Dark Past (part 4): The Useful Post (?) or Randy Smith's "valence theory" of level design.

This is a series of posts that analyzes the immersive sim. It's a play on the excellent RPS feature, Dark Futures.

Many moons ago, I began by (part 1) emphasizing the robustness of systems in immersive sims before (part 2) moving closer to level design, then (part 3) criticized both ideas, and now the point of all this: (part 4) Randy Smith's "valence theory" of level design, as applied to the Thief games. (NOTE: he never called it that, but I am.)

We're done with the theoretical basis. Now this is the "Useful Post" of the Dark Past series, a primer on some level design theory for immersive sims with stealth mechanics. It's also particularly relevant, given the recent announcement of Dishonored.

Disqus

I migrated all comments over to Disqus. I'm told it's better, and I see all the cool kids doing it, so that's why I did it. Please voice any seething anger here... even if it has nothing to do with this post.

How Tutorials Should Be Done

Why make sloppy pop-up text "tutorials" that give away all the mechanics / dynamics (I'm looking at you, BioShock) when you can have extremely elegant level design teach the skills and let players work things out for themselves?

Portal 2 did it. Almost every Stephen Lavelle game does it. Most recently, Impasse (via IndieGames.com) does it too.

Remember, less talk and more rock.

Love letter to a bridge

Mention the "bridge in de_aztec" to any Counter-Strike player and they'll nod knowingly.

Sure, you might have Aram Bartholl wanting to build a 1:1 scale model of de_dust "in real-life", but why no love of any similar magnitude for Chris Auty's vaguely Mesoamerican masterpiece? Throughout the entire map cycle, The Bridge has no equal in terms of elegance and genius, I'd argue.

As a service to our younger gamers, who, upon being asked, "what's your favorite CS map?" will respond incredulously with, "isn't CS that really old game?" then blow a large bubble gum bubble in your face and go back to texting a fellow bro -- here, you little shit, here's why The Bridge is great.

nwdm_nocturnal, iterations

Both infuriating and liberating to work in Half-Life 1 again.

 

Super Friendship Club

New pastures and new projects, founded by the Cambridge scene and its many satellites.

The first "pageant" is up; you have a month to make games about "justice."

Also, post your other projects there for some world-class feedback.

See you there!

MapCore Weekend Challenge: "Nightwatch DM"

Textures and level design by Henning Horstmann.

Many moons ago, I worked on a single player Half-Life 1 mod called "Nightwatch" with many of the the best and brightest minds of the mod community. Even with all our expertise, resources and manpower, we still overestimated ourselves and ended up not releasing a thing.

The world textures were amazing though; ~60% by Adam Foster, ~25% by Henning Horstmann.

This weekend at MapCore, we're going to live vicariously through you and actually release some Nightwatch maps -- make a small Half-Life 1 deathmatch level in 72 hours using these awesome textures!

The Half-Life 1 version of Hammer is more or less identical to the current Source version, except the design process is so much faster. No worrying about cubemaps or water shaders or prop models. Just start mapping!

Confer the thread for instructions, what to download, and various tips and tricks for working with Half-Life 1.

Unity for Source Modders

I still make Source mods and I like it, don't get me wrong -- there's no harm in a little experimentation though, right? Now, if you make levels for Source Engine stuff then you already have the skills to start using Unity. Think of it as learning another language and being bilingual or multilingual. Here are some general concepts from Source, their translations in Unity, and some tips:

> In the Unity editor, hold right-click in 3D camera view to enable WASD / mouse-look / noclip-style navigation, just like in Hammer. Hold "Shift" to sprint. This is probably the single most important thing for you to remember that you might not've figured out immediately.

Polonius (pre-alpha)

Against our better judgment, me and Eddie Cameron have made another Unity FPS for the Mini Ludum Dare #27, "All Talk." It's horribly unfinished because we spent most of the time playing LA Noire and going out to bars and eating amazing burgers, but hey, next time we'll know.

This game is based on the central setpiece of Francis Ford Coppola's classic espionage thriller, "The Conversation."



Here's how it works: you have three characters with microphones. Two have long-range parabolic "sniper" microphones in fixed positions, and one is on the ground to actively tail the target.

The target couple wanders into all kinds of obstacles (walls, trees, spheres, crowds) that prevents the snipers from getting a clear recording, so that's where the ground guy comes in -- he can tail them for a limited time, but then occasionally the target will turn around -- in which case he has to go run and hide.

Right now a lot of it is broken and the game doesn't work as well as it should. Specifically, it's either really hard or it's too easy if you find one particular exploit.

There's also a bunch of stuff we want to add: working gameplay, character animations, non-male character models, additional missions and scenarios, maybe a second "audio mixing" phase where you have to mix the 3 sources together before submitting to the client, etc.

Still... I think we're slowly getting better at this.

If you really want to play it, though I can only half-heartedly recommend it, the 7.1 mb Unity web player build is right here. Here are two important things you need to know before playing --

1) A yellow arrow hovers above your target for 30 seconds as an aid at the beginning of the game.  After that, you're on your own.

2) Also, keep your briefcase guy out of the target couple's LoS, or else you'll lose! They have really far LoS! Just hide behind stuff to break LoS.

A summer mapping initiative

It's so refreshing to make Portal 2 levels -- you have an idea, you make it, you test it, you detail it, you test it, you fix it and then you have a rather playable map in the end.

I've worked on so many unfinished levels and half-baked concepts the past year... and then I just cranked (crunked?) out a few chambers in the last few weeks.

Making a map pack is suddenly so much more manageable. Never before has the function of video game architecture been so clear and elegant. In a weird reversal of architectural history, ornament has even transformed into something functional (it makes a surface unportalable) and slanted walls become more than just visually interesting.

The only thing I dislike is the lack of a decent custom map loader interface in the main menu. Right now you have to go into the console and type "map [mapname]" which the average player can't be bothered to do. I'm sure it'll get addressed in the next update (DLC #1?) but until then, profound sad-face.

If you've been working on the same old project for the last few months (or years) then take a break and spend a few days on a Portal 2 map.

Remember the designer you once were and enjoy the feeling of actually finishing things.

Because I know I sure needed it.

Dark Past (part 3): Letting Go of the Immersive Sim, of flu viruses, ghosting, and why we're all Kate Winslets at heart.

This is a series of posts that analyzes the immersive sim. It's a play on the excellent RPS feature, Dark Futures.

In past posts, I argued that (part 1) immersive sims were so cool we got overprotective of them and suffocated them, but (part 2) we can still extend the same design theory to contemporary single player design.

For part 3, I'd like to explore the limits of "immersive sim theory" and even criticize it in light of recent research. This devil's advocate stuff will help us in part 4.

Both system dynamics (sort of the science of systems) and Looking Glass Studios came out of MIT in the 70's or 80's or some time around there -- and for the convenience of my argument, let's assume it wasn't a coincidence...

Further Reading for "Gay (But Not Gay)..."

I'm probably going to regret bringing up the "Gay (But Not Gay) Characters in Video Games" thing all over again.

However, I feel obliged to relate the whole matter to a somewhat recent "post-gay" article and the ensuing criticism. And then there's that whole snowballing mess that is GLAAD.

I believe that no non-crazy person disputes the necessity of having some LGBTQ video game characters.

Rather, the debate, I think, focuses on how they should be represented and what kinds of gays are most deserving of representation. This is the same debate taking place outside the sealed vacuum that is video games, in a small but growing civil war within our fabulous ranks.

... Of course, Jim Sterling is still wrong.
  

Question for the colorblind / an idea of accessibility and audience?

Was choosing "red" a bad idea / horribly insensitive to colorblind people? Like, will they be able to distinguish the non-portalable metal plating from the stone walls? I don't want a BioShock 2 debacle on my hands.

Or am I misunderstanding how colorblindness works?

I'm told a good guideline is to just desaturate a screengrab completely and make sure the brightness / contrast can speak for itself... I suppose I could darken the red texture a bit? Or is the light-dark contrast good enough?

Here are some breakdowns of other "player minorities":

Close Reading: "Noveria," Mass Effect 1

I wanted to airlock Ashley Williams as soon as I met her. The vehicle physics are awful, like a shopping cart coated with Vaseline. The PC equipment menu interface still sucks. The squad AI is foolish. Tech skills seem rather worthless. Biotics are overpowered. Shops don't sell anything better than what you find. And so on.

... But the scripting and level design in Noveria? It's quite good.

Spoilers below, but only about the first 75% of the quest.

Let's Pitch: F-Stop.

Let's speculate what F-Stop (aka Portal 1.5) was / is.

Come up with a game pitch in the comments, if you'd like. Focus on the mechanics and what possible puzzles / levels would be, and for extra credit you can think about what the technical implementation would require.

I'll start:

I'm just going to leave this here.

"Half-Life Trailer by James Benson." Would body awareness work properly like this in an actual game?

A Faster Horse

Did Valve hire fashion designers? I feel like their costumes are always so... solid? Not glowy bits everywhere.

It would be foolish to characterize a 95 on Metacritic as a mistake.

It was a resounding retort to all those naysayers against the Source Engine (i.e. me, every other week): Portal 2 would've been harder to make in Unreal. It's as if many Portal 2 levels never really leave the "grayboxing" stage -- maybe that's the joke here? -- and to graybox over and over, properly, you need great brush tools, which UnrealED doesn't have at all.

... Because brushes are supposedly obsolete? Ha.

Or maybe we'll just say that it wasn't a risk. Valve even said as much publicly, back in 2010: "We [asked people what they wanted, and they said more portals and GladOS, so we shelved this other promising prototype and did as they asked.]"

Within the first minute of the game, they ask you to "appreciate the Art." Ding! The implication is that this game isn't meant to be bold Art -- rather, it's a supposedly higher calling -- it's Entertainment.

This self-awareness even comes through in the pacing: they're fully aware of the "solve a chamber, listen to a joke, take the elevator" pattern of the whole game. You know they're aware because they break that pattern several times. Those breaks are effective because you, the lab rat, were conditioned to expect certain things.

Your growing ennui with that pattern mirrors the game narrative itself. You're tired of this game, of her? No, you've got it all wrong... GladOS is sick and tired of you, the player, panting and sweating as you run through her corridors.

Why weren't you grateful? She was just giving you what you wanted.

Now, there's a particularly relevant quote by Henry Ford on the subject of focus-testing game concepts: "If I had asked what people wanted, they would have said faster horses."

We would've said to put Half-Life 2 in Black Mesa. We would've said to make Team Fortress 2 a realistic military shooter.

... Well, looks like this time we got our faster horse. Ain't she a beaut?

Elijah Tebbetts' "I Can't Find My Glasses"

From the brilliant mind behind other weird Unity FPS things like The Captain and Bisected Essence II comes "I Can't Find My Glasses." An excellent short Unity FPS that anyone could've made in 2 hours... but we weren't clever enough to do it. I think it could've been more awesome with impact sounds, screeching cats, etc.

First Person Films - Combat in the First Person: Haruti

Watch this amazing 7:33 real-life helmet cam video of a battle in Afghanistan, edited by the New York Times.

Required viewing for FPS-afficionados everywhere: this is exactly the source material we steal from, and it is clear how much more we must steal. Some observations:

• It's kind of funny how desaturated and colorless the video is. Just like in the video games!
• At one point, Watch the second time they come under fire. Watch the squad and the "player"; they go to great lengths to avoid stepping into the irrigation ditch. On a strategic level, maybe the water would get their equipment wet and less-functional -- but wouldn't the trench give them more cover? On a cultural level, slimy irrigation water is gross. How do we represent the consequence of materials / materiality in an FPS? Portal 2 presents a really blatant treatment of materials in the form of brightly-colored gel; but will it ever possible to represent how gross wet toilet-paper feels?
• They hold their fire / conserve their ammo a lot. I think it's pretty clear we don't want to model this, though, because running out of ammo isn't "fun."
• Reloading your gun while running seems pretty hard to do in real-life.
• Covering fire plays a huge role. (Brothers in Arms was the first to formally mechanize this, I think.)
• They almost never fire when standing. (Since Counter-Strike, FPS games now model this.)
• They do not know the exact layout of the level, but they know rough architectural schemas: "this 150 x 150 enclosed orchard was unusual for that area." If we wanted to model that thinking, maybe we should only have procedurally-generated levels, in order to encourage pattern-recognition over rote memory.
• They blew a hole in the wall. Currently, only the Battlefield: Bad Company series models that, and other games less interestingly with pre-placed static "breaching charge" locations for demomen player classes. Dynamic deformation is probably the most crucial real-life combat mechanic to explore in military arcade FPS games. (For more, see "The First Person Ruin")
• At the end, they hug each other. Hugging is clearly important to the narrative of this battle. Why isn't "hugging" a game mechanic? Why aren't there any first person huggers? (Other than Portal 2?) Dear Activision: I want to kiss my squadmate's forehead at the end of a round.

MapCore "Door" Challenge: Done.

This month's MapCore Challenge: prototype a puzzle where the player has to open a door, using the provided template map as a base. (aka, the "Door Dare")

We had a lot of cool entries, so by all means check them out and vote for your 3 favorites.

But because this is my blog, I'm going to shamelessly promote my own entry, "Secret Mission." In it, you have to modify the entity scripting I/O of the map itself, in-game, in order to open the doors. (The actual map logic is all faked, but I imagine the proof of concept is there...)



You might see this mechanic come back in Radiator vol. 4 some day, perhaps in the heavily delayed level, "Being Adam Foster"...

Welcome to the Indie FPS.

Indie platformers spawned sub-genres like the sudden-death one button jumpers, masocore and explore-'em-ups among countless others. The indie RTS spawned tower defense. Most of these indie efforts have non-photorealistic visuals that focus on distilling their commercialized parents' core mechanics into a delicious syrup: run and jump, build stuff that kills other stuff to survive, etc.

Continuing that proposed template, what sub-genre is the indie FPS working on?

Today in 2011, mainstream commercial efforts still focus on arcade man-shooting with photorealistic graphics in military contexts. They are descendents of one vision of first person gaming, the lineage of Wolfenstein 3D (1992).

But back in 1994, video games were confronted with a very different vision of what first person games could be....

Pilsner: Pre-Thesis

"Pilsner" is what my masters' thesis project will likely be, (it's going into full production starting this summer) but maybe I'll completely change my mind in the coming months, who knows. It's pretty ambitious in trying to solve, like, 5 big game design problems all at once.

The pitch is the same as before: "a multiplayer browser-FPS where Jersey Shore meets paramilitary squad tactics."

More specifically, if you happen to be "in the know," it's Rainbow Six + Spy Party + Words with Friends + Wikipedia.

Here's the full 6 page end-of-the-semester brief, if you're curious enough to read it... or just mine the references for your own papers. Just keep in mind the intended audience, my professor -- an experienced designer who doesn't really play video games:

First Person Films: "Charlie Bit My Finger" and "Smack My B*tch Up"

A more recent addition to the "First Person Films" post... described by the creator as a "Left 4 Dead" short film, essentially one extended POV shot. Enjoy.



Ah, vulnerable children in survival horror contexts never gets old, eh?

And as a bonus, here's Prodigy's "Smack My B*tch Up," a (NSFW) first person music video that came to mind when watching the above. I remember watching this on MTV back when they still played music videos...



Look at what the first person mode can do! And look at how narrowly we use it in games! Loooook!

Now in the pipeline...

I'm playing with the Unofficial Portal 2 SDK.
UPDATE: huh, well whaddaya know, the real SDK is now up.

"The Meat Pack." Incredibly hard Portal 2 levels coming to a \sourcemods\ folder near you, this summer.

May 12th, 2011: "No Quarter" at NYU Game Center

http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/2011/02/announcing-2nd-annual-no-quarter-exhibition-of-games

Terry Cavanagh's game is the only one I know anything about -- it's a Unity game that accomplishes the amazing feat of not really looking like a Unity game (or any other game, for that matter) with a really neat depth / dithering / colorspace effect.

See you there and say hello to me, because I'm probably too shy to approach you if I only know you from the internets. Maybe I'll even share one of the twenty brioche sandwiches I snagged from the table.

Ludum Dare 20: Condom Corps, or "It's dangerous to go alone... take this condom, bro."

My first Ludum Dare, and I actually finished it! (Kinda.) Maybe I'll polish it some more and sell it to NYC Public Health?...

 PLAY NOW: Unity Web (compo) | Unity Web (jam)

*** If you are judging, please play the COMPO version. [Link to entry on ludumdare.com]
*** If you are NOT judging, play the JAM version in its (legally) photosourced splendor. The two builds are identical except for the enhanced background graphics in the JAM version.

>>> BASICALLY
It’s a Match3 First Person Sniper for sex education.
“It’s dangerous to go alone… take this condom, bro.”

>>> HOW TO PLAY

• Mouse1 = fire
• Mouse2 = zoom in
• Mousewheel = change ammotype

1) Stare at a dude’s package. Decide what size of condom he needs.
2) Shoot the condom into his hand.
3) Match adjacent colors to create chain-climaxes for mega points.
4) Shoot well-fitting condoms to maintain a “fit streak” multiplier for your score.
5) GET HIGH SCORE!!!

Source code is here. (.unitypackage)

Ludum Dare 20: Dev Log 1

I'm making a game for the "make a video game in 48 hours" challenge, Ludum Dare, even though I have a final project to do for school. (They never said I was the smartest.) Cross-posted from http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/04/30/condom-sniper-update-2/

Unity3D Webplayer test build:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19887116/Condom1/index.html

Skybox art is kinda done, mostly photosourced from Unity standard assets / NASA / CGtextures / Creative Commons on Flickr. Still need to turn off fog for the moon, hmm. All full bright textures for performance reasons; I’m going to be using a lot of point lights in the actual game area, so I want to save my GPU stuff for where it counts.

Mouselook is clamped because you’re mostly just going to be sniping within that rectangle in front of you, delivering condoms to the city’s horniest / most desperate.

Looking to implement the actual mechanics and building generation tomorrow night. I don’t foresee many problems, but we’ll see…

NYC Game Scenesters: Erik Wolpaw talk next Thursday

ATTENTION! If you're in the NYC area, you should RSVP for this talk with Erik Wolpaw on Thursday -- like, right now. You definitely won't be able to stroll in, and even if you do, you'll miss out on free croissant sandwiches.

It's open to the public. Go.

"The format for the evening will be a brief guided play-through of Portal 2 with Erik, followed by an interview and general discussion moderated by Game Center Interim Director Frank Lantz. The audience is encouraged to join the discussion. Please bring questions about Portal, game writing, criticism, narrative and the overall subject of games in general."

And the NYU croissant sandwich things are pretty awesome. Get there early if you expect any otherwise I'm going to eat them all.

New MapCore Compo: "The Door Challenge"

Attention! There's a new level design compo about to start at MapCore:

The Door Challenge, Friday, April 29th - Sunday, May 22nd.

"Using the included prefab in the engine of your choice, script a puzzle to creatively open the door! As this is a scripting challenge, you are encouraged to use dev textures and only what art assets are absolutely necessary to communicate key ideas."



Open to Source and UDK users! (And other engines, if you're willing to port the prefab yourself. I might port it to Unity, as self-proclaimed minister of Source-Unity relations.)

New faces are, as always, a welcome sight.

And remember: the "4 week timespan" doesn't mean you need to spend 4 weeks on it; last time, Thiago made his in 24 hours and won the Cube Compo with dm_zest. (Granted, he already made the textures, but still!...)

Still think it's too much of a time commitment? We're also thinking of doing shorter "weekend" challenges, so chime in there if you like that idea.

Also in the pipeline...

Prototyping a medieval baseball sidescroller for class: you're Troy Percival / Sir Perceval, famed professional baseball player / naive knight raised in the woods. Heavily dependent on a mechanic stolen from Cactus' Norrland. Will your reckless / senseless quest for strikeouts and saves consume you, or will you die triumphantly on the pitcher's mound of the 2002 World Series?

... Also considering a zombie mode. Quickly, strike-out zombified Derek Jeter before the infection spreads to the castle!

In case you hadn't heard...

The official announcement of CryEngine Indie. So I guess now it's CryEngine vs. UDK, battling for high-end standalone indie PC market -- which is growing a lot, with skilled professionals getting laid-off or leaving their jobs to go independent.

Valve is losing their "developer share" of hobbyists / indies with every passing day. I mean, why do they approve mediocre shovelware like Dino D-Day for Steam, but then reject Gemini Rue? Because Dino D-Day was a Source licensee? Hopefully the upcoming Dear Esther retail will restore some prestige to the Source indie brand.

... Oh, right. CryIndie press release goes like this:

"We'll be giving you access to the latest, greatest version of CryENGINE 3 - the same engine we use internally, the same engine we give to our licensees, the same engine that powers Crysis 2.

This will be a complete version of our engine, including C++ code access, our content exporters (including our LiveCreate real-time pipeline), shader code, game sample code from Crysis 2, script samples, new improved Flowgraph and a whole host of great asset examples, which will allow teams to build complete games from scratch for PC."

Ludodiegesis, or Pinchbeck's unified field theory of FPS games, or "please pee on my leg and tell me it's raining."

photo by National Media Museum, "You want a piece of me?!"

I'm reading (fellow frontiersman of modding) Dan "Dear Esther" Pinchbeck's PhD dissertation / unified field theory of FPS games. Contrary to what my inflammatory post title implies, I actually really like it and think it's valuable.

I've also kind of fact-checked my summary with him too, so let this post serve as a Wikipedia article of sorts for piquing your interest in reading the real thing...

“Story as a function of gameplay in First Person Shooters: an analysis of FPS diegetic content 1998-2007.” 

Central to his conceptual framework is the idea of "ludodiegesis" -- ludo meaning "play" and diegesis referring to "the fictive reality of the game." (If you're gagging at these words: remember that part about games being a legitimate form of art and culture? Well, we need to invent new words to effectively talk about this new media. So learn this word.)

It's his elegant way of growing something from the rotting corpse that is the narratology vs. ludology non-debate, mainly by shifting what "game narrative" means:

Castles & Trains

Recommended: "Castles & Trains" by Michael Todd.

In the pipeline...

Pilsner: Tactical Binge Drinking Action.  

I guess the Hollywood pitch would be Jersey Shore + Rainbow Six. The weaponized male gaze. A planned "gay bar" or "Top Gun" game mode -- or maybe it should be the default? Asynchronous multiplayer, mouse-only controls, over a dozen IPAs to choose from, etc.

Course syllabus: "Game Design and Architecture"

Here at the Design and Technology MFA program at Parsons, the "Game Design 1" course is extremely popular. Like, it's one of the first classes to fill up at registration. In it, you learn about analog game design and make your own board games / card games.

Conversely, "Game Design 2" is about level design, mostly in a digital context, and it is much less popular -- to the extent that this semester, it got canceled from lack of enrollment. (Or at least that's the reason they gave us.)

Why was Game Design 1 so popular, but Game Design 2 (level design) allowed to die? I see them as two very similar, important things for interaction designers to learn, but apparently both the student body and administration disagree with me.

However, I'm the one who's always right about everything.

So in my assignment for a design and education class, I thought I'd try to bridge the gap between the two and make a level design class for people who aren't particularly fond of video games. It focuses on interaction and environment across various types of games.

We deal with fairly simple, basic games and mechanics so we can focus on the levels. Also, keep in mind that the intended audience is middle school / early high school, though I'm sure if you crammed in some readings and essays in there it'd make for a decent college freshman class.

The working draft of the syllabus is pasted below. Feedback is appreciated:

Game Design and Architecture
Robert Yang. E-mail.

Think about the first level of Super Mario Bros. or your favorite map in Halo. Think about a game of Monopoly, when you're leaving jail and you have to brave the minefield of hotels. Think about a game of baseball in Fenway Park, where there's a 36 foot tall wall called the “Green Monster” that prevents easy home runs.

In video games, board games, sports, and anything else: it matters where you play.

Video games call this “level design,” but in this course we'll explore both digital and non-digital representations of the environment and how to build them. If you like board games, video games, sports, playground games, or anything else game-related: we'd love to have you.

Death of the Mod?

Kneejerk commentators from RPS: I'm not saying people don't make mods anymore. Of course people still make mods, but these are very different mods from traditional ideas of the blockbuster TC mod.

This was the subject of a roundtable podcast I did with other modders (moderated by the fresh-smelling Phillip Marlowe) but I thought I'd write some stuff I couldn't articulate when barely awake at unearthly hours of the morning. In this post I also speak generally of modding in the contexts I know it (Starcraft, Half-Life 1, Source Engine) instead of just limiting it to Source modding.

Okay, so: Before, there wasn't really anything. So, we modded.

Then there were just a few random 3D engines (Ogre3D, Cube, etc.) but no widespread adoption because they were difficult to use. Want a level editor? Code it yourself!... So, we modded. Besides, only mods got publicity on fan sites anyway; our work was worthless, inferior to the professionals. Who would ever pay for it? Unmarketable. We were just fans and amateurs, working with the permission of the big boys.

There was no indie RTS, no indie FPS. So we just modded Starcraft. We made tower defense maps or Aeon of Strife maps (the 1999 precursor to DOTA). We also modded Half-Life and made this little thing called Counter-Strike. Modding has changed the face of the game industry, but we only know that in hindsight.

Now, everything has changed.

There are new, powerful standalone 3D game creation packages (Unity, UDK) with integrated engines and toolsets that have physics, IK solvers, heightmap terrain editors, etc. Our "amateur" work can be sold on Steam, the App Store, the Android Market, or even by ourselves. Popular blogs readily publicize / discuss these "indie" efforts. In general, it seems amateurs are just more disciplined and more skilled with the practice of game development.

There's now an indie RTS genre, it's called tower defense. There's an indie FPS, it's called Minecraft and has been a huge paradigm shift in itself. A huge, "indie" culture has reconfigured how we see video games: masocore, QWOP, Spelunky, the cult of personality behind Cactus, the Copenhagen Games Collective, anything touched by Stephen Lavelle, Tale of Tales, and so much more. These are great reconfigurers.

Meanwhile, the only recent, equivalent, reconfiguring event in the mod community that comes to my mind is Dear Esther.

In this sense, "modding," as we know it, is dead... Because we aren't merely fans or amateurs anymore. We're now "indie," we're somewhat independent of the commercial game industry that spawned modding: we now have a shared culture, publicity engine and distribution mechanisms that happily exists outside of them. Which is great.

There will still be many mods, of course, but they are definitely no longer the center of innovative design practice by non-professionals. Black Mesa Source will likely be the last "total conversion" mod ever completed, in the face of the rising (time) cost of development and the accessibility of good standalone options. Great games like "The Dark Mod" will no longer be constrained by an audience that doesn't have Doom 3.

As for the future, here are my predictions:

Unity is going to get bigger. Once they release their Flash deployment, assuming it's for free, they'll finally surmount that last "download the plug-in" hurdle and millions of bored office workers will flock to the platform. Flashbang Studios' "Blurst" initiative stimulated one era of Unity; the Flash tech will stimulate another.

Much like "gamer," the term "indie" will apply to so many people that it loses meaning. I'm on Anna Anthropy's boat in pushing a populist approach to game development: tools will get easier, distribution more robust, and one day everyone will just make games for everyone.

Also: start looking around. DotA and tower defense started in 1999, and now ten years later they're distinct, billion dollar genres. What's lingering in the shadows right now?

What grows from the charred corpse of modding? A forest.

Preview "Flatlander Woman" at "Illuminating Noir," April 1-8, 2011 @ Parsons

If you find yourself around the Union Square area in New York City in the beginning of April, head over to the main Parsons design building (2 West 13th Street) and check out the noir-themed film / art festival here; in the main lobby, you can play a preview version of "Radiator 2-1: Flatlander Woman." (I mean, you shouldn't go out of your way or anything, but if you're in the area then go for it. You get to shoot a whole lot of virtual people.)



(Unfortunately it'll be running on a computer with an Intel GMA 4500, so I think I'm going to have to disable a lot of effects... Hmm.)

(And dude, they're screening Blood Simple and have booked Frances McDormand. Whoa.)

MapCore "Cube" Compo: Done.

Well, we're done. We got entries in UDK / Source / Prey for your perusal. (Yeah, a map for Prey. Seriously. Andrew Weldon's weird like that.)

See / download entries here.

Voting is open for a week too.

And if you didn't enter this time, then consider entering next time. It's good practice for starting and finishing something... Just look at these awesome people and what they accomplished in a month.

As for a post-mortem of sorts with my own entry, "Tintern":

I went gameplay first, which is weird for me. Usually I prototype a basic mechanic, then do a fairly substantial art pass, then I design some puzzles / level flow and finish another art pass. This time I went from mechanics to puzzles to an incomplete art pass.

In terms of art style, I was going for a mixture of Giorgio de Chirico's paintings with some architecture from Luis Barragan. You might recall Barragan's influence in my previous Mapcore compo entry; the colors, dude. The colors. Plus, I recently saw Chirico's "The Melancholy of Departure" at the New York Museum of Modern Art so I guess that was still fresh on my mind.

The main gimmick is from a previous project I was working on, which had you fighting a hunter that had a scanner following it around. The scanner would drop mines and generally be a nuisance, while the hunter was fast and would pressure you into running into the mines -- and the key to beating them would be to exploit their relationship.

You had to grab the scanner and basically hold it hostage or something. However, it was difficult to develop the relationship between the two when you're too busy fighting them. So why not make them allies? And following the Halo AI rule, maybe then the player can watch them do cool stuff, and they'll seem smarter?

Oh, and I kind of slipped in some Wordsworth on a lark. And if you happen to hate English Romantic poets and think the inclusion is too pretentious: it's okay, it's just the tip.

Newsflash: Attention-starved Man Invents Mod Team, "Makes" Fake School Shooting Mod

In my apartment, we have a dog. Every now and then she yelps and jumps a lot, until you pet her or take her out for a walk. Sometimes we're too busy eating or working though, so then we just tell her, "Go lie down!"

* * *

He promised "great gameplay" so I was eager to download and try it. Turns out he (or "they") hasn't released anything yet and probably never will. He also complained about Super Columbine RPG, saying it's poorly designed -- and I agree -- but I don't see any indication that this mod will be any better. If anything, it's worse.

All I see are boring, blocky rooms with the same supermarket lighting; sterile, lifeless things. Actually, it's not even really a school shooting mod, because the only thing that transforms this first week's exercise in level design into a "school" is his unconvincing insistence that this profound lack of imagination and craftsmanship is something that it's not.

It's fake; or if it's not fake, it'll suck and no self-respecting man-shoot enthusiast would bother with it anyway.

Don't get trolled so easily, people.

And to this attention-starved pseudo-modder: Go lie down.

(Not that being attention-starved is a crime, you should just hide it better... And of course, I'm not saying he doesn't have the right to troll you. Read ModDB's rationale for pulling the mod from the database; I kind of agree but also kind of don't -- but then again, I'm not the one receiving a flood of misdirected hate mail.)

Butte, Montana. 1973; a board game about open-pit mining.

Last semester I made "Feng Shui," a board game where two players discuss (or argue?) over how to place furniture using chopsticks. This semester I've made "Butte, Montana. 1973." (as in "Beaut" or "Bee-yoot" but not "Butt")

It's an art board game (or board art game? or bored art game?) about open-pit mining. And it's a box of dirt. It's not terribly interesting as a "game qua game" -- if you want that, go play Catan or Call of Honor or something -- but it's an attempt at wondering what else one can do with a game. It also made me realize that video game designers should be forced to make analog games more often.

First, a bit about the design theory that supposedly powers this beast:

Levels to Look Out For (March 2011)

These are WIP / in-progress levels or environments that look cool + some comments / analysis on my part.

Forbidden Place (Planet?) by Bram "Pericolos0" Eulaers and Anders Jansson
This is an amazing looking single player Source thing that's probably been dead for 2 years, but it looks positively stunning. I love the "had a lot of fun in zBrush" rock cliffs. I love the purple crystals. I love how seamless the skybox is. I love how it barely looks like the Source Engine. (Message to the authors who will find this blog post in their link referrers: "PLEASE PICK THIS UP AND FINISH IT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD")

> Untitled (Bachelor Pad) by Ryan "Loom" Bargiel
I'm a sucker for flat shaded anything. I'm not sure I'd actually want to live in this private orange hell, but gosh this blockout looks cool. (Note: All games should be vertex lit... forever. If it was good enough for Final Fantasy 7, it's good enough for everyone else.) It's also gotten me thinking about "composition" in scenes because I really like the floorplan here and all the shots seem well built.

However, I often see people post screenshots with people painting onto it treating it like a static 2D frame. Is that treatment of composition still valid in a freely-explored 3D space, where the player controls a camera and might spend the whole time staring at a wall or stare at enemies? Do leading lines actually "guide the eye" when we're playing? (I'm skeptical, to say the least.) I mean, yes, it's better portfolio presentation, but is is better game design? How does architecture handle the issue of scene composition?

Bugs are kinda cool.

First Person Films: Doom and Enter the Void

The "point of view" shot is ubiquitous in movies -- an actor glares at something off-frame, then the next shot is an eyeline match to the thing they're glaring at, mimicking their point of view -- but full, sustained sequences with substantial camera movement that doesn't break the rules of first person navigation? Pretty rare, I think. (Please leave a comment if you know of any other films.)

Doom (2005) is an obvious example, and probably the most immediately consumable: you see the gun at the bottom of the screen, bobbing and swaying with the movement of the camera, as it seems to glide up stairs and through metal corridors.



The problem with this (occasionally cool, I guess) scene from Doom is that it confines itself to the boring commonplace parts of the FPS game tropes (reloading a gun that many times?) and ignores what playing Doom 2 was actually like: strafing like mad, back-pedaling like a lunatic -- firing, always firing! -- in a linear, confined metal corridor instead of a non-linear open plan layout.

Or maybe the problem was that they were adapting the powerful sedative that was Doom 3? That's right, I said it.

Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void (2009) does it better, mostly because it does stuff with the first person view that we can't do very well in first person games. Here's the first 10 minutes, omitting the crazy nauseating opening credits:

New MapCore Compo: "The Cube"

Last time, we did a 20 brush compo. This time, it's THE CUBE; make a single player or multiplayer level, any game / mod / engine, as long as it's within a 1024 x 1024 x 1024 cube (or whatever engine equivalent.) That's it.

You have about a month. Get cracking!

Oh, and for reference, here's Duncan Blair's winning entry from the last cube compo we did. Ooooh shiny:

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

"I think the 'artgame' thing has pretty much run its course at this point."
-- Jason Rohrer, 27 December 2010

(bonus links: this epic 242+ page thread on TIGSource, or just read this comic by Cactus which sums it all up nicely... but now that it's dead, let's look upon its exquisite corpse -- what exactly was an 'artgame' anyway?)

Lucas Debes, v0.9 (pre-release beta released!)

REMINDER: You need 2 players for this game. One player clicks "Bailiff" to host the game, then the other player on the LAN clicks "Debes" to join the game.

Me and Eddie Cameron made another Unity game. There's gameplay in it. It's actually surprisingly fun, despite my best efforts to sabotage it.

The setup, kinda like Spy Party: there's an island with lots of NPCs. As Lucas Debes (17th century Danish priest) who's trying to escape the Faroe Islands in a rocketship, you have to blend in and pretend to be an NPC... or maybe you're the bailiff trying to kill him and/or sacrifice all the NPCs to Satan.

• A competitive asymmetrical multiplayer FPS for 2 players.
• Windows or OSX. 800x500 resolution minimum.
• Only LAN support for now, sorry.
• Two different but both amazing ending cutscenes.
• Limitless strategies and infinite levels of strategic yomi, the deepest & most strategic strategy game ever made with strategies

We're not particularly happy with the state of polish and everything, but it's long past that time in a project when you need fresh pairs of eyes to look at it and critique it. So here it is:

Download:  v0.9 PRE-RELEASE BETA
- Windows build (11 mb)
- Mac build (16 mb)
Unzip somewhere and play.
NOTE: only LAN support for now, sorry.

Credits:
Eddie Cameron: code + design, http://www.grapefruitgames.com
Robert Yang, art + design, http://www.radiator.debacle.us

Screenshots and "how to play" / strats / tips, after the jump...

Lucas Debes

Lucas Jacobsøn Debes (1623 in Stubbekøbing - 1675) was a Danish priest, topographer, rocket scientist and celebrated writer about the Faroe Islands. In 1673, he built the first rocket-powered aircraft in the world, with the purpose of escaping the local bailiff's clutches. When he finally reached Denmark (after mistakenly landing in Northern England), Debes was barely conscious and all of his limbs had suffered severe frostbite from the lack of frost shielding in the craft. He was then promptly wheeled into the Dutch Parliament, little more than a stump, and reported the bailiff's numerous abuses and saved the Faroese.

Comatose

"Comatose" is a single player HL2 mod by Aspik where you're bleeding uncontrollably, so you have to take all these pills (clotting agents?) as you try to escape a building in some sickly yellow apocalyptic city -- a great summation of my daily life in New York City.

 Warning! Mechanics spoilers / design analysis after the jump...

Not dead, just busy. I have a few posts in the works (manifesto for single player layout design, Dark Past pt. 3, documentation of my board game about open-pit mining) but I've actually been spending my time working on projects instead of blogging about them, which is an interesting shift in habit...

Kentucky Route Zero

Just wanted to remind people about the Kickstarter drive for Kentucky Route Zero, ending in less than 3 days. It has some very talented talent behind it. And, well, just watch the trailer and prepare to be amazed. (The $40 USD donation level looks the most "optimal" -- you get postcards, a poster, as well as the game. Oh, and good vibes / karma, I guess?)