Category: News

The Infinity Blade in its current state is no more, says Fortnite developer Epic Games.

In a tweet published earlier today, the studio explains that the weapon is being removed for being overpowered and poorly balanced.

If the name sounds familiar, this comes just a few days after Epic pulled three Infinity Blade iOS games (it debuted in 2011 as the first Unreal Engine mobile games) from sale on Apple’s App Store.

While its not uncommon for developers to shelve certain things for live games, this could serve as a good lesson for fellow devs to properly balance test any new features implemented into their games. 

Introduced back in update 7.01, the Blade was the first instance of a “Mythic” tier weapon and spawned only once due to its rarity. However, players quickly realized the weapon was unbalanced and reception was poor.

Epic explained in a Reddit post how the weapon would be shelved for update 7.10, saying the goal “is to remove the ability to build and harvest when wielding the Blade.”

“When designing the Infinity Blade the goal was to provide a weapon with inherent risk to balance out the great capability it provides – the ability to harvest/build removes a great deal of that risk,” the post continues. 

“After this removal we’ll continue to monitor the Blade’s effectiveness and make adjustments as necessary as well as communicate those changes.”

However, it seems likely that Fortnite might get rid of the Blade entirely, and instead adjust how Mythic items are introduced into the game in the future. 

Organizers of the 2019 Game Developers Conference are excited to confirm that the popular GDC Pitch event will return next year as part of the GDC Play showcase of emerging and independent developers! 

If you’ve never seen it before, know that GDC Pitch is a special event designed to help select participants practice their pitching skills with experienced professionals — as well as a live audience of GDC attendees!

It’s a valuable experience for both presenters and spectators, since a great pitch can secure the future of your studio, or ensure your game has the resources to reach the players who will appreciate it most.

Here’s how it works: Game developers who register to exhibit their game in GDC Play 2019 by February 13th may be selected to receive pitching advice and coaching, then pitch their game an opinionated panel of investors and publishers in front of an audience. No pressure!

10 selected teams will each be offered pitch prep and training, then get 5 minutes to pitch, followed by questions, advice, and feedback from the judges. The judges will declare a “Best Pitch” on each day, and award each a complimentary All Access pass to GDC 2020.

GDC Play, which is still open to potential exhibitors, is a special area of the San Francisco show that showcases emerging and independent developers with a series of tables and meeting rooms. It will take place from Wednesday, March 18th through Friday, March 22nd at GDC 2019.

Once again, as part of the ‘Best in Play’ awards program all GDC Play exhibitors will be judged on their in-development or complete games by a panel of veteran GDC organizers and Gamasutra editors.

The top 8 will be named ‘Best in Play’ winners, and all 8 winners will receive 2 All Access Passes to the 2020 Game Developers Conference. Special ‘Best in Play’ designations will be attached to the honorees’ GDC Play tables at GDC 2019, where their games will be playable to all GDC attendees.

Bring your team to GDC! Register a group of 10 or more and save 10 percent on conference passes. Learn more here.​

For more details on GDC 2019 visit the show’s official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent company Informa

In today’s big-money gaming space, it can sometimes seem like there are enough A.I. companions looming on the hilltops to fill a whole army of second bananas, with The Last of Us’s Ellie rubbing shoulders with the likes of Elizabeth and even a certain two-tailed fox.

But while a robust companion like God of War’s bow-toting boy wonder Atreus can fill out a playspace and engage even the most laconic of players during dips in the action, building out such a scintillating sidekick can take an almighty amount of time, money, and patience.

Just ask Cory Barlog, the director of Santa Monica Studio’s raucously-acclaimed reboot, who describes Atreus as one of the game’s most controversial features – to the point where his harrowed producers kept pestering him to rethink his ambitious conception of the character, up to and including canning the youngster entirely.

“I was told multiple times, ‘scale it back, change it so he’s simpler,” says Barlog.

Kicking the addiction to revenge stories

“They wanted him to hit marks in the world and just talk, to get it done quicker, so we could ship this thing. At one point, I was even told to consider cutting him out of the game, and I laughed and said, ‘okay.’ But they replied, no, ‘very seriously consider this, we don’t have the production bandwidth for this.’ And I had to entertain what the game would be like without him. I had a very, very passive-aggressive pitch for that one, that, clearly, didn’t go over very well. Subtlety isn’t my thing. It’s like saying, ‘can we make Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but without Sundance? I managed to convince them that he was necessary.”

 

“I was even told to consider cutting him out of the game, and I laughed and said, ‘okay.’ But they replied, no, ‘very seriously consider this, we don’t have the production bandwidth for this.’”

As Barlog recalls, from the very beginning of God of War’s sprawling five-year development cycle, he knew that following the slightly muted reception of the 2013 interquel Ascension, that Santa Monica Studio couldn’t stitch together another tale of Kratos slicing and dicing his way through another pantheon, fueled by nothing but his searing well of vengeance. He describes the franchise’s habitual overuse of forced betrayals and endless quests for revenge as an “addiction,” one that they planned to use Atreus as a springboard to overcome.

“We couldn’t just make another ‘angry Kratos’ game,” says Barlog. “We wanted a character who could reject Kratos’s orders, who could prod and provide a foil for Kratos to actually talk and communicate, not just during cinematics, but through gameplay as well.”

Early on, some on the design team balked at the concept of granting the famously-misanthropic Kratos another child, knowing full-well the sheer amount of grunt-work that the fresh face would bring to the project, both in terms of narrative and technical execution.

The team visited their fellow Sony studio Naughty Dog to talk to their AI programmers, and it was only at that point that Barlog fully understood the morass of issues that Santa Monica would have to trudge their way through to make Atreus a reality – one bugfix at a time.

For example, initially, Barlog wanted to allow players to swim through the shimmering waters of the reboot’s Lake of Nine, but his lead gameplay programmer shut down that fancy before it even got off the drawing board.

“He said 2D navigation was gonna be hard enough – if we incorporate 3D navigation, it just becomes ridiculous,” Barlog says. “We could do it, of course, but we’d have to get rid of so much stuff to justify that dev time. And that’s how we ended up with the boat, which was one of the game’s least popular features internally, until we finally implemented the storytime [conversations between Kratos and Atreus] less than nine months from the finish line.”

Barlog describes the process of creating a lifelike companion like Atreus as a tremendous amount of legwork, with the boy’s humanity slowly trickling in as features were implemented – he went from not speaking at all to only speaking in combat barks, for example. In Barlog’s words, the process is essentially just endless layering, almost like an ostentatious birthday cake that you have to wait five years to finally wolf down.

“It’s coming up with systems and their conditions,” he says. “If an enemy is coming to the right, he says this, if the enemy is the last in the grouping of enemies, he says that, if the enemy is approaching from behind – it just becomes massive, and exhaustive. And that’s just combat, never mind the climbing, or exploration. It’s never going to be limited by the space on the disk, or anything like that. It’s all about the time you invest, how many different behaviors and reactions you can put in for him. That was a big part of the ‘boy button,’ which was first suggested by [designer] Eric Williams. When you have a context-specific button like that, it has to do a lot of work, since you don’t have squad commands. Instead, you press the kid button, and the kid does something. Well, obviously, we have to allow for all that. Just more layering.”

 

“We couldn’t just make another ‘angry Kratos’ game.”

Throughout all this, however, Barlog points to one thing as the lynchpin keeping the wheels on the cart, what he refers to as the project’s “secret sauce” – the simple fact of God of War’s five-year dev cycle, which he says allowed for a level of handcrafted charm that truly allowed Atreus to shine.

“I think several developers who look at what we’re doing think we’re a little crazy,” says Barlog. “That we could do things an easier way, or just automate, but because we have the incredible amount of support from Sony, we can afford to do something that takes five years to do like this.”

He describes the development process as “an ever-shrinking box” that producers and creatives alike have to maneuver in, even as the calendar on the wall flips away and the walls close in around you. “It’s the sweat equity of having one person focus on one problem for years,” he says. “For most people, that’s a luxury you don’t have.”

Still, for those who don’t have a deep-pocketed platform holder to fund their impossibly-ambitious mass market dreams, Barlog has some familiar advice: keep it simple. He points to indie darling Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons as an example of a smaller studio offering a novel solution to a long-held problem – and soaking up a deluge of revenue in the process.

To those who would emulate Atreus, he gestures to one of his own inspirations, perhaps the most lauded companion of all, the ethereal princess Yorda from Fumito Ueda’s landmark Ico, which he describes as “the perfect fusion of narrative and mechanics.

“If it’s not an infinite time, infinite money situation – if you’re not Gabe Newell,” he jokes, “I would ask ‘why do you want it? What are you going to do with it? What do you want to say?’ And then stand on the shoulders of those who came before you.”

More than anything, Barlog says that creating Atreus was a labor of love, made possible by raw technological prowess and massive, massive amounts of work. And, as he recalls, some had interesting ways of showing their dedication. 

“Hayato Yoshidome, the technical designer who basically handled the son from the beginning, has a tiny little portrait of Atreus at his desk. It’s bedazzled, and it’s always looking at Hayato, and it’s almost like he’s saying, ‘do me right, Dad,’” Barlog says. 

“Even late in development, we had to keep that up, because there’d be so many times with Atreus would glitch out. In the most emotionally-tense scene of the entire game, when Atreus is laying down, in a really vulnerable state, all of the sudden his combat banters trigger, and his face twitches, and he says, ‘sure are a lot of Draugr around here!’ It’s the most arresting thing, because you’re getting into the scene, and it’s really working, and then he starts to talk. And we would laugh, because that’s just the process.”

Riot Games COO Scot Gelb has been suspended without pay for two months after multiple employees reported him for workplace misconduct. 

As detailed by Kotaku, various Riot employees claim Gelb repeatedly touched and interacted with them in a number of inappropriate ways as part of a “comedy bit.”

Company CEO Nicolo Laurent detailed Gelb’s punishment in an email sent to employees, although several feel that two months unpaid leave is an underwhelming response at best, with some suggesting he should have been demoted or fired. 

“There were claims made about Scott engaging in inappropriate and unprofessional behavior, particularly during the early days of Riot. And some of these claims were, in fact, substantiated. The conduct alleged in these claims is not acceptable,” reads the email. 

“In light of these substantiated claims, the Special Committee wanted to take firm disciplinary action that would be visible to the company. As such, Scott will be going on an unpaid leave of absence for two months, starting at the end of this week.”

The note added that Gelb would be attending training to address his workplace behavior.

Kotaku also cited multiple Riot employees who believed Gelb got off too easy, with one saying the company’s response was “a tiny slap on the wrist.”

Although Riot has substantiated some of the allegations against Gelb, the studio also found others to be false. With that in mind, and because Gelb “believes in leadership accountability,” Riot has allowed him to stay on at the company. 

The allegations against Gelb were initially brought to light as part of Kotaku’s extensive investigation into Riot’s toxic workplace culture, which saw the COO’s name mentioned repeatedly.

Shortly after the Kotaku article was published, Riot conceded it hasn’t “lived up to its own values,” and published a seven-point plan explaining how it would begin to address its rotten company culture. 

The studio then brought in Uber’s former SVP for leadership and strategy, Frances Frei, to advise its ‘culture strike team’ and foster inclusivity and teamwork within the firm.

For some though, it was too little too late, and back in November a group of current and former Riot employees filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for the alleged role it played in facilitating gender-based discrimination.

How do you make your game sound just right, replete with believable audio physics and effects, when it’s a giant open-world project being worked on by a big team?

That’s exactly what the Crackdown 3 devs are doing, and and at the 2019 Game Developers Conference they’ll give you a special behind-the-scenes look at how the game’s remarkable audio was produced, mixed, and implemented. 

In their Audio track talk on “The Gangs Bite Back: Music and Sound in ‘Crackdown 3‘“, Microsoft Studios Global Publishing audio head Kristofor Mellroth will join Finishing Move composers Brian Trifon and Brian White onstage to give you a behind-the-scenes look at Crackdown 3’s advanced sound, dialog, and music systems.

You’ll learn the unique approach and organizational processes required to compose, implement, design realistic audio systems, and mix in this large open-world game. You’ll also get some practical advice on how to do everything from composing and implementing interactive music for a large open world to effectively organizing assets and systems across multiple teams, so don’t miss it!

For more details on this talk (and many more!) check out the GDC 2019 Session Scheduler. There you can begin to lay out your GDC week, which takes place March 18th through the 22nd at the (newly renovated!) Moscone Center in San Francisco. 

Bring your team to GDC! Register a group of 10 or more and save 10 percent on conference passes. Learn more here.​

For more details on GDC 2019 visit the show’s official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent company Informa

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GXb2Da1Rak]

Just to quickly explain that video, and why it was worth starting with: That was a competitive match of Super Smash Brothers Melee, and Peach has a 1.7% chance of pulling a super strong turnip with one of her moves, and it’s very rare and very useful. So in this clip, the player does it twice in a row, with a taunt in between, and the crowd and commentators go nuts, because that’s unprecedentedly lucky. But my favorite thing about this clip is that Armada, the peach player, was interviewed afterwards about this moment and he says that he “Just knew.” There’s not really any way he could have known, right? That’s sort of the point of randomness, that it’s unpredictable and uncontrollable. So why is the way we talk about luck so active, or participatory? How do we end up with things like “the gambler’s fallacy” and good luck charms? How can people claim to be skilled at luck? There’s this compelling narrative of certain people being able to control fate, to be in total control over there life, but that’s not really possible, right?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs55rZcbXYI]

Well, there’s this guy named Dominic LoRiggio, who calls himself “The Dominator”, and he consistently wins at craps (dice throwing). Above is an hour long BBC Documentary about him. You really only need to watch 30 seconds or so to get the idea. It’s not the most high end documentary, the video quality is bad and the dramatic reenactments are hilariously dramatic. He goes to a shady seminar and gets recruited to some sort of dice gang, they really play up the “fighting fate” narrative. The gist is that because craps relies on the laws of physics as it’s source of randomness, it can be controlled through careful throwing, and it isn’t technically cheating.

Now, it’s very possible that the controlled throwing seminar is a complete scam, none of the sources I’ve found are really sure, but it’s an enticing thought. Not everything we think of as random is necessarily out of our control; dice are basically the icon for chance but they’re much more deterministic than we give them credit for, once you understand the rules they follow. When something seems random but is actually derived from deterministic rules, that’s called a Pseudo Random Number Generator, and that’s the main thing I want to talk about: how they work, the history of pseudorandomness in video games, and what that means to players. My goal in all of this is to make some suggestions for how designers might be able to better tap in to the experiential potential in “Controlling Fate”, because right now the majority of the interaction people have with randomness in games is very surface level, often banal. You can increase the drop chance of loot by wearing a jester hat in Dark Souls, or type in a swear word as a seed for a Minecraft world, but there’s very little thought by the player as to what that means, what they’re actually doing. And there’s a lot more depth of control available with PRNGs.

The people who care the most about PRNGs seem to be mathematicians and cyber security people (it’s very useful for security to be able to generate numbers that are unpredictable if you aren’t in the know, but knowable if you have the key). For one that makes a lot of the writing very dense and technical, but I’ve gone through the trouble of picking out the interesting stuff for us. This article by Eric Uner points out a variety of important properties that PRNGS are derived from, and I think it’s not a huge leap to try to attach some of these useful terms to input. These are the venues that we would be able to give players control over chance through.

Seed is an obvious one, it’s the starting point from which the rest of the sequence is derived, and inputting a different seed causes a different result. A lot of games that use procedural generation have this element exposed, such as the aforementioned Minecraft. But it’s not usually as a part of the central gameplay, it’s usually in the menus, or input before the proper game begins. The relationship between the seed and the outcome is also usually obfuscated to the point where the player can make no meaningful choices when inputting a seed, it’s just used as a way of getting repeat outcomes. If you type in “lava” as your Minecraft seed, you sadly do not receive a lava world, it’s a bit unintuitive.

This brings us to the next property, the formula, which is what converts the seed into whatever it is you’re outputting: level generation, item drops, etc. This part is always there under the hood in any PRNG, but I think exposing it, making it editable or learnable, could be valuable. A game that makes it’s formula slightly more digestible is Conway’s Game of Life, which has a more visual rule set that is still deep enough to produce securely unpredictable results.

It doesn’t let you change the formula at all, at least in any implementations I’ve seen, but it does expose it and help it make sense by dressing it in the analogy of over and under population. The game is also very open and encourages experimentation with little risk, which really lets players take the time to learn the rules for themselves.

Step Frequency refers to how often the operation, the shuffling and dealing if it were playing cards, is repeated. This is something that gets more use in games, but usually in the form of grinding. To bring it back to the opening clip, there is one way for Peach players to get better turnips more frequently, it’s pretty simple they just have to find more opportunities to pull. Even that small, inherent amount of control has had effects on the metagame though. Players have developed a method (shown above) to most optimally farm through turnips, thereby mitigating some of the luck with skill (the method is quite technically difficult). A similar example in shooters would be critical hits, the frequency of crits would be naturally be higher on a weapon with a higher fire rate.

Distribution is another related term, it refers to how varied the results can be. A random number generator that only gives you 4s and 1s has a lower distribution than one that gives you a number from 1–100. Project M, a competitive Super Smash Brothers Brawl mod, adds some foresight, if not total control, of the distribution of Mr. Game and Watch’s Judgement move. The move, in other games, is completely random and displays a number from 1 to 9. Project M adds a visual indicator that lets players know whether the next hammer will be even or odd, thus limiting the distribution and allowing players to make more informed decisions. Since the hammer can also not be the same as the previous 2 numbers, it’s possible to lower the odds of a getting a 9 (the strongest one) down to ⅓, and also be aware of what the other two options will be.

 

All of these properties (and there are more in the article for the curious) can be, or have been, linked to game mechanics, but as I said it’s often been very surface level. I think part of the reason for this is that modern PRNGs are often too complicated to be able to teach to players, especially when a lot of games tend to take a very long time just to get across basic movement mechanics.

Unfortunately because of the cryptographic focus of most PRNG writing, most Pseudo Random Number Generators are designed to be hard to interact with for security reasons, while as designers we would probably be aiming for a pleasant sweet spot of intuitiveness and challenge. I’ve found the closest thing to what we would want in PRNG literature comes from older formulas, which are generally pretty terrible for what the math people want.

One such method is the middle square method, by Jon Von Neumann.

It’s simple enough to be essentially a game on it’s own. You take a number as your seed, and you pick a number of digits, thats k. You square the first number, and then the middle k digits of the square is your new step. You then square that and repeat.

So here’s a puzzle, if the first number is 12345, and the 3rd number is 225625, what’s k? The answer is upside down below, like a newspaper puzzle:

xᴉs ʎʇɟᴉɟ pǝɹpunɥ uǝʌǝs puɐsnoɥʇ ɹnoɟ ʎʇɟᴉɟ = ɹǝʍsuɐ

I’ll admit it isn’t a very fun game, it’s really just math, but it serves as a hopeful example that the sweet spot we want can exist, where, given the proper understanding of the formula, something unpredictable to a layman becomes obvious to someone skilled. So how would we make this genuinely fun, something that people would actually play?

 

Well, one way to find that out is to look at a particular sect of players, who’ve been finding ways to “control fate” even in games where the developers didn’t want them to be able to. Speedrunners, and to an even greater extent TASers (tool assisted speedruns, played frame by frame), are quite dedicated in their unraveling of game engines in order to beat the games as fast as possible. In certain games, usually older ones with more limited computational power, randomness was determined in strange ways, still designed to obfuscate but often tied to player input for lack of a better source of chaos. The tie to player input lets dedicated players do incredible, empowering things .

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zp0jd2I7fPI]

I think it’s kind of beautiful that that just by linking their PRNGs to player input these old games accidentally have such added richness. It’s like a hidden power in the player character that can only be brought out through determination and perseverance. That’s exactly the kind of power narrative some designers love to try to invoke and here they were doing it completely by accident. Possibly the best example of this secret power is in The Legend of Zelda Oracle of Ages / Seasons. The engine is only stepped (shuffled) during certain actions in game: screen transitions, digging, sword slashes. This limited iteration allows more fine control from players but the best part is this: the pitch of the sword slash sound effect in the games is determined by the PRNG, and as such acts as useful feedback (essentially the inverse of Security) for players. Specific series of sounds allow players to confirm their setups and locate themselves in the generator. These factors allow this RNG manipulation to be viable for real time play, while in other games where it’s less accessible it can be too difficult to perform. And if it’s possible for developers to make RNG manipulation playable by accident, I’m fairly confident we can make it better than playable, fun even, if we actually do it deliberately, taking into account all these factors.

So to reiterate, for luck manipulation to become a useful game mechanic, it needs to be tied to player input in some way, and it needs feedback so players can understand the system. It needs to be simplified compared to cybersecurity PRNGs, so that the relationship (formula) between seed and outcome can be understood. Maybe it would be good to let players tamper directly with the formulas, allowing room for creativity. We’ve also learned a variety of ways in which someone could interact with a PRNG, and each can result in different feelings of interaction. Controlling step frequency might be farming for a higher frequency or dodging triggers in order to avoid shuffling. Controlling range might look like wearing certain charms to invoke certain behaviours in NPCs or the weather.

The requirements for players being able to conquer these systems can be varied as well. It can be execution difficulty, like “The Dominator” and his controlled throws. Maybe it’s just a knowledge gate: learning the value of K. Or maybe it’s about learning a system through experimentation, like figuring out what shapes in Conway’s Game Of Life are stable.

 

So what would a game look like that takes all these things into consideration? Let’s design, hypothetically, a game centered around the mechanic of manipulating chance. Firstly, we need to select a what kind of seed we want, and what formula we want to apply to it. In order to help players understand and manipulate the formula easily I want to make it something very visual and tangible.

Taking inspiration again from Game of Life, let’s have the seed be a small grid of pushable blocks that represent different elements in the game. The blocks can be connected to characters in a game world (let’s say it’s blocks with faces) and their coordinates in the push-block grid can correspond to the locations of the characters on the larger map. So you essentially get to place players in different locations and then go out into the world and find them there. Characters could react differently in different areas or when adjacent to other characters. This relationship is nice and intuitive, but it’s probably too controllable right now to be considered random.

This is where we need the formula, some operation to conduct on the blocks at set intervals to make the arrangement change in complicated ways. The formula could be movement patterns that each block has, denoted by arrows on the block: one character might move left and down alternatingly, or one might circle clockwise. Players could try to set the initial positions such that these moving blocks collide with each other several steps later to be in the positions the player needs.

Step Frequency then comes into play. How often do the blocks move, and how often can the player reset them? Let’s say that the game runs on a day night cycle, with blocks moving every hour on the hour. The player can only reset the positions at midnight. Tying step frequency to time makes sense aesthetically, but as we’ve learned it might be interesting to tie the progress of time to the player’s input, via their progress through the map. If the map is split into individual screens like Zelda 1, time could pass an hour every time the player changes screens. Thanks to the visual feedback of a UI clock updating or the light changing it becomes less of an arbitrary connection as it was in the Oracle games.

The skill being tested with this would be of the ‘understanding the system variety’. New players presented with the grid likely won’t understand it and will get a slew of unpredictable and unfavorable placements of characters throughout the day. They can continue shuffling the blocks about randomly each day and seeing what they get, and observant players could hopefully start making deliberate choices and planning more and more steps ahead to get more and more specific outcomes.

Of course this is a very rough outline of a game idea, and a lot of the success of it would depend on the execution and clarity of the feedback, and the complexity of interactions between characters and locations. But hopefully you get the idea, that if you design with these properties in mind you can arrive at some strange, unique ways of interacting with a game that can still be approachable and fit in with standard game tropes.

Obviously not every game can afford to be about luck manipulation, they don’t need to be. But these concepts can be applied with more subtlety to preexisting genres and formats to easily add richness to current systems.

Take the loot drop rates of an RPG, Dark Souls for example. Dark Souls’ only way of interacting with its luck engine is being able to slightly increase the overall chance of drops. Dark Souls loves to obfuscate it’s mechanics and I wouldn’t want to take away from that by completely opening the hood on the underlying randomness. But you could add some subtle depth by allowing some more specific control over the range (Distribution) of drops; Players already wearing parts of an armour set could have raised chances to find the remaining parts, or there could be specific rings that increase the drop chances of specific categories of items (swords, healing items, ‘warm and fuzzy’ items, etc.) Players might even be completely unaware of these mechanics depending on how obvious the effects are, but it would still flavour each player’s experience differently and more deliberately than purely random variations.

I think Esports games in particular can also benefit from this school of thought, I know many already do to one degree or another. But frustration surrounding RNG mechanics in MOBAs, Shooters, Platform Fighters, etcetera is definitely still prevalent. People get frustrated by random crits, but headshots are adored because they’re skill based. Being able to reinforce every luck mechanic with skill or strategy could help mitigate these complaints and add more competitive depth to a character. If a character’s chance for crits increases gradually so long as they never stop moving, that can encourage a certain style of play and require players develop a certain skill. You could have another character have the opposite, where staying stationary is rewarded by their RNG engine.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWEQOABTaLs]

Fun compilation of TF2 crits, some of which are manipulated by certain loadouts and strategies to be more common.

I think a better working understanding of randomness and the potential therein for emergent stories and deep, compelling gameplay is useful for any designer. It lets both designers and players have more control over certain aspects of play and can mitigate feelings of unfairness or non-interactivity. And I think it’s worth our time to play with this more, collectively. Maybe it could spur a new genre, or subgenre, with wholly different skills and knowledge bases to most games currently available, kind of like the many randomized games that emerged following Rogue. All it would take is one shining, trendsetting example. In real life, it might not be possible to “Control Fate” but when you’re designing a game you get to decide what we can control, and why not explore that fantasy?

 

Citation

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Hull, T E, and A R Dobell. “Random Number Generators.” Source For Industrial and Applied Mathematics, epubs-siam-org.library.sheridanc.on.ca/doi/10.1137/1004061.

Kendall, Graham. “How to Cheat at Dice — from an Expert in Games.” The Conversation, The Conversation, 8 Nov. 2018, theconversation.com/how-to-cheat-at-dice-from-an-expert-in-games-96320.

“Luck Manipulation.” TASVideos, tasvideos.org/LuckManipulation.html.

Machicao, Marina Jaeneth, et al. “Chaotic Encryption Method Based on Life-Like Cellular Automata.” Https://Arxiv.org/Pdf/1112.6326.Pdf.

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There’s a lot of talk on narrative in games lately. Titans such as God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 battle it out at The Game Awards while smaller titles like Life is Strange 2 push the envelope on other levels.

Most of mainstream titles bet big on authored, often scripted narrative; big emotional moments whose effectiveness rests on much the same tools like movies: script & direction, dialogue, performance. And looking at the impact these games have it’s hard to argue with results – that’s definitely one way of doing powerful narrative in video games.

However it’s not the only way. Games like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress are often cited as those that offer “emergent narrative”, but while I’m a huge fan of both, I see them more as “anecdote generators”. They expertly offer fun, surprising, sometimes eerily impactful situations, but not really full stories, with intent and meaning behind them.

Today I’d like to share the mental toolset that I think contributes to content and mechanics in Frostpunk working towards a holistically meaningful experience. A “values-driven” game design approach if you will.

Telling stories

Frostpunk – a city building/survival game about society pushed to the limits, a title I led design for – was received very well. A lot of feedback post-launch emphasized the atmosphere, choices… and “story”. But Frostpunk is a strategy game. There’s no holywoodesque cutscenes, crisp dialogue; in fact, there’s not a single NPC in the game. And yet the overall chain of events often led to players perceiving it as a coherent tale that they co-authored.

So lets take a step back – what really is “story”? Each guru offers his own definition, but there’s one particularly interesting notion among the works of Robert McKee, the author of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting.

He asserts that story is a way for people to make sense of the world. And each story, at its heart, is about a conflict of human values. Life vs. death. Victory vs. defeat. Love vs. hate. There’s as many values as there are ways to describe the human condition (which is why all stories often seem to be the same, yet manage to stay fresh). And meaning arises from the way value reversals are delivered through the structure of the story – from beat, to scene, to act.

What a happy coincidence that we’re very good at doing conflict in games! It’s at the heart of every gaming experience, whether it’s “How do I get to understand what’s going on” in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture or “How do I not die here” of Dark Souls.

But if you look close enough, it turns out that conflict in games is really about human values too! It is, however, often pretty trite.

Life vs. death; victory vs. defeat – these are the core conflicts of most games made today. Of course, there are exceptions; unusual, quirky, unobvious themes. And frankly, there’s nothing wrong with this particular set of values. There are, and can be, powerful stories weaved around them. It’s just that they are extremely overused in games today.

Towards designing values

Simply knowing the values your game is about is not good enough though – after all, what’s the practical takeaway here? Thankfully, we can look more in-depth into how games are put together and see whether it gives us something more to go by.

From a design standpoint, just like stories are made of acts, which are made of sequences, which are made of scenes, which are made of beats, so too games have a structure. There’s the shortest, action-feedback loop. Then there’s short-term cognitive (“tactical”) and long-term cognitive (“strategic”) loops. Further out are emotional and cultural loops, which reach into the way the game is perceived by the player and the larger pop-culture.

Michael Sellers proposed this loop structure in his excellent book Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach.

The trick with value conflict is that it doesn’t just play out through the theme of the game or its more or less scripted narrative; it operates on each and every structural level. In traditional stories, scenes are driven by value reversals delivered in beats. So too every loop level really is about a particular set of values (even if they are all life vs. death) and a gameplay conflict they underpin, which the player is trying to resolve in his/her favor.

The values of Frostpunk

Lets take a look at how it looks in Frostpunk.

Loop level	Conflict of values
Reflective Loop  (emotional & cultural)	What does crossing the line mean?
Long Term Cognitive Loop  (strategic)	Crossing the line vs. keeping to your morals
Short Term Cognitive Loop  (tactical)	Extortion vs. balance  Compassion vs. Efficiency
Action Feedback  (visceral)	Good of one vs. good of the many

At the lowest level the game is about gathering resources – you employ people at various places and they procure the stuff city needs to survive. It’s a pretty standard conflict of having vs. not having but thanks to the survival aspect of gameplay it can have other meanings too. For instance: will you send children to work? Will you send them to work in coal mines? In the freezing cold? It can become a conflict of compassion vs. efficiency on the tactical level which is much more interesting and fresh.

Higher, up we have the short and long term cognitive loops, the tactics and strategy of survival. Tactics largely rest on how you utilize the various buildings and abilities you unlocked and how you deal with limitations of your chosen build. This always has an effect on the people of your city: you can ruthlessly overwork them to get what you need or you may choose a more careful, compassionate approach which is much more risky and difficult, especially when going blind into a scenario.

The strategy layer loop is reflected most in one particular part of the game (aside from the tech tree and the build order you choose): the Book of Laws. It’s a set of choices that shape the rules for your people, enabling various behaviors, buildings, abilities that can influence your situation drastically. For instance: if hope becomes a problem, will you print propaganda? Will you enable your guards to disband protests against your rule? “Will you cross the line” was the central theme / value set that permeated this part of the game.

Book of Laws was created to support medium to long term planning, enabling tactical and strategic gameplay on unobvious values such as honesty vs. lies (possibly “in good faith”).

The loop level that was unresolved for the longest period of time in development was the reflective layer (a term which I use to aggregate emotional and cultural loops – the “meaningfulness” of the game). Frostpunk was different to This War of Mine, our previous title, in that it was difficult to empathize with 500 people. Pure emotion was harder to come by in a much more abstract, calculating genre of survival/city-building. And yet there was hope: while playtests showed that players not always empathize with the citizens – they are a statistic – their whole playthrough and what they did to survive promoted a post-playthrough reflection – “Did I really do that? This is how totalitarian regimes are born!”. And there was clearly some discussion whether the question has merit – which to me it means it does.

Of course, the table above doesn’t do justice to the 3 years of iteration it took to arrive at such a structure. The description here is pretty high-level, for the sake of clarity. But if we looked close enough, the vast majority of choices, mechanics and content in Frostpunk can be labeled with the value conflict they enable – we just made sure that all of them stay in line with the overarching themes for different loop layers, and the whole game.

Emergent storytelling & values driven game design

Such a systemic view will never replace the role of intuition, feeling, authorial intent and all of the soft aspects of game design, and by no means is it equally practical for all types of games. But, in the end, all games are about human values, whether they’re consciously designed or they “just happened”.

I find this approach useful both in establishing how the high concept translates to different layers of the game and in maintaining true north when getting down & dirty with the low level. It helps me be more conscious about the meaning that emerges from the mechanics and therefore enables me to actually *design*, not just eyeball it. I believe that this can be very useful in crafting games that foster “emergent narrative” – the stories that players tell through their actions within the possibility space the game enables.

Today often these stories are pretty flat – players either live or die, win or loose. But enough fidelity, freshness and uniqueness in the values the mechanics and content operates on – and maybe over time the emergent stories will grow into something truly profound.

Thanks to Marta Fijak (@YerisTR) for all the work we did on the subject. If you want to chat, you can reach me on Twitter (@qoubah)