it is unlikely we will see any games in any similar series; in fact, it would be quite surprising to see any games at all in this genre appear on store shelves, and the idea that any of these games would ever compete in sales with games like Grand Theft Auto or Mario in our market is almost entirely inconceivable.
Kahoko and her friends have graduated from Seiso Gakuen, Kiniro no Corda 3 starts with a new violinist, Kanade. She enrolled into the prestigious school and joined the orchestra club, hoping to meet other musicians and improve her skills through friendly rivalry.
Rivalry is plenty, however, some of them are not very friendly, while others are full of temptation. Learn about the charming members in the club, what they won’t say with words, they may say through music, communicate with them through your violin.
A game about a girl who has just enrolled in a prestigious music university where the objective is to develop relationships with the other characters? We can imagine this as the plot of a book or even a movie; perhaps a romantic film, a coming of age story or a romantic comedy where the new girl at a music academy falls in love with the handsome violinist.
But a video game? These sorts of relationship driven games have long existed in Japan, something we tend to trivialize and refer to as “dating-sims” in the United States. Some of them can quite easily be simplified to such a basic term; after all, with games there is of course some level of abstraction. But these sorts of abstractions occur in all the games we play, regardless of the subject matter they deal with.
Culturally, we are still a very puritanical people, when it comes to sex and love we are far more strict on what we show publicly, or allow our children to see, or what we are willing to talk about with people than we are with violence.
Heralded by gamers as an innovative step forward and a powerful example of participatory storytelling at work, the Mass Effect series is only well known outside of the game industry for a controversy over the inclusion of what the “news” deemed “pornographic content.” I say “news” because I am referring to the sensationalist media who with blatant ignorance attempted to demonize Mass Effect.
Psychologist and author Cooper Lawrence who originally appeared on Fox news with Martha MacCallum commented on the game by describing “…sexual content in video games as teaching their active users, adolescent boys, to consider women as objects of desire valued solely for their sexuality. She added that the game’s player character is a man who decides how many women he wants to be with.” Riddled with false statements, game journalist Jeff Keely also commenting pointed out quickly that the player was capable of choosing to play as either a male or a female. (Watching this video may actually damage your brain, you have been warned.)
Later interviewed after having taken time to watch someone play Mass Effect for two and a half hours Cooper retracted her earlier statements and noted that she “has seen episodes of Lost that are more sexually explicit.” But the damage was done, most of the regular audience that saw that interview would be very unlikely to hear that the statement was retracted and a majority of the information haphazardly thrown about was completely falsified.
Despite the fact that Mass Effect featured incredibly tame content; the absurdly disproportionate reaction we see here is indicative of just how uncomfortable our culture is with the simple truth that sex is a natural part of a relationship. Digging down to the root of the problem we can see even further that there are some levels of discomfort surrounding romance in general, particularly when it comes to games.
You certainly can “romance” a character in Mass Effect, just as you can in Harvest Moon, a game that on the outside appears primarily to be a game concerned with farming. Anyone who plays and enjoys Harvest Moon however can tell you that the game is about much more than that, the relationships you develop with the people of your town and the possible romantic relationships are what makes the game engaging.
It should be of no surprise to anyone that relationships between people can make a text engaging. How many novels do you read where none of the characters have any relationships, romantic or otherwise? But neither Harvest Moon nor Mass Effect sell or appeal to their US audience primarily on the grounds of a game about relationships. Mass Effect features third person shooter and role-playing elements, and Harvest Moon of course features an abstract farm-simulation.
Slowly but surely as the medium itself matures romance will continue to seep its way in through the cracks, despite the opposition. The same people who would criticize games for being too violent would just as soon condemn them for allowing the players to experience a romantic relationship. Will games be “Romancing” their way through our culture and breaking down long ingrained puritanical fears and traditions? Or will radical politicians make backward shifts back to regulation and enact stringent bans on sexual and romantic content as many European countries have enacted on violent content?
Indeed, “This is a Blog,” a truly grandiose and stimulating statement. Setting the bar high and creating personal scope issues is my specialty. With a first post so wildly deviant from blogging conventions I truly have my work cut out for myself. I suppose that would be incorrect though, I don’t seem to have cut anything out yet. Hand me that pair of scissors.
What am I cutting out you ask? Purpose, mission statement, be as gilded or as plain as you like but I think you catch my drift. This is where I make clear my intent for this blog (aside from looking awfully pretentious with my minimalist WordPress theme.) What fantastic features will find their way to the inner folds of this foray into the fantastic fantasy land of flogging… Erp. I promise there won’t be any flogging. (At least not much.)
Blogging, that’s right, that’s what I’m doing here. Blogging. So, expect the ordinary fare. With GDC 2011 on the horizon, and having felt like a bit silly last year when I realized I had nothing to do with my pictures or notes other than you know… Keep them for myself. (What good is that anyway?) I decided I finally needed to buckle down and start a serious blog, one that I actually (intend…hope?) to maintain regularly. Regularly, being the important word in this entirely too long introduction. So with that out of the way, look forward to stories about things I’m working on, things I find interesting, critical analysis of games I manage to find the time to play and other miscellaneous items.
I'm Douglas Miller. I'm a game designer. I'm great at looking like I know what I'm doing, and I'm even better at trying to know how to do everything. This is the place where my thoughts go when they escape the byzantine thing I call my brain!
