The obvious choice

If you've been paying attention to my blog so far, you probably figured out what I'm planning on working on for this game design competition. That's right, my dungeon crawler.

Sure, there are dozens of dungeon crawlers out there for every day or every month, but as was my original goal with the tinygame, it wouldnt just be a generic dungeon crawler. It would be an infinitely replayable dungeon crawler with charm. It's a bit of a high goal, and I might not succeed for the game design competition, but that's what I want.

The first thing I need for the game design competition is a story. And how do you make a story in a 'generic' dungeon crawler interesting? Why, you make it as procedurally generated as the dungeon of course! Which lends me to the topic of procedureally generated stories in the first place.

One of the few games I've played with procedurally generated stories is Daggerfall, Elder Scrolls II. When you went to a guild and asked for a quest, it gave you a random reason to go to a random place and kill a random thing. Sometimes this was as simple as " got into house. Go kill it." Other times it was more complex, " broke into the guild and stole . We've tracked it to , go and kill it - and take back our stuff."

It was really simple, but it kept the dungeons - which were rather ridiculous in their own random generation - and the quests themselves nice and flavorful in a world that woiuld have otherwise been extremely samey. I want to implement a similar thing, but since my world is goign to be a much smaller scope, so my story behind it doesn't have to be painted with such broad strokes. I can talk about the creation of the dungeon and it's history, I can make the villian more complex than just a random monster. And most importatly, I can make the story the player discovers as he runs through the game different enough that he might want to play through it more than once.

Mainstream

When thinking of the theme 'explore' the most common idea thrown about is that of a simple point and click adventure. You have a screen in front of you, or several to navigate around, and you click on things until you accomplish an in-game-goal. Like escaping a room, or finding waldo.

This was the second-to-last exploration idea I came up with, and while I like it, it's far too generic by itself to be worth anyone's while. There are thousands of room escape games out there, many of them good, many of them terrible for one reason or another. Poor execution, pixel-hunting, and puzzles with convoluted "space-logic" are the worst killers, especially that last one.

There are some great examples of the genre, though - and most of them are in the genre of where's waldo. Finding one object amid a sea of random obstacles can be great fun, or matching the differences between two concurrent storylines - which has become quite popular lately.

I didn't like the idea of just looking around for one object or another anyways, even ignoring the fact that it would take forever to draw all the art. Although where's waldo reminded me of a comic, and that comic co-starred carmen sandiego, which I think is to this day one of the best games that has ever touched on the topic of exploring.

In the "Where in the world is carmen sandiego" game, there is a random crime in a random city in the world, caused by carmen or one of her lackeys. You have to gather clues by travelling all around the world, and catch the villian before time runs out. It was executed well, it was fun, and it had replay value. But to be honest, I didn't think of this until after I started the game for the final idea I had in regards to the explore topic - although it might be a worthwhile idea to look into later.

Exploring the theme 'Explore'

After contemplating the maze idea for far too long, I realized that it would be way too hard to do properly within the time frame. After all, it's not a concept design competition.

So, I went looking for inspiration, and came up with a few more ideas. The next one was a text-based adventure. More of a mental one, it would be about exploring your mind, to come up with the answers for life's bug questions... or something. I didn't get very far before I gave up on this one, too. I didn't have any really good topics to 'explore'. I'm sure that with a good idea, someone could build this up, but not m right now.

The next idea was inspired by one of my favorite sites, Squidi. Exploring your memory, once it has been lost. Basically, the player wakes up with amnesia, and has to figure out what's going on. He discovers quickly that there was some crime he was involved in, perhaps even being framed for, and he has to discover who really did it. As the game progresses, the player is able to go back and dreg through the character's memories, as well as travel around the present day. Finding things in the persent day make things available in your memories, and memories unlock the ability to go places an talk about things in the present day. Squidi's twist was that as you walk around your memories, things that are there but you do not remember the signifigance of appear as static. That's a really clever way of showing the player the things they still need to remember within the memory.

Exploring your memory and travelling back and forth would be a really interesting game, and it would perhaps be the most successful if I could come up with a plot for it. But plots are hard. Villians? Motivations? Locations? Names? And all the art for everything.

That's ultimately what put me off this idea, the art required. I'm not very good at art, and producing a lot of it, especially the same character in different poses, is something that is simply beyond my skills. If I was working on a team, then perhaps ths idea would be plausable, but for now, I have to move on to different ideas.

Perhaps procedurally generated content would be a good place to start?

Jay is Games

So, there's a game design competition just starting at Jay Is Games. The theme? Explore.

When they originally suggested explore as a topic, there were a lot of ideas that came to my mind, none of which were what the public was afraid the competition would be full of.

My first idea was a platformer game, and the idea was based around a really badly designed maze I played about a year ago. Basically, you would be given some arbitrary, and more importantly impossible goal. The impossibility of the goal isn't immediately apparent, because any game can say 'find the boss' or 'collect a hundred coins'. Obviously, whatever is needed to access the end of the game is absent - the last coin, the key to the boss door, whatever. It is also important to have the game be extremely maze-like and moderately large. One-way tunnels are great for this. The goal, of course, isn't to have the player actually complete the goal you set for them, but in fact for the player to draw a map of all the different routes they could be taking. This would spell out - if it were done correctly - a code phrase, or even a world location that they would have not have been able to decipher without a map.

But there are a number of difficulties with this particular method. The biggest difficulty is the fact that the actual goal is different from the goal stated. Not all players - in fact likely very few players - will even realize the secondary goal, even if hinted at subtly. Most players would likely stumble around without a map until they got frustrated, then leave and say they didn't enjoy it - and that's the opposite of good design. There has to be a deliberate mechanism to encourage the player to make the map. The second difficulty is the lack of reply value. Let's face it, once one person has beaten the game and let everyone know that the secret is the code hidden in the map itself, there will only be a few people who continue the game, and nobody will come back to it once they've beaten it themselves. The last difficulty is level design. How do you build a game whose map contains an obvious message for the player drawing the map out, but has the message - or even the fact there is a message - hidden from those who aren't drawing that map. Have it be really big? Have the paths between areas be the letters? Only display the points, and have the players connect the dots? ... actually, that last one's proven effecive in Kingdom of Loathing, but again - once one player picks up the trick and lets everyone know - it gets redundant for others to do the same.

The next idea I had had, was actually an offshoot of this. What about doing the above in the dark, using a flashlight? The message is written on the floor spread across all sorts of different areas, but the sections of the letter won't appear until you shine your light on them. It's another neat idea, but the idea of programming a flashlight in a maze is daunting for any programmer. It still has almost all the same problems, too. No replay value. The message is either totally obvious, or completely abstract. Intensely complex maze design required. Clearly, this particular idea isn't going anywhere.

Time to move onto the next idea.

Choose your own adventure

Branching stories are occasionally chided for being unrealistic becase of the limited choices available to the player, versus the number of real posibilities. Why can't I use the sledgehammer I'm carrying around on the locked door? What am I really supposed to be doing?

In my game at work, email conversations are essentially choose your own adventures. You're presented with a problem and a number of solutions (typically two) and proceed. The conversation is recorded as it happens, and at the end you've either successfully accomplished your goal based on your responses, or you haven't. It's one of the few situations that I feel branching stories actually work well.

When you're at work, you typically only have a small number of actions, like do the work yourself or delegate the task to someone else - so having only the options "Tell her to go ahead" and "Tell her to meet with the team first" is actually plausable. You don't have to worry about many different plausable options, because you're not doing estranged problem solving, you're balancing efficenty of what you think is happening against efficency of what you're asking to be done.

Plausability is a very important thing in games, beacuse of the all-important suspension of disbeleif. Once something starts happening that forces the player to step away with a "huh", they lose the world you're trying to immerse them in. When you fail to present an option that a player would think is plausable, they stop reading, playing and having fun. That's catastrophic.

realistic responses

In the game I'm working on for work, we attempt to simulate a real social network in a real company. There are a number of characters, several of them canadian, several of them not canadian (this is important, because it's a game about how immigrants are different from canadians in various important ways).

There are a number of challenges therein, some of which I had a hand in helping to solve, some of which I did not. One of the biggest challenges was making these characters in the game feel like real people, rather than just props - which they ultimately are. Backgrounds for the characters were crafted, resumes written, and personal photographs created, but what really gets the player involved with the characters is the conversations with them.

There are two types of conversations that exist in the game, chats and emails. Chats give you insight to the character's lives, allowing you access to their thoughts, feelings, and backgrounds. It also helps you build trust with them, which opens up more conversational opportunities, which allows you to learn more about them and so on. Depending on where you chat with them, how quickly and how deeply, determines your untimate success in the entire game, because later-game decisions need to be based on information you uncovered in these early chats with your in-game coworkers.

Emails are more work-centric. They involve your projects, the different teams, who's in charge, and wind up affecting how effectively the characters work - which is also important when you're attempting to be their manager. Good decisions in the emails leads to good results, and bad decisions leads ultimately to poor results, just like the real world.

But the point of making this game so realistic isn't to amuse people, unfortunately. It's to show people how different people are in canada than people from elsewhere in the world. Asians are very group-centric - and it reflects in everything they do - while americans are self-centric, looking for personal rewards and praise, unlike most immigrants who would prefer the team be rewarded even if much of it was their own effort.

Which do you prefer?

A whisp of Smoke

Shadowkin, also called shadowlings, live near the equator of Ronar in the jungles of Grittlanni. Their race is clever, quick, and not entirely solid, allowing them the opportunity to pass through even the tiniest crack - though it requires sufficent concentration and energy to do so.

Shadowkin appear to be black-skinned humanoids with long thin fingers and a beaklike mouth, and feathers for hair. They are shorter than humans, and take well to both water, and magic. They do not easily speak the same languages the other races do, and as such are a virtual unknown across the rest of the world.

Adding to that, the devestation of the race during the ancient age of magic, they are not as advanced as a society as far as any of the other intelligent races, opting for a more tribal way of life, among the creatures and trees of the jungles.