Tiny Subversions

I guess I'll tell you about the project I've been working on.

A few months ago, I was attending a Boston Postmortem meeting. There was no speaker, so it was games night, and some folks from Harmonix brought Guitar Hero. Everyone played and had a blast. As the night was winding down, my friend Mike Gesner (Dragonfly Game Design) placed the guitar controller he had brought for the event onto the table in front of me. As we were chatting, I picked up the plastic guitar and started pressing random buttons.

Suddenly, I realized that pressing the fret buttons on the controller is very similar to counting in binary. Each fret button would map to a bit in a 5-bit binary word. "That would be a terrible game," I thought. "It would show you hex values on the screen and you'd have to strum along with them."

Sometimes you get an idea so incredibly stupid, you know you just have to follow through with it. Hell, within a few minutes, I'd even come up with an incredibly (awesomely) stupid name: b1nary her0. Note the one and the zero. I am a marketing genius.

So I called my friend Craig Perko, who I'd been meaning to do a project with for some time. He instantly saw how stupid-but-awesome this game would be. I also enlisted my friend Kevin (Mopis) to help provide some music.

So Craig and I built a prototype for the PC in Torque Game Builder. I handled the audio code and level design. Craig did everything else. It works. It's not fun. It's so damn hard it's barely playable. But you can hook up a Guitar Hero controller to your USB port using a converter, or use the keyboard, and strum along with the music.

That's pretty much the whole game. Need to hit a 1 on the beat? Hit the high fret and strum. See a 2? Slide one fret lower and strum. Uh oh, 3 coming your way? Hold down those two frets and strum.

It's obviously going to look much better in the future. That's just feeble programmer art.

I'll list some key features we've implemented here:

• play with a Guitar Hero controller
• easy to make new levels and compose new songs (text editor and some WAV files are all you need)
• built-in super-crappy "synthesizer" (feed it WAV files and it will sequence and transpose them)

Some key features we have yet to implement:

• terrible '80s hacker movie story. "Dude, you need to thrash on the guitar of hacking in order to defeat the encryption on the mainframe! Totally rad!!!!"
• songs that are good. All the songs so far as the test ones that I wrote. Kevin's need to be integrated.
  
• vertical guitar powerup. I'm thinking when you play the guitar vertically, we'll show you the actual binary instead of the hex values, but we'll also increase the tempo of the song by some 10% or whatnot.
• [EDIT] bitwise logic mode. As if the game weren't already hard enough, there will be a mode where instead of a falling "A" you'll see "A & 5" and have to strum "0". (Thanks for reminding me, Dave.)
  

Oh yeah, and this game will be released for free. I would honestly feel bad even attempting to make money off of something like this.

Anyway, that's what I've got to show you. I'd love to hear some feedback.

There's a post about the Fan From Hell over at comic book writer/artist Colleen Doran's blog. Much of the post is about a particular woman who shows us exactly how not to network. In particular, she violates almost every Mr. Big Stuff rule possible.

Colleen outlines one of the unspoken rules of conferences: "Thou shalt not bother the celebrity guest when he is having private time." Or, as I'd put it, respect the private time of the big shots.

Sometimes I'm asked, "How do I know when Ms. Big Stuff is having private time?" The answer is simple: if she's alone right now, then she's having private time. These folks cherish every second of alone time they get. Don't be the one to snap them out of it.

Don't be the Fan From Hell.

Labels: networking

Evidently a Dutch town has released a game called The Blob, which is available as a free download. It's Katamari-inspired, and got very good reviews on GameTunnel. Check out the city's website, then download the game here.

I haven't played it yet, but I'm downloading it right now.

Backgammon is a favorite game of mine. A lot of people don't like the game (Americans, at least--the game is incredibly popular in the Middle East).

I think I know why it gets a bad rap. Most people learn to play the game of Backgammon by learning the rules and playing a few games against someone. Then they decide it isn't fun.

This sounds reasonable until you realize that there's a meta-game involved. When you sit down with someone to play Backgammon, you play a series of games, and you set a point value. "Let's play to 10 points today," you might say. Games are typically worth one point--you win a game, you get a point. Except for this thing called the doubling cube.

The doubling cube is a six-sided die with the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32 on it. This represents the point value of the game. By default, the 1 is facing up, and the cube resides next to the person who went second in play order. The person with the die next to them can, right after their opponent has moved, double the number of points that the game is worth. The opponent can then choose: accept the doubling, or reject it and forfeit the game. If the opponent accepts, the die doubles, and then it gets passed over to their side--now the opponent has the right to double the value.

A smart player offers to double when they're ahead. This makes sense: either the opponent rejects it, in which case you win, or the opponent accepts it (stupidly), and you have a better than 50/50 chance of doubling your point score. Part of the skill of being a backgammon player is knowing (a) when to double so your opponent really has no choice but to forfeit, and (b) when your opponent doing the doubling has misread their game and you can take the die, redouble, and kick the crap out of them.

It's this meta-game of knowing exactly how ahead you are, bluffing opponents, and raising the stakes that makes Backgammon interesting. But, like poker, these mechanics are only fun when you're playing against other humans.

Which leads me to playing Backgammon against an artificial intelligence. The problem with an AI is that it always knows exactly when it's ahead and exactly when it's behind. It will always forfeit when you are at an advantage, and it will always double the moment it's ahead. The only way you can effectively play against this and keep a point lead is to try and keep track of the same information, and play the way it does. The main problem with this play style is that you must quit while you're ahead.

(EDIT: Ian has helped me realize that it's pretty much my version of computer Backgammon this applies to. Other versions are probably better. See comments below.)

Now parse this for a second: imagine you're playing Red Alert 2, or Rise of Nations, or whatever it is the kids are playing these days. Now imagine you've spent a while building up a killer army, and you're 80% sure that you can take out the enemy base if you strike now. You select your battalion, send it into enemy territory, and... they surrender. You won. Next level.

Where's the fun in that? You don't get the visceral, long-delayed thrill of crushing your enemies. The payoff just isn't there, aside from the abstract notion of "winning." In fact, the only time you get to battle anyone is when you're almost certainly going to lose, or when it's a neck-and-neck battle of attrition. Not once do you get to stomp all over your enemies.

As a result, playing against an AI causes the main game to be subsumed by the meta-game. The main game functions as the inner loop of a more important outer loop, and all of a sudden 80% of games you play involve one side or the other surrendering early on. If the meta-game were super interesting, I could see how this might work, but when the fun loop is the one being short-circuited, everyone loses.

End result: Backgammon against an AI is not fun by design. Unless you don't mind losing all the time, in which case you can play every game all the way through to the bitter end.

Jason Della Rocca was the speaker at this month's Boston Postmortem, and just he posted some pics of the event.

Labels: boston, postmortem

My pal Jeff has posted the slides from a presentation he gave to the DC IGDA chapter on breaking in to the game industry. Get 'em here!

I was having a conversation with an artist at the company where I work. We were talking about students trying to break in to the game industry as artists. One topic came up that I just had to share with you, my loyal readers.

I think I've already complained here about kids who think they can get a starting job as a game designer. (Briefly: this is an unrealistic goal, those jobs are very rare, you should get a job as QA or something first.) But far worse than those kids are the ones who think they can get a starting job as a concept artist.

If you walk up to me and tell me that you want to break in as a concept artist, I will first think to myself, "Wow! This kid is either incredibly uninformed, or incredibly arrogant. Either way, I'm not very impressed so far." The reason for this? Concept artists have incredible influence over a game's art direction, they get to basically draw all day, and they get to make up cool stuff. In other words, concept art is maybe the coolest job in an entire art department. And of course, there's probably only one of these jobs at all but the biggest companies.

Hmm. Awesome job, lots of influence, not many positions... gee, do you think there's a chance in hell that a student right out of art school will be hired for this? Allow me laugh for the next five minutes.

...

Okay, that was therapeutic. By now it should be obvious that you'll have a much better chance breaking in as an artist if you're a modeller, a texturer, or an animator.

From time to time I meet a student who shows me their concept art, and I say, "Hey, that's nice. Do you have any models, textures, or animations?" And they'll say, "No, Darius, I can't do any of that stuff. I'm good at drawing and I have all this imagination and vision."

At this point I spit on the floor. This person is literally saying that they have no other skills, so they'll default to taking the best job there is! I usually tell them: "Pick any art department at even the crappiest, most mediocre game company and you will find that there is no lack of imagination and vision. In fact, probably every person employed there is bursting with imagination and vision. You need to understand that the reason their art comes out crappy is almost certainly systemic, due to poor management (Art Director left halfway through the project) or to market forces (publisher demands your game look more like Blockbuster X) or something else along those lines."

This probably-innocent, over-idealistic student will come off as a royal asshole through their cover letter alone. That's no way to get hired. You need to develop the grunt-level skills that will get your foot in the door.

One exception to all of this is that you can be a concept artist, as long as you choose to go the humble route and help out an indie developer, usually for free or for very little pay. There are lots of programmers and designers out there who can't draw to save their lives (although if you're one of those guys, you'll do well to check out Craig's great tutorials). Help them out, and get some actual experience under your belt. Maybe the game will be a runaway hit, because maybe you are that good, and then you'll have tons more job opportunities as an artist.

I had a very interesting conversation with Craig last night. We talked about many things, one of which he posted about. I want to discuss something that I brought up during our conversation, related to his idea, but probably a little more pragmatic.

I love how old games like Quest for Glory let you import your character from sequel to sequel. It makes the whole series feel like one long game, as opposed to you starting over every sequel.

Wouldn't it be neat if you could import characters between lots of different games? Maybe there could be some kind of universal but flexible specification for characters. Hell, I'll lay out a first pass method right here.

Let's do something really easy. Say you're an indie developer. You have released two games. One's a typical fantasy dungeon crawler, called OrcKiller. The other is a game where tanks shoot at each other in the future, called GeneriTank.

For the sake of argument, let's say that a character for OrcKiller looks like this:

Name: Joe
Class: Fighter
Total HP: 100
Strength: 8
Agility: 4
Brains: 5

And let's say that a tank in GeneriTank looks like this:

Model: RX-510
Speed: 40 mph
Armor: 5mm
Weapons: Laser Cannon, Machine Gun

You can import characters and tanks back and forth between these two games. Let's take Joe the Fighter and import him into the tank game. You get:

Model: Joe-1209
Speed: 30 mph
Armor: 7mm
Weapons: Machine Gun, Portable Nuke

How did I come up with those figures? Well, agility maps to speed. In OrcKiller, the maximum agility score is 10, and it's a linear number of character points to advance in (you spend 1 CP to get 1 point of agility). Well, in GeneriTank, the top speed of a tank is 100 mph. But a 4/10 in agility maps to 30/100 mph because in GeneriTank, you spend an exponentially increasing amount of money to upgrade tank points. I would spend a lot of time to make a simple formula that says 1 CP = $10,000, and all of a sudden I can convert hero agility to tank speed really easily. Same thing with HP --> armor.

What about weapons? How did I derive those? Well, I didn't. I just subtracted the cost of the parts that I created on import from the total starting cash at the tank shop, and I let the player spend the remaining money on weapons. Similarly, I completely ignored the brains, strength, and class from the OrcKiller character.

The Benefits

The main advantage, in my mind, is that if I get bored of leveling my fighter in OrcKiller, I can import him into GeneriTank. Then when I get bored of blowing up tanks, I take my upgraded tank and import him back into the original game. Now the fighter has upgraded a subset of his stats, and I feel like I've made progress in the first game!

Furthermore, the sense of continuity you get between disparate games would feel enormously good. You could become extremely attached to what is essentially a single character that you've played in 10 different games.

The Drawbacks

Obviously there's huge balance issues here. I wouldn't recommend this for games with online play, as the opportunity to exploit is ripe. However, I think for single player games balance doesn't matter so much, especially since in this case it's unbalanced in the player's favor, rather than unfairly hard.

Furthermore, conversion between various game systems will not always be simple. In fact, it'll probably always be a really tricky math problem. It will almost never be as easy as 1 CP = $10,000. You'll probably need a set of linear equations to handle all the transformation--not hard math in and of itself, but setting the coefficients intelligently could be a nightmare.

But Also...

The balance issue might not be so terrible. You could design many different games that look at different stats. Your players would say things like, "Oh, man. If you want to really increase your character's jump height in Game A, you should import her into Game B as a hacker character and put lots of points into network manipulation!"

While this might not be the most balanced system in the world, I maintain that it would be incredibly fun, and that it would really help you feel a sense of continuity between disparate games.

Does anybody know any games that already do something like this (Quest for Glory aside)?