Game design

Something that is very cumbersome (and boring) to do for every developer out there is the software testing. To combat that, you usually develop a number of methods that helps you track down bugs, for example automatic bug-reports and unit-testing.

One of the more interesting ones is automatic testing. For games, this usually means that you have a system that simulates the player and automatically generates input for it. For my latest project Hyena I’ve had the rare opportunity to play around with an application where the controls are so basic that it was actually possible to write a system that played the whole game for me.

For Hyena this was obviously extremely simple, since controls only require you to choose from of a number of predefined choices. The game-book I used for testing was Flight From The Dark, which has 350 pages and each page has on average about 1.6 choices, so fully testing the game was definitely possible. Some preliminary runs did prove very helpful. First of all, it pointed up some show-stopper bugs in sections like this where you ended up with all choices disabled due to a problem in the LUA-script. The other kind bug it pointed out appeared when I looked at the pages that never was displayed, and could trace that to another LUA-script bug.

Also, doing simple analyses of such runs are also trivial and can be a great tool for game-design. You might remember hearing of such analysis from the development of the original Half-Life. Basically, they built a system that tracked stuff like the health of the player throughout the levels, and having this activated during focus-testing allowed them balance the game better. We (Starbreeze) asked Valve about that a few years ago while working on Riddick, and while they still were very enthusiastic about the idea, they also told us that it never got to the point where it was really useful. My guess is that the big problem for most games is that you still need to rely on real players for the data to be useful.

Then again, that’s not equally true Hyena and game-books in general, since there isn’t that much of a difference between a simulate player and a real one. The only limitation my simulated player has is that it never goes to the action chart and actively uses items (healing potions for example). Of course, it also happily chooses a really stupid-sounding choice as often as a sane one. Still, the analysis gives a lot of information about how well the game-book is structured. Take a look:

http://www.collectingsmiles.com/hyena/analysis/fftd_analyze.jpg

This is a flowchart generated from a simulated run of 40139 playthroughs (yes, it took a few hours) and shows for example that:
• The game is  completed  in 7.5% of the cases
• The Gourgaz kills you in 57% of the cases
• The most dangerous enemy are The Doomwolves, who kills you in 74% of the cases 

It also displays a couple of “flaws”:
• There is this really big path that takes off from near-death experience in this section that is shown in less than 0.1% of the cases.
• A couple of sections are never displayed, either because of the problem above, or because of this one, where a fight extremely seldom lasts 4 rounds.

I intend to expose this analysis functionality in Hyena, so this tool will hopefully be available to anyone who wants to write his own game-book.

Posted: March 7th, 2008 under Game design, Projects.
Comments: none

Yesterday I attended a lecture by Jonas Carlquist called “Datorspel + Människa = Berättelse” (Computergame + Human = Story). The lecture was mostly directed towards people who didn’t know that much about storytelling in games, but it was still very interesting to see everything from an academics point of view (also, he made a good impression on me by namedropping important games for storytelling like Deus Ex and Planescape Torment).

After thinking a bit about this lecture I though of some of the views I and my fellow designers at Starbreeze has had on how to tell stories in games. In the last couple of games we’ve made, storytelling has been extremely important.

I distinguish two goals you have when trying to make a good story-driven game. Let’s call the first “Immersion and emotional impact”, which basically is a story that the player cares about and feels he is a part of. This goal is the one we’ve been striving for in Riddick and Darkness and borrows heavily from movies. A lot of progress has been made here the last couple of years. The quality of the stories has increased because good writers are writing them and the acting are substantially better than just a few years ago. Perhaps most importantly; stories in games are told much better today.

On of the key changes is that nowadays stories are mostly told from a player perspective. We decided to do this in Riddick, which in that game meant that we never showed the player anything that the Riddick couldn’t see. This helps strengthen the relationship between the player and the hero. Another example of what’s improved is that you seldom see the game violating the trust of the player by having the hero make a decision that the player would never do. A typical example if this is when you, after fighting off hoards of enemies in a game, enter a room and see a cut scene where your hero suddenly surrenders; something that the player would never have done in that situation. This can still be seen from time to time, but not so often anymore.

The second goal can be called “Interactivity and non-linearity”, which in my opinion is more to the core of what games are about; meaningful choices. This means having a story where the player can make decisions that affect how the game-story plays out (or even create new ones). This is a much harder goal to reach, since the complexity of a story grows exponentially for every meaningful choice the player is allowed to make.

Obviously, combing these two goals is even harder. To compete with other games in terms of quality a games-developer must focus on the things he knows that the player will experience. With today’s quality standard, doing a game where you have two different story-paths instead of one could be double the work for the developer, especially if the developer strives for the “Immersion and emotional impact” goal. This is because so much effort is needed to create any story-related situation in a game (you need a unique voice and animations and usually a lot of other specifically created content).

Doing predefined story-situations like that may be a stupid way to create stories in games, but it’s basically the only way to do it today. Ideally, the game should be smart enough to be able to automatically create involving story situations inside the game-world, but we are nowhere near there yet, at least not with the kind of beautifully rendered worlds and characters we are used to.

Until then there are many ways where you cheat. One concept we made up about during the development of Riddick is “The illusion of non-linearity”, which basically states that as long as the player believes he has a choice, even though he may not, the player will feel he made an important decision which makes the story more involving. There are many ways to implement this thinking, and I most recently saw it used in the excellent Mass Effect, where you often have three dialogue-choices that lead to the same result, even though they can look like opposites from the player perspective.

Hopefully, we will see more innovative ways to allow the player to have a bigger part in the creation of the game-story. There are a lot of designers out there thinking about it, and there are a couple of interesting games in production trying to do just that. The future will tell.

Posted: January 16th, 2008 under Game design.
Comments: none

One of the hardest things to create in games is the interactive stories. It’s probably because that’s something that is very new for us. Before computers, the only stories you could call interactive or branching were the role-playing game-books such as Lone Wolf (which I remember foundly from my childhood). And even those stories are not much older than half a century. Even so, I wish interactive storytelling had evolved as so many other areas related to computers and computer games like graphics technology and AI has.
 
There are some interesting things going on the subject, though. From the time back when Infocom introduced Zork to the world people have continued the fine tradition of interactive fiction. Every year people try to outperform each other in the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition by creating a short text-adventures where telling a compelling story in an interactive format is key. It’s well worth to check out.
 
The game-industry in it-self hasn’t produced that much new the last couple of years. One of the more interesting was of course Indigo Prophecy which as one of the best attempts of a true adventure-game in a long time. Still, there wasn’t that much innovation in terms of story-telling and the same must go for the game I myself worked on, The Darkness, where the steps on interactive story-telling we did take are evolutionary and where the story should be immersive rather than have true choices.
 
One of the bigger problems in my opinion is the lack of techniques that can be used to talk to non-player characters. Having dialogues as catalysts for story-telling is crucial for most movies and books, but they are so very hard to do believable in an interactive media. Very few games today offer anything more interesting other than multiple dialogue-choices, substituting any real interactivity for a set of predefined questions. To me, that’s a step backward from back even from 1966 when ELIZA was created. An exception is of course Façade, an experimental game where you converse with an arguing couple. It combines an advanced AI with a text-input system and it’s an noteworthy accomplishment, but still failes to convince in my opinion.
 
For some time I’ve been experimenting with a new way to have conversations with non-player characters. The idea is to allow the player to pick up and carry conversation-topics between characters in the game. If a non-player character mentions something new, the player can pickup that topic and carry it to another character to ask him about it. By limiting the number of topics the player can carry, you force the player to decide which topics are worth keeping, instead of just asking about everything as you do in many games. This creates some interesting possibilities where information almost becomes an item that can be used for puzzles and trade.
 
While it’s not as ambitions a system as to one used in Façade it’s instead very simple and user-friendly (once you get the hang of it). It doesn’t hide that it’s a restricted system but I believe that that isn’t necessary to make dialogues an interesting catalysts for interactive storytelling. I’ve released the prototype I made using this system for PC and today I also finished the PSP version of the game. Check it out here.
 

Posted: October 29th, 2007 under Game design, Projects.
Comments: 25

Having a great idea for a game is valuable. That goes without saying, but exactly how valuable is such an idea? I’ve become rather cynical on the subject after working a while in the games-industry. If 50 people work on one game for over two years, how many good ideas are thought up? And how many of those are needed for the next game? Even if you don’t have a team of 50 people or don’t plan to work on one project for that long, there is a good chance that you’ll come up with a bunch of ideas that could become great games; Ideas that never will be realized.

Cosmonaut is such an idea. I came up with it one sleepless night thinking about how I would like to be able to watch the stars from my bed. I realized that it would never be a good fit for Starbreeze, the game-developer I work for. Nor would it be something I could realize myself, since it was too content-intensive. Still, I found the thought fascinating and couldn’t get it out of my mind. There was something special about the lonely cosmonaut staring out of the window in his stranded shuttle. I realized that I at least had to write a brief high concept about it to get it out of my system. It’s not very likely that I will ever make this game, but I can always look at the sky at night and dream that I one day will be able to play this game.

You can find the high concept at www.collectingsmiles.com/cosmonaut

Posted: October 5th, 2007 under Game design, Projects.
Comments: 4

The Swedish game-magazine Level had a nice article about the relationship between art and games in their July 2007 issue. This article contained an interview with me about the game Rorschach, where I collaborated with Ida Rödén to make a small art-game. This game has been shown in a number of more “traditional” art-forums, for example at Umeå Konsthögskola and the M.A.D.E. festival. Art and games has always had a slightly weird relasionship and as usual opinions drift apart. Personally I see interactivity as the key word, and Rorschach tries to explore the interactivity of conversations; something that games in general have been pretty unsuccessful in.

Rorschach is now available for download and can be found at http://www.collectingsmiles.com/rorschach.

Posted: September 26th, 2007 under Art, Game design, Projects.
Comments: 2

Mud and plenty of wind can turn a tent into a flying dragon!

Oh sweet mud. I had the pleasure of attending the Roskilde Festival and watch a few bands like BJÖRK-INFLAMES-ROKYERICKSON-BEASTIEBOYS-DIZZEERASCAL-CSS-QUEENSOFTHESTONEAGE-MUSTASCH-BONDEDEROLE-FLAMINGLIPS-CULTOFLUNA.
But since this is a gaming-blog I will not bore you with that. Instead I’d like smoothly move the topic over to licensed music in games. In The Darkness we did a pretty cool thing. We crammed the disc full with video content that ran on the in-game TVs that were scattered all over the game. We had a couple of different channels with movies like To Kill a Mockingbird and a bunch of episodes of Flash Gordon. These were all public domain, so we could basically do what we wanted with them, but one of the channels in the game was reserved for modern Swedish metal-music. I think we have about 26 music videos in there performed by small Swedish metal bands like Closer, Defleshed, El Caco, F.K.Ü, Acid House Kings, man.machine.industry etc. It was a great way for us to get some extra spice into the game as well as for the artists to promote their music. Then, we ran into the legal nightmare. Most of these artists the were interested in having their songs in the game where registered with STIM as well as some other organization which I don’t remember the name of. Because of that, we couldn’t just have the artists’ permission to put the songs in the game, but STIM demanded huge amounts of money of us to have them in there. This is perhaps understandable since they are there to make sure the artists don’t get screwed and they tried to apply their standing rules probably created for TV and movies but they had little interest to work around them. Still, after some dreadful legal mumbo-jumbo and some tremendous work by our super-hero lawyer, they finally got the picture and everyone was happy.

This made me realize how young the games industry is in many ways. We want to grow up and be able to use all the resources all other media use, but the structure just isn’t there yet. We also tried to have a famous song running during the end credits but the number we were given to just use the lyrics where ridiculous, probably because they used the same payment scheme as the end-credits of a Hollywood movie. We found a good alternative to that as well, but it can be extremely hard run your head into the wall like that over and over again and I hope that this is something that will become easier as the industry grow even bigger.

Posted: July 17th, 2007 under Game design, Travel.
Comments: none

Since I traveled with a few Irrational guys on my short trip through The New World, I got a chance to see Bioshock in quite some detail. This game has been in production in almost four years, which is a very long time for a video game. Now, I know how developing a game for a long time can be from a developer standpoint, but I’ve never spent much though on how the world’s perception of a game can evolve as well.

Bioshock was introduced to the world last E3 and was perceived by many as the Game of the Show. This gave me great pleasure since the game was so wonderfully weird and original. But things seemed to go downhill after E3, at least from my perspective. For every new screenshot or video released, my vision of what the game would be grew further away from what I wanted it to be. This may not be uncommon, but for Bioshock it really drained my enthusiasm. I’ve been talking to some people at Irrational from time to time during this last year and heard their perception of this as well as some of the development issues they have been facing, which has been extremely interesting. It has made me realize how connected the perception of an unreleased game affects the perception of its developers, and how that probably affect how the game turns out in the end. Isn’t that something that is very unique with this media?So, what am I getting to? Not very much other than that after this trip, all my faith in Bioshock has been restored. It may not be the game that I dreamt it would be after last year’s E3, but Irrational have turned my perfect dream into something just as good. So, just as I did last year, I once again believe it will be great. Even one of the Great Ones. August 21 will tell.

Posted: July 10th, 2007 under Game design, Games.
Comments: none