It’s something I don’t see enough among designers, I think. People who burn to create that indefinable magic that we dream of when we pick up a new game in the store. People who radiate the love they have for games.

Perhaps the eyes of the people at GDC had been ignited from the many inspiring lectures and encounters. Or perhaps GDC draws the kind of people who’s eyes remain alight, people who’s spirit never ceases to resonate with the craft.

It is probably both.

Monday

The definitive highlight of the first day of GDC was Warren Spector’s lecture “What Videogames Can Learn from Other Media… What We Can’t… And What We Shouldn’t”.

He compared games to other media, looking at in what ways they are similar and in what ways they are different. He did this in an attempt to identify what our medium is, what we are about (beyond basic notions as interactivity).

Warren, in contrast to people like David Cage (although his own session “How Far Are You Prepared to Go to Develop an Original Project?” was inspiring as well), embraces the uniqueness of the form of video games, instead of trying to emulate other art forms like movies. He pleaded with us not to dull the edges of the things that poke holes through the borders of our comfort zone. The zone defined by the narrative structures of movies and literature, that we perhaps still feel holds a firm grip on “real storytelling”.

One example is visual control. I have personally, as a game designer, found it to be somewhat of a limitation that we cannot control the camera to show the player things. Just think about what a subtle smirk can tell in a movie or in a book – in games this is a visual language that often isn’t useful, as the player might be looking the wrong way or simply aren’t close enough.

Warren’s session changed my old viewpoint of it as a problem, while talking about why it is inappropriate to use cuts or montage in games. He said that, while necessary in the language of movies, it removes the immersion or the sense of presence in games.

The player, not the director should be in control. The player decides what to focus on.

The player decides what to focus on.

This is hardly news, but it changed what I have felt was a weakness into what I now realize is one of the many unique strengths of our medium. The language of movies has become so intuitive to us that it is easy to see anything that limits it as a weakness. But it is anything but. We must free ourselves from the language of movies, to allow games to follow their own path, to have their own language.

On the same topic he stated that games are not about “magic moments”, highly scripted events that mimic those of movies. They are, however, about repeated actions (allowing for choices). Of course, this goes completely against what David Cage had to say, but while they both have a point, I feel that Warren is the one of the two that has the best grasp of the unique character of our medium. That said, I admire Cage’s goals of telling powerful stories in games, and I share his ambition.

Warren continued to talk about themes I’ve heard him talk about before; that idea of shared authorship – that designers should embrace players as partners. Allowing the players to share responsibility for the story allows them to explore, and learn about, themselves.

Not to be forgotten was “Limbo: Balancing Fun and Frustration in Puzzle Design”. I know that not everyone agrees, but I found Limbo to be an amazing game. What stood out from the session the most was that A) the lead level designer had no previous experience in the industry (perhaps that’s why they dared to break rules?) and B) that they wanted the player to die a lot and have fun doing so.

That players die a lot in that game has been criticized, but I think that without any real penalty it’s just a fun way to allow the player to explore the boundaries of each puzzle. I’ll write more about the game itself shortly, hopefully within a few days.

Tuesday

I’m looking forward to Guild Wars 2, so it was no surprise that I enjoyed ArenaNet’s session “Designing Guild Wars 2 Dynamic Events” very much. It’s even less of a surprise for those who know that I feel like dynamic worlds is the proper road ahead for MMOs. They mainly talked about leaving the traditional MMO quest structure behind for scaling dynamic events, that allow players to cause change in the world. Temporary and scripted, but still.

It surprised me how fearless ArenaNet seems, especially in comparison to most other MMORPG studios. Some design concepts that are more or less cemented as “truths” among MMO developers, ideas other studios wouldn’t dare challenge, are simply shunned by ArenaNet as “not fun”. Examples are the leveling curve (GW2‘s flatten early, because “leveling is a description of progress, not a means to an end”), killing off quests, and not preventing players to game the scaling events as they prefer people to have fun rather than to try to stop players from destroying their own play experience.

“Creating a High-Performance: An Interactive Dynamic Natural World” was about the design and technology behind the terrain creation and deformation in the coming game From Dust. The technology running the erosion, water flow and the creation of new land through lava seemed powerful and realistic. But the real joy was to see Eric Chahi present it, next to programmer Ronan Bel. Yes, that’s Eric Chahi of Another World fame! He was great to watch – an excited artist (if you’ve played Another World, you know he’s an artist), nervous, energetic, happy!

I’m looking forward to From Dust, no doubt.

Tuesday was also the day of my own session, “The Untapped Potential of the MMO”. I will publish my script and my slides online the coming week, so until then here’s the summary:

“MMOs relying on the player to weave her own story becomes an increasingly distant idea as developers borrow narrative traditions from singleplayer games. The gains of the designers’ sophistication in storytelling are easy to see, but what are the drawbacks of this path? Are there alternatives to handcrafted content, and what would the benefits of such alternatives be?

We look at the losing battle of creating the never-ending game, the limitations of static content in multiplayer environments, and the dynamic systems that could be the core of our worlds.”

I got quite a lot of positive feedback afterwards, which was great because you never know how these things turn out until it’s done.

Wednesday

I attended a panel discussion on Wednesday, called “3D Development Engine Shootout”. Imagine how bloody a panel of the bigshots from the industry’s hottest competing game engines (Unreal, Crytek, Unity, etc) must be. Or, imagine how tame it could end up when they try to be goodguys in front of an audience of potential customers. They all seemed to agree that they all had the most powerful engine, they all had excellent tools and… Yeah.

Still, good to see these guys’ faces, and I did end up in a meeting with Mark Rein of Epic/Unreal later that day.

The last session I attended was “Living City in Mafia 2″, where coder Jan Kratochvil took us through the details of simulating realistic city life, with pedestrians and cars and mayhem. Having worked with MMORPGs, this is an interest of mine. Jan didn’t discuss theoretics but was very hands on about how they did it, which was good. He gave details on the driving simulation (and how the AI used it), dynamic spawning and despawning of NPC’s and cars, and how to make the citizens behave like proper humans while roaming the streets. Actual practical knowledge I can use. If you’re doing something similar, ask him for his slides.

GamesCom opened for industry professionals on Wednesday, so I managed to try Guild Wars 2 and to see Funcom’s cool The Secret World booth, before my flight left for Oslo.

Now how do I get into the alpha of Guild Wars 2?

We’ll see if tomorrow can top it.

Return in a day or two, and I will have a lengthy post about the sessions and the conference, and in what ways it has made me wiser.

Oh, and I should make sure to shoot some pictures tomorrow.

Humans are story creatures. Our lives are the narratives we craft from everything we experience. Our dreams, our hopes and fears, our daily lives are stories we write. When someone smiles or frowns at us, we find new fabric for our continuous story.

Storytellers are those who share fabric with you. They give you tales, characters, feelings to use in your own story-weave. They deepen your own personal narrative. They help you understand.

This year, Funcom’s yearly summer party took place on a boat going through the Oslo fjord. I happened to shoot quite a few pictures, and I uploaded the best ones my photo blog. It also have a few shots from the 17th of May, Norway’s crazy national holiday where the entire country dresses in traditional folk clothing.

I never played Deus Ex.

I never played Deus Ex – often hailed as the best game ever made – and three days ago it had its ten year anniversary. What kind of designer, nay, what kind of gamer am I to have never played this king of games?

Vague memories tell me I tried the first level without being impressed, only to quit after a short session. While I’ve read tons about it since then, and its (apparently) underwhelming sequel, it’s all second hand information to me. So, after ten years (and plenty of grey hairs), I think that I just might appreciate its complexity and political content more. This is why I have decided to play the game over the coming weeks, and tell you about my experience in a series of posts.

Now all I hope for is that the very dated visuals won’t be that off-putting, or I might just find it too difficult to immerse myself into Spector’s world.

I spend more time running from a to b than actually fighting anything!
Having some travel time when going to new areas is no problem, but if you’re always having to run a marathon to get to a quest objective, it won’t take long until you’re both bored and frustrated. It’s quite common that designers wish to extend their quests through long journeys filled with mobs, but more often than not the mobs on the way can be bypassed. Traveling is not content.

I feel like I’m going through the same areas all the time!
Sometimes zones have just one main quest hub. This forces players to repeatedly pass the same areas to get and deliver quests in the same old quest hub. This continues even as the player has moved on to higher level areas in the zone, having to fight mobs outlevelled to a degree where they no longer pose any kind of challenge.

Quest pockets

“Quest pockets” is a framework for structured content flow within zones. The purpose is to avoid the problems described earlier, minimizing the need to travel back and forth time and again, using the space effectively and allowing the player to discover the zone organically. There are three important components to this:

• Keep the content close to the quest hub.
• Use all 360 degrees of the quest hub for content.
• Spread the content evenly around the quest hub.

The area around a quest hub should be divided into 4 quest pockets.  The player get quests for one pocket, heads out to the corresponding pocket space to finish the quest objectives, and finally returns to deliver the quests in the quest hub. Then he progresses to the next pocket. If possible, the quest levels should be different between the quest pockets, allowing for a natural progress between them.

Each quest hub should have a budget for the number of available quests. In a best case scenario, the number of quests should be evenly divided for the four pockets. Let’s have a look at a possible formula for quest budgets.

There are 3 factors to regard. How many hours of gameplay do we expect the area to provide? How long should quests last in average on the level range of the area? How much of the gameplay time should be covered by quests?

Hours per area * quests per hour * play time ratio

Quests per hour
1-20: 6 (10 minutes)
20-40: 4 (15 minutes)
40-60: 3 (20 minutes)

If we have a quest area with a planned 4 hours of gameplay at level 50, and we say that the amount of quests per hour in that level range is 4 (15 minute quests, according to the table), and we want 30% more quests than the necessary minimum for always having your play time covered by a quest, then the numbers would be:

4 * 4 * 1,3 = 21 quests for that area. Those 21 quests would then be divided between the 4 quest pockets, giving us about 5 quests per pocket.

Picking pockets and zoning out

We control content flow throughout the game on 3 levels; between quest pockets, between quest hubs and between zones. Let’s look at quest pocket progression first.

Using the previous example, we have 5 quests per pocket. We’re trying to not overwhelm players with alternatives, but are at the same time after a sense of non-linearity. The two ways of controlling access are levels and quest chains. In an ideal situation the quest hub would involve more than one level, which guides the player in deciding what content to access first. The quests of one pocket could also unlock quests of the next pocket.

Looking at the figure above, the player would enter the playfield close to quest hub 1. In our example, pocket 1.1 and 1.2 would have 5 quests each at level 48-49, and 1.3 and 1.4 5 quests each at level 50-51. Some of the quests in 1.3 and 1.4 would be followup quests from 1.1 and 1.2 This way we get a natural progression through the zones.

Players progress between the quest hubs through transition quests, leading the players between quest hubs, and zones. Returning to the example, a transition quest would become available when the player has finished some of the content in 1.4 – taking them to quest hub 2 where new quests are available starting in 2.1.

This second quest hub could have a few followup quests from the first, allowing for a continous narrative. Just be careful not to block players from finding content in later quest hubs (if they arrive in the zone with a high level character) through too many and too long quest chains.

When the player has finished the second quest hub, another transition quest takes the player from 2.4 to 3.1. This is the final hub of the zone, where 3.4 carries a new transition quest taking them to the next zone’s first quest hub.

As always, guidelines like these have to be broken to create interesting and unique experiences. Have quests go through the entire zone, or between several zone. It’s vital to make sure the experience does not feel formulaic, especially considering how formulaic MMORPG’s are by default.

I only remember one other game that was so evocative before you even played it. An almost completely black game box, with a minimalistic silhouette of a futuristic city in silver. A bold typeface with letters in black.

Beneath a Steel Sky.

It was released in 1994, but I have yet to see a better box design. 16 years have passed, but I doubt a studio has given any game a better name. But what of the content of the box, what of the game?

Dark, deep, funny, beautiful – I remember it to be all those things. But I was just a kid when I played it. Perhaps, with the mindset of an adult and with so many technological revolutions between now and then, all of that would be lost if I played it today. Perhaps.

A couple of months back I bought an iPod Touch. Why not. I like gadgets. But this gadget demanded software. Or, as the Apple marketing department wants me to call it, apps. I’m a gamer, so I bought some board games and some unplayable action games (yes, twitch gameplay is best played with the tactical feedback that physical buttons provide).

So what kind of games would work well on a pure touch screen interface? Searching the app store on iTunes, I decided to search for non-twitch games like point-and-click adventures. After a while, I found a “remastered” version of Beneath a Steel Sky.

The iPod/iPhone version has one thing other versions do not – a small screen. To be honest, playing Steel Sky on my 22″ monitor would not be pleasant, with pixels so large I could choke on them. On the iPod the game looks more the way I remember it, the small high resolution display making it quite pleasing on the eyes.

And yes, it still is beautiful. All the backgrounds were drawn by Dave Gibbons, the artist behind the Watchmen comic, and whatever he charged it was worth it. Every screen is filled with atmosphere and small details, and while the locations sometimes seem strange, they more often than not feel authentic. The art direction is consistent and makes exploration inviting and rewarding.

The story is a dark tale about a post-apocalyptic society of city states in Australia. Big Brother is watching, and the lives of its citizens are shaped by the status they are given. Access and material standards are all dependent on this, and the higher your status is the closer to the ground you live – far away from the pollution those closest to the steel sky breath. Make one mistake and lose it all.

The player controls Robert Foster, a free man that grew up outside the city states, in the wilderness of Australia. He’s kidnapped/arrested (depending how totalitarian your views are), but manages to escape when taken to the city, which he explores with his cynical robot friend Joey. His motivation is twofold; to flee the city and to discover the mysterious history of his family.

It handles exposition of this unknown world brilliantly, feeding you fragments of the big picture without ever deteriorating into self-serving storytelling. It knows what to leave out and what to show, giving the player a feeling of being in a consistent world with a history.

While the dialog is well written, it reveals a certain lack of self-confidence on behalf of the designers. It’s witty and entertaining according to the traditions of point-and-click adventure games, but this almost ever-present humor weakens the power of the quite dark and serious plot.

The core of the classic adventure games was the puzzle. Their narrative unfolding by solving puzzles, unlocking new areas, characters and new puzzles. Steel Sky suffers, to some degree from the same problem that plagued most adventure games. Quite often the solutions to the puzzles were abstract and could only be reached by trial-and error. What is worse, sometimes the story doesn’t even motivate the puzzles beforehand, forcing you to perform bizarre actions without realizing why.

This, perhaps, was one of the reasons why the adventure genre was largely abandoned by the games industry.

Despite these criticisms, it is still a fantastic game. Dark, deep, funny, beautiful? Yes, it still holds up! It stands apart from other games in the same genre through art direction, setting and story, all building a unique and (grown up) experience with a punch that the games industry still struggles to reach today.

If you’re interested, try the iPod version. A new intro by Dave Gibbons, a decent control system, “high resolution” graphics and a good hint system makes this perhaps the best possible way to experience Beneath a Steel Sky today.

Why? I have no idea. Perhaps there just wasn’t enough distractions on the web. I found the site through Scott Jennings’ blog, one of my daily distractions.

Check out my page at formspring.me/pixelpark, and fire off a question if you’re bored. And hey, let’s not pretend you’re not.

It felt as if game director American McGee stepped unto the territory of movie director Tim Burton, borrowing some of his visual language and his habit of creating dark and sinister fairytales. When I heard that Burton was directing a new Alice in Wonderland feature, it felt like a natural step for both Burton and Alice. Lewis Carrol’s old tale had already proven to provide a perfect setting for all things Burtonesque.

Last friday was the Norwegian premiere of the movie. A mediocre trailer had dampened my expectations, but I left the cinema disappointed nonetheless. While it had rich environments and fun character designs, it lacked the sense of wonder that is so integral to the story. It carried the elements of psychadelic surrealism that Wonderland is famous for, but they felt bland, uninteresting and ultimately generic. I longed for the darkness that Burton’s brush normally is drenched with.

Generic is a keyword for this movie. The characters were almost all unengaging, with the expection of The Mad Hatter. Johnny Depp’s characterization and the character’s backstory made the Hatter interesting and entertaining, in stark contrast to the weak portrayal of Alice. Yet, the biggest problem with the movie is the story. Tim Burton has said that he was unable to connect emotionally with the original story. His unfortunate solution was to paste a generic fantasy tale about good versus evil, a magical sword and a youngling embracing her destiny of becoming a brave warrior. Clichés piled on top of each other. Clichés that have no place in the Underworld.

When we in the third act see Alice clad in armor fighting a dragon, it is quite clear how deep Burton’s disconnect with the original story was. He must never have truly understood what made it special, or the potential of its surrealism. I could go on to discuss how if a director doesn’t know how to approach a source material then he better refrain from adapting it – but I think I will let the Cheshire cat speak in my place:

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. “Which road do I take?” she asked. “Where do you want to go?” was his response. “I don’t know,” Alice answered. “Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”