edited 2nd Apr '12 11:07:58 PM by burnpsy
Games from the Molydeux game jam mentioned above
Interesting stuff.
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Oh man this was a ridiculously fun weekend. It was absolutely astonishing just what kind of talent showed up at our site; there was at least one team comprised entirely of Double Fine veterans, and the lead artist of Braid stopped by for an evening (don't think he actually did any art for people, though), and I'm pretty sure everyone in the room was employed by a real gaming company, and if they weren't they got hired Sunday evening*. As the above posted, there's an archive of the games that got put out.
Ours isn't up there, but we did finish! It's just a really big file, so we're working with Anna to get it up. I mentioned earlier that we were doing the tweet about the pause button, so I'll just continue on talking about how it all came together in lieu of having a link to the game itself.
So we decided to weaponize the pause button by saying "everything turns off except physics," which meant while the player could no longer move and the AI was no longer thinking, they still kept their inertia, they still fell to gravity, and collision detection was in full force. Despite the silliness of the weekend, we ended up deciding to go super serious and make the game about a little girl named Molly who suffers from awful nightmares. When she closes her eyes, monsters start coming into existence and wander about; when she opens her eyes, the monsters all do the Toy Story thing of freezing and flopping all around, and for whatever reason, she can't move either. The game was 2D and viewed from the side, with Molly in her room walking left and right while things spawned around her. It was aimed for iOS play—the final control scheme had the player moving Molly by dragging their finger along the ground, making her jump by tapping, and pausing the game by tapping with two fingers.
Most of this dark theming came from the extremely talented artist we managed to grab on the first night, and he also grabbed a talented animator to help out so we completely lucked out asset-wise. They even managed to sleep normal hours while cranking out all the super creepy art.
Programming-wise, it was a different story even though our two main programmers were also beasts*. I posted the game plan a couple posts back, and as expected, that entirely fell through. Unity, despite being our amazing go to engine back in the day, decided it wanted to be extremely unstable throughout the weekend, especially about syncing files between our devs, so it took us way too long to get some kind of sync system going and the playable prototype ended up getting done by Saturday evening, at which point our designer stopped his PM duties of scoping and documentation and started replaying over and over again to get a feel for balance and what needed to get added/removed to make things not suck. It was pretty amazing watching him in the final half hour as he pretty much rebalanced and tweaked every number available to make the game resemble (and deliver) something fun.
We had an initial goal of 4 enemies (one stupid thing, one flying thing, one jumping thing, and one exploding thing) but only managed to get the first three in because the movement of the explody dude was too complicated to implement with our time frame—he was supposed to roll around on the walls and ceiling and then drop during pause, and would only explode when set on fire by the flying dudes. Yeah, it doesn't sound too bad, and it shouldn't have been, but due to all the lost time on our dev environment, it was either making the monster spawners work properly or get in a new dude that would need to get balanced. I think that if we do pick the project up, exploding dude will be our first priority because it would add a ton to the gameplay.
I was doing music and sound effects for the first half of the jam then transitioned to programming during the last half since I had to hook up all the sound scripts anyway. The music went fairly well—not only was it probably my best song, but it was finished at exactly 6:00pm Saturday as needed*, although I did have a problem with my software's stability early on. Sound effects went well, too; for one of the sounds (the stupid enemy's sound), I decided it would be a great idea to make them sound like muffled crying, so I shut myself in a closet, stuffed a shirt into my mouth, and started screaming, then took those samples, reverbed the shit out of them, and overlayed a higher pitched track over the original. Got our designer/producer to nearly poop himself after showing him the sample. Good times.
Speaking of closets, I guess I'll talk about the work environment for a bit. The place that was rented for the jam was only available from 10AM to midnight, so half our dev time was spent at one of our guys' apartments. No, not sleep time. I think I got a grand total of 4 hours over the entire weekend. The other half was spent at the site itself, so I lied when I said I wouldn't show up on the livestream. In fact, we were front and center of the thing, so everyone on the internet got to watch us start drinking alcohol and caffeine first thing in the morning.
Anyway, back to the process. If there's one thing I've learned from jams, it's that Sunday is pretty much the best day because most of the assets and frameworks are done, so it all just starts getting pieced together and you suddenly go from shitty boxes that kinda move sometimes to a legitimate game. Pretty much no different here, besides the fact that getting every major sync was a half-hour waste of time. Despite all that, we set the feature-complete deadline to 3PM so the last 4 hours could go to QA and balancing. Unfortunately, there was of course a major slip, and it was at that point we cut the explody dude. I'd been working on UI and the scoring framework, and unfortunately, we had to cut making points and combo multipliers pop up over enemy heads when they died because there was just no time to get a thread safe framework up and running. We also ended up forgetting to have poofy effects when things died, and I didn't have a chance to properly equalize the sound effects (the problem for Goodnight Molly was that things were too quiet which really isn't bad since it's a lost positive; last year, several effects were way too loud and that's a straight up added negative)
And after all that, we managed to have a game. This is where I would link to the final product, but like I said, it's not uploaded yet due to filesize shenanigans, so here's the music and the lose screen to tide the curious over:
The event ended with presentations, medium quality champagne, and cake that was purchased from an erotic cake shop. Also a lot of awful puns from the livestream audience which would get read out loud in an awkwardly sensual voice after each presentation. But yeah, watching the presentations, the other games that I saw were super neat. For some reason, bears that get oxygen by hugging but end up crushing them was a pretty commonly used theme, as was the pigeon that flies around a city stopping depressed businessmen from jumping off buildings. Special mention to a friend's game which got mentioned in our Kotaku article. In that game, you have a radioactive baby who gives off light when you rock it, and you have to Qwop your way to a rescue helicopter before your opponent does. Overall, though, every game was amazing or better, which surprised me, because usually you see a bunch of teams fail hard due to scoping and out of the ones that do make it, the median is "that's kinda cool I guess" rather than "holy shit that's awesome" which is what I saw here.
tl;dr—this was the best god damn game jam I've ever been a part of, and I'm already excited for next year.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Haven't seem some of those games. Probably missed them. Welp, gonna try those out.
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Goodnight Molly has been posted!
Enjoy :)
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
ch00beh: If I can ever get my wife to log in she would right in with this thread. She has a sign in name but rarely visits tropes.
Who watches the watchmen?
Left Eye
The Atlantic did an article on Johnathan Blow recently.
I haven't played Braid yet and I know next to nothing about Blow, so I won't make comments about either, but the article itself is pretty.... annoying.
Umbran Climax◊
I am vexed!
Re: Combat Systems, Magic and Balance
Personally, I think the mundane is underrated in fantasy games, although I'm not unbiased. One of my past-times is martial arts, specifically the Liechtenauer system of medieval Germany. You can have a look at how the swordsmanship pans out just below:
Personally, I think it's really cool, and it's something I'd love to represent in a game someday. Despite what you might think, swordsmanship isn't that complex — in fact, the best systems are generally quite simple so they can be called upon during battle easily and without error. So putting real swordsmanship in a game isn't a matter of defeating major complexity (although they're certainly more complex than standard hack-and-slash or turn-based systems), but understanding the theory that underlies the style.
If you've ever played Jedi Outcast or Jedi Academy, you'd actually played a very strong appropriation of the European longsword style as applied to gaming. Just like the real thing, the game encourages you to take the offensive, dance around your adversary's flanks and choose dodging over parrying. You even get all eight strike angles to choose from. Pretty good!
A development team that's willing to implement such a deep and simple system like that will waste their time, I think, on offensive magic. Why give that to players when such an emphasis has already been placed on close combat? After all, you can always give them ranged weapons for distance damage. While the buffing/debuffing role for mages is a good start, I think it can be taken further. For instance, magic could take the place of modern technologies in a tactical sense. A scrying spell could give the user a bird's eye view of the map, and another spell could allow them to see the lifesigns of adversaries through objects. Or perhaps there's a spell that creates a "ghost bot" of yourself, which doesn't fight but dies when it takes enough damage, being a prime tool for misdirection.
Personally, I think that's what magic should be about in fantasy games — giving players tools that the technology represented in the game doesn't allow for.
Plus, if you limit mages to mundane weapons while giving them advanced tactical tools via magic, I think general gameplay would be much more interesting. A mage with some stealth and combat stuff mixed in could be a sort of medieval Batman.
Magic can be absolutely anything we want it to be, which is why I think it's madness that magic is still MP bars, spell selections and nukes. I'd much rather see more creative applications of magic in terms of both ideas and mechanics.
edited 13th Apr '12 8:05:54 PM by MadassAlex
Swordsman Troper — Reclaiming The Blade — Watch
Left Eye
Any non-contemporary portable ranged weapon will most likely lack elemental effects and AOE. They also have to rely on direct line-of-site where, say, a bolt of lightning or earthen spike from below would not.
Not that any of those things are needed. They can even sort of be compensated for without offensive magic, though not in as many ways as magic(ranged weapons that fire in arcs rather than straight lines, elemental buffs are still magic but not directly offensive, explosives and traps for AOE).
I disagree with the notion that passive effects are what magic should be in all fantasy. Like you said, magic can be anything we want; making it all the same in a different way is just like creating a new cliche.
Besides, there are other ways to spin the weapon vs. magic dichotomy. Tales of Graces, for example, has an offensive caster whose spells only work(or only work well, in a few cases) at close range, while her weapon has the longest range of any playable character.
I am interested in your idea though. Have there been any settings in games where magic is almost entirely passive/indirect in use?
edited 13th Apr '12 10:52:47 PM by JotunofBoredom
Umbran Climax◊
???
I got halfway through the Jonathan Blow article's first page and stopped reading. Oh man, yeah, he is super pretentious. Braid reeks of it. I still love it*, but yeah, it is floating all up in the clouds. Blow tried to do something interesting with the words between each level and didn't really; the crowning moment of true art in games is really just the end. No other moment in that game really struck me as more than an interesting puzzle to solve.
I can completely accept Blow's pretentiousness, though, because he's totally right in that there are too few pie in the sky designers and too many studios aimed at blockbusters. I might not like the guy's attitude, but I respect what he does and what he says.
PS. I too would love a game with subtle magic. I feel like I've played at least one, but I really can't place my finger on what it would be.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
I am vexed!
^^ Not wholesale, I think.
Demons Souls gives us a partial example. There are two types of casting — Miracles and Spells. Spells have various effects, although many are offensive in nature. Miracles are almost purely defensive, though, based on the Faith stat. The thing is, the weapon damage of blessed weapons is also based on Faith. This means that you can have a character dealing strong close combat damage with a good selection of powerful Miracles at their disposal as well.
Intelligence is the stat that informs Spells and the damage dealt with magical weapons, so building a character around that stat works similarly. You can deal high close combat damage while also having strong offensive magic, but the dichotomy between close range and long range combat means only one of these offensive aspects is in play at any time, especially given the time to cast a spell.
As for AOE damage, I think there are other ways to do it. A blackpowder grenade, an off-map artillery call and so on and so forth. Or you could even do entirely without it. Besides, it never really made sense to me that mages are the best damage dealers. I think that idea more or less started with Dungeons And Dragons because of the abstracted nature of the game, but it makes more sense to me that a warrior's mundane sword should be a faster, more reliable way to defeat an adversary. People have survived being struck by lightning and immolation, but no-one survives being cut across the throat.
It might just be personal, but I find this to be a narrative hole in many fantasy games. Fantasy video games essentially began with Dungeons and Dragons as the driving influence, and I think that was okay for a while, but now that influence is still strong to the detriment of fantasy games everywhere. As fun as D&D can be, most people rightly recognise it as a pile of cliches and questionable mechanical decisions. Games like The Riddle Of Steel have their own flaws, but also offer very different takes on how to deal with things mechanically and narratively.
One thing I like about Riddle, for instance, is that there is no basic "attack" option in close combat. Since there are no special combat feats, you unlock new (real) techniques as your character progresses and learns, very few of which are about dealing damage. The whole goal of the combat system is to fight your adversary into a vulnerable setup, after which you can finish them off. A lot of techniques are based on helping this kind of thing. For instance, the "beat" technique strikes their weapon aside in narrative terms; in mechanical terms, they cannot use that weapon for the rest of the round and lose combat dice until next round's refresh.
Then you have stuff like "counter", which is a parry that costs you a couple of combat dice. In return, you get to capitalise on how successful your adversary's attack was if your counter overcame it. Then you move into high-level stuff, like "Master Strike", which allows you to split your dice between attacking and defending in the same turn rather than choosing just one.
As you can imagine, this creates a very different game when compared to D&D. Less abstract, more immediate. And much more interesting in combat, in my opinion.
Riddle also has a really unique magic system. If you're still reading, take a breather or something. You might want to consider this section a separate post.
There are several "vagaries" of magic that mages can learn. Each vagary has three levels. When you have a level in a vagary, you know every spell. For each level you progress in a vagary, every spell is given an empowered form. And while spells can be cast on their own, the real point of interest comes from how they can be combined. For instance, you might have a shrinking spell. So you could just shrink the enemy knight's armour and crush them that way, but why stop there? Your shrinking spell might also have a telekinetic element that sends him hurtling into his buddies, giving you time to escape.
Later, if you liked, you could use a summoning spell to call his spirit and bind spell it to a corpse you've dug up for questioning. At the same time, you could create an illusion of him being alive and his friends in shackles around him for psychological impact.
That extends beyond the reach of what's possible in a video game, of course, but I love the combinational approach towards spellcasting in that game. There's no default offensive spell, for instance, but the system doesn't prevent offensive application of a self-created spell. Or any application of any spell; the whole idea is to be creative, and the system is meant to reward players who think outside the box.
Swordsman Troper — Reclaiming The Blade — Watch
???
I do wonder what kind of real time system one could create where melee combat is more about positioning and maneuvering than about smashing things real hard. The closest I've played to that is Toribash, which is a turn based kung-fu-esque game. You're given a ragdoll, and each turn you get to choose which joints on the ragdoll to move. When both players accept, the game moves forward some number of frames. Repeat until someone's torso hits the ground, and the person who dealt the most damage wins. Usually games last about one attack since it's pretty much impossible to keep a ragdoll from falling.
The most interesting thing I find about that game is that it follows actual body mechanics. You need to drive the ragdoll's foot into the ground, rotate the waste, and use the free arm as a counter weight to get in a good punch.
Anyway, the biggest hurdle I see with making a combat system about finesse is getting passed discreet input. The best I can think of at the moment is just some kind of quicktime, context sensitive kind of thing.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
I am vexed!
As someone who practises European longsword fencing, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. Input is really the biggest hurdle to overcome, but at the same time, our era of gaming has tools as versatile as the mouse and controllers with two analogue sticks. Furthermore, a button press or hold can contextually change what the other inputs do, so my thought is to combine as many potential options into as few inputs as possible. The idea is for the resultant system to be as simple and versatile as possible. Easy to understand, difficult to master.
Games like Jedi Outcast and Mount And Blade have had a go at this kind of thing, and I think they did pretty well, especially the former. In that game, the eight strike angles of a sword (or any other close combat weapon) were achieved by clicking the attack button while moving in a certain direction. In the latter game, four different strike angles were achieved by clicking and holding the MB 1, moving the mouse and then releasing.
So I got to thinking, why couldn't you use the latter system and have all eight angles? Mount And Blade probably avoided it because of the complexity. Where Jedi Outcast was a game about smaller-scaled duels and such, Mount And Blade is a wargame and so plays with broader strokes. Mouse sensitivity is another issue, because if two strike angles are too close together in the code, then obviously a lot of players will struggle with actually getting what they want. Another issue Mount And Blade has is that, while holding down MB 1, you continue to be able to change perspective at a slower pace. Obviously, this is to maintain the capacity to control the player avatar as you like without ruining a front-on attack.
The best system I can envision — and I take the games I've mentioned as proof that it can be done, and done well — works on the basis of holding MB 1 and selecting your strike from eight (or seven, giving that the low vertical strike is biomechanically difficult) angles, which the game anchors one's mouse (or analogue stick) movements towards. Releasing the button lets go and the strike completes itself.
Most games, after this, would have the player avatar return to basic stance to allow them to continue fighting from a neutral position, but that's not exactly how the real thing works, and I hold the real thing to have many interesting, game-worthy elements of its own. In actual European longsword combat, you strike from and into different guards, which change your options, or at least how efficient certain options are. The general rule is that each strike should end in a guard that points towards one's opponent, so a high descending strike would end in something where the hilt is held low and the blade angles upwards a bit.
If, in this hypothetical system, weapons were physics objects that could protect the player by providing a barrier, then each guard opens and closes different openings. So any strike you choose to enact will change the nature of your defense once it ends, closing off some openings and presenting others. Ergo, we have a kind of attack and defense combined into one control mechanic.
Of course, it's possible to select a guard without attacking in real life, and so it should be here. Perhaps MB 2 could use a similar anchor system, but connected to four points (beside each hip, beside and a bit above each side of the head), which simply moves between pointing guards. If MB 2 does select between pointing guards, pressing MB 1 while holding MB 2 could allow for a thrust from that position. Ergo, cuts, thrusts and defenses taken care of with three inputs and a consistent, logical system. MB 3 could be selector based on clicking and holding to access two more non-pointing guards for before the conflict enters absolutely immediate range.
If the game had a lock-on system, then there'd be no conflict between the mouse being a perspective tool and an attack selection tool. Finish it off with standard WASD movement, and the spacebar can be used for Legend Of Zelda style hopping dodges (but in eight directions rather than four), and you have all the core tools a good swordsman has at their disposal.
Unfortunately, I'm no programmer — I just sort of study game design from whatever resources I can get in my free time. Were I a coder, I'd probably already have a primitive version of this underway. The best I can do thus far is try and develop the concept from a design perspective to be as user-friendly and understandable as possible, while also being grounded enough in previous gaming successes that it might actually work. If it did work? I sort of envision it being like the fantasy or historical equivalent to the modern FPS, in that the realism modern FPS games bring very effectively ground the player in real logic, tactics and a lack of abstract observation. To this day, though, fantasy and historical games use very bare-bones combat systems that appear to be entirely uninfluenced by historical resources. In fact, the most historically accurate sword fighting game is, to this day, Jedi Outcast — which is kind of weird and disappointing, if you ask me. Why should it fall to Star Wars to be the thing to provide historical accuracy and fun, engaging gameplay at the same time?
In any case, sorry this was so long. I'm not even a coder or part of a development team, so I feel a bit guilty for putting it all out on the table like this. All the same, I think this might be the only thread here where I might get some feedback or discussion on this kind of concept.
Swordsman Troper — Reclaiming The Blade — Watch
Left Eye
After reading those posts I just had a random thought of taking a realistic martial arts game and dividing it into a two-class system.
The first class would be a more honorable fighter that plays by the rules and the second would be the cheating type(dirt in the eye, hidden second weapon, and whatnot).
The former would have actual skill and proper training on their side. The latter would be only somewhat skilled in the basics, but make up for it with a veritable bag of tricks or by using the environment to their advantage.
I loved Jedi Outcast but never finished it. Guess I'll try from the beginning again this weekend.
I think your idea could be done. Would probably feel a lot like a 3D fighting game(in that most of your movements, once locked on, would be relative to your enemy's position), but more free-flowing.
Umbran Climax◊
???
I keep getting distracted by all the source material that's linked, so I haven't finished and therefore don't quite have an opinion on it yet, but so far it's an interesting take as a lot of game design stuff is based on segregating playing styles to optimize motivation rather than just saying "everything goes!"
I want to say the former take on design is also heavily influenced by scoping, simply because one game cannot do everything. (or can it?????)
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
I am vexed!
I think The Elder Scrolls solidly proves that too much breadth negatively impacts a game. While there's a lot that can be said of the qualities of those games, they lack gameplay depth in their three focuses of combat, stealth and magic.
Swordsman Troper — Reclaiming The Blade — Watch
???
I don't think the article is talking so much about just breadth, but more about using the idea of appealing to a particular interest instead of a particular player type to influence design.
For example, people seem to play Dwarf Fortress for the random stories that unfold, ergo, design the game to appeal more to the imagination. Seems pretty obvious when you just sit down and think about it, but strangely hard to implement.
In other news, for anyone interested in Unity, Chris DeLeon made a tutorial to get people started. He also mentioned one of the projects I was on! (Dusk)
For the aspiring devs, I highly recommend checking out this engine and trying to bootstrap your first interactive doohickey. It's pretty fantastic (so long as you are not on a team with a tight deadline and no budget)
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
Face Time
Not that I'll probably get into development, but what does everyone think of the Source Engine? Praises, criticisms, etc.?
edited 1st May '12 10:13:58 PM by RocketDude
"Hipsters: the most dangerous gang in the US." - Pacific Mackerel
???
Never tried it, unfortunately.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
I'm still working on my debut title, and so far it's looking like Turtles all the Way: A Shell Game will be using Unity. I'd only actually tried XNA before going for Unity.
As such, I have nothing significant to say about the Source Engine. That said, the fact that a Linux port is incoming may be worth considering.
edited 1st May '12 10:20:47 PM by burnpsy
Face Time
Yeah, you kinda need to have Alien Swarm installed or have bought a Valve game to even try working with it, unfortunately.
"Hipsters: the most dangerous gang in the US." - Pacific Mackerel
???
I mean Alien Swarm is free, and Valve games are generally A+ material, so I see no reason to not have Source.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
Face Time
I've heard that Source is effort-intensive, though. Lots of mod projects tend to take quite a while to come out, so that supports that allegation.
edited 1st May '12 10:29:28 PM by RocketDude
"Hipsters: the most dangerous gang in the US." - Pacific Mackerel
???
I wouldn't doubt it, but it might just be a meh asset pipeline, or it could require direct tomfoolery within the engine itself to make fancy stuff happen. What makes Unity so magical is that its asset pipeline is pretty much drag and drop and all the fancy logic is done through external scripts.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
Molyjam 2012 is officially under way for all sites! Peter Molyneux apparently showed up at the London site and gave a rousing speech while stating that he's actually going to be scouting talent for his new game company
, so that's pretty exciting slash no pressure or anything.
If anyone wants to see how games are cranked out in real time, there are livestreams of several sites here
. SF is currently off, and our team is not working there anyway, so y'all probably won't see me, so that's good.
Anyway, our team is going with the idea of "your only weapon is the pause button." We've decided that this means that interaction and AI are turned off, but physics/momentum are still in effect. Preliminary design docs are up, platform's chosen, junk food/booze/energy drinks have been bought, and we've set a target of having the minimum engine work by saturday morning. I may or may not continue to do a live blog of our progress if anyone is interested, but if I don't, I will at the very least tell y'all when the finished product is put up.
And, just to leave things off, here's the jam's super secret keynote video to inspire everyone to save the gaming industry!