May your every sexual arousal be followed by the runs!

May every piece of food you eat for the rest of your life be slightly overcooked!

Ahem.

So I’ve been playing quite a bit of Mass Effect lately.  (Yes, another shooter!  In addition to Bioshock!  It’s like I’ve been replaced with a Real Gamer or something!)  I’ve really been enjoying it, more than I thought I would.  I figured I’d be slogging through the actual fighting sections in order to get to the next part of the story, but I’ve actually been enjoying the fights.  There’s something very fun about taking down a Geth tank with nothing but a pistol and some telekinesis.  The AI is quite good, too–it’s nice to be able to trust that my team will actually attack the enemy, take cover, stay with me, use their talents, and just generally act competent without me needing to micromanage all of them.  The pathing is nice as well, which is something that is usually the bane of my existence in games with companion AI characters.  They stay out of my way and rarely trap me in a corner, and when they do I can order them to move.  The only problem is that my giant tank teammate has a tendency to bogart the cover when we’re all behind a big crate.  I mean, the dude is huge!  Covered in natural armor and technological armor!  He totally doesn’t need cover as much as my tech and biotic-using human woman.

The only real annoyance I have?  The stupid truck.  The Mako.  It’s bouncy, handles weird, aims weird, drives weird, and they never give you a tutorial the first time they drop you on a planet in it!  I didn’t even know I had missiles until I hit the left bumper by accident, and I discovered my thruster boosts when I was flailing around in a button-mashing frenzy hanging halfway off a cliff.  I’ve decided that it’s just extremely happy to be out of the ship, and that’s why it’s so bouncy.  “OHMIGOD, this is AWESOME!  I’m FREE!  I’m so happy to be outside!  Whee!  WHEE!  I’m gonna jump around!  I love you so much Commander Shepard I love you Iloveyou!”  It’s like a puppy.  A big puppy with a gun on top.

Really, though, it’s a game where I get to play as a female character, interact with lots of interesting characters, and kill tanks with nothing but a pistol.  Makes me feel badass, so I can’t get too cranky about the truck.

I hope they make it less bouncy in the sequel, though.

This actually has me thinking, though.  In D&D, if you go gallivanting off into the snowy mountains without the proper gear, the DM will let your ass freeze to death.  If you don’t have food and water, and remember to eat it, you will starve.  There are many, many ways to screw yourself over in D&D, which will hopefully learn you a lesson about preparing properly.  Are there any video games with the same consequences?  I’ve played Planescape: Torment, which is based heavily in D&D for its rule system, but you still never have to eat, or worry about the cold or the heat.  I’d be interested in playing a game where the environmental effects atually effect the environment.  The ground is slippery when it rains, icy when it snows.  One where the player would actually have to pay attention to her surroundings in order to stay healthy and hale.

However, such a game would probably be a pain in the ass to make, so I’m not holding my breath.  Just shivering.  Always shivering.

The thing is, sometimes as a gamer, you don’t want innovative.  You don’t want something that breaks new and strange ground.  Sometimes you just want to sit down with a game type you love, understand, and enjoy playing.  It’s comfortable and fun and recognizable.  I call this Mac and Cheese gaming.  Let me explain.

Food can be an amazing thing that exposes you to new cultures and flavors.  It can combine flavors in new and interesting ways.  It can be prepared in an incredibly variety of fashions.  Food can make you glad to be alive or make you kinda wish you were dead.  But sometimes, for all the marvelous, amazing, fancy things that can be done with food…  Sometimes you just want to sit down with a bowl of mac and cheese.  Good, creamy, rich mac and cheese.  Now, you don’t want bad mac and cheese.  You want the pasta to be cooked just al dente, and the cheese sauce should be the right consistency, not too thick or too thin.  There should be just enough cheese in the sauce that it has a cheesy richness, but not so much that the sauce breaks or get grainy.  Mac and cheese, cooked just right, is a wonderful thing.

When I sit down to play some Zelda, I want some Mac and Cheese gaming.  Is Twilight Princess amazingly innovative or mind-blowing?  No.  But it is delicious, and it’s just right for me.

… shit, now I want mac and cheese and we have no pasta.  Thanks a lot, blog.  I blame you for this.

Furthermore, if you’re playing a game and you come across some kind of bug in it, chances are the developers know.  Many, if not most games will ship with some kind of bug.  It might be a simple art bug where a door is slightly offset from the wall.  It might be a collision issue where you get blocked from walking for no actual reason, or, alternately, where you can walk straight through a wall that shouldn’t allow passage.  It might be possible to get permanently stuck in the scenery, or have the audio skip disjointedly, or have the player just straight-up fall out of the world.  The thing is, the developers probably know damn well the game is shipping with bugs.  You really don’t need to tell them that.

Why do games ship with bugs, then?  Well, sometimes schedules get drastically cut, and there just isn’t time.  Sometimes schedules were poorly planned to begin with, and there just isn’t time.  Sometimes the very nature of the game you’re working on gets dramatically changed, requiring a lot of re-working, and there just isn’t time.  Sometimes half the people at a studio get laid off, and there just aren’t enough people to complete the game in time.  (Have you noticed a pattern yet?)  Sometimes a minor bug is known about and it just doesn’t get fixed because it’s not important enough to risk breaking the level for.  Toward the end of development, a game is like a house of cards.  If you have framerate, memory, gameplay and story all working together reasonably well, you do not risk breaking that balance for something as small as a trash plane sticking through a wall or a chair floating slightly above the floor.

My boss often says there are two kinds of games:  Game that are perfect, and games that ship.  It’s much better to work on games that ship.

Games start with a GDD, or Game Design Document.  Games that do not start with a GDD are pretty much doomed to fail, because they will have no concrete guidance on what game they are making.  The GDD contains story and character information, but it also contains much more than that.  A GDD will describe what genre the game falls into.  It will describe gameplay decisions and the consequences of those decisions.  It will describe character movement, enemy types, weapons, and puzzles.  It will contain descriptions of the levels, and the actions the player will need to perform in order to progress through said levels.  A GDD is the game, albeit in a 2-d, non-interactive form.

GDDs are important for both the developer and the publisher.  They’re used to pitch games to publishers, so both parties understand exactly what kind of game is being discussed.  The GDD will of course be amended and altered over the course of the project, but it’s still a very vital starting point.

The GDD for Grim Fandango can actually be downloaded in PDF form from here.  It’s worth a read for aspiring designers.

I’ve been playing Brutal Legend lately, and it’s been a blast.  I’m only maybe four hours into it, but it’s been really fun so far.  (Except for the driving.  I have never been good at driving games, so whenever I’m driving with a deadline I hand the controller over to Chris.)  I love the writing and the characters and the amount of ass-kicking I’ve been getting to do.  It’s very enjoyable, and it’s been making me think about a particular debate that recurs amongst developers.  Do you want the player to empathize with your character, or do you want the player to become your character?

It’s the latter idea that creates most of the Silent Protagonists in video games.  A lot of people think that if the main character never speaks, the player will project him or herself into the character’s world, and become the character.  Frankly?  I think this is kinda bullshit.  I never see myself as Link, I never see myself as Chell, and I don’t feel like I’m my Fable II character.  I don’t even see them as extensions of myself.  (Maybe if I got to choose some dialogue for my Fable character I’d feel differently.  Seriously, everyone wants to marry her and I can’t explain to them that she’s not ready to settle down right now, damnit!  Leave her alone!  She has a world to save!)  Link, for one thing, is depicted as having an actual personality, even if he doesn’t speak.  I like Link because he’s Link, not because he’s an extension of me.  Chell probably comes the closest to making me feel like I am the character, but that’s a factor of the game design.  Since there are no other humans in the game, and she never speaks, and the only things that speak to her are AI that don’t use her name, it’s pretty easy to start thinking, “Shit, they’re shooting at me!” rather than “Shit, they’re shooting at her!”  In Fable II, I actually feel way more connection to the NPCs in the story, because at least they have personalities!  The only thing that makes me feel connected to my character is her dog.

I tend to prefer games that feature an interesting character that I can empathize with.  Eddie Riggs is funny, badass, and kinda sweet.  I want to play the game just to see what happens to him.  Same with Beyond Good and Evil (if I can ever get past this stealth part).  I like to play as a character who interests me, who seems like a real person in some way.  I want to have a connection with the character, and I usually don’t get that with Silent Protagonists.  That doesn’t mean they can’t be part of a good game, of course, it just means I’m going to be playing the game for the game, and end up having less invested in it.  When I care about a character, I want to get them through the game unscathed because I don’t want to see them hurt.  When I don’t care about a character, I just want to get them through the game unscathed so I don’t have to repeat sections.

Silent Protagonists aren’t bad, per se, but I don’t think they do what some developers think they do.

Re: Minigames.

Minigames can be great.  They can break up a lot of the same gameplay and add interest and re-playability to a title.  However, when you want to add a minigame, consider whether the minigame you are adding uses any of the skills that your player will have built up over the course of the game, or whether it uses the skills that would be built up in a completely different title.  Maybe don’t add minigames with gameplay elements completely alien to the title you’re working on.

An example:  My boyfriend is currently playing Blue Dragon, a JRPG of the old guard.  Turn-based, with fighters, healers, black mages, and monks.  Occasionally, though, the designers decided to break up the gameplay with minigames.  Some of these build off skills you already have (like the escort mission–probably the least annoying escort mission ever).  Others require something that is pretty much never required in a JRPG–reflexes.  I don’t know about other people, but I play JRPGs partially because they don’t require me to aim at anything or have hairtrigger reflexes.  At one point in Blue Dragon, you are required to pass a punishingly hard shooting gallery minigame in order to progress through the game.  My boyfriend has much better reflexes than I do, but it still took him three tries and a whole lot of swearing.  It was very nearly a ragequit moment.  I was just sitting there going, “Who thought this was a good idea?  People who play JRPGs don’t expect this kind of shit!  What the hell is this shooting game doing in my JRPG?”

So, to sum up:  Consider the kind of people who will be playing your game, and ask yourself, “Will these people like this minigame?  Or will they wish death upon my family when they encounter it?”  Please, don’t make me wish death upon your family.  It takes so much energy.