Plot Doors

Well I do link to other blogs pretty often, but the post I want to link is kind of old so I don’t feel like searching for the post. Anyway, if you play a game especially an RPG, but other genres can use them as well, usually to a lesser degree, eventually you will come to a place where you can’t go any further, there is an obstacle of some sort, and you have to go on some mini quest just to get something that will get you past this obstacle. The most common is to have a locked door that you need to find a key to.

Running around looking for keys seems like a pretty lame game, so developers usually try to jazz things up with story related reasons why a door can’t be opened. Like there is a magic spell holding a door shut and you have to travel the world collecting magic stones to break the spell. Entire games can be devoted to just collecting keys, even if they aren’t actual keys in the game they serve the same purpose, to open a single plot door.

Bard’s Tale, from 2004 not the much older game by the same name, actually parodied this common RPG cliche of sending  players on random quests just open a single door. Every time he thought he was getting to the end of his quest he was disappointed to find that he had even more work to do before he could save the princess. When he finally got to the end he expected even more stuff to do.

Unless you want to give the player free reign over the entire game world right at the start, some plot doors are necessary. You might try using really tough monsters to block peoples progress, but that tends to piss people off just as much. As I said before developers are coming up with more creative ways than simply looking for keys to open a door. If the obstacle and solution makes logical sense in the game world, and especially if the obstacle is an important part of the story, than plot doors usually don’t bother people too much.

So why am I worrying about plot doors? If you’ve been following the blog recently I’ve started developing a game recently. So far its got, semi decent combat, a few simple puzzles, a flimsy story, and some plot doors. I said before that plot doors are good if they make logical sense and/or are important to the story. Well the since the story is so bad, there’s really no way to come up with decent justification for running around collecting items. You can play for yourself and see what you make of my justification, but its pretty weak so far.

If you’ve never played one of my prototypes, just use WASD or arrow keys to move the guy to the help sign to get instructions on how to play. You can find the game here.

Adding Urgency to Gameplay

There are some times in games where the usual gameplay just doesn’t cut it. The game designers want to add a sense of urgency. They want to raise the stakes, and if the player doesn’t act immediately then they will fail their objective, whatever they may be. The most common way to add some urgency to a game is to add a timer, and if a player doesn’t complete an objective in time, its game over.

Although it will depend on the game, and exactly how the timer is handled, but I’m usually against timers in RPGs, Platformers, FPSs or any sort of action game. There are a couple of reasons or this. One is that usually if you fail you have to replay a long section over again. it can really suck if you are seconds away from completing your objective, but run out of time, and have to replay a 10 minute timed section over again.

Although I would usually prefer to have no timers at all, I can occasionally stand them is they are very short, so that even if you fail, you don’t have to redo a bunch of stuff. Another time I wouldn’t mind timer is if they are optional, for the sake of giving the player bonuses if the complete them, but are not necessary to complete the game. The only problem is that optional timed challenges don’t really add urgency to the storyline, since they are optional.

How can we add more urgency to games without timers? I’m going to bring up two sections from the Halo games. Halo:CE and Halo 3 ended in very similar ways. Crazy shit was going down and you had to get the hell out of there really fast, so you had this epic driving section. Halo:CE did what I’ve been arguing  against this whole post, it put in a timer to try and make the section more urgent, and it didn’t really work for me.

Halo 3 ended it in a very similar way, with a crazy driving section, but it didn’t have a timer. It created player urgency in a much more visually appealing way, the place you were driving on was slowly falling apart. Losing because of something that is clearly visible in the level always feels more fair than because of a number counting down. From a gameplay perspective its not a whole lot different than a timer, but its better to clearly see what caused your death.

Having the level fall apart is a great way to add urgency to the game, and Halo 3 isn’t the only example, I mostly just used it to contrast it with a very similar section in a previous game in the series. Uncharted 2 comes to mind with a few section that have urgency because they are being destroyed. There was a section on a train, where a helicopter was destroying cars on the train, and you had to keep moving froward quick enough, to avoid being blown up.

Of course making levels completely destructible may take a lot of work, and not everybody can do this. Or maybe the story in the game is such that it just doesn’t make any sense to have large scale destruction. Well there is another trick you might try to add some urgency to the game. Make an unkillable enemy to chase the player.

Now I understand that unkillable enemies might be pretty frustrating, but can work really well if done well, and used sparingly. In Uncharted 2, there was a section where Drake was being chased by a tank and had a long section where he had to run from it, until he found an RPG-7(many of them actually) and blew up the tank. DeadSpace had a section with a  regenerating enemy, they could be slowed down by shooting its limbs off, but eventually they grew back, and it couldn’t be killed by normal means. The great thing about sending really tough enemies to chase the player, and was used to great affect in both Uncharted 2 and DeadSpace, is the payoff the player gets when the finally have the means to destroy this tough enemy.

In conclusion, I’d say timers are pretty bad ways to add urgency to gameplay. If you really want the player to go quickly, put something in the gameworld, either through destruction of the level, or adding powerful enemies, or something else that is actually part of the gameworld, to force them to go quickly. The only time I might consider timers to add urgency is a circumstance it would make sense in the real world, like a bomb about to go off.

Please leave any comments about what you think about these methods for adding urgency to a game, and mention any ideas not in this post that you can think of. I almost forgot to add, having NPCs constantly pestering the player is a very very bad way to try and add urgency. Its completely fake urgency, so the player will just ignore it and take their time if they want to, and its just annoying. Never do this.

Happy Victoria Day!

Tragic Hero: Baiting the Trap

A few days ago I had an idea about making a game were the player becomes a tragic hero, rather than watching a story unfold that has a tragic hero in it. You should probably read it, if you haven’t already, before continuing with this one. That same day I also had a post about the BrainHex quiz which tries to determine the primary motivation for why people games. It just occurred to me that the different categories in the BrainHex quiz can help me lay traps for players in the tragic game, and I will explain shortly.

So first off, the game is a traditional medieval RPG, but the player character starts out quite strong compared to other RPGs. In the last post I said I just wanted side quests, no main quest, and the tragedy would be hidden in one of those optional quests. I’ve decided that having a main quest would work better, but if you do it without following any of the optional content, the game will be very short and very bland. You will get the one “good” ending where nothing horrible happens to your character.

The other problem with my previous post was that I thought I could trick every single player into falling for the same trick, leading to a tragedy. Thanks to the BrainHex listing several different categories of gamers, we can set tragic traps that prey on specific play styles. Probably should have a few for each category spread across the game world, to minimize the chance that they will accidentally miss it.

For seekers it should be easy enough, there will be many optional dungeons throughout the game, most of which are completely safe, but a few of them will have cursed treasure, like the kind mentioned in the previous post, or some variation that leads to a similar result. The player slowly gets weaker, attempts a final quest to undo it, than dies.

Conquerors shouldn’t be too hard. Since the player starts out so much stronger than in normal RPGs most quests will be too easy and the conquerors will crave more challenge, so offering up a series of increasingly challenging quests should be the perfect bait for them. Maybe the player fights an enemy that delivers a mortal wound that will slowly lead to their death.

Achievers could be the easiest of all. Simply make an achievement that tells them something like, start a brawl in the pub, but really it can be pretty much anything we want. Unable to resist the urge to get an achievement, these guys will follow a path to their own demise. Maybe the person they get into a brawl with in the pub just happens to be a wizard who curses them, and will only lift the curse if they do tasks for him.

Some categories might be harder than others to come up with, especially socialiser, which seems nearly impossible to work out in a single player game, but maybe someone can think of a way to do that one. Anyway this is just a theoretical exercise so its not a big deal if I can’t think of something for every category.

An important aspect of the game, is that after the terrible fate, whatever it may be, has befallen the player they get quite a bit of time before the end. They can try desperately on a quest to overturn the fate that has befallen them, or they can continue on the main quest and try to finish it before their demise, or they can go on any number of sidequests, or they can sit around doing nothing while their death approaches. There will be a large number of possible endings based mainly on what tragedy befalls the player, and what they do with their limited time.

Exploration and Player Agency

In a previous post I briefly mentioned player agency without really explaining what that is. Basically, agency, is the capacity for an agent to act in the world. So player agency is every available action a player can make in a game. I might divide agency into categories. Choosing between a shotgun or a sniper rifle, or choosing between casting a fireball or a lightning bolt is a tactical decision so I would call that tactical agency. Choosing between saving a village or slaughtering innocents is moral agency. Choosing between going west or going north would be navigational agency.

Games seem to be offering more and more tactical agency, as games try to increase the number of weapons in each new game, or number of spells and abilities in RPGs. Games are pretty poor at moral choices but some are getting better and overall it seems moral agency is on the rise. But navigational agency seems to be getting worse. Final Fantasy series used to have a sprawling overworld for the player to wander around, and contained huge maze like dungeons to explore, and now the overworld is gone, replaced by a series of linear dungeons, with the occasional branch that may lead to a treasure, and you can clearly see what the branch leads to without needing to explore it.

Some people might not even care about the increasingly restricted navigational agency, as long as the gameplay is still good. Which also brings up another point, that “gameplay” usually refers to tactical agency, as if moral and navigational choices don’t count as an aspect of gameplay. I would call bullshit on that and say every choice a player makes is an aspect of gameplay. If you add more places to explore, you’ve added more gameplay.

The downside is that it might not be something that everyone wants to do, or that anyone wants to do all the time. An important aspect of navigational agency is for the player to choose not to explore if they don’t want to. There should always be obvious directions to accomplish the minimum navigation needed to beat the game. If the player has to explore to beat the game, then his agency is taken away just as much as someone who wants to explore in a linear game.

Since there are a lot of people that just want to kill bad guys and don’t care about navigational agency, it really doesn’t seem like a big deal if some games are incredibly linear with no real exploration, cause they cater to a specific crowd. The problem is that there is a widespread trend to reduce navigational agency, with only a few developers still offering some decent exploration. Those developers are Bethesda, Obsidian, and Rockstar. Maybe there are some others I haven’t thought of, but pretty much any other game will have either one path to go through the game, or some minimal exploration that is very restricted.

Not that every game necessarily needs to have a ton of exploration, just that most games would be improved by an increase in player agency, and navigational agency is an aspect of player agency. Please leave your comments and criticisms. We would be interested to hear from you.

And just in case anyone is wondering what caused me to make this post, it was brought on by reading this post at another blog. Not really the post itself so much, but the comments on that post and on another blog. The real reason for that link is to get some pingback. If you don’t know what pingback is, lets just say, I’m an internet parasite trying to leech readers off a superior blog. You’ll know my plan has succeeded if you clicked the link on another blog and are now reading this.

Game Balance Through Evolution

This post is mainly concerned with games in the genre of RPG, you know, games where you level up and get stronger over time. I can however imagine that the concepts can applied to other genres, its just that I haven’t really considered it too much yet, maybe I will in another post.

In my experience there are two main ways to balance the strength of enemies against the strength of the player. The first is to have different areas with enemies of different strength. A player can spend as much time in an area as they need, then when they feel they are strong enough they can move on to the next area.

The second way to balance is to have level scaling, so that every time the player gets more powerful, so do all the enemies. This effectively makes leveling up a pointless task, and in some cases the enemies will get more powerful per level than the player, making leveling up a thing to be avoided. Of course there are games that will have enemies in certain dungeons at set levels, while the world that connects them has level scaling, and other ideas that combine the first two.

The idea of game balance through evolution is closer to level scaling, but should provide more variety in enemy strength than level scaling usually allows. So will start with a simple case by imagining a population of monsters with only one gene, the HP gene, which is how many hits it can take before dieing. At the beginning there will be great diversity with some having very few HP, and some having a lot of HP.

In most RPGs a player has the option to run away, unless they are surrounded and have no way of escaping alive so the player will run away from enemies too powerful to beat, and will kill the weaker monsters. Over time enemies with lower HP will be wiped out because they will be unable to survive and stronger monsters will take their place. But that’s not all, random mutations will occur between generations, either decreasing HP, and make them less likely to survive and reproduce, or increasing HP making them more likely to survive. The diversity of the population should provide enemies easy enough for the player to beat no matter what, but the general trend is for monsters to become more powerful over time, just like the player.

Lets not stop there. Most RPGs have different elemental attacks like fire, ice, lightning etc as well as having monsters be weak or resistant or neither to these elements. In the time it takes for a player to get an ice, fire and lightning spell at level 1, he could get 3 levels in his ice spell and do more damage than a level 1 spell. So it wouldn’t be surprising to find a player that specializes in an element to do more damage.

All the monsters will have genes representing resistance to the different elements, and random mutations can also cause them to increase or decrease. If the player relies completely or mostly on ice attacks, we can expect all the enemies with low ice resistance to die out and those with higher ice resistance prosper. Maybe enemies with high ice resistance, but incredibly low HP might still be killed by the player, but we can expect that even enemies with moderate HP and a decent amount of ice resistance will send the player running. So the overall trend is for the population of monsters to become more and more ice resistant, until the player changes his strategy.

Now I’ve been speaking as if all monsters in the game are one population that evolves together. It would make more sense for there to be several species of monsters that evolve separately, and the interactions between these monsters would impact the way they evolve. A dungeon with a breed of monsters that has a really powerful fire attack, might force other monsters to evolve fire resistance to survive.

A serious problem with using this method is finding a good rate of evolution. If the enemies evolve too slowly it won’t have any impact on the game, but if they evolve too quickly the player will be overwhelmed. I think this post is long enough as it is, and I’m interested to see what other people have to say about this. If you know a game that uses a system like this, link it. If you know a blog post or article that talks about something like this, link it. Thank you.

Edit: I may not have been clear, but if anyone has any thoughts, good or bad on this pleases share them. I was hoping for some conversation related to this topic.