Category: News

Lead artist at Campo Santo Jane Ng recently presented at the NYU game center about her work as an environmental artist on Firewatch, mentioning how she only modeled 23 different trees featured in the game. 

Ng emphasized that designers don’t need to create hyper-realistic, detailed assets in order to be memorable, but to focus on “feeling real”.

She discussed the importance of atmosphere over realism when modeling the environment of Firewatch, citing a technical limitation for the reason she manually had to create the trees.

“I had to make it by hand because Speedtree was not integrated in Unity back then.” She explains. “It can be done but you also realize that very few games have pine trees, because of all trees in the world pine trees are the worst in terms of being made 3D.” 

The environment of Firewatch doesn’t feel repetitive because, according to Ng, objects and places were scaled based on what felt right as opposed to what was accurate. 

Definitely check out the presentation to hear more about her creative process during the development of Firewatch.

If you’ve picked up Reigns: Her Majesty already, you might have noticed that Nerial’s sequel to the 2016 surprise hit Reigns is a bit more complex than its goofy predecessor. While it’s one thing for a game sequel to have new mechanics, it’s another for it to explore entirely new themes while still preserving the cheekiness of its predecessor. 

Thankfully, over on the Gamasutra Twitch channel, we were lucky enough today to be joined by lead developer Francois Alliot, who did much of the work on the first Reigns, and who partnered with former Gamasutra editor Leigh Alexander on the second. 

Alliot was kind enough to answer our questions about working on the game, and you can see those answers in the video up above. In case you’re already running from the peasants however, we do have a few takeaways for your convenience down below. 

“Tinder is a toy” – the philosophy behind every Reigns interaction

One interesting design highlight from Alliot is that everything from the swiping mechanic to the iOS vibrations to the “glitching screens” seen in the game comes from the idea that to Alliot, the dating app Tinder is more a toy than a human connection program. To Alliot, the design of Tinder indicates an expressive, infinite experience that takes over the entire mobile device, and “traps” users in a way that’s mirrored in the endless death cycle of Reigns‘ heroine. 

By building off that philosophy, Alliot says he was able to expand the card-swiping interaction beyond just simple binary choices, and create pleasantly surprising scenarios that stayed true to the oddball tone of the narrative. 

Reigns: Her Majesty is about the weirdness of royalty as seen by women

According to Alliot, there are two reasons Reigns: Her Majesty is a sequel instead of another expansion for Reigns. First, adding all of the new content for a Queen character would have doubled the size of the original game. Second, Alliot says he thought it was important to recruit a woman as a writing partner (in this case, Alexander) to properly explore the nuances he couldn’t with his own creative style. 

It’s important to note these nuances while playing the game because it’s striking how different the perspective of the characters are from the first game. There’s jokes about lust, power, and tradition that give the game a fresh feel thanks to the collaboration with Alexander (at one point, Alliot points out which cards have interactions that come from both of them, highlighting how well these two work together)

The business of a small interactive fiction developer

We also quizzed Alliot about the production process for this quickly-timed sequel, and it turns out he’s been trying to keep as level-headed as he can about this whole indie business as one can be. As a small developer, he says he’s focused a lot on trying to be able to complete production without going through insane crunch, as well as setting up fair financial deals for his collaborators. 

For instance, on Reigns: Her Majesty, Alliot says he offered his fellow creatives an option between either getting a share of revenue after the game shipped, with a smaller salary, or a larger salary in exchange for no revenue share. 

It was also interesting to hear Alliot describe his reasons for seeking out Devolver Digital as a publisher. He told us that while a lot of indies see themselves as jacks-of-all-trades, he preferred to set up a business deal with someone more experienced in marketing and communications than he was, so he could stick to his core skills he felt most comfortable with. 

For more developer interviews, editor roundtables and gameplay commentary, be sure to follow the Gamasutra Twitch channel.

There’s a lot of destruction in Rainbow Six: Siege, and it’s such an important feature for the game that an entire engine was built to handle it. 

In this 2016 GDC session Ubisoft’s Julien L’Heureux discusses the process of developing and implementing the destruction engine Realblast. He shares the technical difficulties encountered when it came time to integrate the engine into Rainbow Six: Siege, which is what causes all of the destruction featured in the game. 

Designers interested in learning how Rainbow Six: Siege was developed may appreciate the fact that you can now go back and watch the talk completely free via the official GDC Vault YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC, GDC Europe, and GDC Next already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas.

Deep Dive is an ongoing Gamasutra series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game, in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

Check out earlier installments, including  using a real human skull for the audio of Inside, the challenge of creating a VR FPS in Space Pirate Trainer, and creating believable crowds in Planet Coaster. 

I’m Audio Director for Rainbow Six: Siege and have been working at Ubisoft for seven years. Prior to Siege I worked as an Audio Artist on titles like Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell. I have also worked as product manager for Ubisoft’s internal audio engine solution.
 
Before working in the game industry, I worked as a sound editor for several television series and films. As a hobby, I have been making music for as long as I remember and nurture my addiction to synths, guitars and basically anything that can produce sound as much as I can.
 
Having great interests in technical aspects of sound, I was excited to join the game industry. I felt that compared to the well-established industry of film and TV, games offered much more opportunity in innovations and technical breakthroughs. We are only starting to tap into the potential of interactive sound, real-time mixing and new positioning algorithms, I can’t wait to see what the future holds for us.

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There are basically three main concepts in the physics of sound propagation: Reflection, which is when a sound bounces off surfaces; Absorption, which is when a sound passes through a wall but absorbs certain frequencies along the way; and Diffraction, which is when sound travels around objects. You can hear these phenomenon in everyday sounds. Many other factors of real life come into play for localizing sound but I will focus only on the propagation side of physics and how we managed to simulate it.

The main innovation on Siege was the extended use of diffraction, which is called Obstruction. By using a series of strategically placed points in the map, called Propagation Nodes, we are able to calculate the lower cost paths of a sound between the listener and the source. The cost of a propagation path depends on multiple factors, namely, the path’s length, its cumulated angles, and the penalty assigned to the destruction level of the specific Propagation Nodes impacted.

For example, if a wall is intact, the Propagation Nodes inside the wall are unavailable to the algorithm (infinite penalty). If a hole is created, however, the closest Nodes will be exposed to the Propagation Path selection and will potentially let sound pass through depending on the area impacted. Then, we virtually reposition the sound to reflect the direction of the paths, instead of the actual position of the sound source, which ultimately simulates diffraction.

We also use several strategies to simulate Absorption, which we call Occlusion. Depending on the source we will either play a pre-rendered simulation of the obstructed sound (e.g. footsteps on the ceiling) or play the same source in a direct path along with real-time filtering. Since the latter is more CPU intensive, it was mostly reserved to guns. Just like in real-life it is possible to hear the occluded and obstructed versions of sound at once, we combined phenomenon to give more information as to the source location.

Finally for Reflection, which is essentially Reverberation in the game terms, we opted for the use of an Impulse Response Reverb Processor. This specific type of reverb “samples” the acoustics of a real room, and then plays our game sounds through it. This method is, in my opinion, light years ahead from Traditional Parametric Reverb—at least for simulation purposes. The only drawback is that due to CPU constraints we could not use it in many instances. To counter this constraint, we relied on “baking” the Reverberation on guns and playing it back on the position of the gun. This allowed the player to benefit from a positioned reverb on weapons, which provided better positional information.

Destructible environments were one of the great challenges of the Sound Propagation during production. It’s one thing to propagate sounds through shortest paths, but to have the level modify itself during gameplay was something that we had never done before. Not only from a rendering quality perspective, but also from a CPU performance perspective it was quite challenging. We put several nodes on all “breachable” surfaces, and these nodes stayed closed until destruction occurred. We went through many iterations on the needed granularity to find a sweet spot between precision and performance constraints.

Another interesting factor is that Sound Propagation modifications are not one way: the nodes can go from closed to open, but also from open to closed. With barricades and wall reinforcements, players can modify the potential sound paths and the algorithm will re-calculate in real-time the new propagation paths solutions. These Occluders (e.g., barricades, wall reinforcements, etc.) don’t necessarily have to close those propagation nodes completely; depending on their material properties (e.g., wood, glass, concrete, etc.) they can add a certain amount of penalty for the sound to pass through them. For example, wooden barricades and metal barricades both have their own obstruction settings. So we can muffle the sounds more or less depending on the materials used.

Additionally, with a high level of destruction and bullet penetration in Siege, it would have been disastrous if we would only rely on Occlusion without the presence of Obstruction. Occlusion would have been a major wall hack. For instance, as a Defender, all you would need to do is reinforce as many walls you can, and wait to hear Attackers walk by non-reinforced walls to shoot away–the Attackers would never know what hit them. We try to be as accurate as we can, but the simulation of “real life physics” adds a certain guessing-game that levels the playing field. Granted, there are some situations when it can be downright frustrating, but that’s kind of how real life is, too. 

This is not to say that we are not continuously trying to improve our algorithm. We love to read posts on Reddit of players who have taken on explaining situations when they feel Sound Propagation was unfair; this is pure gold to us, and we will definitely take this into account in future improvements.

Rainbow Six: Siege’s Hereford map.

Listening as player action

With quiet and inaction being such a core part of the game, even with the relatively short round timers of 3 minutes, the primary action of the player is listening, and when we started the development process we actually thought that, from an audio perspective, the map ambiences would be a bit of a bore. Waiting inside of a suburban bedroom is not like being in the middle of a battlefield or in space, right?

At that time not all gadgets, navigation, and gun sounds were plugged in, and Sound Propagation was still in its early stages. But as the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place, we realized that we had something way better than “faked tension.” The threat you hear is real, and it’s coming for you. The restraint in using heavy ambience layers helped us to add tension as well as to give a much more space as to offer accurate information to the players.

The sound propagation for the Hereford map.

Special attention was put to the realism and amount of details in our Navigation Sounds to help the player gain more information simply out of listening to others navigating through the map: the weight, armor, and speed of Operators can all be determined by listening to cues in the Navigation Sounds.

Gadgets deployment like breach charges, barricades, and other devices also received particular attention to make sure we gave good cues to players relying on sound to get Intel.

First Person Navigation Sounds are also mixed quite loud for two important reasons: it informs the player that they are producing quite an amount of noise revealing their position, and second, it tells the player that they need to slow down if they want to hear the others.This is the basis of Siege’s sound design; if you go slowly and listen to your environment, you can gather more Intel and perform better.

A close up of propagation nodes.

Result

From the beginning of the project the desired emotion was tension. At some point we were adding a bunch of music and artifacts to infuse more tension, but as stated earlier, the best element that we had was the sound of the other players who you could not see. So we removed all “imposed” emotion-giving sounds to focus on what really mattered: the sound created by players. 

Today, in retrospect this sounds obvious, but I find that not many games refrain from using any classic tension sounds during gameplay. Keeping the experience void of artifacts, to me, gives Siege a sound print that is not only fun to listen to, but also that influences the game greatly.

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: San Francisco, California

Supergiant Games, the independent studio behind Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre, is seeking a technical designer to join its creative team to help implement, iterate on, and debug game systems and content. The ideal candidate has excellent instincts and well-practiced talent both for the technical and experiential aspects of game design, and thrives in a highly collaborative, small-team environment. This is a full-time position on-site at our studio space in San Francisco.

 Requirements:

• 2- or 4-year college degree or equivalent work experience
• Credit on at least one commercial, student, or personal game project from start to finish
• Fluent in Lua or similar game scripting language
• Fluent in XML, JSON, or similar data file format
• Fluent with at least one game editor such as Unity, Unreal, Galaxy Map Editor, or GameMaker
• Experience with C# or similar programming language a plus
• Extensive knowledge of and experience playing games, new and old, low and high budget, across a variety of genres
• Excellent interpersonal and written communication skills and comfort working in small, collaborative team environment
• Local resident or willing to relocate to San Francisco area

Responsibilities:

• Work closely with our content team, including our designers and artists, to implement new systems and features
• Assist in iterating on and adding content to existing systems
• Reinforce a high standard for cleanly implementing systems and content with our tools and scripting language
• Work closely with our content team and Quality Assurance to track down and fix bugs found in game systems and content
• Work closely with the engineering team to identify and test new tools and engine capabilities

What we offer:

• Competitive compensation, 401(k), and medical benefits, including vision and dental
• Work on a small, creative, high-performance team
• Craft and iterate on essential systems and content in Supergiant’s next and future titles
• Opportunity to travel to game conventions and conferences

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

“I think I’m looking at what games can do from a similar wide-eyed place as people who make immersive sims, but I’m coming at it from a different angle,” says game designer and musician Greg Heffernan, aka Cosmo D.

“Games like Thief or System Shock emphasized player agency, narrative structure, and a loose framework to traverse that structure. When I play a jazz piece, I feel a similar sense of openness and decision-making over a set musical framework.”

With his musical background, Heffernan wanted to further delve into that sense of exploration felt in both music and games with The Norwood Suite, which debuted in October. 

Norwood Suite is a spiritual/direct sequel to Cosmo D’s Off-Peak, another game of hidden nooks and crannies. Through a place that opens up as players poke and prod at its secrets, and music that further deepens as players do so, Heffernan hoped to create that same sense of musical exploration in playing a piece through a world that emphasized and rewarded curiosity.

​The Norwood Suite takes players to a secluded hotel on what appears to be a simple errand, but through curiosity draws them into the lives of the guests and the almost surreal architecture of the hotel. That curiosity not only lets players see more of the hotel and learn more of the stories that are whispered in its walls, but also leads them to explore the game musically, as every new development brings with it some piece of music or sound that adds to the songs of the hotel.

A Background In Song

“Starting out as a classically trained cellist from a young age and traveling through various musical worlds over the years, music has always been a big part of my artistic and professional life. The appeal to fuse it with the rest of the game’s design came from the fact that it felt completely natural for me to do so,” says Heffernan.

Music had long been important in Heffernan’s life, and that love of it gave it an importance in all of their artistic explorations. This is what lead to the creation of Off-Peak, a game where players could explore a train station filled with music, records, lives, and messages. It, too, would open up and reveal more secrets, hidden places, and music as players looked around. 

It wasn’t quite all that the developer wanted from the experience, though. “Off-Peak was my first actual game and my design abilities were relatively limited when I was making it,” he says. “With The Norwood Suite, I wanted to a make a longer, commercial-length game in the same style because I felt like Off-Peak’s mechanics were calling out for iteration.”

“Specifically, I wanted to create an inventory system where you could pick items up in the world and be able to give them to characters. I also wanted to create the ability to eaves-drop and interrupt conversations, whereas in *Off-Peak* the conversation system was more binary and less reactive,” continues Heffernan.

One more design decision, though, would reach the heart of what Heffernan wanted from the game’s world – one that would let him infuse music into more of the player’s interactions within it.

“Most importantly, the way I handled in-game dialog was completely re-worked for The Norwood Suite. Words appear one at a time,” he says. “And the appearance of each word is punctuated by samples of musical instruments, in tune with the diegetic music emanating from speakers throughout the hotel. You can hear the influence of both Killer 7 and the old Charlie Brown specials in this approach.”

Like the kind of exploration Heffernan mentioned about playing the jazz piece, this musical touch to the conversations players joined or overheard would let them explore music as it is played live. How does interacting with this one character alter the music? What does it sound like when I stand near this group and listen in? While players are learning more about the characters’ stories, these stories also form the fabric of the music, creating new tones through simply listening along.

Here, there is a dual exploration. It’s players delving into character stories to learn more about them, but there is also the choice to listen to someone just to hear what they add to the music. It’s an exploration of tone and sound at the same time as story, yet music also tells its own story when played, as well. It draws the player into an approachable instrument with the game’s world and characters, and lets them feel what it’s like to wander through music of their own creation. 

“My goal is for the game to provide a sustained sense of ‘whoah’-ness for players,” says Heffernan. “I want them to discover a point in the game and go ‘whoah’, then another point and go ‘woooooaaahhh’, then another with a ‘what!?’ and then maybe a ‘hmmm…’ and it would just be a steady wave of those feelings. I want players to feel this when they hear dialog, find items, unlock new rooms, discovered secret passages, or learn new plot revelations. Music is essential in scoring and reinforcing every one of these moments.”

A Character’s Song

Nothing was wasted in the player’s journey through the hotel – each step deliberate, and another part of the grand song that is The Norwood Suite. “The architecture was inspired by a melange of things,” says Heffernan. “The Hotel Chelsea in New York, the mountain lodges in the Catskills of Upstate New York, the Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in Massachusetts, the interiors of hotels in Wong Kar-Wei films. Maybe a dash of the Overlook and the Great Northern, too. It’s a big soup.

“Yet, all of those places, whether real or fictional, had space for some kind of music in them, and I just wanted to dial that aspect up with this game,” he continues. “And yet, despite all the surrealism, I still want there to be a functionality to the Hotel Norwood. Believe it or not, nothing in the Hotel Norwood is there just for the sake of being there. Everything has a purpose.” 

Key to filling this place with song in an interactive way was through each character adding something to the music as the player listened to them or engaged with them. Every interaction with character would be a way for the player to alter the music, then, creating a new tune based on who they wanted to listen to.

This isn’t just about adding to a central piece of music, though. Like all art, musical taste can tell someone a lot about a person, and Heffernan put this to work in the game as well.

“I’ll point to the dialog system as the clearest embodiment of this,” he says. “It allowed me to develop people’s personalities through what instrument I’d choose to represent them.” 

“For example, if we look at the two people at the front desk, each one is represented by a unique electric organ, made popular in the 1960s and 1970s,” he says. “Narrative-wise, the 60s and 70s play a role in the hotel’s history. I wanted the older woman on the right, represented by a Farfisa organ, to subtly evoke a night at the Bingo parlor. Along with her actual dialog, she’s meant to come off like an old librarian archetype.”  

Each character would be represented by a certain instrument, and these instruments would tell the player a little something about who they are. So, not only does The Norwood Suite add a form a musical exploration by altering the tunes through their interactions, there’s also a story that is fed into by the music itself. The game is not just looking to reinforce the music through story, but also flesh out narrative and character through that music as well.

“The other attendant, decidedly younger and slovenly in appearance, is represented by a Hammond B3 organ,” he says.”B3s were used extensively in Prog Rock records from the 70s, and this is the kind of guy who’d geek out to that music in his basement. Combined with his own dialog, he’s portrayed as haplessly counting the hours stuck with this older woman all night. This is just one example of what I was thinking about when fusing music, character building and world building into the game.”

Character is strengthened through music, with this example. It tells the player something about the character just by listening to the tone in their voice. Again, this allows Heffernan to draw players into that exploration of music – in seeing how certain tones sound with the song, they learn more about the music. They also learn more about the people who form that song as well.

Keep Up The Beat

 “The structure of the game starts with a fixed, deliberate goal, then opens up the world, then ultimately joins all the threads together and guides the player back to a final, inevitable resolution,” says Heffernan.

Heffernan wanted to keep that beat going as players worked through the game, finding ways to constantly lead them along and further encourage that curiosity to keep them moving ahead. After all, a song cannot just abruptly stop. It has to flow to its inevitable conclusion, and a good musician has to be able to work to that end without stopping.

“As the game opens up, every completed action unlocks a new passage or points the player in a new direction, or revisits old directions from new angles,” he says. “My intention with this is to constantly surprise the player, or keep them wondering what might be around the next corner. I try to avoid dead-ends. Every room has a button that offers a secret path to another part of the hotel, so the forward momentum of flow is constant. I reward backtracking by moving characters around at different points in the game, so that they meet one another and their conversations dynamically change depending on who they’re talking to.

“All of this is meant to create a sense that life at the hotel is happening alongside the player, but doesn’t necessarily revolve around them. The re-activeness of the world is meant to create a sense of unpredictability so the player is never certain what to expect when they achieve an objective or find an important clue,” Heffernan adds.

This is the same as adding a tone to music, or trying a different beat or instrument. It’s that same musical question of ‘What will it sound like if I do this?”, but done through gameplay. It keeps the player moving forward through the game/song, but also through song. What will happen when I take this action? When I do it at this time? A song may sound one way in the musician’s head, but what does environment do to alter it? Mood? The people around them taking it in alongside the noise of their life? So many things can alter a song’s reception, just as so many things in motion can change what the player receives from The Norwood Suite

Rewarding Song

Players are endlessly rewarded for their curiosity, both musical and narratively, throughout The Norwood Suite, giving them new secrets, new stories, and a new song as they wander and interact with the world.

This was no simple process for Heffernan, requiring iteration and tinkering in every aspect. “There’s no real road-map to this and it wasn’t a top-down approach. The music, the gameplay, and the way those systems interacted were case-by-case, character-by-character,” he says.

However, with their love and life spent in music, it was only natural to give it so much importance, as many developers do with the things they enjoy. This was what brough song and immersive sims together for The Norwood Suite.

“At the end of the day, whatever one’s background, I think we’re all trying to create work that is meant to engage our audience in a meaningful way. My taste in games is quite broad, but my favorite games have always been immersive sims.” says Heffernan.
 
“The way I’ve honored those games in my own work is to have my levels and narratives be open and non-linear, trusting players to figure things out on their own terms. It’s a design sensibility that people of all design backgrounds have been drawn to, and I’m nodding to it in my own way.”

This mixture of sim and music, and that exploration of a jazz song through the musician’s choices made while following the rules, created the interactive musical story of The Norwood Suite, creating a game where both story and song are enriched through curiosity and experimentation, giving players a little taste of the joys of making music with a world that acts as an instrument.

Without much pomp and circumstance, Valve has seemingly flipped its ‘Curator Connect’ system live for both developers and curators on its digital distribution platform.

Curator Connect aims to introduce a handful of changes to Steam’s existing curator system and ultimately make it more useful for curators and game developers alike. The program launched into a closed beta back in October, but Kotaku UK reports that the system has been released outside of beta and is seemingly now open to all developers and curators on Steam.

On the developer side of things, the program aims to help developers overcome discoverability woes by making it easier to connect with relevant Steam Curators. 

Nested under Marketing Tools and Data in Steam’s developer options, Curator Connect gives developers the ability to search for curators by name, operating system, language, or curator-specified tags. From there, they can verify a curator’s reach and identity through linked social accounts and add them a list of preferred Steam Curators.

One of the major perks of the new system for developers is that they are now able to build lists of curators and send copies of their games directly to those folks from within Steam itself. Ideally, this lowers the risk that a game code will hit the inbox of someone faking their identity or fishing for codes to be resold on third-party websites. 

Developers are also able to apply descriptive tags to their own games with the goal of helping interested curators find games relevant to their expertise and audience. Curators also receive a number of new features that could boost visibility for games on Steam such as the ability to embed videos, group relevant reviews, and view more data about their followers.

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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Ostensible Improvements: When Better Isn’t

Today I’m looking at sequels with design changes that are ostensibly improvements but in practice have negligible or even negative impact. This is the intellectual cousin of my blog on incoherent game systems but with a key difference: in that piece the design decisions looked dubious even in theory when closely examined, whereas these sequel changes appear to be slam dunks on paper.

This piece will examine three types of dubious improvements:

1. Genuine improvements that are conservatively iterative enough to be more than cancelled out by the passage of time
2. Improvements that are in some sense objectively better but don’t make the game as a whole appreciably better
3. Improvements motivated by textbook good design that result in a worse game

Better But Not Better Enough

I recently began playing Super Mario Galaxy 2. It’s the rare straightforward Mario sequel from a company that normally eschews the standard “bigger, better and more badass” (AKA “conservative iterative improvement”) approach. There are probably arguments to be made that Galaxy 2 is better than 1, and had I played them side by side or in reverse order I might agree. But playing them in release order Galaxy 2 feels fun but inessential — probably the most skippable game in the series.

Everyone is familiar with the concept of sequel and genre fatigue so I don’t need to elaborate. The point being that minor design changes, even when inarguable improvements, often can’t counteract the downward pressure of boredom with familiarity. As the number of “bigger, better more badass” franchise entries increases the less “is this game better than the last?” is a relevant question; the pertinent question becomes “is it better enough to outpace fatigue?”

Better in Ways that Don’t Matter

Project X-Zone 2

One of my favorite 3DS games is Project X-Zone, a Namco / Sega / Capcom crossover “strategy RPG” that takes no real strategy of any kind. Unit formation doesn’t matter, range doesn’t matter. There’s little unit differentiation — in most SRPGs you’d have a tanky low-damage front line protecting glass-cannon offensive units — in PxZ the units all feel roughly equivalent.

One of the weakest elements of PxZ design is the use of super and special moves. Both moves draw from the same globally shared resource bar. A super move takes 100% (out of 150% max…don’t ask me!) and can more than double the damage you do; a special move can take 30% of that same bar and do an extra 15% damage. Why would you ever use the latter given how XP inefficient it is? Answer: you wouldn’t, rendering 90% of the special abilities in the game useless.

I was very excited when I read about Project X Zone 2‘s changes. It struck me as similar in spirit to the detailed document the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn team put out, illustrating that they understood the concerns of the player base and had an eyes-wide-open view of the problems with the game. Almost every issue with the strategy layer of PXZ1 was being fixed in 2, bolstered by some nifty additions. Characters do extra damage when attacking from the side or back — positioning now matters! Special moves now use a unit-specific resource rather than drawing from the same global super move resource, meaning special abilities and super moves no longer compete against each.

The sequel introduces a leveling system that lets you power up individual moves and a character customization system that lets you choose passive and active abilities. More player choice, strategy, personalization and “reward loops” huzzah! The game even has Roman Cancels and Force Roman Cancels — google it!

Project X Zone 2 fixes every mechanical problem with the original. It’s like they read my mind when planning the sequel.

But then I played the game and those changes make almost no difference.

The big problem with PxZ2 is that while the strategy ceiling has been raised the difficulty has been lowered. The game is so easy (at least to me, being decent at these types of games) that any application of strategy is purely optional. You can attack from the back for extra damage, use special moves to increase movement options, use Force Roman Cancels to develop long and damaging custom combos — but you can easily beat levels purely by bumbling through them.

Tellingly the IGN review makes no mention of any of the system improvements at all. None! Despite the mechanics of the game being radically overhauled the review signs off with “Don’t come expecting deep gameplay or even inventive updates to distinguish it from the previous game.” While that’s not exactly right it’s right enough in spirit — the game is significantly updated, but along an axis irrelevant to overall enjoyment.

The main reason to buy PXZ2 is not for the mechanics but because you can call the werewolf dude from Altered Beast to fight alongside Opa-Opa from Fantasy Zone, Ulala from Space Channel 5, Kage and Akira from Virtua Fighter, and, uh, whatever that squirrel thing is.

Low difficulty rendering the advanced mechanics superfluous seems to be the biggest issue with the game, but I’m not convinced that making the game hard enough to require the proper use of mechanics would make the game better. My favorite moment in part 1 is the introduction of a Gain Ground level that includes that game’s unique character collecting system. The reason I love this moment is that I @$*!ing love Gain Ground (the secret best Sega game) and it makes me happy that someone somewhere remembered it exists. Similarly my favorite moment in part 2 is when Ken and Ryu fight against M. Bison, using the sequence of moves and the soundtrack from Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. (Snob voice: the Japanese version)

These are pure fan service moments, not gameplay elements. But the strength of the game — the entire point of the game — is fan service. A harder game with a realistic possibility of losing would mean repeating levels, and while that can be fun in a more strategy-oriented SRPG like Fire Emblem it would be jarring in such lighter fare. Turning the game into a challenging, mechanically satisfying one would take a lot of work, even on top of the substantial amount of work put into the sequel. It would require a radical transformation. The sequel improvements fail to make the game meaningfully better because while much work was put into strategy elements ultimately it’s still not a strategy-centric game.

Tacoma

Along the lines of Project X Zone 2 is Tacoma. I’m fairly certain nobody has made this particular comparison before, but read on! (I realize Tacoma is a follow-up, not a sequel, but it’s close enough — if it makes you feel better imagine the main character in Tacoma is the girl from Gone Home grown up.)

According to SteamSpy Gone Home has 700k owners. Tacoma has 26k. Gone Home was a subject of conversation for years, Tacoma for days. It’s not my place to say that the game was a disappointment commercially or critically — I haven’t played it nor do I know what the budget or sales expectation was. But it feels safe to say that it underperformed in some sense.

Revamping Tacoma to be more than ‘Gone Home on a space station’, in which the creators explain the differences and improvements from Gone Home to Tacoma is an interesting read in that the focus is squarely on mechanical improvements. The problem with Project X Zone 2 is that the improvements were mostly mechanical to a game that was not mechanics-driven, and I suspect that is even more true of Tacoma. (Normally I’m loathe to talk about games I haven’t played, but this section is based on critical and audience reception, not my personal opinion)

My understanding of Gone Home is that the appeal is the subject matter, the atmosphere and the nostalgia. The mechanics are Resident Evil 1 style “pick up and rotate objects.” Often when effusive critics write about the mechanics of the game what they praise is the lack of mechanics, as in this Atlantic piece:

Gone Home also feels a bit like an experiment. It’s a new, effective attack on the convention that in order to be plausible and poignant, game stories necessarily need more complicated systems, higher-resolution graphics, the participation of real-world actors, and heaps of choices and rewards

The pitch for Tacoma is that it’s more mechanically interesting, an embrace of the convention that the previous game rejected. If adding more mechanics makes a narrative game better isn’t the endpoint just…Bioshock? (I would note that my favorite narrative game, Kamaitachi no Yoru AKA Night of the Sickel Weasel AKA Banshee’s Last Cry, has no mechanics at all!) In Tacoma you can rewind and fast forward conversations to create interactive CSI-style re-enactments. When the devs speak of “active” vs “passive” observers the distinction is not emotional engagement or attentiveness, it’s APM. The idea seems to be one follows from the other — that players who are more mechanically involved will also be more emotionally involved, but that may be a plausible-sounding non-sequitur, especially considering the success of the first game. If anything I suspect that using tech tools to explore conversations makes an experience less emotional and more clinical, encouraging left-brain thinking. I’ve seen “Sleep No More” (an inspiration for the game) effusively praised but never has that praise been that it’s emotionally engaging. Instead it’s wonkish appreciation for the elaborate construction.

So how is Tacoma like Project X Zone 2? Both games improved upon largely irrelevant aspects of the first game, while doing little to improve (or even taking a step back from) the core appealing elements of the original. Tacoma may be more mechanically advanced than its predecessor but those advances were met with a collective shrug because mechanical complexity was never the point of the game. And while the systems may be more advanced they’re still relatively simple; in neither game did the systems improvements pass a relevancy threshold.

Other

I once worked on a game that was sent out for a mock review / analysis. It came back with a list of suggested improvements, and when we made all the improvements and resubmitted it the response was “you did everything we wanted but ultimately the game isn’t any better.” Which was disappointing but unsurprising — if mock reviewers knew which specific changes to make to improve a game they’d probably be game designers.

I was going to include a picture of the “feels bad man” frog but I guess that frog is racist now or something, so here’s a different frog.

When I first played Earth Defense Force I made fun of how bad the upper body animation was, but better upper body animation wouldn’t make EDF appreciably better. (I’ve since repented and now recognize the majesty of EDF) Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon contains the most “objective” improvements in the series but is the red-headed stepchild of the franchise.

Counter-intuitive as it may be it’s possible to undeniably improve an aspect of a game without improving it as a whole.

When Better is Worse — Silent Hill Homecoming

Now onto the most interesting category of changes: on-paper improvements that directly hurt a game.

I covered the Tactics Ogre PSP remake in my blog on incoherent design, but I’ll mention it again to make one point: almost every individual change sounds like the sort of “good design” conventional wisdom you see repeated in medium posts, conference keynotes and youtube videos. Ability points add more long-term goals and another reward / compulsion loop. Redundant death failsafes make the game “more accessible.” Special moves allow for more strategy and variety. The changes in the remake read like a greatest hits of game design wisdom, the sort of pro tips you’d see in a “can’t miss” tweetstorm. But in practice these changes are bad, and together they are multiplicatively bad.

The Main Course

The game I want to talk about in detail here is Silent Hill: Homecoming.

The Silent Hill series was often lumped in with Resident Evil under the umbrella of horror games with clunky controls and rudimentary combat, despite that only the first game uses classic RE style tank controls. The PR for Silent Hill: Homecoming focused heavily on better combat and the game was made by a western developer during the height of the “Japanese games just suck” hysteria that brought us games like Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z and Lost Planet 3.

Here’s a wiki description of Homecoming’s combat improvements:

In contrast to the more naïve everyman protagonists of previous games, combat in Homecoming takes into account Alex’s training as a soldier. The player is able to perform light and heavy attacks, or mix them to perform combinations, and may also perform a variety of finishing moves to ensure that the monsters are dead. Attacking enemies also leaves wounds in them that match the motion carried out by Alex in inflicting the attack.

In terms of controlling Alex, the player may also perform new maneuvers such as targeting the enemy before attacking them, dodging enemy attacks, and performing counter-attacks. As well as melee weapons, pistols, rifles and shotguns are available as firearms, which can be upgraded to stronger versions later in the game: firearm handling is also rendered in a more realistic manner, with Alex having to shoulder long guns and suffering aim effects like recoil.

On paper this certainly sounds like “better combat.” The developers of the game went as far as to claim that previous Silent Hill games had “shitty” combat by comparison. (Side note: as a developer taking over a beloved franchise this is probably not the best way to endear yourself to fans)

Plot twist: Silent Hill: Homecoming is generally regarded as one of the worst games in the series and the combat is a main reason why.

Who did the plot twist better? Silent Hill: Homecoming or PXZ2?

Combat’s Impact on Story

In Homecoming you play as Alex, an army vet, presumably because the developers needed to justify your character’s combat prowess. Silent Hill has often hewed close to Jacob’s Ladder and An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and by making the protagonist a solder the similarity is even more obvious. Even players unfamiliar with those specific stories are almost certainly familiar with the storytelling twist they employ. While playing Homecoming I fully expected the ending to exist relative to Jacob’s Ladder, either as a variation on or reversal of it, which makes the game feel derivative regardless of how it plays out.

At the end of the game (ps: this blog contains spoilers) it’s revealed that Alex was never an army vet. That Alex was supposedly a veteran adds little to the story and reversing it is twist that lands with a thud, and raises the question Alex as a veteran was supposed to answer: why is Alex so good at combat?

This entire plot line feels like it exists only because someone in a meeting asked “how can we narratively justify the increased combat emphasis?” Done well this would be an example of form and function working together with the story supporting the mechanics. But done poorly, as it’s done in Homecoming, it feels like a cascade failure, with the combat changes negatively affecting even parts of the game that aren’t combat related by adding superfluous and derivative plot elements.

Combat’s Impact on Play

In Homecoming there’s a part where an overwhelming number of bipedal hammerhead sharks storm a building. I fought them and died. Then I continued, fought them again and died again. Over and over.

A voice in the back of my head told me I was supposed to run instead of fight. An NPC tells you as much, though arguably that NPC could be written in character rather than as a cypher for the designers. Wondering if this was just a me problem I found a Let’s Play video on Youtube and the player got stuck at exactly the same place I did, fighting and dying to the sharks over and over. I also found complaints about this exact sequence on forums. So it’s not just a me thing.

That so many people get stuck on the same part might lead one to think that it’s just a case of bad encounter design, something that should have been smoothed out by playtesting. But it’s indicative of a larger problem: that Homecoming has shifted to a game in which the player’s first instinct is to fight.

When I fought Orenstein and Smough in Dark Souls I did it without summoning another player or an NPC. It probably took me 30 tries to beat them but beat them I did. For many players the point of action-oriented games is overcoming challenge — a flood of monsters isn’t something you run from, it’s a test of mettle. If Kratos walks into a room with 30 enemies he doesn’t turn tail and run, he cracks his knuckles.

I have no problem running from enemies in older Silent Hill games because in those games combat is a last resort, something you use when an enemy is between you and the destination. But in Homecoming combat isn’t a last resort. Pre-release PR focused on how combat was fun and expanded. You have cool abilities and finishing moves. When you slash enemies it leaves gashes in the path your knife took — why would they put that in the game if you aren’t supposed to knife enemies a bunch? Combat is a tier-1 system, the system that differentiates Homecoming from previous Silent Hills — presumably you’re supposed to use it. So when the game introduces a combat encounter with many enemies the player doesn’t interpret that as a sign to run. It’s a combat game, you fight.

Emphasis is a way for designers to signal intent. If a game has a simple crafting system a la Resident Evil the signal is that that’s a tertiary element of the game. If a game has a well-developed crafting system put front and center, a la Minecraft or the various early access Steam survival games, the signal is that crafting is an integral part of the game.

One of the main complaints about Quantum Break was that it was a standard third person cover game with weak TPS mechanics that overshadowed the more unique gameplay elements . The rebuttal to that was “you’re playing it wrong” — you aren’t supposed to hide behind cover, you’re supposed to run and gun while using your powers. But then why does the game have familiar chest-high walls, a formal cover system and regenerating health? The level and system designers sure put a lot of work into things you’re supposed to ignore, things that indicate “stop and pop” rather than “run and gun” gameplay.

Pictured above: the main character of Quantum Break assassinates the main character of Knack

Similarly Silent Hill: Homecoming signals that it’s an action-oriented game. Including a set-piece where the player is supposed to run from uneven odds makes no sense in a genre where uneven odds are the norm.

Combat’s Impact on Theme and Horror

In previous Silent Hill games the player is prey — a normal human in way over their heads. In Homecoming you’re a trained soldier (or are you????) with a fancy combat system at your disposal. When you see an enemy you think “I bet I can kill that thing”, not “I bet that thing can kill me.”

Resident Evil 4 represents a similar shift, but Resident Evil 4 is a great action game that knows what it is. While there are still some horror elements much of it is tongue in cheek — you’re not supposed to be deathly afraid of Wizard of Oz Munchkin reject Salazar. Silent Hill: Homecoming still plays it straight and tries to be horror, seemingly unaware that it’s now in the action-horror genre. The emphasis on action and player capability makes it not scary, but the improved action doesn’t rise to the level of an A-rate action game. The main complaint I see on forums is that the game has too much combat; the increased amount of combat outpaces the increased fun of combat. Part of that is due to combat being more time consuming. Enemies have less simplistic patterns, you have defensive options, and combat becomes a more elaborate dance. Whereas in previous Silent Hills you run up to a dog, bash at it with a pipe and one of you dies. (Or you just run away) It’s not just that the number of combat encounters is too high, it’s that players are encouraged to fight rather than run and that the improved combat systems dictate longer fights. The end result is that the dial is turned away from atmosphere, exploration and themes and towards brawling.

Obligatory Wrap Up

Game design is very fad-driven with many, many people constantly sharing the best way to make games. This conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong, but even when it’s correct in the abstract it’s rarely tailored to individual projects. “A [good] game is a series of interesting decisions” is a nice rule of thumb but doesn’t apply to Guitar Hero or most walking sims. “Juicing” a game via bouncy animation curves, icons that grow and bop around on hover, motion trails, etc, can be fine but would be wholly inappropriate for a game like Dark Souls with its stark gothic aesthetic. Adding “environmental storytelling” to games via audio logs and vaguely menacing graffiti (written in bloooooooodddd so spoooooooooky!) may work well for — eh, let’s be honest, it doesn’t work well for much these days.

In my blog on Dark Souls I wrote the following:

I don’t believe that context-free “good design” is a real thing.

Coherent design is important – how well do design decisions work in the context of other design decisions? Form matching theme is important – how much does the design support the theme and content? I would go as far as to say that form and content are inseparable in gaming – form isn’t just a vehicle to convey content, it is content.

I still very much believe this and find it pertinent here. In Project X Zone 2 the design decision to deepen strategy mechanics doesn’t play well with the decision to lower difficulty such that strategy is irrelevant. In Tacoma the story is supposed to be emotionally engaging, but the form it’s presented in is clinically antiseptic, and your story as the player is that of a dispassionate investigator in a CBS police procedural, not of an emotionally-involved participant. In Homecoming the themes and ambience suggest horror and fear but the mechanics suggest action and confrontation. In all of these cases there’s increased mechanical complexity and decision-making. Tacoma presents an entire system of making “interesting decisions” absent from Gone Home and that’s better, right? Gone Home is the novel and Tacoma the far superior Choose Your Own Adventure book.

This is my face when I see another “boss battles are bad” think piece, and maybe your face having reached the end of this blog.

Feel free to take to comments to lavish me with praise, call me an idiot, or share your own examples of ostensible improvements.

Until next time.

Laralyn McWilliams is Chief Creative Officer at Skydance Interactive and will be at GDC 2018 to present the talk You’re Not Broken: Finding Your Creative Way Through Difficult Times.

Her Advocacy Track talk will discuss ways to recognize when your creativity is affected by stress, loss or other derailing emotions; methods for connection and communication with other creatives; emotional and practical tools to begin to reclaim your creativity. Here, McWilliams gives us information about herself and what she does.

Don’t miss out! The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next March is going to be full of interesting and informative sessions like Laralyn’s. For more visit the show’s official website.

Tell us about yourself and what you do in the games industry.

I’m a game developer and designer, currently Chief Creative Officer at Skydance Interactive in Los Angeles. I started off in the days before anyone on a dev team had a job title (I was a combo of producer, artist and coder), then became a producer for years until suddenly “game designers” existed and I knew that’s where I belonged. I was occasionally in a producer role after that, but for the most part my career post-2000 has been as lead designer, creative director, or in company leadership. Along with my design work, diversity on our game development teams has always been important to me, and I’ve written about it several times on Gamasutra.

What inspired you to pursue your career?

I fell in love with attractions at Disneyland when I was a kid—I knew I wanted to create worlds. I got my first home computer when I was in high school in the early 1980’s (a TI-99/4A) and taught myself BASIC. When I first played Scott Adams’ Adventure game, though, my goals solidified: I wanted to create INTERACTIVE worlds. That wasn’t really possible as a profession in the early 1980’s though, and this was the height of the period when tech ads/culture started steering toward men.

It never occurred to me to study programming in college even though my freshman year I was an operator on the giant VAX computer system. It wasn’t until after college, working, law school, and a bit more working that I saw Myst and couldn’t take it anymore. I had to find a way to create worlds. I taught myself to make 3D graphics, taught myself better programming in the multimedia software I used for my day job, made a game demo, sold it to Micropose, partnered with a local game studio, and started my own company. This was around 1994.

Without spoiling it too much, tell us what you’ll be talking about at GDC.

We all deal with events in our lives that derail everything: events like divorce, death of a family member or friend, layoffs, bankruptcy, or a diagnosis of severe illness. When you’re going through these events, they rob you of your creativity—an essential part of every game developer’s job, regardless of discipline. They can also steal your focus, energy, and self-confidence. My talk provides tools to help you climb out of what feels like a pit of darkness, not from a psychological perspective (although that’s part of it) but from a professional and creative perspective. I really want my experiences dealing with three rounds of cancer to help other developers stay positive, engaged and creative.

What are some of the biggest challenges you face in your work?

There’s a reason co-op games are popular and also feel evergreen to play: people are fascinating, challenging, rewarding and unpredictable. Anyone in team/company management knows that understanding the people on your team and striving to improve both their work lives and their work product is a challenge, but one that’s incredibly fulfilling. We’re also working primarily in VR, and it’s always an exciting leap off the cliff when you’re taking on design for a truly new platform that provides new player experiences.

What are the most rewarding parts of your job?

It’s a tie between seeing a team working well together and enjoying the act of creation, and seeing players enjoy the game we worked so hard to build. That’s game development at its best, when you’ve been a part of a group that had a vision and realized it, and that vision can become a part of players’ lives. Ultimately there’s magic in helping to create memorable moments for our players.

The subject of your talk is incredibly relevant for anyone paying attention to the news in 2017. How do you encourage people who live and work online to feel justified for creating?

Creation is an act that helps both creator and audience. I believe in the fundamental power and value of pure entertainment–I don’t think entertainment is important only if it has a “message” or deeper meaning. Brightening players’ lives with entertainment is, in itself, meaningful. The process of creating even something that is “just” entertainment is therapeutic in many ways–it gives you something to focus on and escape from the woes of the world (whether those woes are personal, societal or political). Of course, all of the benefits for both creator and audience are enhanced when we put more of ourselves into what we create: our struggles, failures, triumphs, losses and learnings.

Two great examples are Crashlands, created while a developer was going through cancer treatments but not directly itself addressing cancer, and That Dragon Cancer, which clearly expresses the developer’s experiences. The bottom line: whether you express your struggles in it or not, the act of creation promotes healing.

What helped you maintain the drive to be creative as you were dealing with cancer?

That’s a key part of what I discuss in my talk. It’s really hard–and often impossible–to maintain the drive to create when you’re dealing with a life-changing event, whether that’s cancer or divorce or unemployment or the death of a loved one. I really struggled to even feel creative when I was going through chemo, much less actually BE effectively creative. And that’s OK. That’s why awareness and forgiveness are such an important part of my talk. You need to be cognizant that you’re in a situation where it’s hard to feel the mental focus and freedom creativity requires, and give yourself room to work more slowly and less effectively than you do when all’s well. I share some of the focusing and motivational tools I discovered as a part of the talk.

Do you have any advice for those aspiring to join your field someday?

Design is one of the toughest disciplines in terms of breaking in. The best advice I could give is to build stuff, constantly. Actually that’s the advice I give even to working designers. Be fascinated with tools and how other games are built. Get in there, whether it’s with the Elder Scrolls Construction Kit or Super Mario Maker or Unity or Unreal, and try to build something similar to what you’ve seen and liked. Then try to build something you’ve NEVER seen. Build stuff, break stuff, and learn stuff—that’s the core loop of being a game designer.

GDC 2018 will take place March 19-23rd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information, visit the show’s official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

This article originally appeared on gdconf.com. Gamasutra, VRDC, and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas.