Category: News

Japan is a nation synonymous with video games, and the country is home to some of the biggest games companies in the world. 

Sony, Nintendo, Capcom, Square Enix, Bandai Namco: the list goes on and on, but despite being so ingrained in video game history, the region’s approach to preservation is surprisingly nonchalant. 

According to a recent Kotaku feature, the cultural differences present in Japan mean people simply aren’t concerned with keeping or cataloguing things. It’s nothing personal, just a different way of life. 

“In Japan, you don’t keep things,” explains French national Joseph Redon, one of the driving forces behind the country’s Game Preservation Society. 

“It’s a cultural difference, you see. Today, we have a typhoon. I felt an earthquake just a few minutes ago. You didn’t? Very small. But this country is a rock above the sea. It’s full of calamities. 

“The way of thinking, the way of living, the way things last, the cycle of their lives here is very different. You build a house in Japan, thirty years after, you need to destroy it and make a new one.”

As the name suggests, the Games Preservation Society is a grassroots initiative that aims to do exactly that: preserve and catalogue Japan’s video game heritage. The fledgling organisation was only founded in 2011, and is headquartered in a quiet suburb of Tokyo.

The challenge facing Redon and the society’s other members is astronomical. The Frenchman claims “almost nothing is left,” but he’s prepared to play the long game in the hopes of pulling many a forgotten digital heirloom back from the brink. 

Be sure to check out the full Kotaku article to find out how the Games Preservation Society plans to save Japan’s games. It’s well worth your time.

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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Some of the biggest challenges facing modern game development can be found in open-world game design: how to build large, vibrant and interesting locales for players to explore. Artificial intelligence can often by adopted to address this challenge by creating interesting and dynamic environments that enhance the overall experience for the player. In this article, we take a look at the methods and design decisions behind the ever increasing game worlds in Ubisoft’s Far Cry series.

Far Cry is renowned for an open approach towards problem solving: allowing players to explore the world in a manner that suits them. Originally starting out as an open — albeit linear — gameplay experience, the series has became increasingly more adventurous in its design; with maps not only increasing in size but also with the introduction of more interactive environments and wildlife. The latter proves really exciting, given that it can completely change the dynamic of gameplay — which could prove inspirational or even fatal when you’re in the thick of the action.

However, achieving this level of engagement and interaction can be rather demanding: given designers need to balance the players sense of importance and agency, while ensuring they’re not bludgeoned repeatedly and offered some respite. Similarly, there’s also the implementation issues faced in managing open world assets: given it’s not computationally feasible nor responsible to leave thousands of non-player characters roaming the Rook Islands or the vast mountain ranges of Kyrat.

So how does it all work? The answer of course, is with a little bit of AI ingenuity through smart directors. This is an increasingly popular way to manage large open-world environments, with much of it stemming from the pioneering works found in Left 4 Dead. Turtle Rock and Valve’s survival shooter focused on the distribution of enemy characters within close proximity of the player and Far Cry follows suit. So let’s look at the design tricks behind their AI implementation.

The original Far Cry launched back in 2004 is an action heavy first-person shooter that gave the illusion of open-world gameplay through its large albeit limited areas and maps. Meanwhile, 2008’s Far Cry 2 was the first in the series to truly embrace the notions of open world play and more importantly, systemic design: the ability to have a range of independent systems and mechanics that can be combined in fun and interesting ways. The opposing human factions, reactive and aggressive wildlife, combined with vehicles, environmental effects and more are intended to for players to exploit for their own personal gains. But it didn’t quite pan out: Far Cry 2 is a bit of a frustrating experience, largely because these systems were not properly balanced or constrained.

 

However continued development of these systems lead to their adoption in 2012’s Far Cry 3, where they had reached a level of maturity that improved the experience overall. The systemic framework in Far Cry 3 achieves what Ubisoft themselves refer to as “The Anecdote Factory”: a system that would create weird, wonderful and individual gameplay experiences you would talk about with you friends. This could range from unexpected tiger attacks to luring tigers from nearby jungle growth into enemy bases whilst flying a small gyro-copter and dropping C4 explosives.

Meanwhile 2014’s Far Cry 4 attempted to improve upon what Far Cry 3achieved while also addressing some of its criticisms: notably the balance of this systemic framework operating in and around a linear narrative.

The vast majority of this systemic framework is reliant upon non-player character (NPC) AI: ranging from the enemies, to the civilians, to allied fighters to the animals that prowl the open-world maps. It just needs to know where and when to put them in the world.

The scale of the world of Far Cry 3 is very impressive: with the Rook Islands of the estimated to be around 300 square miles in size. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and given you would need thousands of non-player characters within that space to make it interesting, you suddenly have a difficult design problem to solve. Not just in ensuring characters are in locations that present interesting opportunities for players to explore, but how best to manage these characters in a resource constrained piece of software.

 

 

This leads us to Far Cry’s dirty little secret: that at any point in time, the game is only maintaining active non-player characters within less than 500 metres of the player, with enemy characters and animals being added and removed to the world as the player moves around. This is actually quite pragmatic, given that leaving large numbers of characters in the game at once is highly expensive: wasting not just memory needed to store these NPCs, but potentially CPU cycles to continually update the state of these characters during play. The game isn’t interested in managing hypothetical situations such as a tiger attacking a gazelle 3 miles north west of the player. The resulting encounter system of Far Cry 3 and 4 operates on a simple principle: if the player didn’t see it, it didn’t happen.

The NPCs within the game are designed to react and behave in a context-driven fashion: to attack, evade or explore areas of the map based on what’s happening around them. This is driven by finite state machines (FSMs), a topic we’ve covered at length in our videos on First Encounter Assault Recon (F.E.A.R.) and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Many of these NPCs, be they enemies, civilians or animals, are designed to react to nearby stimuli in an appropriate fashion. Their responses are reliant upon a rich navigation mesh that is embedded into the game world, with smart object nodes placed in areas of interest that can trigger specific animations. While they know how to react intelligently, it does not factor whether any other non-player characters are in proximity. In fact, enemy NPCs are rather limited tactically, which becomes more apparent when you play the likes of Far Cry 4 in the online cooperative mode. Despite this, they’re still a cracking shot and a separate damage director system manages their shooting capabilities based on the number of NPCs in the scene. Thus ensuring you don’t get killed by six headshots at once from 100 metres away.

 

 

In order to maintain decent performance – given that these games not only have to run efficiently on PC but also between console generations — the director AI enforces constraints on the number of systemic elements that are active at any point in time. This includes the number of enemy NPCs, but also animals and items such as vehicles given the additional computational load they bring with them. In fact, in Far Cry 3 the numbers are really limited: with only 12 NPCs max in the world at once and up to 20 animals, with vehicles also limited to around 2 or 3 types at any point in time. The relevance of these characters are measured frequently: with the director moving or deleting characters if it’s apparent they’re too far away and won’t ever catch you. If you’re running in a particular direction, the system will spawn enemies in front of you: factoring not only your heading but your current speed: thus ensuring they don’t pop-up in front of you.

This system was enhanced for Far Cry 4 to become to create more interesting and varied events. Placing the NPCs in the world is one thing, but placing them in specific configurations related to one another can result in the player becoming involved in more engaging experiences. As such, Far Cry 4introduced a dynamic encounter method that procedurally generates events within proximity of the player: such as enemy NPCs in combat against Kyrat’s wildlife. This pays attention to your current objectives, sometimes putting them in the way, or focusses on completed tasks, like having a recently captured output come under attack again by the local militia.

 

The use of dynamic director systems has become increasingly popular for open-world game environments: with titles such as Saint’s Row IV, Titanfalland The Witcher III: Wild Hunt all adopting these in some fashion or another, with their own unique design problems to solve. But this isn’t the only innovations that the Far Cry series continues to make, with the more recent entry Far Cry: Primal, introducing companion AI in the form of tamed animals. This is in fact an extension of the AI system used for the tiger companion in the Shangri La sequence of Far Cry 4. We’ll be returning at a later date to talk all about how that works and the design problems Ubisoft’s developers overcame to make it a reality.

Far Cry 4 is available now on PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One.

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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Hey Game Gurus,

*Disclaimer, all opinions are my own and do not reflect my employers*

I hope everyone is well, playing and/or making the games you love. It has been a long time since my last post sadly. I know our bond is strong and I am pretty sure that we have both missed each other……. a lot. It is okay to wipe away those feelings because we are finally reunited, once more.

In a previous post, I discussed how important documentation is during the development of the game’s creation.

Documentation A Necessary Evil 

That was just us dipping our toes into the water, so let us go a little bit deeper into this pool.

During the early stages of design, you will be working on creating/answering the question of

“What is the game?”

There are many ways to answer this but the one method I want us to focus on today in this post is the games ‘Pillars’.

Some of you may be wondering what I mean by this or may not be familiar with this term. What I mean by this term is think about the 3 – 5 main elements/emotions your game is trying to explore and make the players feel?

So why is it important to figure this out? Why do I need to limit my game to these amount of categories? 

“Max, my game is going to tackle and do so many amazing things” Replied the reader. 

Well sir or madam, as always I appreciate the question. The reason behind this is to keep your game coherent. If you are trying to do everything in one game then players may be getting lost or you will not be able to deliver all these elements/emotions to a high standard when you have 100s.

Another reason why is it helps all your teammates understand the overall picture of your game. Most people do not realize that even while in the production stage of the game not all the answers are there. We all wish they were trust me, it would make game dev a lot smoother. Yet giving your team these key elements to work with during the production process it allows them to make informed design decisions. Giving your teammates guidelines will make your team’s life easier and overall a happier team!

(maybe not this happy, but trust me…happier)

As with these pillars, they can start to ask themselves, does this mechanic/idea serve or fit into the pillars of our game? If the answer is ‘No’ then it may be best to remove this mechanic. (Now I am not saying every mechanic must serve these pillars, you can use “off topic” mechanics to create different emotions and make the player feel a way uncomfortable. Yet these ideas will come later on during development) The team can focus on the core elements of the game, before working on subverting the experience.

So now that you have an understanding of a Game Pillar let’s take a look at a few examples of games and break them down into their core pillars.

The Last of us is one of Naughty dog’s many master pieces. If you have not played it yet (then seriously why?) go and check it out.

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A lot goes into making Last of Us a truly an amazing game, that so many of us enjoyed. So let’s take a look at the core pillars of this game:

• Crafting: Ammo is scarce, so to distract or cause a higher amount of damage to one’s foes it is better to use items populating the world. This works in unison with the environmental story telling of how this is not many resources left in this world
• Story: Last of Us is a linear game which is heavily narrative lead, they want everything to tie in with the story as mentioned with crafting. The game focuses on the story of the two main characters rather than the player’s own story.
• AI partners: The game is all about building a relationship between the player’s character with the AI partner Ellie and other partners you meet throughout your journey
• Stealth: Combat is used in this game, but if you were to run and gun, then the game would make your life extremely difficult. So player are encouraged to play more stealthily

As you can see (if you have played the game) that most of the game fits with these core principles. Puzzles, requiring AI help, there are stealth section in the missions, the story is king and even in multiplayer crafting is important to the players.

That is only one game, so let us break down another.

Hhhmm I have recently picked up a Switch

Which means I want to break down Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

I am only just passed the tutorial but have seen a lot of videos breaking this down, (If you feel I have missed anything please Tweet me with your thoughts)

• • Exploration: Player are encouraged to explore, by being able to go to any area they wish whenever they wish (Once they have finished the tutorial) the designers have hidden certain information from the player compared to Ubisoft open world games, where they litter the player’s HUD with side missions. Meaning players have to look for these.
  • Traversal:  BoW offers so many modes of transport, each being as fun as one another. From, climbing, swimming, running, paragliding to the amazing shield surfing. Moving through this world is made into a fantastic experience through the diversity and (sorry for lack of a better word) fun of the movement in the world.
  • Scavenging: Players are constantly needing to go through the world and search for items. From weapons which break after a few battles, to the food players must use to regain health or help them traverse through all kind of environmental hazards.
  • Options: This game is praised all around for a number of options that are given to the player. From multiple ways to solve puzzles to the combat scenarios or how the player makes their way around the world. Anything the player can think of in terms of trying, the most likely will be able to do it. Compared to most games, there is no one way to solve the issues, which is laid in front of the player.
  • Combat: I see this as one of the lesser pillars for this game personally. Now you have loads of combat in this game and a number of enemy types but again my personal opinion is that the combat is not the most amazing combat system out there. Still, it is a pillar as this is how you interact with most creatures in the world

Those are two games broken down into their core pillars, I am hoping that you can see how using just a few pillars it has allowed the creators to focus and push the best part of their game, working around these to enhance everything. This is a great tool to bring more coherence to your game as well as a good guideline to help your teammates when working on a game of your own.

I would like to ask you to take a few mins and think about one or two of your favorite games and break them down into their key pillars. See if you learn from this, how the game actually bases a lot of its challenges around these pillars.

Please tweet me If you do find anything interesting: @MaxPears

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