shinikaru

I've had the past two weeks of work off, which has been an experience in its own right :) The Holidays have been great, and I got to spend a lot of time relaxing. I also started working on a little side project I've been wanting to do for some time now, Sprocket, and that led me to a few ideas with my blog.

The project is a game idea I've been batting around for some time - a (at first) single player RPG-Lite game focused around a kid who battles enemies using an array of Robots he builds from collected parts taking place in a steampunk inspired world. The battle system would be more unique than your typical FF/Pokemon Menu based ordeal - I had talked to Kurt about some different ideas, such as "writing" visual programs and modifying them through the course of battles, etc - but that's not important right now.

Anyhow, like I mentioned, I began working on it over break, and had the idea of logging my progress, ideas, and questions on my blog - sort of like a Project Log with some direct interaction. If anything, I hope it'll drive me to keep working on it when time permits - but the added communication over ideas and mechanics could be really interesting too.

Since I'm doing this all on my own for now, I'm having to wear many hats. Most of my work over the past week has been modeling and rigging a dummy main character, which as been an adventure in its own right. I have a decent amount of experience with modeling programs (notably Max and Maya) because of my job, but modeling and animating a humanoid is well beyond the task of a humble game designer! It turned out to be a lot of fun though, and I'm pretty happy with the results.

So that will probably be the first Log I post. After I wrap up my required art assets to get a prototype going, I'm going to shift gears and flesh out my GDD and begin to design some of the more important systems (read: combat) as I work on getting the game engine going.

So I hope you'll check back from time to time and see how I'm doing! And any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Earlier this summer, I finished working on a children's game for the Wii, PSP, and PS2. It was the first kid's game I had ever worked on, so I knew it would be a learning experience. One thing I tried to be cognoscente of from the beginning was our difficulty curve in relation to the market we were ultimately targeting.

The first thing you learn working in Game Design is controlling and managing difficulty will be one of the biggest hurdles you deal with. Our game was a side scrolling beat-em-up mixed with R-Type style flight levels. That meant balancing two completely separate types of gameplay with very little overlap between the two. This property also had a fairly successful GBA game that was known for its extreme difficulty - something that made it a cult classic of sorts; so we had to take that into account too.

As a designer, I've always been interested in how difficulty affects gameplay. Our industry started being reliant on actual difficulty (instead of content) driving game length - hardware and storage restrictions demanded it, and it also played into the basic human desire to iterate and improve. As time passed and technology progressed, games began to grow and we began to see content drive them, especially in RPGs. The focus shifted from games being a purely skill based experience into new frontiers like story and creative gameplay mechanics. And while there are a large amount of games today that are still reliant on skill based gameplay, its rare to see a game outside of the Puzzle genre that solely relies on it.

So with design maturing at a constant rate, shouldn't our concept of "Difficulty" too evolve? Personally, I feel like there's no excuse for designing a game that gates player progression through Difficulty. Creating these artificial barriers around your experience seems counter-productive as a Designer. That's not to say you can't create a difficult game, but instead that you need to adapt to the full scale of player ability.

A lot of this is heavily controlled by the game you're making. With the children's game I had mentioned earlier, we were attempting to create a beat-em-up/R-Type hybrid experience with light platforming. We wanted the platforming aspect to be "icing on the cake" - it wasn't our core gameplay mechanic and simply served to make levels more interesting and interactive. Therefore, we tried to avoid driving difficulty through that facet. The typical punishment in a platforming game is to "pit," where the player incorrectly maneuvers the gameplay space and falls out of the level. In most platforming games the player would die and begin either at the beginning of the level, or less punishingly the previous checkpoint. We opted however to simply take a small amount of the player's health and throw them back out of the pit and returning them to gameplay.

A few people on the team had complained we were making the game too easy; and that got me thinking: is it wrong to let the player play your game how they want to? If someone wants to play through your game without having to worry about dying, is that a bad thing? While increased difficulty is a completely valid gameplay mechanic, I'm more interested in creating experiences that rely on unique gameplay elements and interesting content to keep the player engaged.

At the same time, however, I'd be foolish to ignore either side of the difficulty curve. Even with my ideal situation of creative gameplay experiences and top notch content, I want to provide for players who desire a more difficult experience. This can be solved by offering a few meaningful difficulty settings, but because of the complications of balancing a system like that, it's not always an ideal situation nor one that's usually too successful.

New Super Mario Bros. for Wii, released a few weeks ago, addresses this problem in a fairly unique way with their much touted 'Super Guide' system - If a player fails in a level eight times, they're presented with the option of either having a CPU controlled Luigi show them a walkthrough of the stage, or simply skipping it. Now, Mario games are obviously more skill-based; the difficulty of the game is heavily reliant on gating through complicated platforming sections. But at the same time, the game features other mechanics like simply controlling Mario while using different power-ups that still provide a great deal of entertainment and satisfaction. By initially requiring the player to traverse each level correctly, and only assisting when the player is clearly having a difficult time, I don't have an issue with altering the typical flow of gameplay and bypassing a level.

It's not hard to see the 'Super Guide' system adapted to a variety of game types successfully either; take a popular current generation title like Halo 3 for instance. If during the course of gameplay, a player fails to pass a specific checkpoint x number of times, wouldn't it make sense to start scaling the difficulty back? Perhaps fewer enemies are spawned, or player gun accuracy is increased across the board? As the player improves again, these modifications could slowly ramp off again.

Perhaps the best way to create a more dynamic difficulty system would be to take a queue from Left4Dead's AI Director. During the course of gameplay, the AI Director is processing a wide variety of player metrics, and then trying to create a dynamic ebb and flow of frenetic difficulty, driven by reactionary behaviors to those metrics. Imagine a reactionary behavior system who's goal was to create an ideal difficulty, with the ability to modify that baseline through "difficulty settings". Most games these days are already monitoring a wide range of player metrics for the sole purpose of Achievement Systems - by starting the design process with this mindset of adapting difficulty to player skill, there should be no reason for a game that isn't entirely skill based to allow any caliber of player to finish it. And as designers, that's what we should want, people to have the freedom to experience our work in a way that's meaningful to them.

So what are your thoughts? I'd like to continue dwelling on this topic, with my next post focusing on more modern games that still greatly rely on difficulty, or at least derive some meaningful benefit from it (Demon's Souls, for instance).

I should preface this by simply saying: Buy it. Little King's Story is about as much fun as I've ever had on the Wii. A clever mix of Harvest Moon, Pikmin, Sim City, and Heroes of Might and Magic make it a fairly unique experience.

The game comes off fairly unassuming at first; an old knight has been searching for you, the "true King" most of his life. He props you up in a shanty-like Castle and begins to run down the core game mechanics. Overall a fairly boring tutorial (Design Fail 1: I don't want to read your tutorial. I especially don't want a feature called "The Classroom," where I can read up on ALL of your extended tutorials.). Once you break into the real game, you find yourself roaming your Kingdom and beyond while recruiting a team of Villagers to follow you. You soon gain the ability to turn these villagers into different classes, such as a Soldier, Farmer, or Carpenter. Each class provides a benefit, usually unique to itself. Carpenter's can build things, such as bridges to further your Kingdom's expanse.  Soldiers are crucial to beating large UMAs (Unidentified Moving Animals). As you progress through the game, you'll gain more specialized (and hilarious) classes.

I think where Little King's Story shines most is in it's pacing - there is the carrot on a stick factor that is driven home so hard here that it's nigh impossible to stop playing. You're always looking forward to the next expansion, defeating the next UMA, unlocking a new class, and more. This is supported by the awesome "Suggestion Box" - the game's Mission System. It's sort of like taking Jobs in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance - there all usually preempted with some funny explaination and story, a slew are optional, and the goals are clearly lined out. In a really open game, sandboxy game like this, it's great to always know what your next task is.

My only real complaint then about Little King's Story is Citizen Manipulation - the designers clearly took a few cues from Pikmin - much like Olimar's tossing of the Pikmin, the King sends his subjects at whatever he's facing (via the Analog Stick on the Nunchuck). This leads to some pretty frustrating events and needlessly difficult boss encounters. It makes you wish the designers would've taken a cue from New Play Control Pikmin and let players use the Wii Pointer to direct their citizens. The only real benefit of the Nunchuck/Analog setup is you can play Little King Story like an old Tony Hawk game - completely melded into your couch exhibiting as little body energy as possible (a lot of people said that about Twilight Princess too!). Anyhow - the option would've been appreciated!

If this sounds like something you would be into, I can't recommend it enough. For me it's an experience much like playing Civilization 4 - I know once I start playing, I'm going to have to fight every fiber of my being to eventually pull myself away. And every once and a while, that's a really awesome thing, especially when it comes from a Wii game.

It's been a busy month to say the least. Between a pretty heavy workload at work and an overall lack of free time, I've neglected my blog once again. So lets bring things current!Game-wise, I've been playing quite a lot of Dawn of War 2. What started with a fascination for Skirmishes with my Coworkers at lunch and after work has turned into an obsession with the Campaign in Co-op. And I find it fairly surprising, mostly because I never actually expect much from an RTS' single player component (although it's probably not entirely fair to refer to DoW2 as an RTS really).

On paper, it's a pretty strange concept. Diablo light adventuring, click-fest looting meets a squad-based RTS. But these things come together to create a really great package. Random loot constantly drops, which definitely drives the carrot-on-a-stick idea; not to mention the items you get for completing specific missions. While they don't visually change much (because at that viewpoint, you really wouldn't notice), they generally tend to impact gameplay in a unique way. During this time, your squads (four active at one time in Single Player, two per player in Co-op) are gaining experience, which can be spent on unlocking a slew of new talents and abilities.The gear and skills tend to highlight specific aspects of the class the squad falls under.This leads you to ultimately design squads that really fit your play style. There's also times where you'll customize your load out to fit specific mission information; Anti-Vehicle, Defense, and more.

And surprisingly, the Story's passable. It's not going to win any awards, but it does get the job done and is usually interesting enough to keep you interested in the overall picture.

The only complaints I could leverage against it really deal with just wanting more. We're on the last mission of the Campaign, and while it's probably taken us 11+ hours or so (and the redeployments we're doing should take on another two or 3, I really don't want it to end. A lot of the squads have just gotten some really great gear and abilities, and the desire to spend more time playing with those is huge.

My other complaint still inevitably falls under game length; almost half of the game consists of redeployments (new objectives on already played maps); which for the most part is fun... but a 50/50ish ratio might be just a bit too high.So in reality, I just can't wait for Relic to release an Expansion Pack. I'm hoping they'll keep up the same level of support they did with the Original game; if so, I have a lot to be excited for. In the meantime, I'll shift focus back to Multiplayer Skirmishes.

Or replay the campaign Co-op as the Guest so Eric can get the Host only Achievements :)