For reasons that are, well, personal, the beach holiday didn’t turn out to be much of a holiday, if anything it was more draining than it would have been to just go to work.

The result of which is that I needed a bit of time to recover my energies, a post-holiday holiday. So this week was a bit of a write-off, game dev wise. When I got home from work I just vegged in front of the TV most nights. Watching True Blood, a series I was surprised to discover I thoroughly enjoyed. Love the culture clash between the usual melodramatic, gothic vampires and the Louisiana townsfolk. And, oh man, I’m not a country fan but I love that theme song, it’s been in my head all day.

When you came in the air went out,
and every shadow filled up with doubt.
I don’t know who you think you are
but before the night is through
I wanna do bad things with you.

Speaking of enjoyable ways to spend time, I have recently discovered Auditorium, an innovative, intriguing indie puzzle game, a great companion to that other wonderful indie puzzler, World of Goo (Which I did end up buying).

Give Auditorium a try, the demo is free-to-play and addictive.

Gah. I decided to upgrade my blog to b2evo 2.4.2, since I was in the process of upgrading my forums anyway.

But something seems to have gone for a loop, all the stuff that used to be on the right sidebar, the category links and whatnot, seem to have disappeared. Nuts.

You’ll have to bear with me while I try to figure out what has gone wrong with the bloody thing. Or until I decide I need to roll back to the old version.

Since I’m heading down the coast for a day or so (Denbeigh’s family have a time share near the beach), this may take a little while. I’m sure we will all make do without archive browsing for a few days, somehow.

In other news, it has been hot and humid the entire weekend here in Durban but the minute we start packing for a beach holiday the clouds roll in. Bloody typical.

In a move that unabashedly affirms my giant geek status, I have joined the chess club that’s starting up at work. Oh yeah baby, time for some real pawnage, old skool.

We generally play Dawn of War over lunch break at work, I’ve spent many a happy hour slaughtering the filthy Xenos in the name of the God-Emperor of Mankind. But this will be a good change of pace from the more frantic mayhem of RTS.

Interestingly enough, it seems the Chess Club is taking off here at work. Most of the programming department seems to be “in", interesting because we’re almost all hardcore gamers. You have your console types, your hardcore PC gamers, your MMOers…but all of us love games in general. Yet…everyone is interested in a decidedly NON “next-gen” game. I mean, chess boards don’t even have a usb port to plug my mouse in.

I mention this because of something I read over on RPGWatch, a forum post wandering whether turn-based RPGs are “dead". I really don’t think so. Turn based games in general have survived the millenia, just ask anyone who plays Poker or, cough, chess. Hell, Magic the Gathering is still going strong as far as I know. Turn based mechanics have stood the test of time, so I don’t think it’s the interest that is lacking.

A better question is probably “Are turn-based RPGs ever going to be made by mainstream developers again?”

My answer to that one is, simply : “Not until someone else does it first".

Or, for a slightly more complex answer : “Not until the current evolution of game publishing reaches it’s inevitable conclusion.”

What am I talking about? Well, the first answer is fairly straightforward. Game publishers fund what has been proven to sell. They might talk about how they know what gamers like but the reality is that all they really know what gamers bought last year. By definition that only leads to more of the same and more of what was popular yesterday. If there is some permutation of turn based mechanics that will lead to a breakout hit game, they will never discover it that way.

So it rests on someone else discovering that combination. Once that happens, the mainstream will rush to follow the money.

There is a catch though. That combination needs to be discovered by someone with enough exposure to garner the attention of the big players. To expect an indie to make enough profit to do so is a little optimistic.

Which is where the second statement comes in. The game industry is evolving in an interesting manner. Basically, the bigger players are consolidating, they’re absorbing anything smaller than themselves. Which leads to only one result…a few giants in the market and, and this is the important part, a GIANT vacuum in the small-medium scope game market.

No big player is making the games for the smaller audiences, the people who like flight sims, turn-based games, adventure titles and deep historical simulations. The money isn’t there to support their enormous bulk and similarly enormous development expenses. They’ve moved out of/are in the process of moving out of those markets. But those markets are still there. There is still profit to be made, so long as you constrain your scope and expectations to less than the AAA market.

This vacuum is really just getting worse. The bigger the profits from a Halo or a WoW, the more the big players focus on those titles, the more niche markets they forget about. The vacuum grows. The economics dictates that where there is a demand, someone will realize it and move in to supply that demand. You are already seeing smaller players moving in, establishing themselves in adventure titles and historical wargames and the like.

I see this process accelerating, the number of suppliers in that market space growing, public awareness and the communities that go with that likewise growing. These markets aren’t dead, turn-based RPGs aren’t dead. They’re just sleeping until perceptive business people realize they can survive, even thrive, with business models targeted at the smaller “pies” that the big boys no longer consider satisfying.

Ah, it’s always rather amusing when the shady deals that grease the great wheel of mainstream gaming reviews/advertising get dragged, blinking, into the light for a round of public scorn and tomato throwing. Similarly amusing is the general scramble as embarrassed marketing shills attempt to to cover their asses.

This week’s comedy comes courtesy of Tomb Raider Underworld :

Part 1

Part 2

Nice to see another gaming journalist find their spine, hopefully Joe doesn’t lose his job over this incident like Jeff Gerstmann.

The cynic in me says this is just another storm in a teacup, an incident soon forgotten when the public goes back to drooling over the next hyped title, hype generated, ironically, by the people they were throwing tomatoes at a few days ago.

But there is a tiny sliver of hope in me, one fragile flower growing in a desolated wasteland of cynicism, which hopes these two events might be the trickle that precedes the bursting of the dam, that dam being game journos as a whole finding their ethical standards.

In the previous post on Fallout 3 I mentioned how I liked the repair and radiation mechanics, how I found that those mechanics did a lot to convey that Post Apocalyptic, scavenging-in-the-rubble feeling for me.

I’ve been thinking about that aspect recently, about designing game mechanics which serve to directly support the theme you are trying to convey to the player. I think it does a lot to add flavor to your gameplay, to create a memorable experience in the player’s mind. These mechanics tend to stand out in the player’s memory.

I’ve been sifting through my own memory for a list of all the games that had this kind of mechanic in them. Now, a theme-supporting gameplay mechanic is different from a quest, encounter or special ability. A theme-supporting mechanic is something which conveys some fundamental aspect of the setting via a system which the player “plays".

Probably the earliest example of this mechanic is the Ultima games. Your character didn’t just have physical attributes like Strength and Dexterity, the game also tracked your Virtues. In your quest to become the Avatar you had to try to behave in a way that embodied those virtues.

This is a prime example of a theme-supporting mechanic, the struggle for Virtue was at the heart of the game theme and the game supported that directly through a gameplay mechanic.

An easy, more recent example is Vampire: Bloodlines. You don’t have mana in Bloodlines, you have a bloodpool. Likewise you don’t have health potions. To replenish both your health and your bloodpool (which in turn powers all your vampiric abilities) you need to feed on the blood of the living. In a very direct way this mechanic let you experience the lifestyle of a creature of the night. Depending on your character, you may have seduced women in clubs with your charisma, or fed on hobos and rats in back alleys. But, whatever the case, you were very much a predator, a creature bound to a dark hunger. You can also add in the Masquerade and Humanity sub-systems to the list of theme-supporting mechanics in VTMB; overall it is a really great example of what I’m talking about, that game.

Mask of the Betrayer was another game themed around a dark hunger, in this case a spiritual void within the player character. Some people didn’t like this mechanic but I personally loved it, the hunger and it’s threat was immediate, real, something I experienced as a player directly. Without that spirit bar I doubt the spirit hunger would have had half the impact.

Planescape : Torment, another venerable entry, featured immortality as a central theme and sure enough there was a gameplay system in place to convey this to the player, dying in PS:T was no threat, in fact it was often a boon, providing memories and insight as to the character’s past lives.

The Fallouts, well, I’ve already mentioned Fallout 3, but all of them have included something to support the gritty PA theme to some degree, from the radiation to the drug addiction.

The Elder scrolls series includes a lesser theme-mechanic in the form of the crafting system; crafting magical items requires capturing the soul of a creature in a gem to power the enchantment. It’s not a primary gameplay mechanic but it does support the theme of the Elder Scrolls setting, adding life to what would otherwise be a standard crafting system. (as a side note, it always surprised me that the Christian right hasn’t kicked up a fuss about this mechanic, I always feel a bit guilty sucking something’s soul out to make a magic sword in TES games, heh.)

Deus Ex, one of my favorite games, featured a theme-supporting mechanic in the form of the nano-augmentation upgrades. While every RPG features some system of increasing character prowess, Deus Ex rooted theirs firmly in the nanotechnology at the heart of the game’s story and setting, placing these upgrades as physical items in the world to find and implant within your avatar’s body.

The newly released Storm of Zehir focuses on rival trading houses, from what I understand, and there is apparently an economic system in place to support that. I have yet to experience if myself (hurry up and release in SA dammit) but I look forward to trying it. I enjoy trading in games for some reason, I spent hours just amassing a fortune in Space Rangers 2.

Now, I should make clear that there is a difference between theme-supporting mechanics and merely interesting or unusual mechanics. Interesting mechanics are cool…but don’t actually do anything to convey the setting or story themes in the game design. For example, Ultima Underworld used runes to cast magic. Neat…but not fundamental to the theme of the game, unless your game is themed around the dangers of improper grammar!

There are plenty of ideas for theme-supporting mechanics in popular literature. The Darksun setting, for example. Magic in Darksun draws on life energy to power spells, reckless use of magic drained most of the life from the planet, turning it into a near-endless desert. Magic users in the setting fall into 2 categories, Preservers and Defilers. Preservers use magic without drawing more than the life in an area can support, Defilers drain whatever they want, even if it kills off the life in an area. A great concept for a magic system I think!

Well, you may be expecting me to say that I’m adding some theme-based mechanics for SoW. Sadly…not. Thinking about this makes me think that I should have. But I’m at feature lock-down on SoW, nothing new gets added to the design now, only tweaks to existing systems. This is definitely something that I will and am considering for my next game, in fact the cyberpunk-fantasy theme lends itself to this well, what with bio-augmentation, virtual reality and nano-technology. Juicy!

I’ve probably missed many games with themed mechanics, why not remind me of them in the comments? More fuel for the fires of design!