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manyblinkinglights · 4 years ago

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MY PERSONAL TAKE ON UNITY-”HUMANOID” FERAL AVATAR RIGGING FOR VRCHAT

First of all: this is actually not that bad. If you avoid the many pitfalls I will lay out for you in this tutorial, the worst thing about the hookup process is the same thing that’s bad about everything in Unity: dragging the little thingies into their little boxies gets kind of tedious.

NUMBERED LIST:

1. Start with Rigify’s meta-human.

2. Modify it by deleting extra bones, and

3. altering the hips and legs and shoulders for compatibility with VRChat’s full-body IK, as per Kung’s YouTube tutorial.

4. Build your quad model around the head, neck, chest, spine, and hips of your Humanoid.

5. Lock your Humanoid legs and arms out of weight painting.

6. Rig your quad model, and

7. Get it into Unity.

8. Start putting rotation constraints on all/most of your quad model’s bones (I’ll tell you TWO BIG SECRETS). edit: I forget what two things were supposed to be the secrets. Pick whichever two things helped you most and let’s just call those the secrets.

9. Build and test your avatar, then start tweaking your constraint weights until you get the effect you want!

ADVICE:

part A: You can test an activated quad leg rotation constraint directly in your scene by applying it, and then grabbing your humanoid thigh or shin transform and rotating that, but YOU HAVE TO CTRL-Z IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS. NEVER apply a rotation constraint to a bone that’s been left out of its default position!

part B: Always, always, ALWAYS and only, only ONLY work on your Armature in Blender from full X, Y, or Z isometric view with X-mirroring on.

KNOWN LIMITATIONS:

The levelling bone in your backbone always points directly back, relative to root, from the user’s hips; they twist up and leave it behind if they turn from side to side too far, all the way around, or, god forbid, hit VRCEmote 6 (backflip). You cannot sexy poledance or flop onto the couch in this style of avatar without making a spectacle of yourself.

If there’s some crazy calculus that’d spit out the exact right leg lengths and constraint weights to perfectly eliminate foot-vs-floor clipping at every height, I do not know it. There are just too many variables at play; put whatever leg lengths onto your quad that it requires, and then try to come up with rough, biomechanically-inspired values for your constraint weights such that your quad feet wind up near the same elevation as your Humanoid core’s feet when you enter the Humanoid sit position. If you do this your end result will be PRETTY DARN GOOD at standing and bending/dancing heights, but it WILL get squirrelly as you approach crouch. That’s just the way it is; in fact I recommend replacing the prone and crouch animation blendtrees with the standing ones. While this tutorial will generate an avatar that crouches and crawls around prone okay/amusingly, you do get sent into the floor in crouch/prone and there simply isn’t anything to be done about it.

There is also NO WAY to migrate rotation constraints from one avatar to another. You can copy a fully-constrained avatar and hot-swap in your own edited mesh, but you (basically) CAN’T EDIT bones in an already-constrained armature without turning it all into spaghetti.

ONE.

You need a working, full-body-tracking compatible biped skeleton to start with. But... there aren’t any out there (that I’m aware of) to start with, so I recommend scaling up a meta-human out of the Rigify add-on for Blender... here’s a guy walking you through that bit of it: https://youtu.be/DS885Sk1gSs?t=30 (we will not be making an “animation rig,” we are just getting a human-shaped Armature into the project with almost all of its bones named correctly already. So just do that part.)

TWO.

...and then deleting the face stuff, some other stuff, and the extra four non-finger hand bones out of each hand (make sure not to accidentally nuke part of your thumb, like me, because you might not notice until way later that you’ve given yourself a stumpy single-jointed thumb). You want to go from this:

To this:

I mean, I guess you could leave them, but too many useless bones will come back to bite you later if Unity decides it can’t figure your shit out and makes you drag every. single. handbone. into. the L and R hand slots yourself. Set yourself up for success and don’t skip this deletion step. Also, now’s the time to rename your hips -> spine -> chest -> neck -> head chain, since Rigify has them all as like spine01 spine02 etc.

Your penultimate guy:

THREE.

Now modify its thighs and hips as per Kung’s tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sfTEBAl8sA

Basically, for this armature in particular you need the tops of the thigh bones to be below the entire hip bone, as follows:

AND you need the hip bone to be above the thigh bones (Rigify’s is too far back). Personally, I got good results from just grabbing my legs and scooting them backward.

If you DON’T do this, PC people and three-point tracking people will still be able to use your avatar fine. But full-body people’s hips will jut forward in a super fucked up way. IF YOU FOLLOW THIS TUTORIAL EXACTLY and include a BEND bone, this will be a problem. IF YOU CUT CORNERS and disregard the BEND bone (and/or you choose to lock the hips out of weight painting--valid), you can skip this step. But you seriously might as well do it.

IMPORTANT! The lengths and angles of your bones here determine, in part, the later behavior & vivacity of your finished model. I like this modified Rigify base because VRChat’s IK makes it nice and lively. If you use a different Humanoid base, like a ramrod straight turbocompatible one, or a cool but non-fullbody-compatible style one (hey, go for it! PC and three-point tracking people have rights too!) the flavor of your animations later on will be different!

FOUR. Build your model around the head, neck, chest, spine, and hips of your inner Humanoid! Don’t hold me liable for anything that happens to you if you change the armature proportions, but based on this one time I helped a kid hook up their quad horse, you can get acceptable/interesting non-full-body-compatible behavior if you do change them (to perfectly follow your cool dragon neck or whatever). I will continue on as if you did not change them! Anyway, do your thing. If you’ve got someone else’s mesh for this step, do your best to pose it in a neutrally upright standing position, and then put the Humanoid in it like they’re the front half of a horse costume, scaling the whole rig up and down as necessary. Again, ANY CHANGES YOU MAKE TO THE PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMANOID RIG WILL CHANGE YOUR ANIMATIONS LATER, and break full-body compatibility if you go too far! Here’s mine, see the little guy in there? Try to pick him out from the rest of the rigging:

Your head needs to be placed so it does a good job aiming its head/so you can set the view orb so you more or less see out its eyes, and your neck, chest, spine, and hips should be in its neck and forequarters, but your legs and feet DON’T have to match up with your quad forelegs or forefeet! Your quad feet can be anywhere relative to your Humanoid ones so long as your quad is in its symmetrical, neutral standing posture.

You can see that mine are a bit in front. It’s fine.

FIVE. Parent the mesh to the armature (or uhhh is it the other way around? Whichever way around it is, do it) with empty groups. Go into your Vertex Groups panel and lock out the limbs--that’s shoulders, upper arms, forearms, hands and fingers, thighs, lower legs, feet, and toes. You want them zero and kept at zero (unless your want your arms for a taur).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG82fogtuCg WATCH THE ABOVE VIDEO IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY. :V You can run the auto weight paint from here and/or start dinking around with weight painting your quad’s neck however is most comfortable for you if you want, but you still need to

SIX. rig your quad model! Okay, here’s the one big rule for your grounded legs (wings and funky lil extra limbs that just wave around can do whatever):

you must leave your Rigify legs straight up and down, no angling outwards, and YOUR QUAD LIMBS MUST BE STRAIGHT UP AND DOWN, NO ANGLING OUTWARDS.

See mine:

You don’t have to have them all perfectly in line from the front like I do, you could have your legs be set at any widths (say, wider stance in the armature hind legs than in the Humanoid ones, if your quad has wider hips), but they HAVE to all be exactly straight up and down, just like the Humanoid legs are. I tried matching my actual gryphon limb angles like in normal rigging once, and it resulted in incorrect foot placement/limb angles when standing neutrally (because VRChat’s neutral stance is not a perfect T- or A-pose). It’s fine if they’re different heights, though--here’s a side picture where you can see that my hind legs are lots taller, and my forelegs a little taller, than those of my Humanoid core:

Okay so maybe this belongs up there under FIVE. but, since you CANNOT add any jaunty character to your quad by adding naturalistic/sideways angling in its armature, the mesh, instead, must deviate from the armature to give you the illusion of a jaunty stance, and I DO recommend doing (just a little of) this. Your bones don’t HAVE to be in the center of your mesh volumes to still work okay, especially when they’re only serving as relatively-restricted legs (knees don’t twist, and neither do a bunch of quad bones driven by them). So, feel free to “pose” your quad legs in an interesting way around their upright bones, especially when it comes to giving your hind legs a different character from your front ones. Otherwise it’ll be way more obvious they’re rigidly linked, despite their different proportions. I recommend angling the apparent set of your hind legs out just a little, so your hind feet seem to be set wider than your front ones.

Not only does this help give each set of your legs its own character, to help with the illusion that they’re actuating totally differently, and that these are definitely your own original character do not steal’s full custom animations and not VRChat’s default ones--but your back legs are going to be operating the reverse of your front legs. This means that when the wearer adopts a wide stance, with their feet well apart from each other (as in many dances), YOUR BACK LEGS WILL CROSS. The amount of space I left between my gryphons’ hind legs, above, accommodates the normal amount of moving around that people do pretty well, but be advised that making a beautiful character with its hind legs neatly, narrowly posed might hit you with some heartbreak later! (You could get around this by instead rigging your quad to have its forelegs be the reversed ones, but this might be a little disconcerting for a fullbody wearer; or you could give yourself a “pacing” gait, where both your front and back left legs step forward at once, but this is a glaringly visible design choice for the kinds of people who notice these things. If you do this, make it a choice, not what-you-did-because-it-turned-out-you-had-no-choice.)

(I did a bunch of bogus shit to make it so I could switch between regular locomotion and a pacing gait, but that’s outside the scope of this tutorial.)

Now, your BOB, LEVEL, and BEND bones!

BOB: Somewhere on your armature, put an unparented bone (any size) along your midline called BOB. (I put mine below my hips and called it dingle.dangle.) Ever ported a model in and left something unparented accidentally? Remember how it disconcertingly gets “left behind”? Well, we’re using that phenomenon to our advantage! BOB will be our rotation reference bone for LEVEL and BEND.

LEVEL: So, LEVEL. Your quad’s back/torso should be/have one big bone coming out of the back of your Humanoid hips, call it LEVEL. It should be the parent for all your quad’s limbs, except for anything you have coming out of the head or neck (idk, whiskers, chinwings, whatever).

BEND: BEND is optional, but recommended; a bone that also sticks out the back of your hips, and stretches out more or less to the end of your ribcage, maybe to the middle-ish of your ribcage. Mine is parallel to the floor but that doesn’t matter much, and weighted at around strength .4 to the ribcage behind my shoulders, a little bit of the back of my shoulders where they meet my body, and tapering off towards my waist. Basically when you wiggle this bone up and down, it should arch and bow your back a little bit, over the top of your other weight paints, in whatever way is visually acceptable to you. Mine does this:

SEVEN.

Now, into Unity. Navigating Unity is mostly beyond the scope of this tutorial, but if you can add a VRC Avatar Descriptor, you can add a rotation constraint. It works the same, you just go find the bone (”transform”) in the hierarchy that you want and add a rotation constraint component to it.

So, get your .fbx out of Blender and into your Assets folder or whatever. Click on it and go to Import Settings, set it as Humanoid, apply, configure. Pick out and add all the bones of your Humanoid armature to the Humanoid panel (if it hasn’t autopopulated--it might!), reset your pose and then enforce T-pose if necessary, delete the reference to Jaw, put Chest in and make sure there’s no Upper Chest, etc., all the usual things. You should see a little green T-posing person in the forequarters of your quad! Hit Done and you’re done. (Look up ordinary VRChat avatar 3.0 import tutorials if you’re having trouble with this step; you’re Humanoid at this point already, same as anybody). Now drag your newly-confirmed-for-Humanoid .fbx into your scene. Open up its hierarchy and look for the LEVEL bone; it should be under hips. Put a rotation constraint on this bone (click on it, Add Component button, search “rotation” or “constraint,” pick Rotation Constraint). Click the little plus to add a target, and drag BOB in there from the hierarchy. Leave the strength 1 above and 1 below (the 1 below will always be left alone at 1 unless specified otherwise), and click Activate. There! You did it! Now your whole entire ass won’t wave around!! You can hop right in and Test Avatar if you want--your head and neck will be the only things that move while your legs will all be stiff like a piñata, but by god, your back will be staying level. Try crouching and going prone!

Enjoy this first, sweet taste of quad success if you’ve gotten this far, because there are many, many ways to screw the rest of this process up, and even with me guiding you, you might find some brand new ones. Applying a rotation constraint correctly is as easy as above, but here are some pitfalls: if you move any bones in Unity with active constraints on them, or bones upstream of an active constraint, they get fucked up. If you activate a constraint on a bone that’s been moved, moving the bone back afterwards will fuck the constraint up. LEAVE YOUR MODEL IN ITS DEFAULT POSE AT ALL TIMES, UNLESS YOU’VE MADE SURE TO SWITCH TO GAME MODE. (Sometimes you get lucky and you can rescue a ruined bone by deactivating its constraint and then going to Modified Component -> Revert on the transform itself. But don’t count on it.)

If you change any values within a constraint while it is active, it gets fucked up. Uncheck “Is Active” before modifying any constraint!

But wait, there’s more! If you hot-swap your model (minimize Unity, open Blender, do edits, export your new .fbx, delete your old .fbx in the save dialog and replace it with your new .fbx, WAIT A FEW SECONDS because opening Unity in the middle of the hotswap borks everything, maximize Unity, it thinks for a second, then accepts your new model while hey presto preserving your rotation constraints), AFTER ARMATURE EDITS, so, again, if yo-- if you--*about to sneeze voice*--

If you hot-swap your model after armature edits, the whole thing can get fucked up and you might have to re-apply all your rotation constraints again.

hhhhh that’s better. Now, you MAY hot-swap your model after wholesale bone additions and deletions, but rotation-constrained armatures lose their tiny minds if you change constrained bone lengths, positions, or angles!

Moving on! You just did LEVEL, now let’s do BEND.

BEND is constrained at .5 strength to BOB. Add a rotation constraint to BEND, set the strength to .5, hit the plus, drag in BOB. (Dial your reflexes in on this sequence because you are going to be doing it a lot.) The purpose of BEND is to bring a little life to your otherwise ramrod-stiff quad spine; you can experiment with strengths (of weight paint, of constraint weight, of bone length) but I recommend you try copying me to start. So that’s: BEND, a bone sticking out to about the end of your ribcage, weight painted at .4 or so to your ribcage and gradienting smoothly away, constrained to your unparented bone BOB at .5 strength (waving around without any constraint put too much wiggle in my gryphon).

BOB, LEVEL, and BEND are the major engines behind my quad rigging giving an acceptable effect! You don’t need to throw $90 at Final IK if you’ve got some time on your hands and BOB, LEVEL, and BEND. :)

Now for ALL THE REST OF YOUR LIMBS!

A note before we begin. Unity rotation constraints can’t ever go past 1:1, that is, there is no way to “amplify” a motion to make it a bigger one. You can only approach parity with the reference motion, never exceed it. The clearest example I can think of is a tail. My tail is six bones, and I thought I could constrain each one to the head at .1 and they’d “stack” and make it so a small motion of my head would put an attractive curl in my tail. Lol, nope. The first one rotated the tail .1, the ones that followed each inherited that .1 rotation from their parent and had their constraints satisfied, and did nothing, and I had a tail that barely moved at all. (Blender’s bone constraints work differently and allow this kind of amplification; you can also test things out in there, but I could never figure out which settings would give me Unity-like behavior.) So, with that in mind, bring up a gait cycle of your target animal. If a video is too confusing, look for some static images (like an animator’s gait cycle) that show the gait. Try to see which bones rotate the most, and which rotate noticeably less. Use this to inform your constraint weight values later. If you picked a static image, you can even measure the rotations throughout the cycle to see which move most and least! I don’t know enough to use exactly specific language here, so, to the extreme literalists in my audience.... sorry about what I just said. If you find your ability to magically pick up on what I mean is poor, I’ll just give you my gryphon numbers later! Or you could just try some stuff, like having every bone at max strength & seeing what happens, and then picking just one to turn down to .5 strength and testing again. That should clarify the concept for you quickly.

Alternatively, the quick-and-dirty “I’m NOT HERE to acquire any sensitivities I don’t ALREADY HAVE” test is to just try to get your quad feet as close as possible to your biped feet’s level/height when the biped thigh is picked up to 90 degrees and the shin hangs straight down (the “sit position”). Here’s how mine do:

Now, that’s half of the challenge, noticing which bones in the legs ought to be more or less responsive, and then roughing out an idea of the relative weights/responsivities each leg bone needs to make that happen, deciding which bones are liveliest and should be set at or near 1 and which are stiffest, or least active, and should go around .5 (you might even dip to .3). But (you might scream) what are you weighting these guys RELATIVE to? What are their TARGETS? Well!

...I’m not going to try to explain this. I’ve confused everybody every time I’ve tried. :p Just start with the shoulder constrained to the thigh, then the next bone down to the shin, then the NEXT bone down to the thigh again, then the shin again, and so on (thigh shin thigh shin thigh shin). This will get you 98% of the way there because most of the bones in a tetrapod leg-chain operate in simple opposition to each other. Basically, by rotating the shoulder like the thigh, when you raise your leg, your quad will start to raise its shoulder. By having the next bone rotate like your shin, and then continuing the pattern after, contracting your knee will make your quad contract its whole leg. This breaks down a little at the paw-and-toes, or the distal complexities of the horse, but just start with this pattern by rote. Then test it, and if one of the bones is obviously backwards, swap its target to the other one and test it again.

Last concept: if you have two bones in a row weighted to the same thing (like where you’ve got two bones that do not work in opposition to each other), the second one needs to have a bigger weight to the target than its parent. Because it inherits the parent’s rotation, and then only adds whatever amount that’s bigger. So, for my forepaw, I have it at .5 to the shin, and then the toes are at 1 to the shin. The whole paw acts as a shin-unit, but weighting the hand less than the toes allows the toes a little of their own flair. :v

(Okay that was a third-grade-biology-textbook lie. I actually have my upper paw .5 to the shin and my toes/beans at 1 to the foot. I might have a little bit of weight to the foot in the upper hand/palm part of my eagle foreclaws too. But I don’t recommend you add any weighting to the foot until you’ve got a good baseline result with just weights to the thigh and shin!!!!! The foot does things that you might find confusing and upsetting and which can introduce a LOT of incorrect limb placement/clipping, especially the further up the chain you allow it to interfere; it should be used sparingly or (as in my hind legs) not at all.)

Finally, the more your bone lengths and angles resemble your target animal’s (use a skeletal reference!), and the better you are at deciding which bones should respond a lot (and be weighted with high values) and which should respond less (and be weighted with lower ones), the more visual interest and species-specific character your quad avatar will have! You can see my gryphon’s rig above; here are its constraint values (where I go LR to LR, the left bits of the Humanoid control the left bits of the quad; where I go LR to RL, the left bits of the Humanoid control the right bits of the quad):

Back: LEVEL: 1 to BOB BEND: .5 to BOB Wings: upper_arm.LR.001: .5 to upper_arm.LR forearm.LR.001: .5 to (forearm.LR .5, hand.LR .5) hand.LR.001: .5 to hand.LR Hindlegs (targeted to the OPPOSITE side human legs): thigh.LR.002: .7 to thigh.RL shin.LR.002: .6 to shin.RL foot.LR.002: .9 to thigh.RL toe.LR.002: .7 to shin.LR Forelegs - EAGLE: thigh.LR.001: .7 to thigh.LR shin.LR.001: .8 to shin.LR foot.LR.001: 1 to thigh.LR toe.LR.001: .5 to (shin.LR 1, foot.LR 1) toe.LR.003,5,6: 1 to shin.LR toe.LR.004: 1 to thigh.LR Forelegs - LION: thigh.LR.001: 1 to thigh.LR shin.LR.001: .5 to shin.LR foot.LR.001: 1 to thigh.LR toe.LR.001: .5 to shin.LR toe.LR.005: 1 to foot.LR Tail: tail.001: .5 .5 to head tail.002: .6 .6 to head, etc. ***

REITERATION OF IMPORTANT PROTIP: Again, the quick and dirty test of your targets and values is to switch to Game mode and hike your Humanoid’s leg up so the thigh is parallel to the floor and the shin’s straight down (the sit position). Does your quad also hike its leg up, so its foot is in the neighborhood of your Humanoid’s foot level? Are all of your bones bending the right way? (Any that aren’t need their target switched to the other kind of leg bone.) If your quad is more or less “also contracting its leg so now it’s up,” then you’re either finished, or really really close!! If your quad daintily raises up its lil’ ol’ leggy for you, test your gait in-game and decide whether it has the right “feel”. If one of the bones is too stiff or too crazy relative to your reference animal’s style of motion, change its value so it behaves better, and hang the sitpose test. People mostly spend time standing, anyway, and your quad will likely look great standing and moving around even if it doesn’t do well at the sit test.

#vrchat #gryphon #text post #long post #dash stretcher

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blubberquark · 4 years ago

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Why Puzzle Platformers?

Why are there so many puzzle platformers? Was everybody simply copying Braid, hoping for the same level of success? And more importantly, now that Braid has been out for over a decade, why are people still making them?

If you make games, you already know why there are so many puzzle platformers, but I haven’t found a comprehensive answer to this question anywhere I can conveniently link to.

There are different ways to read that question:

Why are people adding puzzles to platformer games?

Why are there so many commercial indie puzzle platformers?

Why weren’t the same puzzles presented in an abstract, more puzzle-focused way?

Why are people adding puzzles to platformer games?

When it comes to jam games or small shareware projects, we should first ask “Why platformers, puzzle or not?” Part of the answer is probably “because platformers are easy to make with GameMaker“. Another part of the answer is “Because in a platformer, the player character interacts with the level, items, and NPCs, but these do not, for the most part, interact with each other, which makes a platformer comparably easy to implement (compared to an RTS game) and design (compared to RPG games), and platformers don’t need many extradiegetic UI elements.“

But beyond that, when you can add other mechanics to games, why puzzles?

The two obvious candidates to add to games are combat/stealth, and puzzles.

You can could also add multiple-choice dialogue, inventory, RPG elements (quests, skill points, classes), or procedural generation to any sidescrolling game, but none of these cannot carry a game on their own when you tack them on to a platformer. If the dialogue is actually substantial enough to carry a game on its own, the 2D platforming may stick out as “tacked-on” instead.

Strategy or economy (building, trading, tactics and management) are better served by a mouse-based UI. Dialogue-heavy or text-based games usually don’t have platforming sections, but platformer games can have some dialogue. In both cases, the pacing and movement of a platformer undercuts these game mechanics, and a different UI would be a better fit.

You can give your platformer a theme like horror, romance, science fiction, or medieval fantasy.

Puzzles are something you can add into a platformer game, either in between difficult platforming sections, or in combination with them. You can even alternate between stealth/combat and puzzles. Puzzles can be easy or difficult, and you can use them to break up levels or slow down the pace of an action platformer, or centre your whole game around them.

It takes some skill to design a puzzle mechanic that stands on its own, but it’s much easier to design an simple and easy one-off puzzle that you can throw into a platformer level. Easy puzzles are easy to balance: They have a binary win condition and an intended solution, but often no explicit failure state.

If adding another mechanic to a platformer makes it a puzzle platformer, is Speer a puzzle platformer? Is Super Meat Boy a puzzle platformer because you sometimes have to push buttons and the levels are self-contained? Is Outer Bounds a puzzle platformer? It’s not a bright line, but many action games that are lumped with “puzzle platformers” are still about jumping and running, but with a move set that isn’t 100% copied from Mario Bros.

If the main appeal of a game lies in the platforming, then as long as it’s solvable and doesn’t get in the way, it’s a good puzzle. Puzzles in platforming games can present their own platforming challenges, and rely on a slightly different kind of platforming execution skill, instead of puzzle-solving as a core aesthetic and source of difficulty. Players can be forced to traverse the same terrain back and forth along different paths. This can squeeze more gameplay out of fewer designed levels. Combined with traditional platforming obstacles like enemies to avoid, spike pits, moving platforms, one-way platforms, this can lead to more varied and difficult platforming challenges. Instead of getting in the way or breaking up the platforming bits, puzzle mechanics can go hand-in-hand with the platforming, without presenting a challenge in terms of puzzle solving, but only in terms of executing the solution.

Why are there so many commercial indie puzzle platformers?

For commercial games, the answer is more complicated. Maybe the premise of the question is not even true. Trine, Fez, Limbo, and And Yet It Moves all can in one way or another be described as “puzzle platformers”, but no two of them are in the same genre. If you cast a wider net, you get games like Mushroom 11, Owlboy, The Cave, Starseed Pilgrim, and Gunpoint.

Like “Action Adventure”, the phrase “puzzle platformer” has become a catch-all term for sidescroller games that aren’t punishingly difficult.

Of course, many commercial long-form games are classical puzzle platformers. Braid, Vessel, Closure, The Swapper, and Snapshot. These games are about puzzles, not about platforming.

Many smaller games like WarpSwap, ElecHead, Ministry of Synthesis, or LegBreaker are just exploring one puzzle mechanic to exhaustion in a series of one-room puzzles. Larger or long-form games often expand their repertoire of mechanics to create puzzles based on different mechanics held together by common themes or a story, or they focus more on platforming.

Why weren’t the same puzzles presented in an abstract, more puzzle-focused way?

Simple Controls and User Interface

If you see a puzzle platformer, you don’t need to figure out the controls or UI first, you can just pick up the controller and start running around. In their simplest form, the controls for a puzzle platformer are four directional buttons plus one for jumping and one for interacting the with puzzle mechanic, but more complex controls schemes are common.

The controls make writing a puzzle platformer for a game jam much easier than a mouse-driven puzzle game: You just need to check six keyboard buttons. If you are making a big commercial title, ease of implementation in terms of programming is not really a factor: After a day or two at most you’ll have implemented whatever mouse picking, widgets and UI elements you need. What’s much more time consuming is figuring out where to put the buttons so they don’t obscure the scene, or how to communicate which objects are clickable. Getting user interfaces right requires playtesting and iteration. A puzzle platformer might only need a context-based prompt that says “press X to interact“ or “walk into a boulder to push it“.

Game Feel, Embodiment and Characterisation

Another benefit of puzzle platformers over abstract puzzle presentation is game feel. The player controls the player character, and feels like a the player character existing inside the space of the level, increasing immersion compared to the feeling of a person sitting at a computer thinking about a crossword puzzle.

Many big-name 2D puzzle platformers like Braid and Snapshot have a rather zoomed-in view that focuses the level player character and the immediate surroundings, instead of showing the whole level. This allows the game to present important characters, items or places in great detail, and lets the camera pan to frame the most important parts of a scene. Animated movement in a two-dimensional space can give weight and character to the player character, and connect the gameplay to a story. NPCs can live inside a level, next to their home, their things, and their friends.

Imagine the same thing in a tower defence, or a racing game: You’re walking around in a level, and suddenly you meet an NPC, you’re having a conversation, and then you go on your merry way. Characters and environmental storytelling are not unique to platformers, but it’s more difficult to pull off in a game without a player character existing in the world with the NPCs. Puzzle platformers keep all options open.

Of course, this is not the only way to connect characterisation and puzzle gameplay, and it can be done in abstract games. Just in the most recent Ludum Dare, I played the game Interstellar Connection, a puzzle game with a rather abstract, disembodied presentation, in which the characterisation was delivered through dialogue. (I should briefly remark on two aspects of Interstellar Connection here, even though it has very little to do with the rest of this post. First, the game is at its heart a bunch of mazes that can be solved by backtracking. Every puzzle is equivalent to a maze graph, but the presentation makes use of a quirk of human cognition to prevent you from seeing the solution the way you would see the solution in a small maze. Second, I don’t think this mechanic can support a long-form game. If it weren’t for Ludum Dare, this would have been a forgettable minigame, not the main meat of the game, motivated and contextualised by the plot.)

Characters living inside a world could also be achieved with isometric graphics, first- or third-person 3D, or in a text-based game, but they don’t work well in self-contained or grid-based puzzle levels. We’ll get back to other aspects of more open level design later.

Puzzle Design

In a puzzle platformer, you have a player character, and you can have different kinds of obstacles, like pits filled with spikes, ledges, and doors. In a top-down platformer, you can of course also have doors, but you won’t have the same dynamics of gravity with falling down, of dropping things. It’s easier to get down from a ledge, or to drop something than to lift it.

With a visible and embodied player character instead of an abstract cursor, every puzzle can be complicated by combining manipulation of the puzzle environment with traversal of the level:

The level has an “obvious” solution, but the real challenge is navigating the environment to get there.

The challenge is to manipulate the environment to open a path for the player to jump to the right place to implement the solution.

The level has a “red herring” solution that solves the main puzzle but leaves the player trapped behind an obstacle, unable to progress without undoing it.

Level Design, Progression

Multiple puzzles can be placed in the same platformer “level” or “room“. In a “pure” puzzle game, puzzles are self-contained, with a beginning and an end, a starting state and an explicit solution condition. In a platformer, the goal can be implicit: You want to go from left to right and traverse the obstacles.

If a puzzle has an obvious missing piece, it can be a prompt for the player to explore the surrounding areas, to look for a tool, or for a certain puzzle piece that is exactly shaped like the gap that needs to be filled in the puzzle.

Strange Keyworld is a puzzle platformer, almost a puzzle metroidvania. Every so often, instead of reasoning through the puzzle that is currently shown on the screen, you need to explore the adjacent rooms to find another piece and bring it over. Although the puzzles in Strange Keyworld are mostly self-contained, they are still embedded in the larger world.

Most levels in Braid are bigger than one screen, and they have more than one puzzle. Often the first order of business is to get your bearings and explore. Then you learn to traverse the level to get everywhere, identify and separate the different puzzles, and only then can you think about solving all the puzzles by manipulating time and level state to get everywhere.

An interesting twist on this happens in Recursed: Levels are always on one screen, 20x15 tiles... but you need to explore inside all the chests to see what the level actually looks like!

Of course, you could have the same kind of dynamic in an abstractly presented puzzle with a mouse-based UI, where you can zoom in and out, drag the viewport around, or enter doors (and Recursed-style chests) by double-clicking. Then you’d lose the sense of exploration and progression, and the challenge of traversing the space via platforming. Exploring a large level would be easy, but tedious. You would need to program (as the developer) and then learn (as the payer) a new user interface, or you can just move a player character in a world. This ties back into the very first point: Platformers don’t need many extradiegetic UI elements.

tl;dr “Puzzle Platformers” are actually a bunch of genres in a trenchcoat. Character-focused 2D side-scrolling graphics are compatible with many different mechanics and game designs. Character-focused 2D platforming can counterbalance the abstractness of puzzle games.

#game design #puzzle platformer #puzzle game

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ladala99 · 5 years ago

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Spyro Reignited Countdown - Shadow Legacy

And with this we reach the final Classic Spyro game, but with all the gameplay differences, can we really call it part of the Classic series?

It’s a game I often come back to thinking I must have forgotten part of the plot, and always I come out of it going, “nope, I remembered everything. It’s really that short.” I consistently beat it in two days with long (but not too long) play sessions. It’s short, ends on a cliffhanger, and makes you wonder what would have happened if they actually decided to continue from it.

Gameplay

Take the GBA Digital Eclipse games, with their isometric point of view. Take out most of the platforming, and make what little’s there confusing because the art style doesn’t differentiate height nearly as well. Make Flame and Charge do nothing to most opponents and add some new melee and magic attacks. Do all that and you’ll get this game.

The actual combat is... okay. Different opponents require different strategies but most can be beaten by spamming one attack. In the real world, that attack is normally Flame. In the Shadow Realms, that attack is the Tail Swipe (and don’t upgrade the Tail Swipe to the point where it does the spin attack. It makes it so it’s no longer spammable).

Also there’s that dual-world gimmick that adds some but not much to the game. Change realms, go through obstacle, change back. It’s bare-bones as far as that mechanic can go. It’s cool that it’s there, though.

Additional Playable Characters/Game Modes

For the first time since Spyro 3, we get none. No minigames, no other characters, nothing.

Collectables

What collectables?

Oh right, there’s a couple.

Gems are still a currency rather than a real collectable though. And even worse, now how many you can collect is limited by the size of your wallet. This basically just means that certain sidequests can only be done after a certain point.

The only real collectable is Dragon Eggs. They’re scattered around and are given to you as rewards for sidequests. Once you get all of them, you learn a spell that turns you into an egg. You can roll around using the touch screen. Yay?

Sidequests usually involve finding or buying a thing and taking it to someone. They feel a bit pointless for the most part. But hey, you can get Ember off your back by introducing her to Bandit the armadillo and they’ll fall instantly in love.

Oh and there’s those shard/crystal/whatever thingies. Some wear out, some don’t, but really if you see one wearing out you just drop it and grab it again and it’ll be good as new. They have different useful effects so just find some that you like and keep them forever. Or don’t use glitches and buy the infinite ones, your call.

Breath Abilities

You get Ice Breath just like any other upgrade, by leveling up. It’s used in a few places to make towers of ice, and for a boss fight. It’s only really worth mentioning since Breath Abilities are so prevalent in the series.

But yeah, you level up and get different/stronger attacks. We’ve got health counts and everything in this game. Some are a lot more useful than others. Again: Tail Swipe>Everything except in certain circumstances (like those foes with the long slapping tails, or flipping over the roly-poly type things. It’s so spammable.

Bosses

Ice Minion and Fire Minion are really similar. You just use Fire against the Ice one and Ice against the Fire one. You just attack when they stop attacking to rest, fairly standard boss procedure. Their personalities are nonexistant and their designs are not very Spyro-y.

Red appears here and is the most pathetic boss. Is he really a boss? Well, to Blink he is, as Blink is just sitting there being thrown around. But for Spyro, he can just use the Shock spell twice (which the Professor specifically tells you to do) and it’s over. Turns out Red was being mind-controlled by someone else! (Was this the case in A Hero’s Tail?)

The Sorcerer is the final boss. He appears as a lizard-man throughout the game but reveals that he’s “a real purple dragon” at the end. This boss fight is a bit more involved, but the game tells you exactly what to do.

TLoS fans might find these guys very familiar. In fact, they may find the whole game familiar.

Levels

For some reason they take the names of levels in the Insomniac trilogy, but change who lives there and what themes it has. Except Wizard’s Peak; that has the exact same wizards as always lived there. Except now they aren’t enemies but guys who worship dragons. Skelos Badlands isn’t too bad, either.

Just... Treetops is in the Avalar and houses Fairies. Lost Fleet is a farm where Bianca’s family lives. And the Dragon Realms, Avalar, and the Forgotten Realms are all a boatride away from one another. And the levels themselves are within walking distance of one another. There’s also just as many original locations as reused ones.

It’s like, I’m glad you’re acknowledging existing lore, but either be consistent completely or make all the levels your own.

Actual level design is fine. It’s not amazing, but it works for what the game is. Except those random holes. I’ve played the game several times and I still have no idea what the purpose of them is. I wish some dataminers cared enough to see what they’re all about - they’re either completely empty or have enemies and there’s some sound effects when you enter but... what do they do?

Story

Spyro and friends are at Dragon Shores for vacation, but it’s time to go. Spyro, however, is staying behind to be trained by the Dragon Elders. Everyone commentates on school as they leave for their homes.

But, that night, a darkness fills the land and everyone is thrown into the Shadow Realms! Enemies are unaffected by Spyro’s regular moves, so he can only run, as directed telepathically by Tomos, one of the Elders. Turns out that since Spyro’s a purple dragon, and purple dragons are particularly magical, he has the ability to escape through use of the Shadowstone, as well as save others.

After saving the Elders and learning Dragon-Kata from them, Spyro goes out to save everyone else. The Elders suspect that Red’s behind this, but eventually Spyro corners Red and defeats him and it turns out that Red’s being mind-controlled by someone called the Sorcerer.

The Sorcerer is draining magic from all the realms, and he wants to fuse the Shadow Realms and the real world. Spyro confronts him and he reveals himself to be a fully-realized purple dragon. Spyro manages to seal him away, but he will return someday...

If this sounds like The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning except with more rescuing people and the ending of Dawn of the Dragon stuck to it, it does to me, too. I always call Shadow Legacy “TLoS in the Classic Universe” for a reason.

The Sorcerer even looks like Malefor. They’re the same. It’s all-but canon. And it provided so much fanfiction fuel for me as a young teen.

And that’s really the only reason why I approve of this story, despite the fact that this is so much not Spyro-y. I want to see this mentioned, if not resolved. I want the three worlds to collide, and Malefor is the perfect bridge. As he claims, he is eternal.

So yeah. I think on its own this story is pretty strange and doesn’t seem related to Spyro at all. With the context of TLoS, though, it’s intriguing and I want to see more. Unfortunately, I don’t think we ever will. How many people played this game? I almost didn’t.

Unique in the Series?

Spyro’s moveset and the whole Dragon-kata concept definitely is, but other than that, it takes from other games and is taken from all throughout later games. It has the Season Trilogy perspective, the A Hero’s Tail artstyle and character interpretation, and a story that will be seen again very soon.

As far as Classic Spyro goes, this game is very unique, but as for the series as a whole, it’s a bridge that shows how Spyro is moving in a very different direction.

Conclusion

If you’re an avid fan of the entire Spyro series (or at least Classic and TLoS), Shadow Legacy is definitely worth checking out. It’s an oddity that bridges the two in a unique way.

As for someone just looking for a good game, look elsewhere. I never play this game for the gameplay. It’s not challenging enough to be fun.

So I don’t know where to stick this other than I’m glad I have it, glad I’ve played it, but it’s one of those games I have that I know isn’t good.

#spyro #shadow legacy #video game review #spyro reignited

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tumblueberry · 6 years ago

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My back hurts like a bish despite the fact that I went to physiotherapy last friday. Most of the pain is gone, not counting that it hurts after this kind of massage, but the big problem I went to fix seems to not have gone away...I’ll probs need another session this next week uuugh. SO, I took a pill that really makes me sleepy and then actually fell asleep xD Thus I’m here to tell you my weirdly happy dream, because I love to tell you guys my weird dreams that sound like tv shows or movies. IT GOT VERY LONG, VERY VERY LONG OMG XD BEWARE.

Let’s go:

So in this dream I am me, which is not something that happens often! I’m not usually me, Toñi, my brain tends to make me be some other lady/kid/protagonist from a thing. And apparently I travel through time and space with a little crew of four members: there’s me in a middle rank, one of my real life friends (unusual as well! I should tell him the dream xD), another random guy my brain made up and the highest rank being an alien. But it’s not a random green individual with large eyes, no, IT’S WILLIAM MANDERLY (Billy, you know I have a crush on this man), so thank you brain omg. Okay, we get together and our job is like space inspectors/janitors? We make sure things are doing fine wherever and whenever we go, travelling through portals we open out of thin air. It’s like Doctor Who but no adventures, just checking things are going according to history records or whatever I guess.

At some point there’s a problem with me, though! There’s something wrong and suddenly there is a uncompatibility with the portal and I cannot go through, so I can’t go back home or anything. And weirdly enough, time around me goes by fast. It was like when you’re playing Pharaoh (isometric city-building game from the late 90s) and houses suddenly are built or destroyed, thing change very fast but it’s not like when you hit fast forward in a movie, not, things happen all of a sudden and you blink and ten years have passed xD I hope you understood lol. My companions notice, because for some reason while they’re with me time passes as fast for them, so they decided that my friend and the random guy were going to find help while the alien boss would stay with me, I guess because he was the one in charge. I don’t know how it happened but a long time goes by, like months! Alien guy, or, okay, let’s call him Billy for short xD SO BILLY comes and goes from a house we share now in the middle of nothing while the place I’m stuck in (I can’t go anywhere to avoid messing up something in history) changes as it should. I only knew I was on Earth but not where exactly, this wasn’t explained to me by my brain or the dream xD but I think I was supposed to know? Whatever, the thing is I could look through the windows how the world changed from prairies to little houses to bigger buildings (just like in the game!). The only thing I really lived (this happened like when in movies or tv shows they want to show that time passes and you see several scenes of the characters doing different things with different clothes to show the change of seasons and stuff, so I saw myself going through the same xD weird!), was when no humans were around (we were hiddlen in a little mountain, there was forest around us but for some reason I could see down the mountain how the coast started to be populated). But there were BEARS! So I can see a mama bear getting close to the house with her son, but my stupid brain decided to use TEDDY BEARS instead of real bears??? xDDD SO IMAGINE! A big ass teddy bear that could reach the ceiling of the house (3m or more) and a smaller version of itself, getting closer. I’m alone and I get scared (I’m an inspector/janitor, I have no training fighting or hiding or anything!), so I try to hide from their view when they look through the windows into the house. They don’t know what a house is, they may not even know what a human is! I was scared they’d get violent if they saw a living being or whatever and get territorial. But they don’t see me, so they keep walking and finally I can breath again. AND THEN is when a portal opens and Billy comes back from his last shift at work and grocery shopping so we can survive here lol. And we hugged awwww. Apparently we were getting to know each other and the dream was telling me there was something more than friendship starting to happen ohohohohoh ladkñjsloewrijdlkj. Again, time passes like in the movies and we are such good friends, and we play games and the other two guys visit us and tell us how things are going with my problem. Apparently it was going to be fixed in a couple more months and we were verey happy so we decided to throw a party the day before I could go back home! Because of course our bosses would let me have a few days to adapt to normal time and space flowing, training back to the job and see my family and other friends FINALLY. I was so excited and Billy was very happy for me but he was also sad because we wouldn’t live together anymore and we had so much fun living in the same house(hahahah ñsldkjñfalsdkfj). Of course I get all silly and teary because in the dream I was starting to fall in love with him but I didn’t want to ruin the friendship so I didn’t say shit. But honestly from the “outside” myself there and the guy were basically married, living together and doing everything together and the hugs and the cuddles, we just didn’t kiss or have sex, man, that’s like dating without the sexual stuff, those were totally dates I mean wow. If there is proof that this was like a movie/tv show, is that we didn’t make any moves to go further with labels and stuck with “best friends” instead of “we’re dating” xD when it was so obvious. Okay, so moving forward, I don’t know what the hell happened but the random guy was suddenly in the army?? and he died during a mission?? right before I got finally home. So instead of a party we have a funeral celebration thing in his name xD everyone is all dressed up, lots of people come through a portal, the house apparently has a second floor now ¿? also a nice view of, hear me out, TOKYO’S HARBOR what the fuck? xDDD and there are lots of big ass ships of all kinds and the city is what you’d say it is nowadays in the real world I guess. And then the time goes like normal at last! So I’m very happy, but also sad for random guy. Now, I’m going around the tables and the groups of people with Billy basically glued to me, it looks like these american parties with people all fancy looking, guess the bosses are there as well, I think they finally allowed my family (not my family in the real world, some random faces my brain made up) to come visit. It was like a “let’s have fun together to honor Random Guy who died while on duty to save the galaxy from whatever shit we’re fighting!” kind of party. At some point I’m sitting alone with Billy. And the man is like super nervous. And I get nervous too. And I’m like what the fuck I’m never nervous with this guy, he’s my best friend and also I love him, literally. But of course, it was because he was talking to me and actually saying he loved me and all this romantic stuff that is very embarrasing, but this is like a movie, so I start crying and I’m so happy and of course HE PROPOSES xDD At this point I’m laughing at this dream while I’m writing. It went from travelling through time and space to romantic comedy movie? xD So of course I say yes and we kiss and we tell everybody. Yay! Let’s get engaged during our ex-companion’s funeral/party! xDD

AND THAT’S THE END, I WOKE UP. And I was smiling and kinda laughing at this weird but happy dream xDD

My dreams are like weird fanfics sometimes, it’s like it wrote a fanfic of my life. Of all the people and specifically, of all the men I find atractive, it goes and gives me William Manderly. Well thank you I guess, I’m not complaining I got to kiss him and hug him in the dream! xD

I hope you had fun reading, have a nice rest of Sunday!

#it is like a movie #a romcom with time travel at the beginning #and it's long you are warned!#enjoy i guess?? xD #my shit #my dreams

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vaultt-tec · 7 years ago

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How did Fallout 1 ever get made?

PCGameN sat down with the Fallout 1 team and discussed its making.

This is in a read more because it is SUPER long. I added it all here but click the link and read it on their site, there are more pictures!

Tim Caine was at PAX when he first saw Vault Boy as a living, breathing entity - it was a cosplayer of 16 or 17 years old, hair gelled to replicate that distinctive swirl. ‘This is weird’, he thought.

Feargus Urquhart remembers walking into Target and seeing that same gelled haircut and toothy smile, not on a fan this time, but emblazoned across half a metre of cotton. ‘How is it that a game that we all worked on somehow created something iconic?’, he wondered. ‘How did it show up on a t-shirt in a department store?’

Related: the best RPGs on PC.

In the years since, Bethesda have taken Fallout into both first-person and the pop culture mainstream. Vault Boy has become as recognisable as Mickey Mouse. The series’ sardonic, faux-’50s imagery now feels indelible, as if it has always been here. But it hasn’t.

It took the nascent Black Isle Studios to nurse the Fallout universe into being, as an unlikely, half-forgotten project in the wings of Interplay, where Caine and Urquhart were both working in the ‘90s. The pair helped create one of the all-time great RPGs in the process.

“The one thing I would say about Interplay in those days, and this isn’t trying to pull the veil back or anything like that - there was just shit going on,” Urquhart tells us. “It was barely controlled chaos. I’m not saying that Brian [Fargo] didn’t have some plan, but there was just… stuff.”

One day, Fargo sent out a company-wide email to canvass opinion. He wanted Interplay to work on a licensed game, and had three tabletop properties in mind. One was Vampire: The Masquerade. Another was Earthdawn, a fantasy game set in the same universe as Shadowrun. And the third was GURPS, designed by Games Workshop’s Steve Jackson.

The team picked the latter, overwhelmingly, because that was what they played in their own sessions. But GURPS wasn’t a setting - it was a Generic Universal RolePlaying System. And so Interplay’s team had to come up with a world of their own.

“I would send out an email saying, ‘I’m in Conference Room Two with a pizza’,” Caine says. “And if people wanted to come, on their own time, they could do it. Chris [Taylor, lead designer], Leonard [Boyarksy, art director], and Jason [Anderson, lead artist] showed up.”

Interplay at the time was almost like a high school, as map layout designer Scott Evans remembers it: incredibly noisy and divided into cliques. Caine was building a clique of his own.

Traditional fantasy was the first idea to be dismissed. The team actually considered making Fallout first-person, a decade early - but decided the sprites of the period didn’t offer the level of detail they wanted. Concepts were floated for time travel, and for a generation ship story - but one after the other, they were all pushed aside and the post-apocalypse was left.

“One thing I didn’t like was games where the character you’re playing should know stuff that you, the player, don’t,” Caine says. “And I think the vault helped us capture that, because both you the player and you the character had no idea what the world was like. The doors opened and you were pushed out. And I really liked that, because it meant we didn’t have to do anything fake like, ‘Well you were hit on your head and have amnesia’.”

There was plenty about the Fallout setting that wasn’t as intuitive, however. Players would have to wrap their heads around a far-future Earth and a peculiar retro aesthetic, even before the bombs started dropping. The question of how Fallout ever survived pitching is answered with a Caine quip: “What do you mean, pitch?”

For a short while, Interplay had planned to make several games in the GURPS system. But soon afterwards they had won the D&D license, a far bigger property that would go on to spawn Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. As a consequence, Caine’s team were left largely to their own devices.

As for budget - Fallout’s was small enough to pass under the radar. Although Interplay are best remembered for the RPGs of Black Isle and oddball action games like Shiny’s Earthworm Jim, they had mainstream ambitions not so different to those of the bigger publishers today. During Fallout’s development they were primarily interested in sports, and an online game division called Engage.

“It was almost like a smokescreen,” Urquhart explains. “So much money was being pumped into these things that you could go play with your toys and no-one would know.”

Which is exactly what the Fallout team did, pulling out every idea they’d ever intended for a videogame.

“Being just so happy and fired up that we were making this thing basically from scratch and doing virtually whatever we wanted, we had this weird arrogance about the whole thing,” Boyarsky recalls. “‘People are gonna love it, and if they don’t love it they don’t get it.’

“Part of it was a punk rock ethos of, every time we came up with an idea and thought, ‘Wow, no-one would ever do that’, we always wanted to push it further. We chased that stuff and got all excited, like we were doing things we weren’t supposed to be doing.”

The team laugh at the idea that Fallout might have carried some kind of message (“Violence solves problems,” Caine suggests). To these kids of the ‘80s, nuclear holocaust felt like immediate and obvious thematic material. The game’s development was guided by a mantra, however.

“It was the consequence of action,” Caine puts it. “Do what you want, so long as you can accept the consequences.”

Fallout lets you shoot up all you want. But if you get addicted, that will become a problem for you, one you’ll have to cope with. The team were keen not to force their own views onto players, and decided the best way to avoid that was with an overriding moral greyness. The Brotherhood of Steel - in Fallout 3, a somewhat heroic group policing the wasteland - were here in the first game simply as preservationists or, more uncharitably, hoarders. Even The Master, the closest thing Fallout had to a villain, was driven by a well-intentioned desire to bring unity to the wasteland. His name, pre-mutation, was ‘Richard Grey’.

“Everyone needed to have flaws and positive points,” Taylor says. “That way the player could have better, stronger interactions whichever way they went.”

Although the GURPS ruleset eventually fell by the wayside, the Fallout team were determined to replicate the tabletop experience they loved - in which players don’t always do what their Game Master would like. They filled their maps with multiple quest solutions and stuffed the game with thousands of words of alternative dialogue. “The hard part was making sure there was no character that couldn’t finish the game,” Caine says.

Fallout’s dedication to its sandbox is still striking, and only lately matched by the likes of Divinity: Original Sin 2. It was a simulation that enabled unforeseen possibilities.

“I am shocked that people got Dogmeat to live till the end of the game,” Taylor says. “Dogmeat was never supposed to survive. You had to do some really strange things and go way out of your way to do so, but people did.”

During development, a QA tester came to the team with a problem: you could put dynamite on children.

“Where you see a problem…,” Urquhart says. He is joking, of course, yet the ability to plant dynamite - achieved by setting a timer on the explosive and reverse pickpocketing an NPC - became a supported part of the game and the foundation of a quest. This was a new kind of player freedom, matched only by the freedom the team felt themselves.

“We were really, really fortunate,” Boyarsky says. “No-one gets the opportunity we had to go off in a corner with a budget and a team of great, talented people and make whatever we wanted. That kind of freedom just doesn’t exist.

“We were almost 30, so we were old enough to realise what we had going on. A lot of people say, ‘I didn’t realise how good it was until it was over’. Every day when I was making Fallout I was thinking, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this’. And I even knew in the back of my head that it was never going to be that great again.”

Once Fallout came out, it was no longer the strange project worked on in the shadows with little to no oversight. It was a franchise with established lore that was getting a sequel. It wasn’t long before Boyarsky, Caine, and Anderson left to form their own RPG studio, Troika.

“We knew Fallout 1 was the pinnacle,” Boyarsky says. “We felt like to continue on with it under changed circumstances would possibly leave a bad taste in our mouths. We were so happy and so proud of what we’d done that we didn’t want to go there.”

Fallout is larger than this clique now. Literally, in fact: the vault doors Boyarsky once drew in isometric intricacy are now rendered in imposing 3D in Bethesda’s sequels. And yet Boyarksy, Taylor, and Caine now work under the auspices of Obsidian, a studio that has its own, more recent, history with the Fallout series. Should the opportunity arise again, would they take it?

“I’m not sure, to be very honest,” Taylor says. “I loved working on Fallout. It was the best team of people I ever worked with. I think it’s grown so much bigger than myself that I would feel very hesitant to work on it nowadays. I would love to work on a Fallout property, like a board game, but working on another computer game might be too much.”

Boyarsky shares his reservations: that with the best intentions, these old friends could get started on something and tarnish their experience of Fallout.

“It would be very hard for us to swallow working on a Fallout game where somebody else was telling you what you could and couldn’t do,” he expands. “I would have a really hard time with someone telling me what Fallout was supposed to be. I’m sure that it would never happen because of the fact that I would have that issue.”

Urquhart - now Obsidian’s CEO - is at pains to point out that Bethesda were nothing but supportive partners throughout the making of Fallout: New Vegas, requesting only a handful of tiny tweaks to Obsidian’s interpretation of its world. “I’ve got to be explicit in saying we are not working on a new Fallout,” he says. “But I absolutely would.”

Caine has mainly built his career by working on original games rather than sequels: Fallout, Arcanum, Wildstar, and Pillars of Eternity. But he would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about working on another Fallout.

“I’ve had a Fallout game in my head since finishing Fallout 1 that I’ve never told anyone about,” he admits. “But it’s completely designed, start to finish. I know the story, I know the setting, I know the time period, I know what kind of characters are in it. It just sits in the back of my head, and it’s sat there for 20 years. I don’t think I ever will make it, because by now anything I make would not possibly compare to what’s in my head. But it’s up there.”

#fallout #fallout 1 #fallouts 20th birthday #happy birthday gamedude #fallout nv #obsidian #news

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overencumberedkiwi-blog · 5 years ago

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Categorizing Narrative Use

Introduction

Video games have used story lines to enrich their player experience since their inception. Weather it was a building sense of dread from the Arch Demon in Dragon Age or the stunning revelation in Bioshock, narrative serves to bring the player into a world apart from their own and evoke emotional responses. However, the specific use of narrative in regards to the mechanics of gameing is widely debated. Considering the experience in any given game is completely subjective and influenced heavily by the player’s own preferences, this debate doesn’t not seem to have a clear cut resolution. In the following analysis, I will attempt to break down the use of narratives in video games and compare their respective pros and cons, especially in relation to the side of the aforementioned argument which argues that games exist strictly as a set of mechanics which do not serve to enrich the narrative of the game, but allow for the facilitation the narrative and serve as the basis for the classification of the text as a whole as a “video game”. While I will attempt to keep the analysis purely academic, please keep in mind that these are my own subjective opinions.

Narrative and Mechanical Coupling

As I can tell, there are five total narrative classes in which all games fall. Firstly, and perhaps most commonly, there is Narrative and Mechanical Coupling. Games that fall into this category have a story that is paired with their mechanics due to the latter being created to serve the former, or created in tandem. Examples of this can be seen in games such as Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and Firewatch. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is a third-person action adventure game where the player takes control of Gabriel Belmont with the objective of hunting down the titular “Lords of Shadow” to obtain their power. While it does have 3D environments and puzzle sections that allow the player to move around, and collectibles that boost your health meter and damage, the game runs on a linear mechanical track most of the time where the player must complete a plainly stated objective in order to progress. Explorable areas are comparatively small, enemies spawn in groups which must be killed to remove barriers, and boss fights are large action set pieces that require specific conditions to be met in order to deal damage, such as hitting glowing areas, throwing special weapons at the boss, or interacting with structures in the area. This is quite different than Firewatch, a game in which the player takes control of a Fire Lookout in charge of attending to a large part of the Shoshone National Forest. Described as a “walking simulator”, the player moves Fire Lookout Henry around the world to explore and uncover the story of Henry’s past and his relations to several NPC’s he interacts with, usually in the form of branching dialogue paths with the player choosing how Henry ought to respond. Some environmental interaction occurs, but it is usually limited to descriptions in order to expand the players’ understanding of the world, or special items pertinent to puzzles or story line situations. In each case, emphasis is placed on the story the games is telling with mechanics that serve only as a medium to deliver that story to the players. Both the narrative and the mechanics are paired to deliver an enjoyable, interactive experience.

Narrative as Secondary to Mechanics

Some games are meant to be played purely as an expression of the player’s will. Examples can be seen in games like Minecraft and The Sims. Minecraft has almost no story, with the player taking control of a single being in an open, completely explorable world with the freedom to gather and alter resources into whatever they see fit. The Sims similarly offers the player a wealth of mechanics and allows them to create their own stories in the lives of small simulated cities and people, which the player controls as an unseen, formless entity. Both games shed any inherent narrative and allow the player to build their own world of stories and decisions with little limitation.

Narrative and Mechanical Separation

Some games have stories and mechanics that may not always compliment each other. However, rather than trying to reconcile this division, they simply approach both in a separate way. The narrative is stated in some way, weather diegetically or not, and the game mechanics carry merrily on. Examples of this would be in games like Overwatch, League of Legends, and World of Warcraft. Overwatch is a first person hero shooter where two teams of six players are placed into large maps to either accomplish, or prevent the enemy from accomplishing simple and relatively unchanging goals like moving a payload or capturing a point. The lore to Overwatch is quite detailed, but almost none of it can be found in game. Instead, online forums, blogs, web pages, and animated shorts tell the story all the while totally separate from the game mechanics. It may not make sense for Soldier 76 to pistol whip Mercy to death, but that is something you can do in game. League of Legends also shares this narrative style, with much more lore available in their client to be read in between games, but the bulk of it existing on their website. League of Legends is a MOBA, or multiplayer online battle arena, with an isometric view and a similar team structure and objective-based competitive play to Overwatch. Regardless of narrative ties and motivations, anyone can kill anyone else in League of Legends. World of Warcraft may initially seem like a bad example, as it is an MMORPG, or massively multiplayer online role playing game, with plenty of in-game lore and well-defined NPC characters and factions. However, because of the static nature of the game’s narrative, regardless of mechanical interaction, World of Warcraft certainly belongs here. Perhaps a quest is given to a player controlling a gnome mage to kill twenty members of the Horde army in a specific area. The player may kill these twenty members to complete the quest, but besides a gold and experience reward being given to the player (a mechanical change), nothing has changed in the narrative sense. That same player could kill thirty, fifty, one hundred, one million Horde members but it wouldn’t matter. After a time they would simply respawn and the game’s story would remain unchanged. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this would be Raid Instances. In a Raid, a large group of players assemble to take on difficult enemies in combat and defeat the Raid’s end boss. Even if the boss is a flaming dragon and harbinger of the apocalypse, if you kill him the world will remain in peril and he will simply respawn.

Canonically Fluid Narrative

Some games acknowledge their narrative and mechanical divide, but rather than keep them separate, they elect one particular versin of their story as “canon”, or an officially established sequence of events. Games like Dark Souls, and Archlord are prime examples of this. In Dark Souls the player controls an unnamed character of their own creation and tasked with slaying a list of powerful beings. From there, it’s up to the player. They can wield a sword if they want, or maybe cast spells. They can run straight to the Greatwolf Sif and try to kill him, or gather resources slowly to face the gargoyles. With little exception, the player can explore the whole of the world almost immediately and therefore has access to most of the weapons, spells, armor, and items in the game. Due to the innumerable approaches the game gives players to how they slay their enemies, it does not present a clear canon in the subsequent games in the series. In the third game, for instance, several hints in item descriptions and the environment itself hint that a Dragon Slayer named Ornstein abandoned his assigned post in the castle at Anor Londo, the city of lords. However, the player kills Ornstein in the very first game. He is not an optional boss, he must be killed to progress, so how could he leave the place he was killed according to the canonical lore? That is due to the parallel worlds concept upon which Dark Souls is built. It is stated plainly that the events in Dark Souls happen repeatedly due to their place in a cycle of death and rebirth, as well as an endless span of parallel universes where events play out differently. Because there are so many worlds, players were not sure how the third game would interact with the lore of the first. It does this by electing a certain canon while each player plays out their own version of that canon in their own world. Similarly, the MMORPG Archlord elects only portions of it’s narrative as static or canon. While the nature of the MMO would seem to place it automatically in the “Narrative and Mechanical Separation” category, this particular game skirts it by changing the lore just enough to suit what the players want. In the game, a player starts out as chosen race/class combination and can kill monsters, complete quests, and join dungeons to level up and become more powerful. After a certain point, a player might join a guild and choose to siege the castle of the Archlord. Empowered by the game with the ability to control in-game weather, summon monsters, and enormously increased health and defenses, the Archlord was once just another player who managed to kill the previous Archlord. If the Archlord dies, his power is transferred to whichever player landed the killing blow and they will reign for a while before someone else can challenge them. While the overall plot of the game remains unchanged, much like World of Warcraft, the smaller narrative unique to that game server changes every time the power of the Archlord changes hands, since each player can choose whatever they want to do with it.

Interpreted Narrative as Personal Experience

The final category of games is a bit more abstract. Games like Journey and Pathologic are hard to nail down in terms of narrative function because it’s less about the game interacting with itself and more about the game interacting with the player. Journey is an indie adventure game where the player controls a small being in a red robe and scarf in the middle of a massive desert landscape. The only mechanics are forward movement, jumping, and floating mid air for a while. Artistically stunning and joined by a magnificent musical score, the game has no lore in the traditional sense, but rather bits and pieces of story elements from which the player can form their own opinions. The game emphasizes the feelings it evokes, rather than the story it tells. On the other end of the spectrum of narrative rigidity, Pathologic is a game about three playable characters who all view the same story line from different perspectives, that being the quest of the player to find the cause of a mysterious and lethal sickness called the “sand plague”. The game’s initially concrete objectives and understandable survival RPG mechanics eventually give way to surreal and cerebral visuals, cryptic and sometimes lying NPC’s, and architecture that breaks the laws of physics. The game delves deeply into existentialism and other philosophical themes told not through the straight forward concept of argument or discourse, but rather through the murky and confusing concept of firsthand experience. The dread that comes from asking who you are, questioning your purpose, and losing control of your mind is not viewed from a safe distance, it is experienced in first person with your own logic to guide you. This game, just like Journey, is not about what happens in the game itself. Rather, the narrative exists to create parallels between the game’s world and our own, and provoke the player to think upon different aspects of life and psychology.

These categories seem to be to encompass all of gaming as it is, but I’m sure it won’t be too long before a game exists that shatters this line of thought. Games are constantly evolving along with the way in which we interact with them. And even if the above analysis does not last long in the sphere of discussion, I hope it helps provide a new angle from which we can assess and interpret games.

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mingu-baristagamer · 7 years ago

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EarthBound Review

The last review I did was on UNdertale and there I made sure to compare that game to one of my favourite RPGs of all time, which was Eartbound, and that was released in 1005 for the SNES. Even though I only got to play it recently on the Wii U VC, it has quickly become my favourite. And I think it is fitting that I review Earthbound now.

Let’s start off with the story which is a honestly really whimsical one where the hero sets off on a journey to save the world. Baseball lover Ness wakes up one night to find an alien has crash landed on his planet, and warns him of impending doom bought on by the otherworldly being Giygas, so he sets out to explore the land and find the sanctuaries to learn melodies, so he can become stronger. Along the way, he meets friends like Jeff, Paula and Poo (who I aptly renamed Shit, hehe). Each character is so interesting and varied to play with - Ness has all his powers dripfed to him over time, Paula has her unique Pray ability that helps out in a big way, Jeff has no powers, but he relies on science. And Poo... well, he’s already quite strong.

The overworld doesn’t exist, it’s all pretty seamless and explorable on an isometric 2.5D view, which was huge for the time that Earthbound was released, and even here the uniqueness was not lost. The music is quite amazing with distinctive tunes, and I found myself staying in one location to finish the track even despite my deafness. But a big part of this game’s charm is how funny it is, and how it appears to parody the RPG genre as well as create hilarious situations like helping a band out of debt, and using an eraser to inexplicably delete an obstacle. The humour and parody is something that Earthbound did better than Undertale did, in my opinion.

Now we move on to the combat, which in itself was pretty unique and interesting, even from the moment you see the enemies walking around. Time the encounter just right, and you could get an extra hit in, Time it wrong, and the enemy got the first hit. Which is already rather interesting in its own right, but wit until we go into the actual encounter. Instead of having each hit and loss of HP be finite, the game uses a odometer HP mechanic which ticks their HP down as the battle rages on, giving players a chance to heal them before they are knocked unconscious. This was a fun mechanic to play with, and certainly one of the strongest reasons Earthbound was so revolutionary, along with the tactical advantage of getting the first strike. In an useful design decision, when the player is strong enough, battles against weak enemies are won immediately.

Another intriguing fact about this game is how big a part emotions play in the game. I’ll get to the biggest part in a bit, but I want to quickly mention that if Ness is missing his home too much, this will affect his motivation to battle. Not only will he fight with a lacklustre attitude (his damages will do the same regardless) but he will stop and think about home, missing his mom, or thinking about pasta. This could be alleviated by calling home, which I think is a clever way to sneakily introduce a mechanic while making the phone cal useful - even if it already acts as a way to call his father and keep track of his finances.

Finally we come to the best moment, and arguably the most cathartic as well - the final battle against Giygas. By then, Ness will have undergone trials and tribulations and gotten stronger and ready to face the destroyer. The fight against Giygas is iconic for the reason that it is a cathartic mess, and ultimately disturbing if you can remember the backstory, about the developer being traumatized by a rape scene from a young age. The entire time the battle was just really unsettling and you get the sense of dread that you cannot win. This also brings about one of the most unique ways I’ve ever defeated a boss - through praying and exposing him to emotions. From there, the fight just gets more distorted and disturbing, until finally it is won. This fight... honestly, it stands as one of the most disturbing experiences in video games for me, but it’s also one of the best boss battles.

So there you go, a short review on Earthbound. Why does this game stand as one of the best RPGs for me? Honestly, it’s mainly because this game was so unique and revolutionary for its time. The characters were interesting and likeable - Ness had tons of personality despite being mute, and the humour and parody of the genre was so spot on, I found myself laughing a lot. Really, if you’re looking for one of the most unique RPGs to play, it might be worth finding this on the eShop or Virtual Console.

#review #mingu plays #games #video games #ness #earthbound #mother #nintendo

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weatherman667 · 8 years ago

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The Record of Agarest War

I’m going to focus on the interface and gameplay, because this is what links the player to the world.

And the interface sucks. As the saying goes, a user interface is like a joke, it’s not good if you have to explain it, and it makes a lot of ridiculous decisions, apparently not learning from any other games from similar genres.

Let’s start with combat, almost typical of a turn-based tactical games. It’s set in a pretty typical isometric plain. A completely boring plain.

Strike 1) Terrain means nothing. It has no affect on gameplay.

Strike 2) Isometric plains are fun to look at, as they are a good bridge between top-down, that let’s you plan, but not actually see what the characters are doing, and the side-view of seeing what the characters are doing, but not be able to plan properly. The big problem with isometric plains is that they royally suck to navigate using a D-Pad. Most games simply let you use the stick to navigate around. This game does, but in the stupidest way possible. It forces the stick to work like a D-Pad. Instead of having s free-flowing cursor, it instead moves one square at a time, but up is up-left, left is down left, down is down right, and right is up right. This makes navigating around the combat plain frustrating. Frustration is the opposite of why I play games. It’s not only the opposite of entertainment, it completes ruins suspension of disbelief.

Strike 3) Link points. Each character has squares around them that allies can stand in. So long as one person is in another’s link square, they can take team actions. The problem is that the game doesn’t tell you where the link squares are you before you move. It shows you where the character you are moving’s squares are, before you move, and afterwards shows if you are linked, leaving out the crucial detail that makes it difficult to plan. The link squares are arbitrary, and get in the way of actual tactical thinking. It’s part of the move to big explosions rather than proper gameplay.

Strike 4) Lack of tactics. Despite the premise of the game, there is little to think of tactically in the game. Your choices are step towards enemy or don’t. The answer is don’t, because waiting at least one turns saves you up AP, which is infinitely valuable. You can attack as many times in a turn as you have AP for, and by waiting one turn, the protagonist can one-hit kill two characters in a turn. You quickly gain another character who has a great team attack with the protagonist. The problem is that the protagonist already has the equivalent of a one-person team attack, (Power Attack + Double Swing), but the other two characters don’t have a team attack, despite having a long history of fighting together.

Strike 5) You move all of your characters before taking actions. This seems like it’s a good idea, as it makes you have to try and predict your enemy’s movement. The problem, is that you can run towards the enemy, they can run past you, and no one gets to attack. The ability of walk towards the enemy until you can attack them not possible. Repeat: walk forward and hit with sword might not work. There is no overlay as to attack range when moving, so, it’s easy to mistake a character’s range, and have them be unable to do anything. The whole point of playing turn-based tactics games is thinking. If I want to run-and-gun, there are a thousand games I can do that in. I’m playing a tactical game to plan.

These might seem like idiotic nitpicks, but I’ve played turn-based tacticals from 2 decades ago that did this better. Much better. Much, much better. As I said at the start, the interface is what let’s you not only enjoy the game, but maintain your suspension of disbelief.

As for the rest of the interface, I’ve played games where the menu system is as enjoyable as the combat. This is kind of necessary for turn-based tacticals, but Agarest War’s menu layout is just plain frustrating.

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waynekelton · 5 years ago

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Apple Arcade Roulette #2

Round and round the roulette spins. Here are five more random choices from Apple Arcade's selection. Will we strike gold this time? Or just strike out? If you missed our first batch, as reminder: Apple Arcade is out, and with it over a 100 new games for you to try and explore at your leisure. There's almost too many for us to consider individual reviews, although we know other outlets have gone down that route.

If you want to cut to the chase, read our list of our favourite Apple Arcade games so far.

So, we're running a new feature where we take a randomly selected batch of five games across a spread of genres, and run through some quick reviews so that you can get an idea of what's worth your time, and what isn't.

Hot Lava (Platformer) (2-Stars)

Normally I love everything Klei comes up with but this was a disappointment. Hot Lava has a pretty obvious premise: remember playing that 'the floor was lava' game when you were a kid? And it has a great theme: you’re pretending to be a character from a sweet 90s Saturday morning cartoon, with all the kitsch and bombast that comes with that genre. But the gameplay itself is just preset obstacle races with instant death when you fall into the lava.

What’s more, this precision 3D platformer does not work with mobile controls. One control option has you using the gyro in the phone to control your view, which is precise, but awkward if you're in a space where you can't move around. The other option is touch only, but doesn't give you easy access to all of your abilities. If you have a controller, give it a try, but it’s not worth the hard drive space otherwise.

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Where Cards Fall (Puzzle) (2-Stars)

I guess ‘moody navigation puzzler’ is now a well-established thing, and Where Cards Fall is the latest entry in it. There have been some standouts in this genre, Monument Valley being the most obvious one, that built their deliberate pace around smart and mind-bending puzzle design. However, in this case, Where Cards Fall's slow pace, requisite for ‘atmospheric’ titles, meant that in my brief time with it I barely scratched the surface of the puzzles.

You walk a character through various isometric playing fields, dragging around packs of cards. The cards essentially are platforms that can be collapsed and moved to create paths that the hero can jump through. Lead him to the magic card portal exit and you get to watch an inscrutable vignette. In the time I spent with this game, the hardest part was the fiddly controls—it took a while to figure out that with some care I could control the size of the platforms created by pinching my fingers ever so slowly. The puzzles themselves weren't challenging at all.

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Mutazione (Adventure) (4-Stars)

This adventure game’s story is told with a light touch but it’s instantly compelling. Your character, Kai, has immediate motivation, as she attempts to fulfill her grandfather’s dying wish and understand what he had devoted his life to. The setting, too, is immediately intriguing: Mutazione is an island of mutated people and plants, whose characters are quickly and efficiently drawn.

The game starts feeling like a traditional adventure game, but its conversation trees are mostly for flavor (like obvious influence Kentucky Route Zero) and its puzzles all revolve around amateur botany. It’s occasionally awkward to control, especially the lengthy plant encyclopedia that is inexplicably indexless. But for players looking for a unique interactive story, Mutazione should be your first stop on Arcade.

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King’s League 2 (Strategy/Management) (3-Stars)

A sport’s management game without sports, King's League puts you in charge of a team of fantasy fighters as they battle their way up the titular league. The story mode is entertaining with well-written (albeit broad) characters and it does a good job introducing the concepts of the game. If you don't want to bother clicking through dialogues, you can also just jump in to creating your own custom team.

You recruit team members from town, choose training styles to mould them, and buy new gear. When you get into a match, most of the battle is handled for you, as your units march forward and bounce off one another. All you do is occasionally activate a special ability, when you have the chance. Because the matches are so simple, the team management is necessarily also simple. King's League definitely has more of a 'mobile game' feel with its simplified gameplay. If that's what you're looking for, though, it might be a good fit.

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Shinsekai: Into the Depths (Platformer) (3-Stars)

Capcom takes a break from arcade ports to bring us this Metroidvania set at the bottom of the ocean. This is one of the best-looking games on Arcade and probably they best sounding. Headphones are a must if you want to get the full underwater experience. The game itself is a slow paced platformer with forgiving controls that work pretty well on a touch screen, with a swipe-anywhere stick and tap and drag controls for actions.

In the time I had with it, I saw a lot of potential, but not too much interesting or challenging happening in the first hour or so. The slow pace is also a blessing and a curse: easy to handle with touch controls, but often dragging out basic movement in ways that kill the pace of the game. Your goals are also not entirely clear, which can be a motivation-killer in a wide-open game like this.

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Still nothing too amazing this time around. I'm standing by my assessment that Arcade will probably be packed with a lot of good-but-not-great titles that are polished but not innovative. Let's try again next time--hopefully the wheel will land on one of the new games Apple just added!

Apple Arcade Roulette #2 published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

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gertlushgaming · 11 months ago

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Crashy Laps Review (PlayStation 5)

For this Crashy Laps Review, we play an arcade racing game, with all the tracks visible on the screen, designed for playing in single-player and Local Multiplayer modes. Based on classic games, there are isometric and top-down selectable camera views.

Crashy Laps Review Pros:

- Nice graphics. - 348.1MB download size. - Platinum trophy. - Racing gameplay. - Two views to use - isometric and top-down. - Engine sound - combustion or electric. - Three difficulties - Novice, professional, and expert. - Isometric view of the track, meaning you can see the whole track at all times. - A top-down view is a more traditional arcade view. - Sound option outputting - music and fx, music only, fx only, and engine only. - Four tunes of day to drive in - morning, midday, evening, and night. - Four race events to choose from - championship (4 races/4 cars/4 laps), time trial, quick race, and Grand Prix. - Five race locations - Candy Lands, Alpine Bridge, Silver Dunes, Frosty Way, and Around the World. - Each location has four race tracks. - You have to unlock the racing locations by earning certain cups in the championship. - Unlock race tracks by placing in the time trial. - Every track and location shows what you have to do in order to unlock it. - Online leaderboards. - Customize your car before an event and put a 3-character name or initials in. - Vibration can be set to - off, all, and collisions only. - You can zoom in on the track from within the pause menu. - You get reset onto the course if you crash too hard. - A little speedo lets you know if your speed is too fast and your grip will be bad when your speedo goes red. - Arcade presentation. - You can change the view and zoom in on the race pause menu. - The controls are simple and easy to learn with Accelerate being on the shoulder and face buttons as is the brake so you have some choice. - Nice looking locations and the track design is good. Crashy Laps Review Cons: - Cannot rebind controls. - Doesn't explain things like the fact you cannot play championship mode until you have done a time trial. - On the menus if you leave it too long then a credit pop-up shows. - The controls are loose and not that responsive. - Resetting onto the track is cool but it doesn't kick in when you spin out and are going the wrong way. - You don't get much visual feedback on your racing. - Not only is a time trial the first thing you need to do in order to do the fun stuff but you have to do the time trial on all the tracks in a location to get that unlock. - Each track in time trial only shows if you did it before and your best time, not how many laps you have done. (this is important for unlocks) - The music sounds very generic and repetitive. - You don't get told if unlocks happen in both track and locations and events. - No zoom-in function for the top-down view. - You cannot always see the environmental hazards. - Only the one-car model. - Has limited replay value. - The difficulty of the AI just increases how much cheese and cheap moves they use. Related Post: The Walking Dead: Betrayal Preview (Steam Early Access) Crashy Laps: Official website. Developer: JanduSoft Publisher: JanduSoft Store Links - PlayStation Read the full article

#Indie #PlayStation5

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aurelliocheek · 5 years ago

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Albion Online: How to build a world

If you want to design a forest for an online role-playing game, you need more than just trees, leaves and branches. When you ask the Albion designers, it’s about creating the right feeling!

Marcus Koch (Founder, Art Design), Stefan Warias (Environment Art) and Chris Wild (Founder, Level Design) explain in this interview how they built the game world of Albion Online.

Making Games: Why did you choose Albion as your game world? Chris Wild: We were truly inspired by the legend of King Arthur. Albion is the ancient name for England which was to be the setting for our game until we realized that England might be too limited for any potential expansions; after all, you never know how large an MMO may get. That’s why we didn’t limit the game to England alone.

Marcus Koch: But we maintained the substance of the old legend. Caerleon, one of the most important cities in Albion Online, for example, is another name for Camelot. The witch Morgana and the wizard Merlin are also included in the background lore, and we created a nice pantheon for typical figures from the tale of Arthur. We deliberately avoided the traditional dwarves and orcs. There are thousands of games featuring dwarves and elves, and I love them all, but we didn’t want them in our game. Another advantage of the name Albion was that the alphabet starts with an A.

Christoph Hombergs (shouting from the background): Don’t underestimate this when it comes to forums or top lists that are in alphabetical order!

Marcus Koch: We decided on the name pretty quickly, after about six months. This helped us designers in the beginning, when we had no background story yet, to move in a creative direction which would later fit the game. We quickly established some clear designs and colour codes, so that players would immediately know what they can expect from the game world. When you spot undead, you know, for example, that you are in a tier-4 or tier-7 area. In a full-loot MMO, quick reactions and easy readability of the situation are extremely important for the player. And all that plays an important role in the design process.

Chris Wild: The design of Albion is also a result of the time when it was created. Game of Thrones was a hot topic then, which has more of a low-fantasy direction. And that was the direction we wanted to take as well.

Marcus Koch: The early versions of Albion had a somewhat gloomy and realistic style, but soon we realised that it wasn’t quite what we wanted. Fortunately, we then went for a kind of cartoon-like look which went down well with the entire team.

Stefan Warias: It all happened very naturally. Before working on Albion, Marcus was a cartoonist at Mosaik, and I was working on a project with cartoon-like graphics. We all experienced that this style is relatively easy to implement, with only a few colours and surfaces, which is obviously fantastic for a small team like ours since it gives us the chance to create more content for the game.

Making Games: Are you still happy with your decision to use a cartoon style and an isometric perspective? Marcus Koch: Yes, even if our game has taken giant leaps with regard to visuals. In the beginning, Albion was really restricted in the number of objects and polygons. But the further the technology advanced, we also paid more and more attention to detail. Today, the characters, for example, have a lot more polygons than back in the day, which is why many of the initial characters fall far short of the level of detail the newer figures feature. Of course, as a result of this, we have now started to take on older items again to rework them. World of Warcraft did the same thing not too long ago: they revised the graphics of the characters, which means a huge amount of work.

With the help of elevation variations, the world of Albion Online looks more realistic and open than the iso-look would normally allow.

Making Games: What challenges does the isometric perspective bring? Stefan Warias: The disadvantage of the camera perspective in the game is that you can never see the sky. But over time we learned to deal with it. Sometimes it helps, for example, that the sky is reflected in the water. Altitude differences in the world create more variety, too.

Marcus Koch: Much to the chagrin of us designers, the camera perspective was massively changed halfway through the development. Originally, despite the top view, you were able to look a bit into the distance of Albion on the top of the screen until a very experienced player of our team thought it was unfair that you saw more of the game world on the top of the screen than on the bottom. As a result, players who attacked from the bottom of the screen had an advantage since they could only be spotted a lot later. So, we readjusted the camera, and from then on, us designers had to present the world of Albion in a much smaller image frame, yet it had to be just as credible. All these changes taught us a lot of things, and we still have a long way to go in our creative development. We still want to implement live vegetation, cloud shadows which move in front of the sun, moving grass … simply everything that increases immersion also for those players who, for example, like to go into the forest to chop wood and don’t necessarily care too much about PvP. Those players, too, deserve a beautiful world that’s full of life. Our principle is that Albion has something for everyone.

Making Games: Is there anything you are particularly proud of? Stefan Warias: As far as the environment is concerned, I care especially about the forests as they consist of only very few assets and yet tell a credible story. It’s exciting to see that only little means are actually needed to make a certain landscape look authentic. If you have too many assets, you get easily lost already when choosing them. In my opinion, a lower amount of assets actually creates more freedom for creation.

Chris Wild: I remember Far Cry where the team actually flew to some islands and took pictures to rebuild them for their game. With our abstract style, the question was more what kind of emotions you get when walking in the forest and to create these emotions in the game, too. We realized, for example, that a forest is all about light and shadow. One minute you walk in the shade, and the next you step into the sunlight again – it’s all about strong contrasts. But just looking at fifty pictures of a forest and saying “here is a tree, there is a bush” won’t do. To create realism and immersion, you have to understand why a person perceives a landscape and in what way.

Marcus Koch: At the beginning, the forest was once the exact opposite of what Chris just said. First, we had a lot of dense trees, and the character and the mineable resources were constantly covered by logs, branches and leaves. Plus, you never had the feeling that you were really in a forest. We played around a bit and found out that the roof of the trees had to be above the camera. After all, the players don’t see the world through the eyes of the character, but through the eyes of a spectator hovering over the game world. If the abstraction level of the character is different from that of the spectator, you don’t get the same kind of immersion either. In first-person games, that’s no problem at all since you immerse in the world through the eyes of the character. It’s a completely different thing in an isometric game. You have to deal with very different challenges and obstacles, also as far as houses in cities are concerned, which are occluded due to the perspective. How tall can buildings be in order to look real, but at the same time don’t cover too much of the game world all the time? We did a lot of trial & error, but over the years we have learned how to give the world more depth through transparent elements and parallax scrolling.

Chris Wild: In the beginning, there were only forests; the swamps, the snow region, and the steppe were all added later. All this obviously made the world bigger, more credible and more diverse. Besides more life in the forests and reflections in the water, I also want to implement birds that fly around. In some places like the Crystal Realms, there are shadows in the game, which move past the player on the ground, and thunderbolts striking in the game world. Now that we have developed all these elements, we can also use them in other places and make the world look even more alive. We also realised that we mustn’t go into too much detail, just in order to make the world more credible. Over time, our elements became bigger with a “calm” look, so that they create a visual calmness within the player who can then better focus on the important things in the game.

Making Games: Is it true that you originally tried to develop the game in only 18 months? Chris Wild: We once had this vision, yes. At the very beginning, our expectations were to develop something similar like Haven & Hearth. That was a game that always served as an example for our investor – a one-man project, that’s what they wanted. We looked at it and told them that we could do something like that within 18 months. But when we saw that we could actually create something much bigger, our expectations were growing, too.

Marcus Koch: The number of our players doubled from alpha test to alpha test, and their feedback gave more and more input for the development. It was a very impressive process where we had to provide more and more “space” in our game world for every new players. This led to phases where we produced a lot of “game world” in a very short amount of time. It was something I had never experienced before.

Stefan Warias: We always aimed for “one world” (editor’s note: where there is only a single non-instanced world in which every player lives) like in EVE Online. But EVE is set in space and therefore not as limited as we are. A new solar system is probably faster to build than a new section in a fantasy world like Albion. We also had no idea how many players there would be. Should we build a world for 1,000, for 10,000, or for 100,000 players? Our game world is limited, so we can’t just add 10,000 new players just like that if we don’t want them to step on each other’s toes all the time.

Stefan Warias (left): “We had no idea how many players there would be. Should we build a world for 1,000, for 10,000, or for 100,000 players?”

Making Games: Do you have plans to expand Albion and make it bigger? Stefan Warias: At the moment, we feel that the game world is big enough, but the thought of expansions is always in the back of our minds. But it always takes time to develop an add-on, WoW is living proof to that.

Marcus Koch: But there is also a very significant difference. WoW is a “theme park MMO” – and people are rushing through the content like there’s no tomorrow. It takes a year to build the content, and the first people finish it in one or two days. Of course, that’s sad for developers, however, that being said, people are also somewhat taught to do that. This wouldn’t work in our case since our game is completely different from the core. Our game is based on people carrying out conflicts, and ideally, this happens within a space that both parties try to occupy or claim. If you add huge amounts of space, you create a problem which we had to face at one point. There was a short phase in Albion where building the game world led to a de-escalation since people didn’t cross paths often enough. Obviously, this didn’t make sense at all for an MMO which is based on PvP and conflicts among the players. By now we have a pretty good idea of what influences the player motivation in Albion, and what we need to do in order to move everything in the right direction.

Making Games: To what extent did the cross-platform approach affect the design process of Albion? Marcus Koch: We knew from the beginning that Albion was to be a cross-platform game – we even considered 2D graphics. Originally, we even wanted to use sprites until our tech team intervened, saying anything would be better than 2D graphics on mobile platforms. So, we decided pretty quickly on 3D graphics, but at the time were struggling with the technical limitations of the iPad 1 or 2 whose performance was rather lousy. In short: The more characters appeared on screen, the slower the game became. Of course, we expected something like this, but for an MMO it was still a problem. As the newer generations arrived, that problem was solved, but also because of the fact that we chose a cartoon style over realistic graphics.

Chris Wild: Another aspect was that we wanted to set a counterpoint to the game principle. We knew that the atmosphere later in the game would be rather rough on an emotional level – especially if you are defeated and then mugged. So, we tried to make the world at least look not too gloomy and repellent.

Marcus Koch: I also would have had a real problem working on the game like that. I don’t like storytelling that’s too dark as I noticed while playing that it can really bring me down mentally if I enter a world which is completely gloomy. I could never play a game like Demon Souls all day long, for example. I need blue skies when I come home at night and switch on the computer and spend some free time. I played WoW for years and every so often I logged off on a beach because the view was so beautiful. I made a campfire, set off an animation… those things were really important to me, like a relaxation tool. The world of Albion offers something for everyone, that’s why we also wanted to make the starter areas look friendly – a place where everything is more or less in order. The further the players advance into the more dangerous zones, the darker it gets and the more malevolent the enemies become, despite the abstractions.

And yet, we have this certain level of caricature which makes the monsters more accessible as I don’t only want to have evil opponents, but rather enemies who may also have a story to them. The undead in the game are actually shadows of their former selves, doomed to fight and to kill for all eternity. That’s why they rise again and again and carry on, always doing their routine which tells you that they surely don’t do this for fun.

Markus Koch Art Director

He started working in the Entertainment Business in 1996 as comic artist and shortly after became a character designer for cartoon movies. In 2002, he switched over to the games industry where he worked as Art Director for Games such as Drakensang and Drakensang – River of Time. In 2011, he joined Bitfield, which would become the core of Sandbox

Chris Wild Level Designer

Chris has been working in the games industry for nearly 20 years. He started out as an architect, changed to games as a Tester during his sparetime, then 3D Modeler, Level- and Gamedesigner. While working on games like Giana Sisters for NDS at his former company Bitfield GmbH he cofounded Sandbox Interactive to develop Albion Online.

Stefan Warias Environment Designer

Stefan started around 20 years ago with Level Design for Microsoft’s action strategy game Urban Assault. As Level Artist, Lead Artist and Art Director, he gained experience in different teams and genres. During this time he also studied Art History, Film Studies and Cultural Studies, with a focus on natural philosophy and aesthetics. Today, he is responsible for the environment art in Albion Online.

The post Albion Online: How to build a world appeared first on Making Games.

Albion Online: How to build a world published first on https://leolarsonblog.tumblr.com/

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thatguysamaniac-blog · 6 years ago

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Acid rounds is a semi regular, irregular spot on TGAM for games we have beasted from start to finish. Richie: Oh a Pokémon Game! that's different does this game have new types, how do you transfer Pokémon across? Cunzy1 1: Well, I'm a sucker for the Pokemon series and that's somehow translated into almost all of the spinoffs from pinball to a feudal era Japan isometric tactics and typing game to whatever a trozei is. Detective Pikachu is not quite the weirdest of the lot but it's certainly up there. Its a perfectly playable and extremely pretty point and click detective story that came out as a downloadable game for the Nintendo 3DS in Japan and then two years later got an expanded physical version of the game worldwide. You play as Pinocchio nosed Mary-Sue Tim who meets a talking Pikachu who likes coffee, has amnesia and is a detective. You can tell it is a detective because he has a deerstalker hat. Tim's Dad is also a detective but is currently missing. Tim and Pikachu then slowly walk about talking to people and Pokemon and solving crimes. Each chapter has a theme. E.g. in Chapter 1 they bust a baby Pokemon Paedophile Ring behind a Pokemon Centre front, in Chapter 2 they uncover a Lickitung sex trafficking cartel out of Vermillion City etc. Richie: Does the world need Detective Pikachu? Surely all 17,000 Phoenix Wright games fill this niche? Cunzy1 1: Aside from the theme of solving criminal (and not-so-criminal) mysteries Detective Pikachu has nowhere near the depth of mechanics that Phoenix Wright does. It's a very basic walk around, talk to things, unlock more things to talk to and 'solve' the case. There are sections where evidence has to be considered and even the odd QTE but really the only taxing thing about it is the odd obscure link between a character's statement or other case fact and what it is supposed to be evidencing. I played this game in several short sittings over the space of a year and remembering details of the plot and previous cases over the course of different chapters was difficult (although it's not harshly punished). Richie: Ryan Reynolds or Danny DeVito? Cunzy1 1: Although Detective Pikachu is a bit gruff in this game, unfortunately, he doesn't have the nature to match it, memes be damned. Ryan Reynolds is a way better fit. Richie: How much did you beast this game? Does it have replay value, new game+ or unlockables? Cunzy1 1: It's pretty much a good old fashioned 'one and done' which I appreciate now and then so there isn't the guilt of not having seen every three second cutscene hanging over me. The only extras are the worst amiibo implementation since Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival. If you shelled out for a the Giant Detective Pikachu amiibo, you can tap it to see all the 'chatting to Pikachu' prompts you missed. You can pick Pikachu's brain at almost any point in the game and there's a lot of programmed interactions some of which are location based but they do nothing. They're a few second long interactions of Pikachu kicking a ball or saying something about coffee. So you could keep playing the game over and over talking to Pikachu every three seconds to unlock every prompt or alternatively keep tapping a giant amiibo to unlock and view them. I hate to say it but this is actually worse than nothing. Richie: Philosophical question, is Pikachu the hero we deserve? Cunzy1 1: We don't know. It looks like the film will follow some of the story beats but SPOILERS FOR THE GAME the central mystery to the premise of the game isn't wrapped up. So potentially a Detective Pikachu sequel on the way. One last thing, Detective Pikachu has an absolutely amazing menu screen. Better than it has a right to be.

http://www.thatguys.co.uk/2019/03/acid-rounds-detective-pikachu-3ds.html

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gamingtipsandtrickshacks · 6 years ago

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Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle Review

We will never know how my life could have gone had I never been introduced to mobile puzzle games. Over the persistent draw of just one more round, assignments were left unfinished, books unread and emails unanswered. I spent endless hours of procrastination determined to prove that I had the smarts it took to solve games that wanted me for my brain and not my reflexes. Even though I've since moved to YouTube as my favourite method of procrastination, Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle makes it clear that deep down I haven't changed.

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle

Developer: Blue Wizard Digital

Publisher: Blue Wizard Digital

Format: Reviewed on PC

Availability: Released on April 13th on iOS, Android, PC and Mac

In this isometric top-down puzzler, you take control of the one and only Jason Vorhees and kill your way through a variety of levels by sliding Jason across a grid until you literally bump into your victim. After getting to all targets, a final mark will appear. You end each level using a finisher move, a particularly grizzly and over the top kill in which limbs fly and blood flows freely. Kill enough people with this move by clicking/tapping at the right time and you fill a bloodlust gauge. Once it's filled you gain new weapons - who knew you could slice through a person with an acoustic guitar?

As horrible as that sounds, surprisingly it isn't. Killer Puzzle features super-deformed characters with big heads and tiny limbs, and while their screaming will definitely have your potential company raise an eyebrow, killing these tiny guys won't cause sleepless nights. It feels weird to admit that it seems okay because the characters are cute and chubby, but everything is just that far over the top that it's fun rather than gruesome. Should the splatter prove too much there is always a "PG-13" option in the settings which removes the blood and censors the finishers. If you really enjoy the finishers however, there's the Murder Marathon, a mode with the sole purpose of ramping up your kill streak.

Complexity creeps up on you.

The Friday the 13th theme is a nice idea especially for genre fans. In homage to classic horror television, Killer Puzzle is made up of individual episodes, each featuring a different location such as the classic summer camp, an apocalyptic wasteland or... the beach. Each episode consists of, you guessed it, thirteen levels. The Easter eggs I spotted made me laugh more than once, and the severed head of Jason's mum easily makes my list of favourite video game companions.

Most importantly, behind the bloody exterior there's an intuitive and clever puzzle game. At the beginning of each level Jason will pop up somewhere on the board and you can take stock of the layout at your leisure. You quickly note the positions of people, traps and obstacles and then confidently make your first move. An optional top-down view helps to put things into perspective. After covering the basics of how to slide around to get to people, Killer Puzzle continuously finds new ways to make your killing spree just slightly more difficult.

Each level introduces something new: people start running away from you, obstacles keep you from your victims and traps such as holes and bodies of water can harm you as much as they harm them. As the board fills up with more targets, the order in which they are dispatched becomes another important element in successfully finishing a level, since they act as movable obstacles that stop you just as much as fences, trees and other items do.

Since Killer Puzzle gives you time to understand its mechanics and shows rather than tells you what to do, it doesn't become overwhelming. Upon encountering something new, you first get to play around with it in an easily solvable level before it's used it in combination with all the other pieces you already know, constantly building on existing knowledge. In a way it feels like slowly learning how to play chess, if the end goal of chess was to kill people while wearing a hockey mask.

There is more than a little of Blue Wizard's own Slayaway Camp in the mix. Happily, Slayaway Camp is a banger too.

The more intricate the levels become, the more often the game tries to lure you into a false sense of security. Many times the solution seems instantly clear but turns out to be just that much more complicated. An X mark on the board is meant as assistance in early levels for example, as it tells you either where you are supposed to land at some point or which row you need to go through. As you move to increasingly trickier levels however, even this will eventually be used against you.

Killer Puzzle isn't a difficult game. Levels rarely take longer than a few minutes. Should you get stuck there are a couple of options to get you back up on your feet. You can either redo a few moves by literally rewinding the episode, ask Jason's mum for a hint or even watch the complete solution in fast forward.

By staying absolutely fair, Killer Puzzle deals with its addictive mechanics in a responsible manner. Even though it is a free-to-play game clearly designed with the people in mind who just want to play a few short games on their phone and then end up getting sucked in, progress never depends on power ups or any other item that many mobile games not so discreetly offer for real money. Here, re-entry is easy and the consequences for losing yourself in the game will never extend to your wallet. You can buy up to four additional episodes for real cash, as well as a handful of gimmicky new costumes for Jason, but that's it.

Another method to keep players coming back is the Daily Death mode. In it you can solve a different puzzle every day, set in what's likely an office full of gameplay developers so overworked they simply didn't see Jason walking in. For solving puzzles thirteen days in a row you gain a new weapon to use in the main game.

This no strings attached approach is probably a deliberate choice: Killer Puzzle's developer Blue Wizard was founded by PopCap alumnus Jason Kapalka, who has worked on Peggle and Bejeweled, someone who knows ways in which fun games can be misused and who had a hand in the very games responsible for the near-death of my academic career. Fast forward a few years and Kapalka and his team still know how to drive me to distraction. At least this is my job now.

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