Fun Thing

Courtesy of Play This Thing!: the unimaginatively named “The Space Game”. It’s tower-defense in space!

The curious thing is, I found it more absorbing on a personal level than the average tower-defense game, and I’m not sure why. Usually with TD games I sit back comfortably, enjoying god mode, and not really worrying too much if I lose and have to replay a level. Here, though, I was more invested in my little mining colony. In the final level where the pirates come in thick and fast and my colony gets completely massacred, I had to give up after a couple of unsuccessful tries — it just felt too much like one of those really grim episodes of Babylon 5 where everyone is dying left and right and I cannot make it stop.

But, er, you may not have that same problem! And it’s fun, though not remotely IF-like.

Chocolatier 3 on Homer in Silicon

My take on the latest Chocolatier game (“Decadence by Design”) is now up over at GameSetWatch.

Second-round voting for the XYZZYs is now open

You can vote here.

Alabaster 31 (Invisible Progress)

Have now:

• had more human beta-testing and incorporated the feedback (of which there was not a huge amount)
• removed the Conversation Builder extension and commented out a lot of the support code from the main game file, so that what remains now in the game is only the material that is intended for the final release
• done a little more streamlining, getting rid of the remaining procedural rules in the hope that that would bump the speed a little. (It doesn’t seem to have done a huge amount, but it was worth a try.)
• sent off the source code for further profiling: there is a particular slowdown when disambiguating the names of quips that I still have not been able to optimize away

Meanwhile, David Kinder has been working on Git and Glulx, using Alabaster as a benchmark project, and it looks like it will be able to speed things up a lot at the interpreter level as well.

Still outstanding before release:

• find out results of profiling; tweak to improve if possible
• add artwork, if same comes through

Information Flow and Gradual Characterization

Ran across an interesting post from Krystian Majewski on design problems with multiple choice dialogue, which, among other things, draws on some play-testing reports on Emerald City Confidential:

[Playfirst] did a user test of the indie point-and-click adventure Emerald City Confidential and they described how casual gamers reacted when they first encountered a multiple choice dialogue. You might think that point-and-click adventures are a good match for “casual players”. Well, when faced with their first multiple choice dialogue, most players simply froze in panic. They assumed that one of the answer as “correct” while others would lead to failure. From the kind if information they received, they couldn’t really anticipate what would happen. Even worse, after they decided, they didn’t receive a clear feedback on what effect their choice had. They were used to the transparent feedback schemes of most casual games and weren’t able to cope with the uncertainty.

I found this really interesting, because I would have assumed, in general, that a simple multiple-choice presentation would be more accessible to casual players than some other mode of interaction.

Majewski goes on to argue in favor of consistent verbs representing standard strategies usable at every dialogue point. At any given time (for instance) the player might have the option to respond intellectually, sensually, or in a religious way — a strategy that reminded me a little of the dialogue system in Forever Always.

I’m not sure how much application this has from an IF perspective. Certainly the core IF audience tends to have different expectations about how dialogue will work, so is probably not completely frozen by a menu. Moreover, it’s possible to write menu dialogue in such a way that it gives more of a hint about the likely effects; the writing and cluing of the player determines, to a large degree, how much agency it feels like one has. At the same time, I generally agree that menu dialogue feels more distancing (to me) than parser-based dialogue, even if the latter is heavily clued with hints about what the player can say.

One of Majewski’s commenters adds:

Real dialogue flow should be such that no specific choice matters too much, but the sum of the choices does. But as you’ve mentioned this is just a nightmare from a design perspective.

I’m not sure it has to be so bad a nightmare as all that, and it’s been done. To pick the obvious example, in Blue Lacuna… (very mild spoilers, and discussion of a WIP of my own, follow the cut)

Emerald City Confidential

I’ll cover this in more detail over on GameSetWatch later, but some people here may be interested in Emerald City Confidential, Dave Gilbert’s new graphical adventure with a film-noir take on Oz. Though it’s marketed through PlayFirst, it’s a lot less casual and a lot more adventure than most of their other offerings. The puzzles tend toward the easy side, but they’re fun and generally fair (and there are built-in hints, so you probably won’t spend too much time stuck).

I did run into a couple of surprising bugs in the late game, which I hope will get patched for a future release. But even counting that into the experience, not bad.

The Game Design Question

I’ve used a variation of the following activity in a couple of different college classes (all of them courses in translation, pitched at a class of 30-40 students with no prior background in classics):

Divide into groups of five or six, and spend 30 minutes or so coming up with a core game design for a game based on some aspect of the Roman economy (or whatever — specific content varies). Name your game. Choose a group member to present a pitch for it to the rest of the class.

Students love this activity. They think I’m letting them play in class, practically giving them the day off. The discussions are riotous. Certain male students who tend to be otherwise pretty quiet in class actually sit up and talk. It usually starts off a little goofy, but they get interested in some specific questions about the game design, and pretty soon they’re paging back through their books to remind themselves about critical dates and data.

It takes a little care to frame the question, because there is always at least one group that will want to spend their time lovingly detailing the weapons that are going to go into their multiplayer XBox fighting extravaganza. (“Wait, who are we fighting?” “Um… there were pirates, right?” “Yeah, okay, let’s have pirates! And we’ll blow up their ships!”)

So I make sure that they understand I’m going to be asking certain kinds of things during the final pitch. For the Roman economy exercise, it was: What does the player have to do in this game? What does winning look like? How do the game challenges reflect (for example) the realities of Roman trade? What sources of information would you use to make the simulation more accurate? What aspects of the game would you have to make guesses about?

After the individual pitches, I let the class say which game ideas they liked best and why. Then we move into a full-class discussion of some issues that the process inevitably raises. In the course on Roman civilization and culture, we used the game project to talk about the problems of reconstructing processes and systems — how can we understand the Roman economy when we have such diverse and fragmentary evidence? What can we know or guess about the challenges of being successful under those long-past conditions? In a mythology class, where the challenge was to recast a classic myth of their choice, we used this as a segue into a discussion of how genre expectations, changing cultural norms, and changes of media affect what we value and emphasize in a story. (“Why did you choose to keep this in your story and leave that out? Which things did you drop because they don’t work in the modern era? Which did you leave out because they don’t work in a game? What did you add? Why? Now can you compare that process back to what Ovid was doing with the myths that had come down to him?” …and so on.)

The point of this exercise is not to come up with a good game. Most of the time the pitches sound unbalanced, broken, or deeply derivative of the gameplay of some existing franchise — a fact that students themselves admit, proposing board games like “Romanopoly”. It’s the process that counts: first getting them to engage in a more active form of review of facts and figures, and second giving them something concrete around which to start a discussion on, say, transmedial narratology. (I’m sure it would also be very interesting to expand this into a whole substantial workshop in which students carried through on the design of their game and actually refined and implemented something that did work — but I haven’t yet had a class where I wanted to devote that much time to the project. So for right now it is just a discussion trick.)

* Actually, the first time I did this, in a mythology class, I allowed them to think up an alternative presentation for any of the myths that we’d studied that day, in any medium. But almost all the groups, in both sections, went for some kind of gaming presentation, which reinforces my sense that the video game is the medium this age group is most critically involved with. The question of imagining a movie, novel, poem, or play around a given myth didn’t appeal nearly as much.

Alabaster 30a

Having got rid of the annoying flaw in disambiguation (I hope), I’ve posted the latest build of Alabaster. The plan at the moment is to do a little more beta-testing to make sure that the conversation is sufficiently rounded out; then to remove the conversation-building machinery and do the last speed tests and refinements once that is gone. If you want to play along, transcripts are welcome.

Currently the biggest between-turn lags — sometimes very long indeed — continue to be in response to disambiguation questions or when the parser can’t match a quip at all. I am not sure why it’s doing this, but I suspect that the quip-creation machinery may be slightly interfering with the efficiency.

Then we’ll do some profiling.

The startup delay should be gone completely, though, and between-move delays reduced in most other cases.

Reminder

First round XYZZY nominations for 2008 are open, and will remain so until February 18, so this is a good time to get a vote in.

Homer in Silicon’s Rejects Pile

I am enjoying writing my column for GameSetWatch, and it’s interesting looking at storytelling in a range of genres. The main challenge is that I can’t write about IF all the time (too niche), so I need to incorporate other material, and that often sends me wandering off looking for other indie/casual games that sound like they might have something narratively interesting going on.

There is sometimes something worth writing about a game that does story very minimally or very badly, but a lot of the time what looked potentially promising is just impossible after all. Latest in the reject heap… well, I can’t believe I even tried this, but Dream Day Wedding claimed to incorporate a “Choose a Story” segment: “Choose A Story – each path has a different outcome for hours of replayability.”

Dream Day Wedding is about as nauseating as you could hope, given the title.