Brian Fargo and the RPG community just teamed up to kickstart 1.5 Million dollars for  Wasteland 2, an old-school postapocalyptic RPG. It was the perfect date, until Brian started getting a little too friendly:

“At 2 million we will increase the staff to make the game more social so that it can become a more shared experience. We like the concepts of dropping notes into the world for your friends who are playing the game, or perhaps we may allow you to send an item their way from Ranger center to help them out. We are fleshing out the ideas but  intend to increase the social aspects of the game without diverting it from being an old school RPG and without hurting the balance.”

This update sparked rage, complaints, and comments like “…I pledged more than I pay for my monthly rent, but seeing the game pushed into the direction of a fallout clone with SOCIAL COMPONENTS is making me consider ditching my pledge in favour of a $15 hold out hope of the game not turning into a steaming pile of rotted feces. Please tell me you’re joking. WastelandVille? Say it ain’t so. ”

It’s important to clarify what kind of social components Brian’s talking about. In an interview with No Mutants allowed,  he compared his ideas to the message system in Demon’s Souls. That game lets you make messages by combining pre-made phrases (“Be wary of” | “Traps”, for example) and leave them as graffiti for other players to find. It’s impossible to say anything out of character or give away plot twists, the whole thing is justified as part of the game’s world, and it’s not there as a way to monetize the game. “WastelandVille!” isn’t a rejection of the way Demon’s Souls does things; it’s a blanket negative response to the word “Social”.

So to sum up: The game was announced over twitter, built interest through likes, shares and plus 1′s, sought funding via kickstarter, and finally reached it’s goal because 30,000 RPG fans from across the globe united into a single online community with the power to make this happen.  And now a subset of that same online community is making an online protest, because the word “Social” has no place in RPG’s. That’s the genre that is, lest we forget, based on a multiplayer game.

With that much irony I don’t think I’ll ever need to eat red meat again.

I don’t expect Brian to stick to his guns on this one. The fans funded the game, and he’s made it clear he’s going to take their wishes into account. I worry more about the smaller guys. If you’ve got a name as big as Brian Fargo’s, you can afford to ask people to hand over 50 bucks for a premium product. As a struggling indie, though, the general wisdom runs; give your game out for free or very little, let players pay more if they like the game, and let them play with friends so that every fan creates two more.

I believe these things can be done without becoming a Farmville money-grab, and I’m interested to see them in an RPG. I enjoy connecting with games in a social context, and I have to imagine that every one one of those forum posters does too. It’s just a shame that the entire concept of socialization in a game brings out so much hate from hardcore gamers, and a shame that I won’t get to connect with other people in Wasteland 2.

I’ve been in love with solitary night scenes ever since I first played Curse of Monkey Island. Maybe it’s because they’re the polar opposite of the explosive froth games normally try to whip you up into, or maybe it’s because they fit so well. We’ve always been better at empty rooms than wild parties. The simplest possible game is a character walking around a black screen; by default, games are lonely things. 

It’s late, and weird stuff is happening. You and a bunch of your friends sneak out of your cosy, normal homes and go down into the centre of this weird stuff. You flee from it, learn it’s secrets, and eventually defeat it by gaining full understanding of it. Then you drag it into the light, dripping and screaming, and go back home for tea and buns.

A bit like Call of Cthulhu for kids, I suppose. The basic rules and setting are well fleshed out by now; I’m planning to expand it, playtest it enough to polish it up, then release it on the internet (For free; I can’t imagine any way to make money off it). Along with the main rules, I’ll package a campaign setting made out of the map in the post below. Discover the horrifying secrets of Burger Head, Caper Cove, and 4 other whacked-out mystery locations in between cutting class and tripping groovy!

I can’t put a release date on it, but I’ll be releasing status reports and pretty pictures as I go. I’m excited. It feels like the game is afoot.

I can neither confirm nor deny the possibility that this map has been drawn for a game. This hypothetical game may or may not ever be completed and released.

Reports that the following individuals have been seen roaming this map as a unified “Teen Team” are no doubt exaggerated. Nevertheless, we advise you to take all possible precautions and notify your local authorities if you witness any mystery-solving in your area.

That is all.

Subverting the architecture. 

I’ll say it again: Subverting the architecture, motherfuckers. It’s the best thing you can do in games, and Thief is the best at it.

Here’s what I’m talking about. Missions in Thief usually start near the front entrance of some mansion or fortress. There’s generally a straightforward route to your objective: Through the front gate, down the hallway, up the stairs and into the throne room. Just a short jog for any normal citizen.

Unfortunately, you’re a thief. This means that the main thoroughfares and access routes that the building has been designed to support are actually dangerous. The main hallways are brightly lit, full of people, and usually paved with clangingly loud marble floors. To get to your objective without being caught, you have to deliberately flip off the architect at every opportunity.

So: front doors are out, back doors are in. You scan the outer walls with a practised eye, looking for structural weaknesses. Cellar doors are good, open windows are better, but the best possible scenario is getting onto the roof. Up there amongst the rafters, the guards crawl under you like ants. It’s beautiful.

Every level in the Thief games throws up a new type of architecture to fuck over. One particular example in the second game takes place in a multi-floored tower built around an elevator. The elevator’s stupidly loud and deposits you right in the middle of guard-posts, so the entire level revolves around figuring out ways to get to the other floors without it: crawling up vents, jumping down from balcony to balcony, and at one point even jumping off the elevator as it descends to cling onto a roof rafter and watch it crawl down without you, confusing the hapless guards below.

This is absolutely my favourite type of level design, and hardly anything does it. Deus Ex took the concept further by making two separate games out of it: The action style has you go with the flow of the architecture, with the stealth style has you subvert it. Apart from that, I can’t think of anything – it feels like years since a game has even let me go up on a roof. Games! For the love of god, give me more roofs to climb on! Assassins Creed doesn’t count; if you can’t go inside the building, then a roof is nothing more than a glorified platform. I’m starving here, roofless and grounded in a maze of corridors. 

At this point, all any of us can do is look to Thief 4 and pray.

A good game has clarity. It may involve subtleties that only advanced players will grasp with time, but it should always be instantly obvious where you are, what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it.

Yume Nikki just burst out laughing. For those that haven’t heard of it, that’s a surreal RPG maker game where you navigate a convoluted megalabyrinth of interlinked dream-worlds. It pulls every trick in the book to keep it’s inner workings arcane and unknowable. You might get into an area by talking to an NPC, or walking past a certain place three times before turning back, or interacting with some flowers an odd number of times. Some doors only appear randomly. One of the more famous monsters has a one in sixty-four chance of being summoned when you turn out a light.

Here’s the hypothesis Yume Nikki’s working with: The moment you fully understand a game is the moment it loses the magic. You should never be able to get your head around an ideal game. Nevertheless, you should explore it, and make discoveries. By experimenting with these discoveries, you can use them to make more discoveries – never finding everything, but slowly building small islands of knowledge. Ideally, you and your friends talk about what you’ve figured out.  

“But how did you get past the bloat ghosts?”

“Oh, you need the Exorcism Prism. You get it by sacrificing your third soul container to the demon in the boiler room.”

“OOOOOoh!”

Every game felt magical and infinite like this when you were a kid, but almost nothing manages to pull off the same effect for adults. You’re too clever, games are too linear, and the internet knows too much. The modern adult gamer is a tough nut to crack; confusing one enough to give them that old feeling of mystery and discovery requires a game that’s as absurd and labyrinthine as Yume Nikki.

The other important way Yume Nikki taps into your kid zone is by relying entirely on interpretation. There’s no dialogue, nothing is named, and the abstract pixel art could represent anything. You’d think relying on the player to give so much would make the game feel cold and impenetrable, but Yume Nikki’s fanbase has responded to the tough love with a massive outpouring of incredible fan art. One-off sprites are given names, personalities, custom mugs and home-baked cookies. It’s an incredible reaction for an indie RPG maker game, and Yume Nikki earns it by cutting straight through to your subconscious. Because it never explains where you are, what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, Yume Nikki is played in your imagination as much as anything else.

There’s a caveat I should mention here: The easy availability of wikis and walkthroughs means that no game can stay an undiscovered country for long. Just type “Yume Nikki Wiki” into google and the whole game lays bare and dissected in front of you, taken apart and catalogued with surgical precision by people who’ve opened up the game files in RPG maker. In the old days, the most accessible source of information was other people who’d played the game. Pooling your fragmented knowledge made the game seem even more mysterious. Now, the closest source of information tells you absolutely everything about the game.

It’s a hard problem, but it’s possible to work around it. Dark Souls gave it a go; you can make messages out of pre-selected words and place them in the world for other players to find, using the games online mode. Because you can only use a limited set of words, the messages end up giving clues instead of revealing everything at once. Not only that, but putting this resource in the game itself makes it easier to access the knowledge of other players over an all-knowing wiki again, just like the old days.

Look at the time! I’d better wrap this up with a moral. Talk less, have secrets and hidden bits in your game, and make sure there’s always some inner workings that remain bizarre and unknown. Do this, and your game will seem magical, strange, and infinite in every direction.

]]> http://themachination.net/blog/what-yume-nikki-does-right/feed/ 8 http://themachination.net/blog/everything-is-jake/ http://themachination.net/blog/everything-is-jake/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:55:28 +0000 Jack McNamee http://themachination.net/blog/?p=1349 Continue reading →]]>

I’m finally posting the game I promised I would at the start of the holidays. All coiled up with nowhere to slam on this beautiful Friday evening? Well step away from the stun gravy and hold off on your hop juice, because Everything Is Jake will let you Jim your Johns for that special Joe or Jane without spending a single dime of your Jack!

Just click this beeeautiful link right here to download the thing, then extract the files and open “EverythingIsJake.exe”. It’s that simple.

But look at me still here beating my gums like a psychopathic dentist, and you don’t even know what the game looks like!

This game was made by me and enterprising renaissance man Matt Rundle as a second year games project. I drew, he programmed. It’s buggy, and it annoys me that I can’t fix the movement, but it works. I realised if I didn’t submit it now, it would moulder in hard-drive limbo forever. So hey, if you like this send it around and say so, and maybe someday I will be able to make games that are better than this for a living.

A hand-drawn map of Dark Souls from memory. Thought I’d post this here after I submitted it to Mapstalgia. I tell ya, it does the heart good to play a game with a map like this. I’m considering just straight it off and making it into a DnD campaign.

Dark Souls, in contrast, has giant gaping pits for elevator shafts. Run in when the elevator isn’t there and you’ll fall to your death. This is because Dark Souls has decided that everything is important.

It’s unintuitive game design at first. Why is it so easy to die to things I never saw coming? Why would you put a shopkeeper right next to a deadly chasm? Why did I just lose all my progress to a freaking elevator shaft? It feels like the designers are just fucking with you for kicks.

What it does, though, is make you pay attention. Even the lowliest enemies take off half your health when they hit, so you can never complacently whittle through them with half your mind on something else. Every corner could lead to a chasm that would kill you instantly; every bit of floor could be a pressure plate activating a deadly trap. Beyond that, the game even has fake walls that dissolve when you hit them to reveal incredible treasures – so now you’re even paying close attention to the wall textures.

It’s a principle that comes straight from Dungeons and Dragons. The whole point of having a living human being act as the computer is that everything can matter. Your socks, a monster’s tongue, some graffiti on the dungeon wall; anything in D&D can and will become absolutely crucial to your success at any given moment.

This leads naturally to the army of ridiculous trick-monsters and traps D&D spawned. Monsters that pretend to be the floor. Monsters that pretend to be the wall. Treasure-chest mimicking monsters that eat you (That old classic made it into Dark Souls). At first it seems like these are just the DM’s way of fucking with you, but what it does – along with hidden treasure- is enforce the “Everything Matters” mentality. When any wall could eat you and any rug could have gems underneath, nothing is flavour text; you can’t take anything for granted.

Compare this philosophy to something like Modern Warfare. Any genre-savvy player knows that all the noise and fury around them is irrelevant: the bombs will always land to the side of you, the tankers will always just miss you, you will always make the jump just in time. The only part of the game that feels real is the enemies you have to shoot. All else is smoke and mirrors that you’ll totally ignore, focusing only on the big yellow “Follow” arrow. Modern Warfare desperately to get you to care about things that don’t affect your success. It fails.

When you enter a new area in Dark Souls you edge forward cautiously. Shield up; sword ready; prepared to die. Every bush and rock looks like it could be concealing hidden treasure or the infinite armies of hell. You shuffle forward; you examine everything; you make a decision. In that moment you are totally, irretrievably engaged. It is, in a word, magnificent.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is a beautiful, meditative game that can’t shut up about how beautiful and meditative it is. What it does right, though, is economy.

In the first episode you go down into the depths of a forgotten temple to steal a mystic treasure. On your way there, you fight one (1) wolf-monster. When you steal the treasure, you fight one (1) temple guardian. That’s all.

New orders, Games: Give me less shit to fight. My brain has a very limited ability to care about the things in your game. Throwing a million skeleton warriors at me when I exit the temple is guaranteed to stop me from caring about a single one. If I don’t care about something, why have you gone to the trouble of putting it in your game?

This applies across everything. Give me less traps, less NPC’s, less puzzles. The more shit you give me, the less I can care about any of it. The more shit you make, the less good you can make any individual element. Put as little into your game as possible, and make me care deeply about each bit.

Superbrothers is one of the only games I’ve played that’s tried this approach. The game pushes all it’s time into a very small amount of stuff: about 5 NPC’s, 3 monsters, 2 puzzle elements, all reappearing in subtly changing ways over the course of four hours. You spend all your time exploring around a hut owned by the two main NPC’s, in a main hub area that’s about five screens big. You trek all around it multiple times, unlocking new bits of it, solving different puzzles in it. It changes as you go through the game, culminating in a Dream-world that’s a distorted reflection of it.

The end result of this economy is that I can remember every single enemy in S&S. Think back to the last enemy you fought in a game. Was it a russian? A zombie? I know I can’t remember. Dozens of man-hours modelling, animating and voicing that whatever-it-was, and I can’t remember it at all.

Only put important things into your game. It’s a crazy bold new design paradigm, but I think it could work.