Ludomancer

My Fingers Hurt ...

2006-01-27T17:14:00.000-08:00

... from playing several hours of Guitar Hero last night. I wanted to get it before Christmas but by the time I went looking for it all the local stores were sold out. Finally last week I broke down and ordered it online.

What a fun game! I can't play a real instrument to save my life. Once I tried learning the guitar for real but I couldn't even tune it. But with Guitar Hero I am a ROCK GOD!

90% of it is the controller. I've never really gotten into the other Simon Says-style music games but there's something magical about standing there holding that little guitar. It's hard not to rock out while you're playing -- I've caught myself head-banging along with the music when I'm in a really good groove.

It makes me want to pitch a shooter with an AK-47 as the controller ... .

Tokyo Game Show

2005-09-16T17:26:00.000-07:00

It's been quite a while since I've posted anything here. We've reached the point in the project where things are moving really fast. I spent a lot of time in Salt Lake a few weeks ago nailing down the final cut on the 2-D animatics. And now almost everyone on the design side is deep into fleshing out the details of the missions.

Warhawk is being shown at the Tokyo Game Show this week. So far we're getting some very positive press. One of the nicest bits is this Gamespot article that says, essentially, "This doesn't look good enough to be fake."

Good call. Yes, it really is real gameplay footage. Yes, that really is the water that will be in the final game. Yes, you really can battle against several hundred enemies at a time.

(Unfortunately the video isn't up anywhere on the web yet. So unless you're in Tokyo you'll just have to use your imagination. Trust me. It's very cool.)

What it Feels Like

2005-06-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

I'm working on some script revisions and it got me thinking about what writing physically feels like. Obviously this is totally subjective, but I realized that when I sit down to write it feels like rock climbing.

I move through a piece of prose one handhold at a time. I can't see where I'm going, but I reach up above me and feel for something to latch onto. I shift my fingers until they find solid purchase, then pull myself up.

It's not like I'm creating something out of nothing. It's like the story already exists and I'm exploring it, trying to find the right set of handholds that can get me to the top of it.

Sometimes I have to majorly backtrack. A series of easy handholds leads to a dead end. Sometimes I can't find a handhold at all and have to leap blindly into the darkness.

And through it all, I'm suspended over the abyss.

So There's Not Going to Be a Strike

2005-06-09T11:48:00.000-07:00

The voice actors' unions have voted not to go on strike. As someone who's halfway through developing a game using SAG talent, this comes as a terrific relief.

I've been conflicted during these contract negotiations because I usually side with labor, but in this particular case it seemed unfair that actors might get residuals while most dev teams still don't. A typical voice actor only works on a game for one or two days, while an artist or programmer might literally spend years. Compared to movies or television the amount of work done by the actors adds up to a much smaller percentage of the whole.

Long term I'd like to see the industry as a whole moving toward unions. I think that's the only we we'll ever get sane working hours and decent royalties for the rank-and-file developers. The amount of leverage SAG and AFTRA were able to exert on the publishers (despite the minor role that voice actors play in the development process) is evidence of just how strong organized labor can be.

Man, What a Stinker!

2005-06-07T16:08:00.000-07:00

My wife and I went to see Revenge of the Sith on Saturday night. I'd heard that it was much better than Episodes One & Two and this worried me because I've been dealing with the awfulness of the recent Star Wars movies by pretending that they don't exist. I've pushed them down the memory hole, Winston Smith style. Star Wars is a trilogy that ended over 20 years ago. At one point Lucas talked about making some prequels, but the plans fell through. We have always been at war with Eurasia ... .

Episode Three had the potential to wreck this careful exercise in willful amnesia. What if it was actually good? Then I'd be forced to accept the existence of One & Two as fact. All of that awfulness would come rushing in: Jar Jar Binks. Midichlorians. Pod Racing. The Trade Federation. The taint of One & Two would become permanent, seeping into the original trilogy through Three and slowly destroying it from within.

Fortunately, Three stinks. Worse than One & Two actually. Or maybe it only seems that way since I've worked so hard to blot the previous prequels from my mind. In any case, I can revert to my convenient fiction of pretending that the latest movies were never made.

The amazing thing to me about Revenge of the Sith was how badly it flubbed the basics. I expected that the dialog would be wooden, but was surprised me was how bad the editing was. The film jumps from scene to scene with no sense of how the different narrative threads will play off each other. Quiet dramatic interludes are inserted in the middle of action sequences, totally destroying their momentum. Time jumps backwards and forwards in the cuts. The most egregious example was a scene where Obi Wan falls into a pool of water and the film cuts away to other action for several minutes before cutting back to show him surface! I mean, isn't this the sort of thing that you're supposed to learn not to do in film school?

Or take the action sequences themselves. The battle sequences in the original Star Wars are beautifully set up and pay off wonderfully. Here are the good guys. Here are the bad guys. Here's what the good guys are trying to do. Watch them do it. But the battle sequences in Sith are chaotic messes. There's so much stuff going on it's impossible to tell which side is which or what the overall stakes are. Spaceships zip around and things blow up but it all seems kind of random and pointless. Nice CG. Why do I care?

At one point I actually leaned over to my wife and whispered, "This ... is ... killing ... me ... ."

It's Called Warhawk

2005-05-26T13:45:00.000-07:00

Last week was E3 and Sony unveiled the PS3 so I can finally be a little more open about the unnamed game that I'm working on.

It's called Warhawk. It's a remake of the old Playstation game of the same name. The game is being developed by Incognito in Salt Lake City -- the excellent team behind the Twisted Metal franchise. I'm providing senior design direction.

Phil Harrison showed video footage at the Sony press event at E3. It's been really cool to hear the positive feedback we're already getting in the gaming press, particularly this one over-the-top column at IGN.

Brian's Rules of Level Design #1

2005-02-16T09:22:00.000-08:00

This Hallway Has a Backstory!

I've been thinking a lot recently about trying to codify how I approach level design. This post is the first in a series of the informal rules that I use when I'm designing and populating a level.

One of the things that I try to do very early in the level design process is to come up with a "backstory" for how the level works. By "backstory" I mean a rationale for level layout that goes beyond just presenting challenges for the player. Instead I try to come up with a level layout that also makes some degree of real-world sense, either architecturally or geologically.

The idea is that players have an intuitive understanding of how buildings and landforms typically work in the real world. If game spaces obey similar rules it helps make the spaces seem more realistic and easier to navigate.

For interior spaces spaces this means understanding the function of each room I create. Say I'm designing a level that takes place at an ore-processing plant. I'll start with rough layout that takes into account how such a plant actually operates:

Train cars arrive here. Conveyer belts take the raw ore into this room here where the grinding machines are. Other conveyer belts take the cracked ore into the furnaces here. Slag from the furnaces is dumped here. This part of the building houses the lunchroom and the management offices. And so on.

Once I have a rough layout that mimics how an actual factory works, then I'll start shaping it into a fun play space, narrowing the player's possible traversal paths and organizing the various rooms for dramatic impact. But I try to always keep the spaces functional. No random rooms filled with inexplicable crates, or generic industrial machinery. If a room or hallway exists, there's a rationale for it.

Wherein I Define ART

2005-02-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

Here's another post that I made to the Chaos Engine today. This was in answer to the question: "So a piece of art is art purely because someone intends it to be?"

Only if it's accepted as such by community consensus.

It's like money. What's the difference between a dollar bill and a random piece of green paper? Only this: Most people think that a dollar is money. Most people think a random pience of green paper isn't. It's not sufficient for one person to think something is art. Just as its not sufficient for one person to decide that a particular piece of paper is money.

Most entities that we deal with on a day-to-day basis are social constructs like this. Art. Money. Marriage. Traffic Laws. Language. They exist because we all agree they exist, and vanish like the morning mist if we don't.

This is why arguments over "what is REALLY art" are pointless. It's like arguing about whether a dollar bill is REALLY worth a dollar ... .

Very Weird

2005-02-09T10:10:00.000-08:00

We're in the middle of casting for the voiceover dialog and the auditions have started rollng in. It's a lot of voice samples to go through -- 60 to 80 different actors are reading for each of the major roles so it takes several hours to go through all the readings for a particular character.

This is a weird experience for me on a couple of levels. Primarily because all the sample lines they're reading are pulled from my script, so they're all reading lines I've written. I've heard these words in my head many, many times as we've gone through script revisions, so it's a very eerie feeling to all of a sudden hear someone reading them aloud. Particularly since these people are all professional actors who can really sell the lines. It's like hearing your name spoken aloud by a total stranger ... a reflection of yourself in an alien mirror.

The other layer of strangeness: Momentum is also building to hire "names" for the top few roles. I've worked with voice talent before but they've always been strictly scale -- no stars or celebrities. Now all of a sudden we're in discussion with the agents of famouse people. As weird as it is to listen to someone else read my lines, its even weirder to hear them read by a voice that I recognize ... .

Plot is Not Story!

2005-01-18T13:24:00.000-08:00

Here's a post I recently made to The Chaos Engine:

I think a mistake that a lot of games make is to equate having a strong plot with having a strong story.

Mainstream movies (moreso than other narrative forms like novels and plays) are all about moving the story forward. Things happen in movies, the plot twists, secrets are revealed, cars chase other cars, people shoot at each other. There's constant forward momentum.

But plot isn't the only way to tell a story. Think of a play like "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof". Yes, it has a plot and some surprising revelations along the way, but that's not what's driving the story. They story is mostly about the way the different characters interact with each other in surprising and subtle ways. There's less forward momentum and a lot more ... milling about.

The problem with games adopting the movie industry's very plot-heavy way of telling stories is that strong plot doesn't mix well with the interactive experience. The plot says "This happened, and then this, and then this." In a passive medium this experience can be fun, but in an interactive medium you immediately run into the problem of the player saying "No, this didn't happen. that happened instead."

Another reason complicated plots don't work well in games is that people simply forget what's going on. A typical movie is done in less than two hours. A short game can take 10 hours to complete. Plot twists only work if the player remembers what's supposed to be happening so he can be surprised by the change-up.

The approach that I'm taking with the game I'm currently working on is to try to take the plot out of the story as much as possible. A plot of sorts still exists, but its mostly contained with the non-linear mission structure -- it's not what the story is about. The story is really about the characters. The cutscenes and in-game dialog aren't written to advance plot points (although occasionally they do) but to give little vignettes of the emotional lives of the hero and the villain and their comrades.

The idea is that the primary function of the story is to give emotional weight to the player's actions. And that means a style of writing that's closer to a stage play than a screenplay.

Wow, Has It Been A Month?

2005-01-04T16:31:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm back posting again. The combination of tons of work and the holidays totally pushed this blog to the bottom of the pile.

New Year's Resolution -- Post at least one thing a day. Even if it's total crap.

The rewrites on the script are done! I finished up the last changes right before leaving for Christmas. Now I'm working on the casting sheet so we can start auditioning voice talent.

With the script out of the way I'm going to be shifting back over to the design side for a while. We're deep in discussions about the minor missions right now -- how many there are, how they're structured, that sort of thing.

Tom Sawyer's Island Does Have a Flaw

2004-12-02T11:56:00.000-08:00

Two flaws, actually:

1. The landing where the rafts drop you off feels wrong. There's nothing there to immediately draw you deeper into the island, just a couple of uninteresting paths that don't seem to lead anywhere.

2. The fishing dock on the other side of the island is a weird dead space. It's a large open area with no obvious purpose. A bunch of paths lead to it (Injun Joe's cave exits there) but the little fishing shack doesn't seem significant enough to justify them. You often find people kind of milling around here, like little bits of flotsam caught in an eddy.

While I was poking around on the internet for more information about TSI for my previous post I discovered what's wrong.

The rafts used to arrive at the fishing dock instead of where they do now on the far side of the island. So that weird dead space used to be the island's "lobby". And the current raft landing used to be just an unimportant stretch of shoreline.

It's a testament to how strong and integrated the original design was that even changing just one thing, like the arrival point of the rafts, can throw it off-kilter.

I Love LA

2004-12-02T11:55:00.000-08:00

I bought a new copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh at my car wash this morning.

Why Tom Sawyer's Island Rocks

2004-12-01T10:41:00.000-08:00

At first glance, when you compare Tom Sawyer's island to the other attractions at Disneyland it seems kind of boring. There isn't a ride to ride on, or amazing animatronics, or music, or even any normal playground equipment. It's just some paths through the woods, a few caves to explore, a treehouse, and a fort. All very low-tech and low-key.

It's my seven-year-old son's favorite part of Disneyland.

What's going on here?

Nothing at Disneyland happens by accident. Particularly not TSI, which is the only attraction in the entire park that was designed by Disney himself. TSI isn't poky by accident, it's poky by design. And, if my son is any indication, it's a design that works really, really well.

When trying to understand why a design works or doesn't work it's often useful to put yourself in the original designer's shoes and try to imagine what you would do in his situation.

The most important question we can ask about Disney's concept for TSI is: Why didn't he make it a ride? It's easy to imagine an alternate reality version of TSI that would be something like Pirates of the Caribbean. Guests would board river rafts and drift through scenes from the books. There would be animatronic versions of Injun Joe and Huck and Jim. The thing practically designs itself.

So why didn't Disney do it that way?

The answer I think, is wildness. The Tom Sawyer books are infused with a feeling of wildness and freedom, particularly when Twain writes about Huck. They're part of a deep current in American culture that values authenticity and nature over the forces of civilization and sophistication. It's the force behind western movies and rock 'n roll and American ideas of what it means to be a man.

The genius of TSI is that instead of telling kids a story about wildness, it just encourages kids to run wild.

It starts from the moment they board the raft to get there. It's an island. There's only one way on and one way off. Unlike in the rest of the park, parents don't have to worry about kids getting lost, which means that they can relax and let them off the leash. It's the one part of Disneyland that little kids can experience on their own.

Second, it's packed with secrets. Random exploration is encouraged and rewarded. Poke around in the caves and you'll find a cavern with hidden treasure. Climb to the top of the fort and you'll find a spyglass that shows a burning cabin. The island itself isn't that big but it feels like its filled with mystery and adventure.

Third, it's a wonderful stage. It doesn't impose any particular narrative on your explorations, but provides lots of hints at fun stories to tell yourself. There are places to hide, places to defend, places where you can pretend you're driving a car or a ship, places where you can pretend you're climbing a mountain.

And finally, it has terrific flow. This is something that I've become very sensitive to from desgining shooter levels. Paths on TSI always lead somewhere. You never hit a dead end or a dull spot. Sightlines are long enough that you don't get lost, but short enough that you always have new vistas opening in front of you. There are plenty of landmarks to keep you oriented, but plenty of inbetween space as well so that when you get to a landmark like the treehouse you feel like you've arrived at a place.

(The only other real-world space that I've ever been in that come close to TSI as a good shooter level is the new Getty Museum in LA. Man, I'd love to have an afterhours paintball game there ... .)

I think ultimately the thing that impresses me so much about TSI is that it does such an incredible job of structuring the visitor's experience while still providing him with complete freedom of movement. It's a beautiful example of good freeform level design.

Disneyland As Hero Quest

2004-11-22T09:40:00.000-08:00

We took the kids to Disneyland yesterday. I love going to Disneyland, not just because its fun, but because its such a great example of level design. The original imagineers did an incredible job of constructing a narrative experience using nothing but architecture.

Here's an example. In a lot of amusement parks you walk through the front gate straight into the thick of things. There are rides right near the entrace and a bunch of different paths you can take to explore the park.

But Disneyland is different. In Disneyland you walk through the front gate and you're in Main Street USA. There are some souvenir shops, but there aren't any big, exciting attractions. The overall feeling is one of quaintness and comfy familiarity. Let's face it, Main Street USA is boring.

But off in the distance is Cinderella's castle.

You have to walk toward it. Partially because there's no other route into the park, but also because its so intriguing and compelling. You're standing in the middle of a celebration of the mundane, but off in the distance is a promise of fantasy and adventure. You can't stop yourself from walking toward it.

The entrance to Disneyland is a version of Joseph Campbell's archetypical hero quest, written in architecture. All hero quests start with the hero safely at home, whether its Frodo in the Shire, Luke on Tatooine, Neo in his apartment, or Alice at her picnic. But the hero is always drawn out of the realm of comfort and safety and into a place of wonder and excitement.

Whenever you visit Disneyland the architecture of the park invites you to take your own personal hero quest. Step-by-step as you walk up Main Street you leave the real world behind and embark on a mythic quest. And at the end of the day, when you're wearied from your labors, you return to the mundane again, just as Frodo returns to the Shire when the Ring is destroyed.

Next: Why Tom Sawyer's Island is the best-designed ride in Disneyland.

Rewrites

2004-11-19T15:36:00.000-08:00

We've settled on a bunch of changes to the script and I'm plowing through them. Making little corrections like this is a bit like playing a game of pick-up-sticks. You wiggle one line and discover to your dismay that its connected to half-a-dozen more spread out over three different scenes.

Of course, I could just change the line and say fuck it. There's stuff I'm obsessing over that I'm sure no one will ever notice.

But I'll know it's in there ... .

Yay!

2004-11-11T16:39:00.000-08:00

Sometime around 3:30 this afternoon I finished the cutscene script.

136 pages, 54 scenes, 20,439 words.

I've printed it out. It's nice and thick and chunky. It would make a great doorstop.

Special thanks too my two kids who amused themselves for five (5!) hours this morning so I could power through the last few scenes. Now I have to go home and clean the Lucky Charms out of the carpet ... .

This is the happiest I've been in months.

Homestretch

2004-11-09T16:37:00.000-08:00

I haven't been blogging because I've been working non-stop on the script. I'm definitely over the hump now. Most of what remains is a rewrite of a previous version, or action scenes, both of which I can do in my sleep.

The hard part is always brand new character/character interaction. It's sooo easy to slip into banter ... .

Artist in the House

2004-11-03T09:32:00.000-08:00

We've got a concept artist working in the office today. He's a really talented guy named Jim Martin who's done a lot of movie work. He'll be here all week doing sketches of one of the main vehicles in the Unnamed Game.

He's been doing concepts for us for about six months now, but we've got him in the building now so he can really push through this one design. This way I can check in on him a couple of times a day, instead of stuff having to pass back and forth in email.

The freaky thing is ... they set up a drawing table for him that's right behind me. So I've got this persistent eerie feeling that there's someone watching me ... .

Man, I'm paranoid ... .

Election Day

2004-11-02T13:26:00.000-08:00

Man, it's hard to stay focused today. Every ten minutes I go check one of the political websites, which is totally pointless since there won't be any returns until this evening.

Getting Into Cutscenes

2004-11-01T14:52:00.000-08:00

One of the hardest things I've found about writing cutscenes is getting into and out of them.

In a non-interactive medium, a movie or a novel, you can start a scene at any point in time you want. In fact, dramatic compression almost demands that you begin in media res. You can come in in the middle of a conversation, or end right as something dramatic happens. Audiences understand how cuts work and are willing to accept large discontinuities in space or time if the chunks of narrative on either side of the cut relate to either other.

But cutscenes in games are always preceded and followed by stretches of gameplay. And gameplay itself doesn't have cuts. Gameplay is a continuum of experience. In order to flow into and out of gameplay smoothly, the beginnings and endings of cutscenes have to mimic that sense of a continuum.

To be blunt, it means that I write a lot of cutscenes that begin with someone walking through a door.

Alpha? No Fair!

2004-10-29T17:16:00.000-07:00

God of War is celebrating their Alpha milestone downstairs with beer and bratwurst.

Up here I'm typing away at the cutscene script.

I wanna be at Alpha!

Better Get a Bucket

2004-10-27T16:50:00.000-07:00

I'm really groggy today. There was a rainstorm last night and our bedroom ceiling started leaking. At first it was just a drip-drip-drip around a light fixture, but it quickly turned into a steady trickle which was really unnerving.

We live in a condo and we figured the leak was coming from the back deck of the woman who lives above us. My wife tried calling her but she didn't pick up so we resigned outselves to waiting until morning. We rolled the computer desk to the other side of the room and took down the Shag print and took all the books off the shelves.

Then it started getting really bad. The trickle turned into a stream. And I started seeing wet spots appearing in other parts of the ceiling. I had visions of the whole ceiling coming down.

I called the woman again and finally she woke up. I got her to let me in up the fire stairs.

The drain in her back deck was totally clogged. It was filling up like a bathtub. There was about an inch and a half of water covering a 10' x 20' space! No wonder it was draining into my bedroom.

We unclogged her drain. The leak stopped. The ceiling is drying. And I'm going to bed early tonight ... .

Serendipity

2004-10-26T09:37:00.000-07:00

I spent all day yesterday in a long meeting trying to nail down the progression for the Unnamed Game. When you unlock what, and that sort of thing.

Near the end we needed one more weapon to fill a hole at the end. We came up with a cool idea, but almost immediately discarded it because it didn't look like it would play well with the final boss. And what's the point of giving the player a cool weapon right at the end if he can't use it on the final boss?

Then light dawned. We came up with a really cool twist to the final boss battle, one I've never seen before in any other game. The Cool New Weapon wouldn't work in a normal boss battle, but with the new twist the CNW becomes one of the coolest things in the game. The final battle is going to be fun to play, but even better, the way you defeat the final boss resonates metaphorically with all the themes we've been developing. It's like we planned it this way all along.

I love it when this sort of thing happens.

Games Are Not a Storytelling Medium

2004-10-25T09:17:00.000-07:00

And yet we tell stories with them.

Greg Costikyan brought this point up in one of the sessions and I agree with him. The point is that you can't tell a story through play mechanic alone.

The purest games are games like Tetris. All they are is concentrated play mechanic. Playing Tetris is like listening to a Bach fugue. Both can be entertaining and satisfying, even moving, but they don't tell a story.

The games I'm interested in are more like Wagnerian operas. They still have non-narrative play mechanics at their core, but these mechanics have been co-mingled with characters and dialog and evocative settings so that they become narrative vehicles.