What. The. Hell.

Ok, I should probably mention that Avatar is pretty. It’s really pretty. In fact, it’s almost too aware of its own prettiness. Like a woman who is aware she it stunning and uses every opportunity to draw attention to her looks, Avatar is almost obnoxious in how badly it wants to shove its spectacular alien vistas in your face at every turn.

It’s a sci-fi movie, and they use that convenient excuse to make every damn thing in the movie as beautiful as possible. Moss that lights up as you walk on it? Check. Ethereal jellfish seed things? Check. Glowing plantlife that caresses you as you walk through it? Check. Floating mountains? Check. It’s cool at first but after a while it becomes too artificial, too designed for visual appeal.

And it’s not just the visuals that feel contrived. It’s the plotline. Imagine if a Hippy and a stereotypical DnD Druid raised a child, and that child went on to direct a movie. ‘Cause you get the NATURE IS AWESOME HUMANITY IS GREEDY EVIL WE MUST BECOME ONE WITH NATURE message shoved down your throat with all the finesse of a rhinoceros driving a steamroller. At every turn the movie uses the “it’s sci-fi!” justification to load up the story with contrived plot-devices to support the hippy message.

The basic idea of the avatar bodies is neat. But then we get the fact that all living things on the alien planet have the ability to mind-meld. So now, when the hippy aliens (who are essentially blue American Indians) spout their one-with-mother-earth philosophy, it’s real! Still not awful, but they aren’t done yet! Because there is also a sacred tree. Which stores the alien’s ancestors’ memories. But wait, the sacred tree can also transfer consciousnesses between a human body and the vat-grown avatar bodies. Which the aliens know how to do when the need arises, because hey, that’s a scenario they encounter in their day-to-day lives. And the alien memory tree can interface with a human body because hey, it’s all the same, right?

Oh, and there is a “flux warp” (seriously, was that the best name you guys could come up with?) in the area of the tree. Which means the humans who rebel and decide to help the aliens can hide out there where the sensors can’t detect them. And, when the final showdown between the aliens on their pterodactyls and the humans in their gunships happens, the humans can’t use their sophisticated guidance systems, they must rely on line of sight so as to give the alien dudes a fighting chance with their bows and arrows.

Oh, and nature ‘hears’ their plea and rallies the wildlife to help them. And there is a legend of a super-pterodactyl riding hero, which is great when the protagonist is cast aside and needs to earn back the alien’s trust. SERIOUSLY, could the plot get any more self-indulgent? And in the end, the humans who came to the planet to mine a substance that is worth a metric fuckton of cash are sent packing, and of course won’t return and bombard the forest from space. And the hero gets to become an alien and live happily ever after making alien babies. Hooray! A victory for nature! Puke.

The plot was fundamentally the same as the Last Samurai (and any other ‘westerner meets noble savages, integrates, help them fight other westerners’ plots), except I actually liked the Last Samurai, for all that it had its own indulgences. At least in TLS the samurai all get mowed down in the end in a hopeless charge against superior technology, convincing the Emperor through their commitment to their principles even unto death instead of a convenient “flux warp”. Hell, if we’re comparing those types of plots, I liked Ferngully more, and that was a Disney cartoon.

Most disappointing movie of the year, for me.

I mentioned that I’d post up some of the ideas I have for introducing time constraints into an RPG, if I was going to do them. Well, you can find them here. Yes Kris, on the forum. It’s a better place for that, should it turn into a discussion. Also, space wise. If you want to leave comments on the blog instead, go for it

But yeah, standard disclaimer, these are just ideas, NOT official SoW design concepts. They could be, if I wanted to take the time to implement them, but I’m wary. Read the thread for more details.

Spotted over on RampantCoyote’s blog, this 7 part series analyzing ‘The Phantom Menace’ is pretty damn amusing, he tears great big gaping holes in the movie. The series is a little slow to start with and the jokes are a touch corny, but it really picks up around part 3, I ended up unable to stop until I’d watched all of them.

There needs to be more reviews like that for video game plots. There is a lot of talk about making games ‘cinematic’ these days. While I don’t necessarily agree with that goal as a whole for an interactive, gameplay-based medium, we can certainly look to cinema for some of the lessons it can teach us about telling stories. The part about how graphics without a good story (and I’d add gameplay there for gaming) are empty and meaningless in particular is one the industry could and should take to heart.

Note to self : Next year, go dressed as Santa. My ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ shirt was cool and all but damn did Santa get plenty of action.

And I must say, I do appreciate a woman who brings her own handcuffs, it makes things easier. Thoughtfulness, so rare in this decadent modern era.

Time for the last Burn Nightclub fancy dress of the year, the Nightmare Before Christmas party. Ladies, gents, I’m hiring a taxi so I don’t need to drive, which means I may or may not be upright and intelligible by Monday. Enjoy the rest of your weekends, all.

So, a weird thing has happened. I’m currently quite in the mood for a good RPG to play. And I’ve got Dragon Age, I’m still in the bit with the elves and the werewolves, I’ve truckloads of that game left to play. But…my interest in DA has plummeted.

It’s a combination of the excessive combat (bloody werewolf ruins), the fact that the talents/skills don’t have much depth (I feel like leveling just ups the damage rather than opening up much cooler abilities after a point, so I’ve lost a good chunk of the desire to climb that leveling mountain) and the storyline being so very, very uninspired. I like some of the sub-plots, the mage circle and Redcliffe etc, but the overall storyline is fairly yawn inducing.

But I still have this itch that wants scratching, you see. So I was wondering through the stores and a box caught my eye. The NWN platinum set. All 3 NWN 1 games for R80 ($8). I wasn’t that impressed by the original, but my friend who was with me said the expansions were good fun. I hadn’t played them, the price was right for an impulse purchase, so…

And here is the part I find disconcerting. I’m really, really enjoying SoU. More, in fact, than DA. MUCH more than NWN 1. I’ve only just got out of the first part, into the desert, but what I’ve played so far has been some really great, classic RPG gameplay. The story and setting isn’t THAT much more original than DA, you’re playing in vanilla-fantasy Faerun as a trainee ‘adventurer’ whose master gets attacked and the powerful but mysterious artifacts that he guards get stolen for unknown purposes, prompting you to go after them.

But it’s still better than ‘Demonic Orc Things are rising and gonna kill everyone! Save the world, hero!’

And the gameplay is better. It’s a largely linear storyline, but there are plenty of opportunities to make choices, choices which influence the game later on. For example, I found a band of kobolds in some elven ruins who had an artifact I wanted. I could have attacked them, a hard fight. But helping an elven ghost in a side-quest results in him telling you how to activate the traps which will make the kobold fight a lot easier. However, instead of doing that, I persuade them to leave peacefully vial dialogue. Then, later, when I confront the kobold Chieften in another cave system and he is about to set his guards on me, those same kobolds I let go convinced him not to attack me. It’s good stuff, skill checks and neat scripting touches abound. I loved the part where I freed the dragon’s food oxen and they stampeded over the kobolds waiting to ambush me.

The characters are nicely done, they’re high fantasy ‘adventurer’ types, sure, but the NPCs don’t fit into the standard archetypes that Bioware rolls out in every game. No bratty teenage girl, hoorah!

DnD 3rd Edition is also a better rules system, IMO. I had thought the opposite when first playing DA. DA’s system is certainly cleaner and more intuitive. But 3rd Ed seems more fun to level up in, overall. DA’s system seems to plateau long before the maximum level, in terms of enjoyment.

So yeah. For all the vastly improved graphics, voice acting and whatnot in Dragon Age, I’m enjoying an old game much more. Drives home just how ‘fluff’ those elements really are, in comparison to gameplay and storyline, for me at least. Usually when this happens, it’s an old game I played a decade ago and I can’t tell if it’s actually as superior as it seems, or if nostalgia is tainting my impressions. In this case, the experiment is clean.

Ok, I’ve decided to change the way I handle this blog thingy. When I go through busy periods I struggle to post the type of long/detailed posts I usually do here (they can take a few hours to write, consuming an entire evening). Which means you get patches of excess verbosity followed by stretches of tumble-weed filled emptiness. So I’m going to try go for more regular but less chunky posts, with a few longer ones in the old style scattered amongst them, one every 1-2 weeks. We’ll see how that works out.

I may also look at moving the SoW lore stories off the blog and onto the actual website, in a sort of “latest update” format. The blog can serve as an informal conversation piece and stream of consciousness, the website can be a repository of all things SoW. I will of course link to those posts from here, as well as start forum discussions, when I can.

Right, so that was just an FYI.

Thanks to Twitter and John Romero (I follow the posts of a number of game developer and gaming interest groups), I stumbled across the blog of Jordan Mechner (hidden behind the deceptively-named url of http://jordanmechner.com ), the designer of both the original Prince of Persia and the Sands of Time reboot.

Now, if I was to create a list of my top 10, all-time favorite games, Sands of Time would be on it. I consider it a masterfully crafted platformer. The puzzles, the storytelling, the gameplay mechanics and the pacing all came together to create a wonderfully enjoyable gameplay experience. Many games are flawed gems, I look past those flaws for the elements I enjoy. But occasionally you get a game where all the elements flow together in harmony and it is the gameplay equivalent of listening to a skilled orchestra, every note in its place. Only a handful of games have achieved this impression for me. Sands of Time is one of those.

Anyway! To the point man, to the point. Jordan Merchner was one of the designs of SoT and that makes his advice worth listening to, in my book. And, fortuitously, he has some advice for other game designers! Which I’m going to repost for your reading pleasure, with my comments posted alongside! Hoorah!

First up, Tips for Game Designers :

1. Prototype and test key game elements as early as possible. (I didn’t focus enough on this)
2. Build the game in incremental steps – Don’t make big design documents. (Got that one)
3. As you go, continue to strengthen what’s strong, and cut what’s weak. (Ties in with 1. Greater prototyping focus next game!)
4. Be open to the unexpected – Make the most of emergent properties.
5. Be prepared to sell your project at every stage along the way.
6. It’s harder to sell an original idea than a sequel.
7. Bigger teams and budgets mean bigger pressure to stay on schedule.
8. Don’t invest in an overly grandiose development system.
9. Make sure the player always has a goal (and knows what it is).
10. Give the player clear and constant feedback as to whether he is getting closer to his goal or further away from it.
11. The story should support the game play, not overwhelm it. (This is a tricky one for me, since I love story, but I agree. Story and gameplay are not the same thing. It’s easy to lose focus on gameplay for storyline, for me.)
12. The moment when the game first becomes playable is the moment of truth. Don’t be surprised if isn’t as much fun as you expected.
13. Sometimes a cheap trick is better than an expensive one.
14. Listen to the voice of criticism – It’s always right (you just have to figure out in what way). (I hear him on this one. The trick with criticism seems to be NOT to take it directly, but to try understand what lies behind it and how/whether it applies. Taking it directly is like being strapped to horses running in different directions. )
15. Your original vision is not sacred. It’s just a rough draft. ( Salute. My vision has changed a number of times, I keep revising. )
16. Don’t be afraid to consider BIG changes. ( Ulp. I’m considering some even now, but it’s scary to contemplate the effort. )
17. When you discover what the heart of the game is, protect it to the death. ( I want to say ‘a strong, branching storyline’. But story isn’t really gameplay. So can I count that? )
18. However much you cut, it still won’t be enough. ( Truth! Did you know, SoW is less than a third of the scope it was when I originally planned it? Triage, triage, triage! )
19. Put your ego aside. ( But it keeps my head warm )
20. Nobody knows what will succeed.

And then Designing Story-Based Games :

1. The story is what the player does, not what he watches. ( Yes. Cut-scenes are nice enough, but watching other NPCs, or worse your own character perform little scripted movies isn’t particularly compelling. )
2. List the actions the player actually performs in the game and take a cold hard look at it. Does it sound like fun? (Resist the temptation to embellish. If a cinematic shows the player’s character sneak into a compound, clobber a guard and put on his uniform, the player’s action is “Watch cinematic.” Letting the player click to clobber the guard isn’t much better.) ( Pay attention, quick-time event designers! This is why I dislike QTEs, no matter how cool the animation looks it’s still just “press a button when the light blinks”. That’s really lowest-common-denominator gameplay design. )
3. The only significant actions are those that affect the player’s ability to perform future actions. Everything else is bells and whistles.( Hmmm, I suppose. But I’d argue that those bells and whistles aren’t unimportant. Especially if you’re invested in a storyline, seeing a specific conclusion, even if it doesn’t affect your future actions, is a reward mechanism. )
4. Design a clear and simple interface. The primary task of the interface is to present the player with a choice of the available actions at each moment and to provide instant feedback when the player makes a choice.
5. The player needs a goal at all times, even if it’s a mistaken one. If there’s nothing specific he wishes to accomplish, he will soon get bored, even if the game is rich with graphics and sound. ( Agreed. Even for sandboxey games, give the player some sort of direction to follow. You should never be scratching your head wondering what script trigger you need to fire to make the next goal become clear. )
6. The more the player feels that the events of the game are being caused by his own actions, the better — even when this is an illusion. ( This is why emergent gameplay systems are so compelling. The more you feel like your input led to the output, the greater personal investment you have. One of the problems with heavily-scripted RPGs is I feel like I’m being led around by the hand, my input simply taking me on to the next stop on ‘the tour’. Trying to reconcile the desire for player agency with the goal of a strong narrative is one of the challenges I keep running into. )
7. Analyze the events of the story in terms of their effect on the player’s goals. For each event, ask: Does this move the player closer to or further away from a goal, or give him a new goal? If not, it’s irrelevant to the game.
8. The longer the player plays without a break, the more his sense of the reality of the world is built up. Any time he dies or has to restart from a saved game, the spell is broken. ( An argument for soft, accumulating penalties as opposed to binary ‘live/die’ scenarios, in my mind. )
9. Alternative paths, recoverable errors, multiple solutions to the same problem, missed opportunities that can be made up later, are all good. ( Roleplaying, yeah? )
10. Don’t introduce gratuitous obstacles just to create a puzzle. ( Hands up everyone who hates invisible walls? )
11. As the player moves through the game, he should have the feeling that he is passing up potentially interesting avenues of exploration. The ideal outcome is for him to win the game having done 95% of what there is to do, but feeling that there might be another 50% he missed. ( I’d say, for RPGs, you should always only be able to experience about 60-70% of the game in one go. About ‘passing up potentially interesting avenues of exploration’ : I’d say this can only be true of a game where there is an opportunity cost associated with your actions. This is one of the areas I keep thinking about in my design. Too many RPGs have next to no opportunity costs for things. You kill monsters for gold, which allows you to buy weapons which allow you to more efficiently kill monsters for gold. There is no opportunity cost for this cycle, it is pure profit and thus too compelling NOT to do for more players. Like the way most of us are compelled to search every barrel in games. Why wouldn’t you? There is no opportunity cost for this action, only potential gain. )

I mentioned I was doing the Movember thing on this blog, didn’t I? I suppose it is only fair to show the end result. Sadly, nature has not blessed me with potent facial-hair growing powers. I am a disgrace in the eyes of Tom Selleck and manly-men everywhere.

Here’s a photo I took. It’s probably the best photo I’ve ever taken, for reals. It’s like those paintings where the eyes follow you, except in this case it’s my nostrils. Like twin voids, drawing you in…

Damn, it was like a bristled brush on my upper lip. Probably the only good part was being able to stroke my chin while raising an eyebrow smugly. All I needed was a pipe to complete the image. A bubble pipe. And a bathrobe/fuzzy slippers.

What else? Hmmm, well, I’ve been working furiously on SoW. There are two times when I go quiet :

1) I’m swamped with work at the day job and don’t have time to blog.
2) I’m working furiously on SoW and don’t have time to blog.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess which one it is during any particular ‘dry patch’

Part of the problem with being a lone dude, I can work or I can talk about working, but I can’t do both. And a lot of the work I do isn’t particularly exciting to read about, though it needs doing. Some database structural reworking and support code. Exciting.

I did help Vince D. Weller write an article about Dragon Age. It’s mostly his ideas, I just helped with the writing a bit, Robin to his Batman. It’s spoiler-ific, be aware. I like Dragon Age, it’s one of the best Bioware games in a while. It has its flaws, certainly, but there’s some quality stuff there. I’ll probably write a decent review soonish, when I’m a bit less busy. Though most of you will probably have finished it long before me. One of the ironies of game development, it leaves you less time to actually play games.

In other news, I’m happy to report that having a car again rocks. Hellooo, social life! I’ve missed you.

I’m generally a bit of a troglodyte, I spend most of my time in my dank, dimly lit ‘cave’, but even I get a bit stir crazy if I don’t get out in a while. A few good weekends of partying has restored my spirits to fighting form again. Like going to see my brother’s band playing at their first live ‘gig’. Have I introduced you to my younger brother? I’m the gentle, quiet, bookish brother. He is…not :

And some of his friends. They pushed over a speaker and kicked a hole in the roof. :

It was a classy location, that pub. I’m told they throw a cloth over the sign when the local church youth group comes for lunch, haha :

Him blowing out the candle on his ‘birthday cake’ recently :

Good fun all round, even if I was about a decade older than everyone there. Pity, punk chicks are kinda cute, with their pouty, teenage rebelliousness and fondness for tartan and badges.

Hah, I love my brother, we’ve been opposites for most of our lives but we get along well, more now that we’re in our twenties. I’ve learned to be more like him, he’s learned to be more like me, and we’re both better, more balanced people for it. Here’s a shot of us at Splashy Fen, the picture of brotherly love.

And we nursed matching hangovers the next day. Ah, good times, good times.

Right, enough posting of arbitrary family photos, back to databases!