I need a ruler

Very good news for us: our game for our assignment rocks. After sitting down for a long playtest over the last few days, we have come to two conclusions:

1. Our game is a lot of fun
2. Our game is incredibly well balanced (so far)

My job has been to focus on the mechanics side of the design document for our game. This has caused me to be thinking quite a lot about rules and rule design. The trend for the modern game seems to be supplying rules without... supplying rules. The classic example is GTA3. The sandbox game. Freedom to "do whatever you want".

This has made me think a lot about a rule structure for any games I design in the future. The GTA "model" has been incredibly popular, reinforced by the industry's desperate longing for the release of the fourth game next week. So on a deeper level, what IS the rule structure for this game? Are they clearly defined? Why do people enjoy it so much?

Really, this model is just a loosely enforced critical path. That's what people are feeling freedom from. Underneath this, however, is a much more intricate rule system. Don't die is a big one. Killing will usually result in netting in some good cash. The developers haven't needed to spell most of these out for players though. The rule system is a lot more implicit, and I believe if they were a lot more spelled out it wouldn't be nearly as fun.

Games of yore had rule sets which were entirely explicitly defined. Games like Monopoly, Super Mario, Zork. And these were still fun. These newer implied rule sets usually take place in adventure games. Perhaps players find exploring their boundaries in the game a motivation for playing these sorts of games.

Implied rules sell. There is obviously a yearning in the market for exploratory constraints in gameplay. Thinking on this, here are two of the implications on rules I could think of for the mech game I mentioned in a much earlier post:

1. Multiple ways to exploit the natural physics system - players are wanting more and more freedom in rules of motion. So I'd consider flight, supersonic motion, teleportation. These would need to be constantly made available without great announcement and enhanced during the game to continue to push the player to explore the boundaries of the game.
   
2. The removal of the boundaries between walking around and combat - making these functions available all the time, rather than "switching into a combat area". Usually if you're around friendly units, your combat abilities are negated. What if "friendly fire was turned on", so to speak? Rules defining what can and can't be destroyed may be completely opened up.
3. A severe but subtle reward and penalty system. Obviously, the sandbox idea doesn't throw the game into complete anarchy. Players need to see these rules enforced in some way. Since we are aiming for the implicit rule structure, instead of giving the player immediate feedback for every action, there should also be some sort of longer term effect initiated.
   

I realise this would make a game that would probably sell extremely well. However, I may not find these design decisions particularly fun myself. I never really did get into GTA - one reason being I found this open-endedness not necessarily enjoyable. But, this is a big industry. Games companies are businesses looking to earn revenue, not to create products that it can only sell to its staff. That said, I think explicit rule systems have great merit. Perhaps I'll discuss this in my next post.

An asymmetric industry

This week in our workshop we were asked to play Fox and Geese. It's a game where one player controls 14 geese and one player controls one fox. The fox is trying to jump over all the geese (which is symbolic for eating them I guess, unless jumping over them causes them to teleport somewhere), and the geese are trying to surround the fox. Clearly, 6 geese can take down a fox. When I initially started playing it I thought "hey hang on, this game is clearly not balanced, the fox has much more power to do". However, after playing it for about 3 seconds, I soon discovered that the geese were balanced to match the fox's evil-jump-of-killing-geese-death-amon.

The current state of the industry, I think, has needed to and is needing to continue to move towards asymmetric titles which are very well balanced. This is probably due to the rise of the RPG and the use of RPG elements in almost every genre. RPGs by nature offer enough customisation to encourage a player playing through a game several times. This customisation of course creates a different play style every time, removing any equality between characters. This has become the norm for first-person shooters. Sure, there may be some similarities such as character speed, but there is usually enough difference between them to cause the label "symmetric" to become redundant.

One of the first games to start this off were the Final Fantasy games. From around 2 or 3, the "job system" was introduced. This allowed you to pick primary jobs (or classes) for your characters and had a massive effect on each character's moveset and abilities. Add to this the ability to have multiple jobs and the combinations were effectively limitless, warranting excessive amounts of play. While I haven't had much hands-on experience with this title, I can guarantee that most people have their preferred job set. The combination they believe to be the most powerful or useful. Were the games balanced? I haven't heard too many complaints regarding jobs being too weak or too strong, but this may be because this is a player vs. environment game. I believe players are more impacted by imbalance when other players are involved.

The first-person shooter used to be one of the most symmetric genres around. All players started with equal health, speed, payload and equally efficient locations. While there were a lot of different guns players were able to pick up, and some ridiculously super powered ones as in the case of Quake II, the reality is that all players still had equal opportunity to these resources. This all started to change with the development of Counter-Strike. In CS, players were able to buy new more powerful weapons every round. Depending on how many people they or their team killed, they would receive an amount of money to buy whatever guns they wanted. This is quite balanced to play mind you, some of the weaker guns in the hands of the right player are just as deadly. But this inclusion of RPG elements in an FPS game began the gradual removal of symmetric gameplay from the genre. The fact that players could be very unique in an FPS game left players wanting more.

Enter the modern FPS. Something like Call of Duty 4. Dark Seeker. Battlefield 2 and 2142. These games have incorporated RPG elements with great care to create a truly customisable yet balanced system. Take Battlefield 2 for example (since it's the one I've played the most). Battlefield 2 rewarded you experience points for every kill you made, every game you played and every capture point you earned. Once you've gained enough points, your avatar will level up, allowing you to unlock a new weapon of your choice. You could select between the different classes and unlock a few new guns for each. This gave you more options to select from instead of just the default weapon load-up. The Heavy Support troop could get a PK machine gun, which was a lot more powerful than the standard gun, yet was balanced out with a higher inaccuracy to make sure that the weapon didn't dominate completely. This holds true for all the weapons, and it is truly a credit to the games designers to maintain a perfect balance with all the customisability.

So what? What does it mean if the game industry is becoming more and more asymmetric, at least in the case of FPS games? Well, specifically for me, it highlights the need to give careful thought to any variance between players, and to consider the effects on them if any changes are made. The best way I can think of to achieve this is just excessive amounts of play testing, fine-tuning, and trying different combinations to ensure we have a flowing piece of genius at the end.

DOMINATION!

Ok, so the other night I went into a bit of a rant saying that unbalance can make games incredibly fun. More specifically, that games that have some degree of unbalance sell extremely well and become very popular. Perhaps I went too far in the direction of saying unbalance is always going to be fun, cause clearly, it's not always. The area that can imped the experience is the dominant strategy idea.

Take any Star Wars game for example. In any game where you are given force powers, the powers belonging to the dark side are always ridiculously more powerful than the light side powers. In Jedi Academy, a game where you control a Jedi Apprentice, you are given a few light and dark side options to put your force powers into, as well as some neutral ones. The idea of this was to give you some "different play styles" that you could use. You could select the light side powers so you could be noble and walk the ways of the Jedi, like Force Absorb, which would let you absorb some attacks. You could do that... or you could get Force Lightning, which allows you to pick up all enemies in front of you and launch them in every direction. Because of this, online play would always result in a lightning-fest, with very few people using light-side powers. While this didn't necessarily remove the fun aspect, it caused the play styles to be illusionary as the aggressive style was always superior.

Dawn of War was honoured for its highly balanced factions... until the expansion, Dark Crusade was released. This expansion introduced the Necrons, a zombie-like race of machines. They played fairly balanced to begin with, until you upgraded your main unit known as the Necron Lord. This unit could be used to resurrect all fallen units in its radius. What players would do is build an army up to their population limit, delete them all, build up to their population limit again, and then resurrect their entire fallen army. This effectively doubled the size of the Necron army above the balanced, defeatable population cap level. No wonder people online only use the Necrons. To be fair, some of the later patches of the game introduced greater levels of balance to the other teams because of this ability of the Necrons, but players using this race still had the edge online.

Mario Kart DS was a fantastic racing game. One of its biggest selling points was that you could play it online via Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection. Upon starting one of these matches, you will instantly see the dominant strategy come into play: snaking. In MKDS, you are able to powerslide to help you get around tighter corners. If you jiggle the direction pad left and right during this, you will receive a turbo boost. Online players exploit this to no end, by going through all the levels constantly using this boost. If you don't do the same, you stand little to no chance of winning a race.

So far I've found that there are different levels to balance that should be considered. Being fair to the player is usually admirable, but a lot of players can stand a lot of "torment" in terms of difficulty before they stop playing, and in fact may find it more enjoyable this way. At the same time, different strategies that are presented to players should be equal in effectiveness, otherwise you severely limit the multiplayer experience.

Enjoyable Unbalance

Balance has become an important part of the "fun factor" of games. At least by today's standards. You'll hear the constant drone of the Starcraft players bantering "STARCRAFT IS TEH BEST GAME ON EARTH CAUSE IT'S SOOOOOOO BALANCED!!1!1!1one". The entire industry will make a case for balanced games.

After thinking about this for about 3 seconds, I thought "hold on, some of the most popular and successful (and fun) games of all time don't entirely meet this balanced requirement too well". An example from my games design lecture was that of Command and Conquer, where the Soviets were clearly more powerful than the allied units. And yet, it's still one of the most popular strategy games of all time.

One aspect of balance referred to the difficulty of player vs machine/environment games not suddenly ramping up. However...

Guitar Hero 3 is a fantastic game, and one of the best selling games of the current generation of consoles. It's an amazing multiplayer game and a highly satisfying singleplayer. After about the sixth set of songs, however, the difficulty ramps up to a ridiculous level. The note count of the songs almost double, and the rhythm of the songs almost disappears, leaving you relying purely on visuals and not audio to strum. And yet it's this level of challenge that completely adds to the enjoyment of the experience. Plus, it's created a culture of gamers that will be trying to get 100% on Through the Fire and The Flames for years to come.

Another aspect of balance is not having to rely on the player dying several times in order to make progress. But...

Megaman X on the Super Nintendo has made many "best games of the SNES" lists and is still a blast to play. The premise of the Megaman series was to play through levels with crazy robots and instant death traps at an extremely fast pace. One segment of the game has you jump on this go-cart and go down the side of a step hill. After about 5 seconds of standing still, you're killed by a massive amount of enemy lasers. You need to be jumping to get around them. However, jump too high and find yourself crushed between a wall and the cart. If, after playing through it another 10 times, you're still alive, you'll need to boost and jump, else you'll fall into a bottomless chasm and instantly die. Sheer bliss of fun getting the jumps and attacks just right.

So while complete unbalance could ruin a game, maybe a seasoned amount of unbalance would heighten the experience. It's worked in the past for Megaman, and it's worked more recently for those crazy rock 'n roll kids with their toy guitars. I think I need to process balance in games a bit more, and then put some more thoughts up later on.

The Uncertainty Principle

I have been a fan of RTS games for quite a while. From my experience, the most enjoyable plays of an RTS happen in the first few weeks of owning it: every unit is new and different, things are surprising, strategies haven't been seen before.

This is particularly true for the game Warhammer: Dawn of War. When I first played the game, 75% of my enjoyment was coming from finding out what cool units I had, and what new technologies I had. Seeing the predator tank, one with 4 huge lasers and a machine gun, with lots of hitpoints, was a real thrill. Finding out that my Force Commander had a move that shot laser artillery off a satellite and could decimate an opposing force was just awesome.

All of a sudden, when I had become more familiar with my own units, these massive units from my opposition entered the field. The Squiggoth, a 15000 hitpoint elephant with 6 cannons and the ability to eat almost any unit appeared outside my base. I had no idea what to do. I sent 5 squads against it, only to watch them instantly dispersed and, one by one, mercilessly killed off by this opponent I hadn't seen before.

There is nothing quite like having that sort of "insurmountable" challenge appear unpredictably. This high level of uncertainty made the gameplay so much more enjoyable, especially in the early months playing the game. It was very satisfying discovering all the different units for all the different races, ranging from their quick but versatile units to their super-powered, take-up-have-the-screen behemoths. But as time went on, and I became more and more familiar with the game, the entertainment completely shifted off this uncertainty of available units to the uncertainty of the opposing players' strategies.

This gave me a thought of an RTS game where the player was able to create their own units during gameplay. This would be somewhat reminiscent of a real war. Take World War II for instance. Towards the end of the war, Japan believed they had seen most of the US arsenal. Then the nuclear bomb was invented and dropped, and the sheer awe created by this technology completely changed the "gameplay", if you will.

I originally thought that it might be useful to create your own units and upload them online, but a friend brought up the issue of everyone just creating things that would just kill everything on the map in one shot, and removing the fun from any game aspect. Then again, this could also be a problem in-game, with people racing to build a "killer unit" earliest.

Perhaps it would be best if each player had some confines on the statistics of these units, for example, strength, hitpoints and speed would all be drawn from the same point. That way, nothing too powerful could be created.

There's also the matter of the character model that this unit would use. Thinking of some way to create one in-game would be a real exercise. So at this stage, I guess I'm uncertain as to how to make a strategy game's uncertainty... uncertain. Let's see how we go.