Timbecile’s Blog

Saw this on gamasutra today:

EA signs Broad Multiyear deal with Unity

Basically EA licensed the Unity platform for a shitload of games for a long time. That’s great news for Unity. Hopfully it won’t force them to jack the price up any.

I hear you. You might be asking yourself “Why would EA license a cheap Indie game engine?” Well, there’s two reasons. First, because it’s cheap. I know EA is a monstrous behemoth of a company. But they’re hit hard by the economy also, and they’re going to try to save money anywhere they can. It wasn’t like that when I was there. The attitude then was

“Should we spend this money?”

“Yes! We’re EA!”

I literally heard a producer use that as an answer when they were asked whether they should fork out a bunch of cash for some useless trip or some other nonsense.

So what’s the other reason?

Unity is a great platform, and it’s just getting better. The original Unity 2.xx is totally free now, with them banking on the future success of the new Unity 3 platform. It includes a built in web player, option iPhone support, new Android support, and it’s one of the easiest game engines to use.

you can check it out here:

Unity 3D

I know I sound like a Unity commercial. That’s because I love it. I am a huge fan of anything that allows people to make games without requiring tons and tons of knowledge of a million different topics. I also used it to make my iPhone game.

Shameless plug: Astro Fighter Alpha

So that’s good for EA. Hopefully now they’ll want to hire people who have Unity experience for tons of money!

So for those people who didn’t know, I’ve been a writing sort of person for a long time. (notwithstanding the amount I update my blog!). I’ve written a lot of stuff, including 2 full length novels (I even self-published one through Cafe Press once upon a time).

Anyway, I’ve had this idea that I have played around with since my days at EA. I use EA as the marker because even though I’d messed around with the idea for a long time, I was in a writer’s group there, and that was where I actually started on the project in earnest.

So that was like way back in 2004 or so. It’s now 2010, so you know I’ve been working on it for a very long time. It’s called Souled (Thanks Keith!) and is a story about Hell, Satan, and redemption.

Well, now it’s done. It reached a bouncing baby boy size of 126,000 words. Since I’m going to assume that word counts are as alien to you as they are to most people, the first Harry Potter book was about 96,000 words. so 126,000 falls into the 400-ish page range.

Here’s a quick summary.

Jennar is a run of the mill young adult who hates his father, the senator with big political aspirations. When Jennar visits the Capital Building for the most important speech of his father’s career, something happens that turns his whole world upside down.

A nuclear bomb explodes over Los Angeles. The city where his mother and brother both live. In a race to get out there, he encounters strange creatures and horrible monsters.

Then he stumbles upon a house that somehow survived the blast. Inside is a quadriplegic who claims to be immortal. He says he sold his soul to Satan and needs Jennar to get it back.

Now Jennar must go into the bowels of Hell itself and recover this man’s lost soul, and in the process maybe regain some of his own humanity!

So as you might be able to tell, it’s a horror novel in the vein of Stephen King. (Just maybe not so wordy!)

If you’re interested in reading parts of it, feel free to let me know. If I like you, I might actually send you the manuscript!

So while I’m at Jury Duty, I figured I’d talk a little about Mirror’s Edge, which I finally got around to playing.

Preconceived Notions
After hearing that EA was going to make a Parkour game, I immediately took notice. I once worked on a pretty kick ass Parkour game, so I was excited that one of the big boys took on the subject.

One thing I immediately disliked was the fact that it was in first person. Most people who complain about Mirror’s Edge have mentioned that the first person perspective makes them sick playing the game. While that is certainly true for some people, I usually don’t get video game vertigo. No-the reason I hated the idea of first person is because, to me, the whole point of playing an acrobatic game is to watch the character do all these amazing superhuman acrobatics. Why would you take that away from the player?

Initial Thoughts
So after resisting for a long time, Mirror’s Edge finally emerged from the depths of my Gamefly queue. After showing up on my door, it sat, unopened in front of my TV for about a week, while I finished the Fallout 3 expansions. Once those were done, I finally, with some trepidation, placed the game into my XBox.

WOW! What a surprise, I thought. while the first person thing was still a little jarring, right out of the gate, the game was FUN! I must have spent four hours doing nothing but running around the rooftops of the tutorial level.
Of course, it can’t be that easy, can it? well, let me take you through the goods and the bads…

Good Stuff

So like I said, the core gameplay (running around on the rooftops doing crazy acrobatic stunts) was great fun. All the moves you’d expect from a parkour game (think Prince of Persia) were there. They were well balanced (usually), and felt exactly like they should.

One thing DICE did well was the red thing. Any time they wanted to draw attention to where the player was supposed to go, they used the color red. Now, most of the game is white, so the red really stands out well.

Where this red attention thing really shined was with the doors. All games inevitably have a problem with doors. The player can enter some doors. Other doors are just for show. How do you differentiate between them? well in Mirror’s Edge, they used color. The only doors you can to through are red. Any other door is normal door color. It ruined the suspension of disbelief a little bit, but in my opinion, well worth it.

Bad Stuff
Now’s the time to complain, and there’s more stuff on this list than on the list of stuff I liked. Just remember as I get into this, that I actually likedthe game…
Even with all the attention they put on animations and things, the first person bit still wasn’t for me. I felt a little blind in first person, and would have WAAY rather seen the character doing all those cool animations. (like Prince of Persia & Assassin’s Creed)
The game was made in a photorealistic art style, with a big focus on the washed out white look. A little weird, but fine. The cutscenes on the other hand were all hand drawn and very dark. (Think Esurance commercials). It was very jarring. I wish they woulda forked out the extra cash to get all CG cutscenes!
Another problem was figuring out where to go. While the game wasn’t an open world game, it wasn’t exactly linear either. Each level had multiple paths to reach where you were supposed to go. Cool, right?
well, not exactly. Often you need to figure out where to go while being chased by cops and bad guys. Basically you’d be running blind while these opponents are trying to kill you, and the combat system was set up so that if they caught you, you’re pretty much dead. I don’t know how many times I had to start checkpoints over because I didn’t know where to go.
They did have two helpers. The first was the red theme that I mentioned before. Of course, Red only meant an obstacle that could be interacted with, but it helped to direct you where you should be going. The other helper was mapped to the B button, which was supposed to point the camera toward where you were supposed to go. The only problem with it was that it only worked sometimes. My guess is that they decided to add it fairly late in the project, and couldn’t add it everywhere. Having it only work sometimes was worse than not having it at all.
Another of the biggest complaints in the game was the reliance on instant death as a game mechanic. Take this as a rule of game design: INSTANT DEATH IS BAD! especially when the player doesn’t have any warning it’s going to happen. There were two implementations of instant death in this game that were frustrating and dumb. The first was the “you have to chase a guy and only have a limited time to catch him”. If you couldn’t catch him in time you died and had to start over. Normally that would by annoying but ok. In this game they really screwed it up bad. In every chase except for the last one, the guy you were chasing would stop and wait for you if you got too far behind. For most of the last one it was the same. Then, without warning, if you got too far behind (at a puzzle section, no less) they changed the rules and made you die if he got too far ahead. so here’s another important rule of game design: DON’T EVER ESTABLISH RULES FOR GAME MECHANICS AND CHANGE THEM LATER. that might be one of the worst things you can ever do. Makes the player think you’re cheating. Why? because you are.

Closing Thoughts

So that’s about it. Even though I just bashed a lot of the mechanics of Mirror’s Edge, I still liked it enough to play it all the way through. Some games that break these rules go back into the gamefly envelope 20 minutes after I first put them in the 360.
Overall, because the core mechanic was so well polished, I was able to forgive a lot of the other problems I had with the game. Which goes to show you that a well polished core mechanic can be all that you need. (Yes GTA 4, I might be talking to you!)

Well E3 is over for me this year. I know today and tomorrow are left, but I got done what I needed to get done. I met up with a lot of old friends, had a few business meetings, and generally had a good time.

I know yesterday that I said I was only going for the games, but when important things fall in your lap, you can’t just push them aside!

The Games!
So yeah, there was a lot of good games there. Hopefully I’ll remember all the cool things I saw. First awesome thing on the list:

I loved the original Assassin’s Creed. It was a great combination of Parkour, open world, and sneaking around. Plus, you couldn’t beat the setting. Set during the third crusade in the Holy Land? forget it!

–Brief Aside: The game is set around 1100 AD. Other things that were happening in the world at that time? The fall of the Vikings…William the Conqueror defeated King Harold at the battle of Hastings (Oct 14, 1066). Richard I was off fighting Saladin in the Holy Land…the same King Richard from the Robin Hood stories. (only in real life Richard dies in the Holy Land and John becomes king!)–

Ok, enough history lessons for today. The biggest complaint in Assassin’s Creed was its tremendously repetitive gameplay. Can’t argue with that,..it was totally repetitive. The missions always ended up like this: Go to city. Find the Mission Giver. Run around the city collecting information. Find the target. Kill the target. Wash-rinse-repeat. I didn’t mind so much. The gameplay was so much fun, I didn’t really care how repetitive it was.

One of my biggest complaint was the combat system. Once you learned the counterstrike from an opponent attack (which almost always ended in a sure kill) there was no reason to fight any other way. The other complaint was that it was too hard to run away. If you got caught, you might as well fight, because the guards would always see you and chase you until they were dead.

Will Assassin’s Creed 2 fix any of this? probably a little bit, but I wouldn’t expect a major overhaul. It’s only been a year since the original, and there’s only so much work you can put into a game in that amount of time.

So what about the game? I only got to see the trailer. Ubi was showing the game behind a closed partition, and I couldn’t get back there. Too bad. Anyhoo, the game is set in Venice around the same time as the original game. From the video, the gameplay looks about the same….I can’t wait!

Batman: Arkham Asylum. Another big stand out to me. The gameplay wasn’t especially innovative or ground-breaking in terms of what they’re doing, but I think this might be the first time they’re doing it in a batman game. Looks very similar to any other action-adventure game of the current generation. (a-la God of War) The setting is what makes it special though. The environments are dark and spooky, and the Joker scares the crap out of me!

Yes! I’ve been waiting for another Ghostbusters game since the classic Activision game on the Commie 64. The gameplay reminds me a little of a third person shooter like Dead Space (where the character is on the side of the screen instead of the middle, and the character actually gives out all the HUD information like health and stuff).

Ghostbusters is going to be awesome though. Written by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis as an unofficial Ghostbusters 4. I’m so excited I’m drooling!

Other Cool Stuff

I saw some other stuff that looked great but I didn’t get any pictures of it. More Fallout 3 DLC looks like a horror movie. Fallout 3 was the best game this year so far for me, so I’m excited about that. Tony Hawk Ride lots of peripheral games this year. I didn’t get a chance to play it, but a skateboarding game on a skateboard should be fun. Beatles Rock Band Before I saw it, I thought it was going to be cheesy, but then I got a look at the instruments. You get John Lennon’s Rickenbacker and Paul’s Hofner bass. I couldn’t help but get excited after seeing that!God of War III Kratos is back and more beautiful than ever. Didn’t look like the gameplay was any more revolutionary, but powered by the PS3 makes it look fan-tast-ic.

Biggest Disappointment

PSP2
I could care less about how technologically advanced it is. Or that it has a slider screen like a phone. Or that Sony abandon the UMD drive and went to a download instead. The PSP2 is going to fail just like the previous one did. Why do I think that? simple. One thumbstick on the same side as the D-pad. What’s the point? Every PSP game that exists struggles with the fact that there’s only one thumbstick. the PSP is going to play second fiddle to the DS and iPhone until Sony pays more attention to how the user interacts with the device instead of what sort of technology they can cram into it.

After a long hiatus, E3 is back home in Los Angeles. I’m looking forward to going and checking out what sort of things all the developers are planning to put out this year.

Weird isn’t it? I’m actually going for the GAMES! not for the “booth babes” or for “Business Meetings”, or stuff like that. Nope,…I just wanna see what sort of games people are working on.

I am hoping to meet up with some old friends while I’m there, but chances are, if they’re there, the only way we’ll meet is if we happen to be in the same place at the same time.

Here’s to hoping for some good games!

From T and M to E

I’ve worked on my fair share of games in my career. Most of the time we’ve been able to rely on combat in some form or another as the primary game mechanic. In the RPGs it was sword and sorcery type combat. In the WW2 games, it was shooting enemies with authentic World War 2 weapons.

Blood? Who cares? Dismemberment? Cool! These are things that game designer rely on every day to create conflict, drama, and ultimately, entertainment. I’ll admit that it’s fun to blast soldiers, or raiders, or fire ants into thin red paste, if you’ll forgive the Wasteland reference.

I’m not going to get into the appropriateness of violence in video games,…that’s a whole different topic of discussion. We can argue with Jack Thompson all day long over what sorts of content are appropriate for public consumption. I think we’ll all agree though that exploding human beings like a blood sausage isn’t the sort of content you want to be directing at 6-12 year olds.

So what’s the deal? The biggest problem I’ve faced going from adult themed games to kid themed games is the inability to rely on game mechanics that we as designers take for granted.

Most games rely on some form of conflict to drive the gameplay. In shooters, that conflict is at the barrel of your gun. In RPGs, the tip of the sword or the end of the wand. it’s the same with most strategy games.

So here’s the challenge: try to design a core game mechanic that includes drama and conflict, but no one dies. ToonTown and Raving Rabbits plunger shooter don’t count. Those games use non-violent versions of the same old mechanic we’ve used time and time again.

In the beginning of my time at Spin Master Studios, we weren’t sure what sort of game we were going to make. Before I got lucky with a skateboarding MMO, I struggled day in and day out with potential solutions for game mechanics that are appropriate for children, but aren’t necessarily just sanitized versions of the same old mechanics that we use time and again.

Of course, there are plenty of games out there rated E, and plenty of game mechanics available that they use. Sports games are one example, though you could argue that they’re just sanitized versions of war in the first place.

Mario and Sonic are two other good examples of game mechanics that aren’t exactly violent (though they are in their own way, killing Koopa’s and such) but they are mostly appropriate for a young audience.

So here’s my challenge to you…can you design a game based on an RPG or FPS mechanic that would be appropriate for children?

Originally posted at Gamasutra