Game Architecture

So, I’ve seen that 17 minute Hitman Absolution walkthrough of the library level. It basically shows what looks like most of one level and Agent 47 expertly evading the police that’s on his tail. Now that gameplay section looks well crafted and interesting but what stuck out to me, in a good way, was the NPC dialogue that features prominently. In case you haven’t seen the video, here’s the YouTube version:

So in the video you can hear a lot of the policemen talking while the player hides in the shadows. That’s nothing uncommon in games with a stealth focus. Be it Splinter Cell or Deus Ex, if you’re quiet you can overhear some conversations and learn more about the world. That serves as a pointer that these guards are busy and can be surprised and a sort of reward for the careful player. However these dialogues usually consist of two henchmen/mercenaries standing around talking about the setting world. In a few cases they might even mention some details in the game world that a careful player could pick up on. And that’s pretty much it, a sort of water cooler talk between hired guns working for the bad guy.

However the NPC barks in this gameplay demo seemed to be doing much more than that. Without knowing what the actual mechanics behind the Hitman AI system are there are some obvious differences in their behavior from which we can infer some ideas, maybe if not for this game then for another one. So, what was different?

For starters, the dialogue seemed to encompass large parts of the scene. Clearly not every policeman or NPC had his own set of lines but it felt like the group was talking on a scope beyond a water-cooler talk. This is doable because the entire group operates on a script that is probably kept until the player triggers an alarm or something similar. This makes the entire scene seem a lot more realistic and (dare I say) cinematic.

In the scene from the video what comes up most prominently is the conflict between the boss policeman and the rookie. The former is being quite a hardass to the latter while generally having only very little patience. Later in the video when Agent 47 takes a policeman hostage and the boss orders his team to open fire after only a short time. This seemed entirely in character for the boss with a temper and my brain made a connection between the two events:

Individual AI personalities

Now as said, I’m not sure if this is being done in Hitman but the idea it might be worth some thought. Imagine a game where individual NPCs have different AI personalities: some with more patience while others might be angrier. And then expose those personalities to the player through their dialogue. So when interacting with them the player can infer what their reactions could be based on his observations. Of course this only makes sense in a game where you actually spend time observing characters and where their actual behavior in response to your possible actions matters. Stealth games would be particularly suited to this as the personalities might make some actions harder or easier.

This requires a certain “personality” model that is based on the possible actions of the player. It makes little difference whether a grizzled mercenary has a romantic streak or likes to collect stamps in his spare time when this is unlikely to affect his behavior in response to the player. More obvious character traits would be patience, aggressiveness, caution, courage etc. Of course you could differentiate it even more and actually build relationships for NPCs, so someone might react more strongly if the player killed or kidnapped their best buddy.

Now for all this work to make any sense the personalities and results need to be communicated to the player. This means that characters have to be painted with broad strokes so players quickly understand who they could be and see the differences in their reaction. It might be worth the work though, as it adds another layer to gameplay that is based on the player’s empathy. That plus the fact that I’m sure this will contribute to the believability of your virtual world.

So which game will be the first to implement this?

Just a few days ago I held my GDC Europe lecture called Big Bucks for Bits and Bytes – a holistic approach to monetization. I’ve spent a lot of time preparing and was quite happy with the result. The slides are now available on my slideshare account. You can download them from there or watch the slides online.

Click the image to see the slides.

The slides are released for personal use only. If you have questions, need further information or plan to use the presentation for anything other than personal use, please get in touch with me.

Another GDC is coming up and again I’ll be there.

As for the last two times I’ll try to keep this blog at least somewhat up to date on the happenings. Most likely though I won’t be able to write a lot while in San Francisco since GDC is always quite a busy time.

Instead I’ll be focusing on twitter this time since the bite-sized posts should be easier to handle on site. Don’t fear though since I’ll be sure to take enough notes to post lecture reviews afterwards though.

I’ve gotten a lot of requests to release the slides from the Qualities of Virtual Goods presentation that Volker and I held at the Browsergames Forum 2010. So now that I’ve cleaned up the slides some I can make the available as a handy PDF download:

The article is released for personal use only and it’s copyrighted by Gameforge Productions GmbH. The exception are the images licensed under Creative Commons and clearly attributed. If you have questions, need further information or plan to use the presentation for anything other than personal use, please get in touch with me.

Just got back from the Browsergames Forum 2010 and it seems like the presentation from Volker and me was a success:

We’ve had a packed room, even though it was too hard to find and not really in the schedule. The talk itself went really good, even though the handheld microphone was a bit of a bother. And then after the talk we got lot of positive feedback from the audience, through twitter and all through the rest of the forum. I’ve even had someone compliment me on the talk in the men’s room.

Right on.

As for the talk: I’ll be putting the slides up shortly. We’ll have to adjust a few things first. Watch this space for the download coming sometime in the next few days.

So I’ve been playing the Web Game Echo Bazaar a lot lately and this sparked some thoughts about narrative design & story in MMO Web Games and common game design standards.

First off let’s talk about classic Role-Playing Games for a minute here. The key thing in many tabletop RPGs is the story; they’re all about telling a story together. They’re at their best, when the individual player has to take meaningful choices that shape the ongoing story. What makes these decisions so strong is that they are irreversible. Whatever you chose you have to live with, which will make you think more about how you play and act.

This is something that’s usually lost in video games. With the (expected) ability to save and load previous states of the game, a story decision loses much of it’s weight. You can decide one way, see the consequences, then load and chose the other options. This somewhat “cheapens” the decision because it makes it possible to evade the results of your actions. Games can somewhat work around that by delaying the consequences of an action. That way, by the time you hit the consequences you’re not as likely to go load a very old save game.

However the persistent and shared worlds of MMOs can help here. Actually it’s both a boon and a curse when it comes to narration. A boon since load/save features don’t really work with persistent worlds (and aren’t expected) MMOs have the potential to have meaningful narrative decisions. It’s not quite that easy though. The curse of the persistent world is that with so many players sharing a space it is difficult to create a story that feels unique and that can have any impact on the world, since it shouldn’t inconvenience the other players and their story.

That’s where Web Games (and Echo Bazaar for that matter) come in though. Since these don’t represent a shared “physical” virtual space, the stories can feel a lot more intimate.

Echo Bazaar does quite a good job at this, presenting you with a wealth of narrative bits that you can choose to create what seems to be your own story. For example there are often options where you have multiple “tasks” leading up to one final decision.

Here the decision feels like it has much more narrative weight, since you can’t just go ahead and do it differently. Well at least that was what I thought when I first took one of these decisions. Unfortunately though this is greatly weakened by the fact that these composite tasks (multiple jobs leading to one decision) can be replayed for a while, allowing you to do the same thing over again.

So to put things in a nutshell: MMOs have the potential to present really meaningful narrative decisions to the player since decisions can be final.

Agree? Disagree? Debate!

I’ve just submitted my proposal for a lecture at 2011′s GDC in San Francisco. In line with my day-to-day work of consulting external studios, the talk will focus on how to monetize free-to-play games.

It’s titled “Big Bucks for Bits and Bytes“. Let’s hope they’ll green light it. I’d be thrilled to share my experiences and ideas with other game designers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about strategy games lately, partially for work and partially for private stuff. And while thinking (and talking and listening) I’ve come to a conclusion that a big part of strategic or tactical decisions is a sort of “calculated gamble”. I just quickly wanted to put this out there and see if I can get a discussion and some other viewpoints.

What I mean when I say gamble is that you start out with some sort of finite resource, be it military units, goods, space or money. Then you’re presented with an option: You can risk some of your resources and attempt something that would gain you even more resources. Say you could attack your neighbor to raid his cities, risking your units to increase your resources. This risk is essential. If there’s no risk involved, no chance of losing something, then the decision becomes a no-brainer. Clearly you will take the riskless option to improve your situation, I mean who wouldn’t?

So about that risk… where does it come from? Well it’s simply there because the outcome of your decision is not known beforehand. Propably because you most do not possess perfect information about the situation. Maybe you don’t know how strong your target’s defenses are or if he’s got friends protecting him. Even if you do know all there is you might still not surely know the outcome since there’s a random element involved. So to get more information and to be better at gauging the risk you could try to spy out their units – or you could simply build the biggest army possible, going in blind in the hopes that you’ll just steamroll over your opponent.

So in essence strategy is: you are presented with a certain risk/reward option. You’ll first try to understand the risk, then if neccessary try to minimize it before striking. However in the end there should still be a certain sliver of insecurity before you make the gamble.

Miegakure is a four-dimensional puzzle platformer. And when I say four dimensional, I don’t mean to use the 4th to refer to time or something equally lame. No, another actual spacial dimension. As far as I can tell the in-development game is played in three dimensions and at the push of a button one of the dimensions can be exchanged with another one. An intriguing concept and worth to watch for the mindbending spaces it is bound to create.

I won’t pretend to know how this is supposed to work but it certainly is interesting. Here’s a video that might help

A coworker of mine just pointed me to a little flash game called Small Worlds. I’ve started playing it and I immediately fell in love. Now normally I put all the playworthy flash games I find up over at the everyplay blog but Small Worlds was special enough in the way it treats game space that I wanted to mention it here. Before you read on, take some time and play it. It’s worth it.

The game was created by David Shute and is subtitled “A short atmospheric game about exploring“. It was entered in the Casual Game Design Competition #6 and won it as well. In it you take control of a simplistic avatar and move around to explore the world around you and find “the exit”. Sounds like most of the games out there, right?

What sets Small Worlds apart is that the entirety of the explored space always fills the screen. This means that in the beginning all you have are a few big colorful pixels, maybe some of them moving, and a soundtrack. At first it’s impossible to make out where or what you are. Then as you play with the keys you notice that the red pixels make up your avatar. As you move around and discover more of your immediate surroundings the picture becomes slightly clearer. Moving white pixels turn to snow as your understanding of the space shifts.

This is part of what makes Small World excel at it’s premise of exploration: As you explore you can feel the gears in your head turn as you understand more and more of the space. Then, after this happens, the game still doesn’t loose it’s magic. My guess is because of the immediate feedback: Seeing all of the discovered space on screen shows you which areas you haven’t uncovered yet. It gives you the feeling that even if you explore dead ends, you haven’t wasted your time, because instead you’ve gotten more of the big picture. In that vein it’s a bit like a scratchcard to me.