Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts

Friday, June 2, 2023

Design review of Redfall by Arkane Studios Austin

I completed the main campaign in Redfall (official site, Steam, also on Game Pass), a 4 player co-op open world shooter by Arkane Austin, who's mostly known for detailed single player story-filled action games. The reviews and player reaction haven't been positive, but as an Arkane fan I felt compelled to play it for myself and take it on its own merits.

Overall I feel it's an OK game that's basically playable, despite the bugs and aggressive texture streaming and general unfinished feeling. If Microsoft had given them another 6-12 months to truly polish everything, then it maybe would've been a more solid OK game. 

Anyway I didn't mind the incompleteness so much because I was playing less for fun, and more "for work", as a first person game developer. In this sense, playing a 75% finished game is more useful than playing a 100% finished game. You get to see more of the big broad strokes before they got quite resolved, the intent vs. the execution. 

So this post will focus on my read of the general game design and player experience.

SPOILER WARNING: lots of general systems spoilers and gameplay screenshots, some story spoilers

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Logjam as mourning wood

Logjam is the latest in my gay sexuality series -- a short small game about a middle aged lumberjack daddy processing wood and other hard things. It's about forestry, masculinity, and history, but on a surface level it's a simple work simulator with a burly stripper and occasional twists.

CONTENT WARNING: Some of the screenshots have some CG nudity in them. It is "NSFW".

SPOILER WARNING: This post spoils what happens in the game. If you care about that, then you should play it first.

Friday, April 1, 2022

new Quake map: The Close And Holy Darkness

This post spoils what happens in my Quake map. If you care about that, play it first.

I made another Quake map -- this one was for a map jam called Retro Jam 7, where we all spent 2 weeks making level design homages to the greatest hits. 

The theme here was "Koohoo" or "The Castle of Koohoo" (2001) by Vondur. The theming felt very fresh for Quake at the time, taking notes (and maybe a few textures) from Unreal. The novel use of greens and blues, as well as the outdoor hub layout, contrasted a lot with the browns and reds of Quake 3 Arena inspired aesthetics popular at the time.

Of course, I figured everyone else in the jam was going to lean on those dark greens and blues, so instead I opted for a rosy morning brown type of mood.

Sunday, June 21, 2020

Hard Lads as an important failure



This post “spoils” what happens in my new game Hard Lads. If you care about spoilers, you should play it before reading. It takes about 5 minutes to play once, and maybe 20 minutes to play it to 100%.

In 2015, a phone video of young muscular White British men hitting each other with a chair went viral. Why make a game about this meme now? Some might characterize all my output derisively as "meme games", which is fine, but personally I’ve tried to avoid doing it on purpose. First, my games themselves should strive to be the original meme, and not merely a fan reproduction. Second, many memes are steeped in internet gamer culture, the only circle jerk I want to avoid.

However. I think British Lads Hit Each Other With Chair is one of those classic internet videos that merits special attention. It does so much in a single minute, and it's not about video games at all. So that’s why I made Hard Lads.

Monday, November 26, 2018

Notes on "Sparkling Dialogue", a great narrative design / game writing talk by Jon Ingold at AdventureX 2018


My colleague Clara Fernandez-Vara pointed me towards this great game writing talk by Jon Ingold this year at AdventureX, an excellent narrative design conference in London. Unfortunately the Twitch video of the talk is hard to follow and the YouTube version of this talk is still forthcoming, so I thought I'd summarize the talk here because I found it very useful. As of December 1st, the YouTube version is now online!

(NOTE: This post isn't a transcript of Ingold's talk. It's a summary with my interpretations, and I might be wrong or misunderstanding.)

Ingold begins with something that should be obvious and uncontroversial to everyone: generally, most video game dialogue is poorly written. This isn't to say video games are bad, or that they we shouldn't try to do any dialogue at all. There are also many reasons why game writers are forced to write poorly, whether it's because of lack of resources, or last minute changes in the design, or other production constraints, etc.

The point is not to blame writers. The point is to highlight a problem in the craft and to define a better ideal. So, how can we write more competent game dialogue that is slightly less embarrassing?

To demonstrate the problem of typical video game writing, Ingold shows us this conversation from the first hour of Assassins Creed Odyssey in the starting mission "So It Begins":

Monday, November 19, 2018

Rinse and Repeat HD remastered, and three years of reflections and thwarted plans



I've just uploaded an updated version of Rinse and Repeat: it is now known as Rinse and Repeat HD, which is basically the same version currently playable at the Victoria and Albert's Videogames exhibition.*

In addition to fancier graphics, I've also: added gamepad / rumble support, re-programmed the entire scheduling algorithm to be more stable, and tweaked much of the balance and feel.

If you're not familiar with the game, you should probably read my artist statement "Rinse and Repeat as cup runneth over" so that you know how the game works.

The rest of this post will assume you mostly know what it's about already!...

Sunday, November 4, 2018

The first person shooter is a dad in mid-life crisis

OK I know Heavy Rain isn't an FPS but I like this screenshot so I don't care
Every semester for our introductory Games 101 historical survey class, a different NYU Game Center faculty member presents a survey of a game genre. Matt Parker lectures on sports, Clara Fernandez-Vara talks about adventure games, Mitu Khandaker talks about simulations, and so on.

My personal lecture happens to be on the first person shooter (FPS) genre. In my lecture, I trace five main currents through the FPS genre:

Thursday, October 4, 2018

Queer Futures in Game Feel


This post is adapted from a talk I gave at Queerness and Games Conference 2018.

Game feel is most known through indie game developer Steve Swink, who wrote an influential article and a book about it. While I like Swink's book and methodology, I also think it limits itself to a very narrow subset of games and feels -- focusing heavily on platformer action games, but never really thinking about the game feel of strategy games, interactive fiction, or dating simulators, etc. There's a lot of pages on the input curve in Super Mario Bros, or the camera feel in Gears of War, or the animation in Symphony of the Night, but it omits something like The Graveyard or World of Warcraft. Do those games not have game feel?

Claiming these other genres and games under the banner of game feel might've weakened Swink's argument for closely coupled cybernetic loops and virtuosic traversal across game worlds back in 2008. But now ten years later, I think the time is right to expand game feel's concerns.

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

On the indie story RPG's use of "encounter-space" and Fortune-499


This post spoils some gameplay systems / moments in Fortune-499 and its general themes, but none of the specific plot events.

I just finished playing Fortune-499, a short stylish story RPG replete with millennial career angst and light deckbuilding. It does what other strong indie story RPGs like Undertale do: it actually questions the logic of its battle and progression systems, exploring its own design space for narrative effect.

Few video games ever do this. Acclaimed AAA RPGs like Final Fantasy 12 ask you to fight many monsters and level-up via "license boards" or whatever, but rarely explore what those metaphors mean / interrogate the logic of these metaphors within the game world.

So if a game is about programming your party members with "gambits" as a metaphor for command and decision-making, then isn't it weird that you have to buy gambits at shops? Does that mean poor people in this fantasy world literally have less sophisticated reasoning and mental capacity because they can't afford better gambits? Or if a character has low self-esteem, shouldn't that affect their license board / upgrade tree, which is a metaphor for self-improvement and growing-up -- or vice versa, if there's a story beat where they renew their commitment and self-confidence, shouldn't they get a million experience points to emphasize their growth? (This isn't over-thinking it, this is just a demand for designers to follow through on their metaphors.)

Of course Final Fantasy 12 isn't alone on this, and AAA games don't usually care about this dissonance / disconnect, while most gamers probably don't even notice it anymore. However, I think Fortune-499 is one of those rare exquisite indie story RPGs that really does care enough to ask questions about its own game systems.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Games as Research symposium, after-action report


A month ago I attended a one-day Games As Research symposium, hosted by TAG at Concordia University and organized by Rilla Khaled and Pippin Barr. If you want my rawest thoughts, here's my live tweet thread from that day.

I learned a lot about design history and current methodologies for studying how a game is made. Here's some of the common topics and threads that we kept coming back to, and a brief summary of each presentation:

Friday, January 19, 2018

On wikipedia-ing games culture and history

The other day, someone wrote to me but confessed they didn't know much about me, and that they had only played my games Intimate, Infinite and The Tearoom.

This felt like a really strange pairing of games to me. The Tearoom is a recent game that got a lot of press coverage, while Intimate Infinite is a much older, somewhat obscure game of mine that's mostly remembered only by some literary art game folks. What the heck is going on?

My suspicions were confirmed when I found out that I had a Wikipedia page as of July 2017, and that this page highlighted those two games with their own subsections. It made me realize that (a) people google me, and that (b) Wikipedia might be their first or second impressions of me. And yet, that page is still missing so much information about me; my dabbling in level design, my love of sandwiches, and so on.

When I whined on Twitter about having a Wikipedia page, boy genius game designer Michael Brough confessed his envy. I was shocked. How can Michael "Broughlike" Brough not have a Wikipedia page? I immediately sought to correct this injustice, and began writing a Wikipedia entry for Mr. Brough.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

The destruction / extinction of digital brutalism

screenshot from "Brutalism: Prelude on Stone" by Moshe Linke
The other day in level design class, a student brought up Moshe Linke's "Brutalism: Prelude on Stone" for discussion. What does it mean to re-create / re-construct / build a brutalist building in a video game?

To review, brutalism was a design ideology deployed mostly in public architecture from 1950-1970s throughout the world, exemplified by large blocky concrete structures in Soviet Russia and/or brick housing developments across Europe.

For the last 2-3 decades, people have criticized brutalism mostly as a cold, ugly, overly institutional style that ignores local communities and human warmth -- and recently that's been amplified by various material and technical critiques of brutalism (poor weathering and staining; environmental impact of concrete; seismic issues; etc) -- but now that we've started demolishing iconic brutalist buildings around the world, there's been a resurgence in defending brutalism before it becomes extinct.

Given that brutalism faces a real existential threat, and it is so heavily focused on the real-world material aspects of architecture, does a digital brutalism make sense?

Friday, November 17, 2017

Level With Me: Dear Esther (2012), complete!


Last week I finished a Level With Me run through Dear Esther (2012, Source Engine) with level design commentary -- I spent roughly 30-50 minutes on each of the four chapters / levels. Some of the moments were ruined by my deletion of all the voice over (I didn't want to talk over the narrator) but most of the game survived intact, I think. (Sorry.)

You can watch the whole playlist (all 4 videos) archived on YouTube. But here's some general patterns / trends / takeaways from this series:

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Open world level design: spatial composition and flow in Breath of the Wild


So, like much of game dev Twitter, I too saw Matt Walker's Twitter thread that summarized a CEDEC 2017 talk on how Nintendo built the game world in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

If you're not familiar, Breath of the Wild is highly-regarded as a return to good game design within the Zelda series -- if you want to know more about how the various game systems or simulations work, you should check out their GDC 2017 talk, where they emphasize an emergent physics / problem-solving perspective with the general game design.

But Walker's thread caught my eye (and everyone's eye!) because it was about something more basic and fundamental, which is composition of 3D worlds. The development team came up with a great memorable typology / design grammar for their vision of open world level design, and I want to recap it before Walker's tweets get lost in an unsearchable Twitter soup.

Again, I didn't really write this stuff or come up with these insights, but seeing as this is sort of a level design blog, I feel it's important to archive this stuff for all history, etc...

Friday, August 11, 2017

Go West young Slime Rancher, and grow up with the country

This post spoils some mechanics and game systems in Slime Rancher.

One in-game day in Slime Rancher, I found a rare "quantum slime", a creature that pooped out "quantum plorts" that I could sell for a lot of in-game money. To make a huge profit, I intended to raise a few on my ranch in captivity, and then collect their precious poop to sell in the market.

To maximize your slime poop plort yields, you're supposed to feed your slimes as often as possible. Every slime has a certain diet (vegetables, fruits, or meat) and a specific favorite item. Quantum slimes eat only fruit, but prefer a special fruit called a "phase lemon". To get phase lemons, you have to bring back a phase lemon from the wild, plant a phase lemon tree, wait for the fruit to mature, and then shoot a different fruit at it (like a cuberry, or a mint mango) to pop the phase lemon into existence. Compared to other crops, it's unusually labor intensive to cultivate and harvest phase lemons.

This is where Slime Rancher's other big system comes in, a cross-breeding mechanic that allows you to merge two slime types together. If you feed a slime with the poop from another slime, it will become a hybrid "largo" slime that inherits both types' diets and other properties, and it will poop out both types of plorts at once when it eats something. Two poops for the price of one! When you do this on purpose in Slime Rancher, you feel like a genius.

Sunday, August 6, 2017

Recent developments in queer game studies, Summer 2017

Here's a few recent updates in the """discourse""" within the exciting world of QUEER GAME STUDIES!!!

First, there's a new call for papers in the long-running Game Studies journal -- this time the focus is on "queerness and video games."  The full CFP is here. If you're a student or academic (or anyone with a perverse tolerance for academic citation styles) then you should consider sending-in some original scholarship and/or maybe trim your thesis into a submission; full articles of 6500-8000 words are due by December 31st, 2017. Good luck!

Next, Miguel Sicart wrote a piece about "Queering the [Game] Controller." Sicart, as far as I know, doesn't identify as queer, so some may argue he thus cannot really "queer" anything -- so please allow me, a certified gay person, to try to unpack some of his ideas here:

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

On first person one-roomers and grass games

old WIP production still from an early version of The Tearoom
I want to talk a bit about the formal design constraints in my gay sex games -- I don't usually emphasize this aspect of my work because it's a very game developer-y thing to care about, but sometimes I guess a little bit of shop-talk is called for:

A lot of my games have been what I'd call short form "one room" games, where I constrain the scope of the game to one room or one small area. When I first started doing Radiator 1 ("Polaris") in 2009, that constraint emerged from my frustration with working on a large international group project like Black Mesa Source, where I wasn't sure if we were ever going to finish and release anything. I wondered, could I work alone, and quickly make a short experience in a small room?

Cut to today in 2017. I've just finished and released The Tearoom, a game that takes place in one single public bathroom. Because it was so small and controlled, I could focus on the interactions and production value very tightly, and produce something with relatively high fidelity and density even though I was working mostly alone. (But it still took me like 8-9 months of part-time work to do all that! Maybe the room should've been even smaller?)

But I also don't exist in a vacuum, cut-off from the rest of video game culture. Maybe my attitude is also a reaction against the rise / dominance / golden age of open world games and walking simulator-type hiking games today? I know other designers counter AAA hegemony in different ways, like how Firewatch adopted a non-photorealistic illustrative art style, or how The Signal From Tolva focused on a somewhat sparse rocky-chunky-sculpted look. Both games feature large open world environments that differentiate themselves with talented art direction that also helped them scope better too.

However, I'm not really a good art director, and I still feel really tied to realism for political reasons, so I guess I have to differentiate my creative strategy in a different way... I specifically set my games in small man-made domestic spaces instead of trying to build huge sweeping landscapes. And even if I did attempt to build a huge landscape, my shabby default Unity 2 tri indie grass will never be able to compare with photoreal translucent Unreal grass, or Breath of the Wild's lush Miyazaki grass, so maybe that's why I don't bother. As much as I enjoy and admire all these grass games, I recognize that it's out of my wheelhouse and capability. Instead of trying to build a giant grassy forest landscape, I can rest with a decently crafted urinal and lean on that.

It might seem like I'm boxing myself in, and maybe I am, but honestly it doesn't feel that onerous to me. Grass is nice, but perhaps there's enough people making grass games already. I'm not sure if I have anything new or interesting to say about grass or trees anyway. (But who knows? Coming in 2018: gay trees)

By constraining the physical-geographical space, I think that helps me explore a wider conceptual-cultural space. One room doesn't just mean one idea? Or if it does, then for now, I think I'd rather make 5 one room games than 1 five room game, or 0.271 forest games.

Friday, June 23, 2017

Some recent conversation on cultural appropriation


A few months ago, I wrote about how I think VR "empathy machines" are basically just a form of appropriation, where VR brands associate themselves with vaguely progressive political causes in a bid to make VR seem more relevant.

Maybe a lot of people still aren't really sure what "cultural appropriation" means? It's also a bit more of a US-thing, because of how race in the US works, so if you don't live in the US then you might not be as familiar with it.

If you're in a hurry, Amandla Stenberg made a popular 5 minute video in 2015 called "Don't Cash Crop On My Cornrows". Back in 2015, white performers like Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and Miley Cyrus were incorporating black music, black hair, and black memes into their acts, but it seemed like that care suddenly evaporated when black people got killed by police. Are white people actually the anti-racist allies they thought they were? If this is "cultural exchange", then black people were getting a pretty bad deal -- in return, they weren't even getting their own lives!

However, the conversation on cultural appropriation has shifted since 2015. So as a sort of public service, I'd like to highlight some more recent writing on cultural appropriation, all published within the last month or so, to give a small sense of what some people are saying right now.

Friday, June 9, 2017

On that one brilliant episode of Murder She Wrote that thinks VR is kind of bullshit


Murder She Wrote was a long running TV show about an elderly mystery novelist (played by Dame Angela Lansbury) who happens to solve all these murders wherever she goes. Like other long-running TV shows on CBS about older women having adventures, it was popular mostly with grandmothers and gay men -- which is why it's so surprising (or maybe unsurprising?) that it also had one of the most accurate on-point less-rosy depictions of 1990s VR on television.

If you want to know more about the episode "A Virtual Murder" (S10 E05), read Laura Hudson's full write-up for Wired.

If you're in a hurry, here's a brief synopsis, along with my short analysis... but first, please enjoy this GIF of someone (spoiler) shooting a guy in a VR headset:

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

The war in heaven: a three-dimensional VR culture clash


Virtual reality is a weird collaboration between several different fields / industries, and each practice brings its own assumptions and baggage. When I go to VR events and conferences away from the influence of games, I often feel bewildered and confused by the different language and norms.

One time I was at a businessy VR event near Wall Street and some tech-biz guy said he had a "VR-ready industrial robot" deployed in a warehouse, and would any angels [investors] be interested in taking a tour? I was so confused (what the hell is a VR-ready industrial robot?) so I joked aloud, "is it a sex robot?" -- but no one else reacted at all, they just continued with the conversation and asked him about market caps or something, as if I didn't even say anything! Not even a pity smirk or furrowed brow or roll of the eyes!

This is part of a larger skirmish about language, and about how to talk about VR. The PC manufacturers have adopted "VR-ready" as a euphemism for "expensive gamer computer"... In tech, you have to be able to refer to an investor as an "angel" without laughing and bursting into flames. These are kind of trivial examples that don't seriously impede communication, but I do think they hint at how we're trying to shape cultures and norms for VR. There's not even agreement about whether to call VR "VR" -- maybe VR is just a subset of "AR" (augmented reality), but really those are both just subsets of "MR" (mixed reality) -- or maybe let's unify under the recent umbrella term "XR" (x-reality?)... terminology and labels and language matters.

And since angels are involved, I guess this is a war in heaven.