expository coding: August 2009 Archives

I found a brilliant video today about Video Games and Learning today, highlighting the current distinction between games that teach (the dreaded "edutainment") and games that are fun, and discussing ways in which so-called tangential learning can be used to make it genuinely interesting for gamers to learn about stuff whilst playing their games.

A lot of this is exactly the same thinking underlying my Bible-teaching computer games idea. Create a compelling story and engaging game world populated by Biblical characters, and it needn't be a case of bashing people over the head with stuff they couldn't care less about.

Today I came across the most wonderful series of articles by 2D Boy about the development of their incredible game, World of Goo, showing how the game evolved over the months (complete with downloadable builds that let you see it in action at each stage!) What fascinated me most was seeing where they decided to start: firstly, by focussing on the core gameplay mechanics, but then very quickly moving on to give their little goo balls real personality and making the whole thing "feel" fun, even before they had any actual levels. Then they just endlessly tweaked tweaked tweaked until eventually the whole thing was perfect and they had a real hit on their hands. They had a clear vision of what was going to make this game fun for people, and trusted that the rest of the nitty gritty details would fall into place once that core gameplay element was taken care of.

I've been constantly battling with this problem when developing my Old Testament adventure game. Any idiot could tell you that the essence of a good adventure game is its story, and yet in practice it turns out to be really easy to get distracted by other things, like tuning your graphics engine or making new 3D models and animations. My self-assigned project for the summer holidays was to mock up a complete working prototype of the whole game, so that I could get a feel for the pacing of the story and the way the puzzles worked. Graphics didn't matter one jot for those purposes, and spending time on making things look right just made everything take much longer than it needed. But it turns out that there's a huge psychological barrier to doing even unimportant things badly. I want my game to look good straight off the bat, and its weirdly discouraging to see it looking crummy, even though I'm not supposed to care about the graphics at this stage. For example, you can see from my previously posted screenshotthat I've been trying to use cowboys as placeholder models for the various characters. But when it came to add one more character to the scene, the thought of using yet another cowboy that looked identical to all of the other characters was grievous to me, even though it should have been perfectly adequate. Similarly, the fact that they sort of look like people made the urge to properly animate them and make their heads turn to face the right direction and so on was incredibly strong. Using plausible graphics for placeholders constantly tempted me to lose focus on what really matters at this stage: the story.

So in an effort to regain focus on what really counts, I decided to strip things right back and make it painfully obvious to myself that I shouldn't be focussing on the graphics, and instead to literally use coloured cubes to represent people and objects of interest. Then if I wanted to add an extra character to the scene, all I'd have to do is pick a new colour, and instantly they could be distinguished from the others. Also, there'd be no possible way of animating them, removing that temptation altogether. But then I thought, why stop there! If all you really want is a way to get a feel for the flow of the game and how its various puzzles fit together, and to force you to make some of the details a bit more concrete, why get the computer involved at all! For true agility and the ability to make changes quickly, why not just do some quick and nasty storyboarding on paper with a biro? It also has the advantage that I've been able to work on it in my lunch hours and in those little moments of downtime throughout the week, without the added mental barrier of firing up my PC and waiting for everything to load.

The results have been fantastic: in just a couple of weeks I've been able to get most of the story down on paper, enabling me to see at a glance where the gaps are and where things just don't feel right and where I need to add in some extra puzzles or strip some out. I still plan to proceed with my coloured cubes idea as a next step, but this has been a great exercise in focussing on what really matters and removing all extraneous details. What it might look like for your project depends entirely on the nature of what you're doing: for the 2D Boys to begin by focussing on the level design on paper would have been a complete disaster (just see how many levels they ended up throwing away by the end of the project!) But ask yourself this: what really matters most at this point in time? and then focus relentlessly on that, doing all you can to ignore everything else.

Edit: I should add that as a Christian I think there's a reason why "focussing on what matters" matters - there is a coming judgement day when we're going to have to stand before the Lord Jesus and give an account for all we've done and how we've used the time we've been given. Are we going to have to admit that we've squandered all our time chasing irrelevancies?

After hearing about the upcoming rerelease of Beneath a Steel Sky for the iPhone later this year, I've been replaying this old classic using ScummVM. Beneath a Steel Sky was one of my favourite games as a kid, with its haunting dystopian vision of the future firmly entrenched in my memory, clearly taking much inspiration from films such as Blade Runner. It combines an incredibly poignant story with artwork from one of the authors of Watchmen, Dave Gibbons, and it's fantastic news to hear that modern gamers will get a chance to experience this piece of gaming history.

But what about the game itself? Sadly, playing it again made me realise that it has some serious flaws in the gameplay department, and is something of a frustrating experience. The story is so compelling that I couldn't help but plough on to reach the dramatic conclusion, but there were a number of occasions where I was very aware that I was mostly definitely not having fun. Here are just a few examples of the types of issues I came across (Edit: I'm mostly just recording these for my own benefit as I go about writing my own adventure game, not purely for the sake of griping about what is at the end of the day an incredible game):

• Solutions involving obscure conversation items - on a number of occasions, making progress required discussing a rather unlikely-looking conversation topic with a particular character, for which there was no clue that it would lead to the breakthrough you were looking for. I quickly learnt that there was no short-cutting the somewhat tedious process of exhaustively discussing every single possible topic with every single character (and to keep trying it at regular intervals in case some other action of yours opened up new avenues of conversation). This was only exacerbated by a tendency for the NPCs to break off conversation with you, leading you to assume there was nothing more to be said even when there was still plenty more your could (and needed to) talk about.
• Puzzles requiring little thought but split-second timing - this happened especially within the "Virtual Reality" section of the game, where you would fairly quickly work out what the solution to a puzzle was, but pulling it off required milli-second precision in the clicking of your mouse. Granted, I wouldn't have been so bothered by this if I weren't playing the game on my mobile phone where moving the cursor around was a somewhat arduous process in the first place, but I can assure you that this was not fun. Especially when I died and had to repeat the whole fastidious process all over again.
• Unexpected death - yes, you read that last point correctly: I died, and had to go right back to my previous save point, something I hadn't bothered to do for several hours. You see, there are no clues in the game itself that you might die, and you can go about 70% of the way through the game without incident, lulling you into a false sense of security. But then, for absolutely no reason whatsoever (certainly not because it would make the game more fun!) you get eaten by a giant spider, and the only options you are presented with are "Restart Game" and "Restore Game".

Such flaws are a real shame, because deep down I love this game, and I definitely don't want to put anybody off giving it a try who might have been thinking of buying the upcoming iPhone version. Given that it's described as a "Remastered" version of the game, I'm hopeful that they might even make some improvements to the game to make for a more enjoyable experience: as Charles Cecile, the developer, said recently, they're coming at it now "armed with 25 years of game development experience", after all. Regardless, the story is so great that it's probably worth your while putting up with these flaws just for the thrill of it all.

Edit: Check out this awesome fan-made trailer:

When Games Break Their Implicit Contract

Every game has a context that determines certain expectations about how it's going to behave under certain conditions. Sometimes this context is the genre to which it belongs: for instance, the majority of first person shooters ship with a well established default control scheme that allows regular gamers to start moving around without even having to think. Sometimes this context is an explicit design philosophy set out by the developer: for example, the manual for my copy of Day of the Tentacle set out the basic principles of a LucasArts adventure game, explaining that you couldn't die or get permanently stuck because of failing to pick up an obscure item at just the right moment.

This context, however implicit it might be, forms a loose "contract" between the game and the player: the game is expected to behave roughly consistently with the gamer's prior experience within that context. Sometimes developers can employ this to great dramatic effect by defying those expectations, leaving a lasting impression on the players. On other occasions, a failure to stick to those conventions can leave gamers feeling frustrated and betrayed, ruining their experience of an otherwise great game.

That's what happened in the case of the example puzzle mentioned here from Monkey Island: the user interface of a Point & Click adventure game leads you to believe that no movement is required to solve a puzzle; you assume that you can just stand still whilst you have a think and try different things out, like "use sword with seagull". Also part of the implicit contract the game makes with you is that it will clearly identify points of interaction when you hover the mouse over them. When a puzzle comes along that breaks this contract, by behaving unexpectedly when your character walks over a certain spot (one that you have no obvious reason to visit if you're not explicitly looking for it) then the potential for frustration runs high, and you run the risk that players get stuck for hours like my friend did at this point.

I felt the effects of this big time when playing LucasArt's later game, Full Throttle. For those who don't know it, Full Throttle is the creation of Tim Schafer, someone I greatly admire as a game designer. FT completely defies many established conventions of the Point & Click genre, mostly intentionally. For one thing, you play a character that players might actually want to be: the rock hard biker, Ben Throttle. A consequence of that is that many of the puzzle solutions involve a departure from the purely cerebral, such as the application of brute force, kicking down doors and such like. For me, the set of possible solutions to any given puzzle was established by my experience of prior LucasArts adventures like Monkey Island, so I found myself constantly getting stuck because I wouldn't deign to try certain things - "*that* would never be the answer!" Thankfully I played it through with a friend who had no such qualms, or we'd never have completed it. But it just goes to show what baggage each and every gamer brings with them to every new game that they play, something which thoughtful game designers have to contend with to deliver a truly satisfying experience.

Last week was the eighth annual Christian Game Developers Conference in Portland, Oregan. I'd love to be able to make it along one year, but sadly it always seems to clash with the summer camp that I'm involved in (not mention that it's rather a long way from London!). In the mean time I shall just have to settle for hanging out with a few of the regular attendees "virtually" on the Christian Developers Network forum.

The existence of little pockets of enthusiasts like this just goes to show that there's no shortage of Christian developers out there. There's certainly no shortage of demand for video games born out of a Christian world-view. But I think the problem is that there's also no shortage of people burnt in the past by horrifically awful games written by Christians with plenty of good-will and passion but which just aren't of commercial quality. The tragedy of these games is that they're often propped up by a market desperate for some attention (and with plenty of money to spend should the right game come along!) whilst being universally derided by the rest of the world (if you can tolerate a LOT of bad language, check out this review for an example of how people view the Christian games market). Ultimately, this just reinforces the perception that it's impossible to make an explicitly Christian game that is simultaneously a good game, leading more and more budding Christian developers to go down the route of making essentially secular games whose only distinctive is the Christian values that infuse their development process. I have no problem with this approach, and cannot for a minute blame those who have chosen this road - the other path is littered with the flaming wrecks of so many failed efforts that it doesn't make for very pleasant driving! But I do think that it's a huge missed opportunity that skirts around the real problem facing our world. To say that all Christian games developers should make Bible-based games is no different from saying that all Christians should be full-time ministers of the Word - obviously absurd! But our world is crying out for somebody to do it, and to do it well.

I am not a completer finisher by nature. When working on my game, particularly when it comes to actually creating content rather than just refining the toolset, I find that I constantly get stalled on little details where I kind of sort of know what I want to do next, and subconsciously I even know what's required to make progress on it, but I just can't quite bring myself to do it.

For the last few weeks I've been playing around with a free version of Basecamp from 37signals as a way to focus my mind and help me get things done. In true GTD fashion, the real value of the tool is in helping me focus on specific next actions, whilst deferring issues that don't yet need my attention. I'm not being a total fascist about it (you'll notice that several of the to-do items in the screenshot aren't really all that specific), but it really comes into its own in those moments when I get stuck. To take a recent example, I knew that what I wanted to work on next was making the cook bring out the choice portion and set it before my two main characters. But mentally I was completely stuck - I just couldn't bring myself to make progress. At one level, the issue was obvious: I had no 3D model of a cook, I was unwilling to use yet another cowboy as a placeholder (four of the other six characters in the scene were already using that model!) and so I just sat there like a rabbit caught in the headlights, procrastinating by looking at Twitter. Taking another look at my list in Basecamp helped me identify the issue, then I was able to decide upon a specific next action to get unstuck: I was going to have to roll up my sleeves and make another 3D model in Blender. Within an hour or so I had what I needed and was able to make progress on the rest of the scene.

There's obviously nothing magic about Basecamp that a simple text file couldn't accomplish just as easily, but it's quite a nice, simple tool that lets you set up different to-do lists for each of your "projects" and quickly move items around in each list as your priorities change. It's also nice to be able to see all the items you've ticked off and feel that great sense of accomplishment.

What are your ways of making progress when you get stuck on a project? Share your tips in the comments below!

Here's a screenshot of what I've been working on for the past few weeks: a scene from Act One of my Old Testament adventure game, where the prophet Samuel is leading a confused young Saul to the head of the table at a posh banquet. I'm itching to release a video of the whole thing, but it's not quite ready, so this screenshot will have to suffice!

And yes, those are cowboys. And no, there will not be cowboys in the finished game. They're just some spare assets I had lying around from a previous project!