Whenever i thought about or wrote down some of my gamedesign ideas in the last few years, i allways tried to focus on my personal technical abilities or on technologie than can be build with small teams and small budget.

as an example: 3d graphics is okay, but no ik animated objects. this and other limitations allways seemed as if it isn’t possible to create 3d characters with low budget. not from a artist point of view (it’s time consuming to create a high quality 3d character), but from a technology pov (even if it is a simple stylized character, all the technology needs to be fully available).

of course, krystian allways keeps the pov: 2d is more than enough, 3d is not necessary. but in 2d still the problem remains: fully animated characters (full body, complex animations) are one of the most complex game-content types.

but of course a lot of games since the eighties had characters involved, a lot of adventures and rpg’s with very emotional tied characters – and a lot of those games did not have best technical presentations of characters.

a lot of (especially japanese) rpg’s that allways wanted to create believable stories with beliveable characters created their own style of only showing heads, 2 frame talk animations (mouth open, mouth shut), synthetic sounds instead of voice acting, etc.

and now i’d like to start a discussion about what other ways of displaying characters are out there, done by others, liked and unliked by players. it’s really interesting how many stick-figure-like flashgames are popular today, but are their ones in which the player is really tied to the character. i mean action games like “N” have cool characters, but not really tied to the player. what if the N ninja meets others in a rpg/adventure world, other stickfigures – will good textual dialog be sufficient without more detailed visual representation of the characters?

i’d like to ask some more precise questions that we can elaborate or research on:

• how much needs to be visible of a character (head only, including shoulders, torso, complete body from hair to feet)
• in which context does a character need to be presented (floating in a frame ontop of the playfield, text in a adjacent frame, standing on the playfield)
• what kind of other decissions determine if a character should be displayed this or that way
• do characters become alive more by their visual representation, or by their textual dialog? what about simple text “to scroll through” or (fake) multiple choice dialogs?

as an example i like to tell what the schleichfahrt / aquanox series did:

• schleichfahrt (archimedean dynastiy) had simple text boxes in 3d prerendered rooms. but multiple choiced and over 100 npcs. people loved it.
• aquanox had icon-small faces (multiple in a group conversation) attached to a frame in which the dialog text was. no multiple choice, aprox 50 npcs. which hovered onscreen over an outdoor underwater look at a sub-station. people disliked it a lot.

  

• aquanox2 had jrpg like huge high quality faces (but unanimated!) + upper-torso hovering with text-frame over pre-rendered rooms. less than 15 characters and no multiple choice. people liked the characters a lot. but i tend to belive that this was more due to the good voice acting combined with the high quality artworks, and had nothing todo with the visual representation style.

  

btw: all 3 games have voice acting in a rather high quality – probably another point of discussion should open up on this topic alone, including the half life discussion about talking player characters. the ones in the ad/an series allways did so.

so, i stop writing now and ask: what do you think?

Stern interviewt Will Wright.

Was für einen Scheiss? Ist das von Stern verfälscht oder warum gibt Wright so blöde Antworten, die falsche Bilder der Spieleentwicklung verstärken?

Game Design wird runtergespielt, da ja nur “Inhalte” zählen. “Der Editor/Baukasten ist viel Arbeit” – das hört sich nach Fleiß- und Programmierarbeit an, aber nicht nach Design-Herausforderung.

Kreativität: dass Publisher und der Markt wesentlich zur Monotonie beitragen, und nicht nur die blöden “Programmierer”, wurde auch nicht deutlich.

Oh Mann. Jetzt ist er schon ein Star Game Designer und kommt in Mainstream-Presse zu Wort, da macht er alles noch schlimmer. Hey, das tut Molyneux auch immer, oder?

Gamasutra: Nintendo Confirms Plans For WiiWare Downloadable Content.

I’ve been waiting for this platform for a long time. It’s great to hear that they’re officially going to open up the platform for small developers, but too bad they haven’t announced any details on how to do so.

But what the hell, I wouldn’t be able to do that anytime soon. We’ll see.

What’s wrong with you guys? How we have a quick and dirty Blog and still dead trousers (for all non-germans, this doesn’t make any sense but I couldn’t resist). Go on an Blog already!

I just saw this on Kotaku. Someone is writing a “Game Journal” of the Zelda Series. He is blogging exactly what happens as he plays every Zelda game. I did almost the same (I skipped Zelda II and the portables and didn’t blog about it) and I found it interesting that it has inspired him to similar thougts about hold-school game design as me.

Recently, some guy on Kotaku initiated a game club – a book club but for games. Players get together, decide on a game, play it simultaniously and discuss it afterwards. I find this game journal idea very interesting. Check this guy out! Seeing players exibit this level of details in their reflections about a game made me think.

Games aren’t really made for this. Yet, they should be. Thinking further I divided game history into generations.
Generation 1 are the old games like Pac Man or Tetris. There were no genres, games were considered complicated toys. There were no “gamers”. On the other hand, people who paid for game development didn’t really care about the content. The game designers were the programmers and they had no clue what they were doing but they were free to experiment. They just hacked away until something cool came out. There was not even real play testing. The games vary between brilliant and utterly rubbish. It’s difficult to analyse those games because most of the game experience was created by accident and heavily limited by the technology. There is rarely an intention behind it.

Generation 2 is what we just went trough. People relized that you can do money with games and started milking them for what it’s worth. Games are not just toys but rather entertaiment for the young. A lot of money is being put into games and so there is huge control about the content of the game. However, key factors which decide on the content are financial. We have a lot of sequels. Very well defined genres and stereotypes. Almost no new developments. Game Designers are programmers, business people and guys from other industries (movies). Because of all the money, there is a rise of the story content in games so high quality assets like FMV cutscenes can be easily used – that way production value is easier demonstrated. It difficult to talk about those games because the reason for their existence is to sell and show off, not convey any kind of message or question. Just like candy is not really food. It’s hard to be a candy gourmet.

But now, at the end of generation 2, there is a well established community of “gamers” who really care a lot about the content of the game. Games also are starting to break through into mainstream. Finally, we have “pure” game designers doing their games – people who grew up plaing games. In generation 3, we need to add the audience as the key factor in the decisions about content. As people start appriciate game play, it need to be the at the top position within a budget. We need games, which offer unique gaming experiences. We need games people can talk about. On the other hand, we need to cut costs in development. Moving more to experimental visual styles and less emphasis on story is the way to do it.

Gen3 games are games like Wario Ware, Brain Age, Katamari Damashi, Shadow of the Colossus, Fahrenheit, REZ. Each of them is offering a totally different gaming expierience, innovative but refined (!!!) gameplay and often comes in a unique and effective visual style.

Recent Gen2 games is stuff like Twilight Princess, Final Fantasy 12, Gears of War. Awsome games but nothing more.

What do you think?

Let me start with an OT. Stupid editor lost my wip post only because I wanted to see if I can disable this stupid hotkey colliding with my text-editing habit (Shift-Control to select whole words). Of course, while implementing fancy Ajax hocuspocus, no-one thought about making user data sacred. How about auto-save when switching to “Settings”? I don’t see Word losing of my words when I go to Options. Take that for mimicking desktop applications, Ajax!

OK back to my original post.

I was reading the recent post at Humanized about iterative design and partly it just reminded me of the development of Legend of Kay.

Before I dive into my reflection, let me make clear that the critique is not about badmouthing my former team at Neon (we did Legend of Kay together). Considering that I was an integral part of the design team – if I may say so -, contributing to a fundamental fighting mechanic, some levels and of course refinement of most of the character designs during modeling (which was my main job), I’m really not in the place to blame anyone.

“To blame” is the wrong word anyway: Legend of Kay turned out not bad at all – having a better meta-score than Killzone 1 (stupid example, being different genres and all, but the PS3 song just came to mind). If anything, it’s about putting my experience and what I’ve learned in the recent years into words and, well, about reflection.

So, shall we?

…the problem statement “Design a better car” isn’t very good: it’s too abstract. Iterating a solution with a problem like this won’t get you anywhere, because the solution won’t be converge to anything in particular. There are too many ways that “better” can be interpreted. [...] Simply put, you don’t know when you are done because “better” is too open ended.

For Legend of Kay, the problem statement was often “make it cool”. But what’s cool? In case of the fighting system, it was stated that it should be “something like Soul Calibur but accessible” and “kinda like Zelda”. But we all failed to detect (or only to mimic, I can’t speak for the other members whether they did detect) that the key was balancing the move set properly.

[...]“good enough” and I stopped searching [...] This is a pitfall to be careful of in iterative design. It is easy to iterate, get to a place that is suitable, and stop iterating.

This is, in my view, what happened to us. We put a lot of efforts into making the control tight while having the animations look cool AND fit the control. It wasn’t a small feat by ifself – heck, it was our first major PS2 work (and, to my limited knowledge, to date still the only German developed, published 3rd person action console game. If I’m mistaken, please correct me, by all means). So, it felt like a big accomplishment and being something not every game at that time achieved, it was “good enough”.

Of course we had enough other production issues so it’s not like we could have done better if we “simply knew better” or “tried harder”. I mean we did tried and paid attention to have varied moves and enemies, but it is true that we didn’t iterate our problem statement much, at least in this case.

In retrospect, I would say that more should have been done in making each move count, gameplay-wise, by differentiating them a little bit more, by having enemy behaviour correspond to different move(s) and by carefully combining those enemies (and environments, winning conditions, additional goals etc.) to further create and tweak challenges.

This post possibly won’t be very comprehensible to anyone but the Legend of Kay team, but like I said: it’s mostly to help me reflecting.