Bit of a change of pace this week. Less work on Art, more on Story.

I’ve decided to rework the introductory plotline(s), ie the beginning part of the game. There’s a reason for this reworking and I’ll write about that tomorrow when I’m not so exhausted. For now, since screenshots are what everyone really cares about, here’s one of the reworked plotline elements so far, using this neat flowchart freeware I found. I really should have done it like that from the start, word documents are a pain :

(Hah! Did you think I was going to show you the actual story text? The only thing I’ll say is red point there is the point when the war ended.)

Note, those aren’t quests, which is why there isn’t much branching. Think of them as bullet points of the back story, arranged into a flowchart to show interrelations. It’s not near complete yet, but story work takes time. I enjoy it, but it’s a lot of sitting around going ‘And then..um…something happens over there to make that happen, but what? Hmm…’

I did do a little on the art side this weekend. A few subtle things, like grunging up the wood textures slightly and making the buildings look like they lean a little.

Then some chimneys and doors. Note, these are separate widgets you place on the building model, that’s why some buildings have a ton of doors.

Squeeeeee!!!!!

The weekend is upon us. And this weekend is particularly special. For this weekend I’m going to go watch Eddie Izzard Live. Squeee More!!!! Izzard is my favorite comedian, I love his rambling brand of nonsense. And I have a seat near the front.

In case you’re some type of Heathen and don’t know Izzard, here are two of his best clips. Enjoy.

Rich Hudson mentioned the difficulty of creating an interesting and original combat system for an RPG, and I have to agree with him. Sure, you can make up new damage attacks, buffs/debuffs etc, but that is just slapping a new layer of paint on an old idea, one we’ve seen before.

So how do you spice up combat? Well, I’m not intending to (or claiming that I could!) create a comprehensive guide with this post (this is one of my quick posts for the week, sorry, I’m busy working on SoW ) but the place I’d start is looking at combat resource types.

Once you strip away the graphics and animations, most RPG combat is about managing 2 resources, health and mana. You get various tools to damage one or the other of those two resources of your opponent while protecting or restoring those resources for yourself. Pretty much everything you do in combat is about manipulating those two resource types.

A way to spice it up is to introduce new resource types and/or create new methods of acquiring/manipulating/spending those resources.

Some people might gasp as the heresy I’m about to utter, but World of Warcraft is a great example of this. One thing WoW does nicely is create classes that ‘feel’ different to play, mainly due to the different resources they use. Some are your standard health/mana classes. But then you have warriors who generate Rage when certain combat events happen, based on their current Stance (aggressive stance gets you Rage when you hit someone, Defensive stance when you take damage), resulting in gameplay designed around building and maintaining your Rage levels during combat. Rogues employ combo points and finishing moves, Death Knights have a small pool of Runes on cooldowns which power their spells in various combinations, turning their gameplay from spending a capped resource into maintaining a good ‘rhythm’ of Rune use so you can keep your cycle of abilities going.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Diablo 3 team have said they are going to try give each class a unique resource type, it’s a great way to differentiate classes. So if you’re trying to spice up your combat, consider a new resource type. Maybe you have mechanics based around Fear/Morale? Magic powered by the souls of the dead or sunlight? There are many avenues to explore.

If you’re wondering, SoW does make use of a special resource type or two. I’ll talk about that another time…

Mini-games in RPGs : The Suck, am I right? Mini-games should be kept out of RPGs or at least restricted to a few once-off puzzles, right? Well, except for the combat mini-game. THAT one is fine.

Wait, what? Combat isn’t a mini-game, surely?

Yes, it is. Or rather, it shows that the issue isn’t as clear-cut as all that. What is a grown-up version of a mini-game? The answer is : an integrated subsystem of the gameplay.

Combat isn’t roleplaying. It is easy to ‘roleplay’ without having a set of mechanics designed to model combat scenarios in detail. You could abstract out the whole set of actions into a single combat roll, or a set of combat rolls, informing the player of the outcome after it resolves, in a similar way to handling a lockpicking or persuasion skill check. But few if any roleplaying systems are made without some section of the rules designed to model combat, a legacy of how RPGs evolved from wargames perhaps, or it could simply be that humanity is a violent species and our fantasy games tend to revolve around letting us explore experiences we feel drawn to but can’t or fear to experience in real life, adventure and violence and danger and power, things that combat offers in spades.

Whatever the reason, combat mechanics are generally a large and fundamental part of gameplay in most RPGs, and few people think “aw shit, another boring mini-game” every time they have a combat encounter. I think this is proof that mini-games CAN work, and it also allows us to analyze how a mini-game should work, if you want it to be greeted enthusiastically by your players. I’m going to post up the points I think make for a ’successful’ mini-game, if you have any points to add feel free to put them in the comments.

Now, a mini-game can still be enjoyable without having all of the following points, I simply think that you need all of these for the mini-game to feel ’seamless’ to the gameplay. Ie for the player not to consider them separate to the fundamental experience, a diversion. Or worse, a complete waste of time.

*It is worth noting that combat, as a mini-game itself, can fall prey to any of these issues, which generally results in the combat feeling unsatisfying, perhaps even turning the player off the game entirely if combat is the main focus*

*Also note, optional mini-games are excluded. If it’s something the player can choose to trivially circumvent, such as Arcomage here or Pazaak in Kotor, that’s fine. I’m talking specifically about mini-games which are fundamentally integrated into certain gameplay paths ( such as lockpicking) and are repeated throughout the game.*

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1) Complexity. Often the simplest mistake with mini-games is to make them too simple. The type of person who buys a complex and deep roleplaying game isn’t going to be happy if the game forces them to play tic-tac-toe every 20 minutes. Sure, that person might enjoy the occasional game of tic-tac-toe, but anything too simple lacks challenge and variety, especially on repeated play-through’s of the mini-game. Your mini-game doesn’t need to have a gazillion moving parts, it simply needs a large enough solution space in comparison to how many times the player will encounter it.

If you only encounter a puzzle once in the game, a single solution is ok. The more times the player encounters it, the larger the solution space needs to be to provide variety, novelty and challenge. Chess is a good example, there aren’t that many types of pieces but the solution space is vast, enough to have kept humanity enjoying the game for centuries.

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2) Increasing Challenge Over Time. It is an accepted principle of game design that the game should ramp up the challenge as the player masters the mechanics, offering an enjoyable rhythm of increasing challenge followed by increasing reward/psychological payoff. Yet so often this is forgotten when it comes to the mini-games, they stay static. Which is actually the same as saying they get easier and easier, as the player masters the mini-game. If these mini-games are mandatory, they become annoying time-sinks.

Ideally, the mini-game should increase both the challenge AND the range of options open to the player over time, in the same way that combat will increase enemy difficulty but also give them new moves to use in combat.

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3) Supports the Theme and Feeling of the Action Being Undertaken. The gameplay of the mini-game, how it plays and ‘feels’, should be consistent with whatever action or task the player is trying to perform that the mini-game is an abstraction of. Even though a mini-game is an abstraction to some degree for the sake of gameplay, you want the gameplay to give a similar ’sense’ as the thing being modeled. When you’re trying to hack a computer or pick a lock, playing a game of Mastermind or Hangman or whatever is generally immersion breaking.

Turn-based combat in an RPG is obviously an abstraction but it conveys that ‘chess’ feeling of making tactical decisions on a battlefield. Even though it is an abstraction it doesn’t hurt the feeling of being in battle, it supports it. If you’re trying to model computer hacking, try to create gameplay that gives the player a feeling of penetrating security systems via different hacking attacks rather than a simple pattern-matching memory game.

I’d like to take a moment to point out a type of mini-game which suffers more than others from this problem : dialogue mini-games. The problem is that human speech is incredibly complicated. If you abstract away from direct speech then you can get away with making ‘character interaction’ more mechanical, see the way diplomacy is handled in 4X strategy games, where nations make demands and threats against each other. But the minute you’re face-to-face with an NPC and trying to create the sense of actual conversation, the mechanical and ‘gamey’ nature of mini-games tends to destroy any sense of verisimilitude.

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4) Tied to the Roleplaying Layer. All gameplay systems make use of some set of skills the player has, they wouldn’t have any gameplay otherwise. However, to successfully integrate your mini-game into the overall framework of a roleplaying game, it needs to tie into the roleplaying layer. In other words, it has to involve a mix of player ability and character ability. Your character can’t be an expert lock-pick simply because you personally are good at tic-tac-toe.

Exactly what the balance of player-to-character skill should be in any system is a matter of taste, but I’d say the character influence cannot be so trivial that player skill can easily counteract it. If that is the case, it is no longer integrated into the greater roleplaying game, IMO. Which makes it feel disjointed, separate from the whole.

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So those are the 4 points I think you need to meet in order to avoid the loathing heaped on mini-games. Can we achieve that in all areas? I don’t know. Certainly we can do better in many areas than the current RPG standard. The Thief series showed us the possibilities for deeper stealth gameplay. Games like Space Rangers 2 and Storm of Zehir have added trade and exploration layers. The Ultima series have shown us that morality can be handled with more sophistication than the simple Good/Evil meters that are common these days.

But in other cases it may be better to stick to simple skill checks/no checks if you can’t meet the criteria above, whether due to lack of resources, because that isn’t your game’s focus (Diablo 3 shouldn’t have lockpicking system, for example) or simply because the problem itself is difficult to solve. Better to use a system that doesn’t get in the way than one which actively detracts from the experience. Until we can synthesize human speech, for example, avoiding dialogue mini-games entirely may be the only workable solution.

Hax, another poor week, productivity wise. The week itself was busy, I’d planned to work hard over the weekend but…I got Mass Effect 2 on Friday. And, well, I’ve been quite enjoying it I’ll talk more about that later, but for now I may as well update on what little I have done.

I decided to do a texture pass. The buildings looked too drab and brown, I decided some variety was needed so that the player’s eye doesn’t simply ’slide off’ all that brown.

Some things to remember when creating a model, I’ve found. It is important to pay attention to the silhouette. You want to avoid it looking too boxy and flat, you want the silhouette to be interesting. Make parts that jut out, avoid absolute symmety, vary the angle of planes. When it comes to textures you want to do something similar, you want to try break up visual repetition, both in texture pattern and colour shades. (I’m not saying I necessary succeed at these things, but I’m working at it. )

The other thing I did with the texture pass was think about the colour scheme. Generally, your scene should have a consistent colour scheme, a palette. Throwing down colours at random doesn’t work, and you have to make sure the colours you use work well together. Part of my pass was to adjust the textures to work better together.

Tiling textures can look very repetitive, visually. A simple trick to help counteract that is to further subdivide a plane. This allows you to alter the texture mapping on the subdivisions in order to counter that repetition. You’ll see a better example in a moment, but you can see it here too. I’ve cut up the wall plane with the wooden plank texture, then rotated the texture mapping 90 degrees in places so the planks run perpendicular to their previous orientation. A little less repetitive looking.

A better example is this new building I did. A bit of photoshop magic and I created that peeling-plaster-over-wood texture there. The problem with creating such a visually distinct pattern on a texture is that it looks horrible if you tile it. So I sliced up the wall plane along those beams, this allows me to map each rectangle plane between the beams individually. By shifting the texture mapping on the faces around, I can avoid having a lot of tiling artifacts. The new peeling-plaster texture is much mixed with the more saturated wood planks is much more pleasing to the eye than the old pure-brown scheme, so that is a success.

Another new building variant :

Also did a simple building connector widget, makes walking down an alley between two buildings more visually interesting :

Here is the set so far, you can see the roof tiles are tinged slightly differently for that variation :

With a few more models, you can start to see how it’s going to look when I put the district together.

I’ve decided to shut down the art blog. Not because I’m giving up on my art practice, but because I don’t feel I can maintain two (active) blogs. So instead I’ll be posting my art and studies here. Its rarely SoW related but screw it. Consider it an amusing interlude where you get to witness me struggling to go from sucky to slightly less sucky.

Latest work, from imagination. This one was a challenge to myself, a different angle from what I usually draw, 3 quarter view + upward head tilt. Didn’t really succeed, the nose/mouth is crap and I still suck at colour, but not as horrible as it could have been. I imagine this fellow’s name is something like Cedric or Cecil.

Bobisimo made this comment, in response to my gushing about Alpha Protocol :

Part of me worries that this means “If you piss off NPC “John Doe”, then Faction A will love you and Faction B will hate you. But if you make NPC “John Doe” like you”, then Faction A hates you and Faction B loves you.” Not that it matters to me all that much, I’m already sold on the game. And to be fair, I’m usually more impressed than less impressed when it comes to Obsidian and the final product.

A very valid concern. Especially given that the way most games handle “moral actions” is by breaking them down into a simple binary split. Good/evil, paragon/renegade/ light side/ dark side. Then putting all the “good” NPCs in one bracket, the evil ones in the other, and making it so they like actions which fit in their bracket but not in the opposite.

The problem is the simplification of the player’s choices and NPCs into two very artificial categories, ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Once you’ve done that, your system becomes little more than a trivial exercise in min/maxing to attain whichever result you want for your character, ie to be the saint or the bastard.

The first problem is that there is no overlap between the two categories. They are binary, and mutually exclusive. Can’t really be both ‘good’ AND ‘evil’. In real life we know you can be, that choice are more granular than that, that simple terms like good and evil aren’t enough to describe all the subtleties, to take into account differing points of view. That sometimes, the ‘good’ choice actually amounts to choosing the lesser of two evils.

By breaking the system down further than good/evil, by having the NPCs rate you on factors like how strictly you adhere to your mission specs, which other NPCs you make deals with to achieve your goals, how much of a mess you make achieving your goals, you introduce the possibility of ‘fuzzy’ results, where the NPC approves of some aspects and disapproves of others. Some may value discretion or discipline, some may value getting the job done no matter what.

This is a good start, but we need more to make the system work better than plain good/evil. We need to work to ensure that NPCs aren’t polar opposites. If one NPC values Discipline and Ruthlessness, another shouldn’t value the direct opposite, Freeform and Compassion. There should be overlaps and oppositions, but approval/disapproval ratings of NPCs should overlap. You need to work to ensure the player can’t simply choose a faction of NPCs and always be able to pick the options which greatly satisfy that entire group.

The final thing that is needed is the possibility of obfuscation. So my character did something mean out in some backwater where nobody could possibly know about it. Why then does everybody treat me like I’m a jerk? The ability to ‘cover your tracks’ is an immensely satisfying, even vital component of this system, in my mind. It boils down to mapping the path of information flow from the player to the NPCs, and to giving players the ability to block or redirect that information. The holy grail of that kind of design is the ability to actually play a manipulative evil character, instead of just a brutish bully.

Will AP achieve this? I dunno, but I think that is what they’re trying to build, and I for one am excited.

(Here’s a picture of a random Venn Diagram I googled. Enjoy it. It demonstrates…um…overlapping categories. Just thought I’d throw it out there.)

I will often do a concept doodle to play with ideas for SoW. They’re pretty rubbish, I’m nowhere near the skill of someone like Zach and I’m not spending much time on them either, so don’t expect masterpieces. But I suppose some of you might like to see ‘em, regardless. Just keep in mind that they may not quite visually capture the essence of a thing, it takes a skilled artist to nail something subtle such as a smirking expression. I’m still struggling to learn basic anatomy! Luckily, my writing skills are better than my drawing skills so I should be more competent at conveying subtleties in things like game dialogues.

Further reasons to be excited about Alpha Protocol :

LINK

To quote :

They all have their reasons and agendas that don’t break down neatly into good and evil.
…
In Alpha Protocol, the cause and effect breaks down into your objective, the means, the results, and then someone’s reaction (and the results/reactions usually spur different objectives, and… and well, the vicious cycle continues). In short, the way you treat someone sends ripples outwards, and others agents and figures in the espionage community may either disapprove of your methods (loudly or quietly or with a fake smile as they’re slowly drawing the gun from their jacket), or they may like the fact you stomped over someone to get where you needed to go. Even your bitterest rivals may respect the fact that you keep your mission in mind… no matter how many of your allies lie dead on the battlefield once you leave.
…
We track all this and so do the individuals in the game. Whatever your motivation and theirs, one thing’s for sure – as much as you can do research on the Alpha Protocol cast of characters in the game, turnabout is fair play. They’ll gather intel on you. They’ll talk to the same contacts you do. They’ll evaluate how you do things. They’ll check to see who you’ve made “friends” with, how invisible/visible you’ve been on your operations, how you dealt with contacts and what intel you’ve uncovered, and make their judgments. Even people that might be the spy equivalent of Lawful Good could still end up trying to shoot you if they don’t understand your choices – or if they understand the repercussions more than you do.

I love it. Here’s hoping they manage to pull it off.