Monday 28 September 2009

Simulation vs Metaphor v.2

I have recently been talking with the Cool Kidz in my Warhammer group about why we rail against some of the rules in 40K. Often a situation will arise that seems like total bullshit and does not reflect how troops would fight on the battlefield. The rules are queried and checked and then someone will be left with their jaw open at how seemingly unfair or unrealistic the rules are.



This, I explained, is down to the fact that the rules are not there to simulate every battlefield situation. Back in the 1st and 2nd edition of 40K (we are now on 5th) the rules were extremely complicated and elaborate and were designed to try and cover everything and simulate as closely as they could the battlefields of the 41st millennium. This meant that there were an incredible amount of tables, bespoke charts and rules and it took an ungodly amount of time to resolve things like combat. The Irresistible Force and Immovable Object situation would arise again and again because Codex entries would conflict with the rules, wargear items would clash and all sorts of modifiers would apply to the simplest table roll.

When the 3rd edition rolled round the designers stripped it all down, dumped nearly all of the rules and started again. They boiled it down to the most important elements and rather than simulate a battlefield they tried to create a metaphor for a battle.

Miniature wargames have the inherent problem of using miniatures. Imagine a war zone in the far future. Infantry crouch behind cover and blind fire at a horde of aliens swarming over a ruined building. Grenades detonate around power armoured war gods and commanders scream over sabotaged comm lines to ill disciplined troops. The battlefield is chaos and cannot be conveyed by miniatures. Miniatures cannot be reposed on the fly to show that they are crouched behind cover and we cannot physically check to see whether the hoofed aliens trip on the exposed cabling of the bombed out office they are attempting to move through.



This leads to a breakdown in simulation and the need for an essence capturing metaphor arises.

Using the example above, in the old rules if you wanted to fire through your own troops to an enemy beyond, each trooper would have to individually check to see if they had a line of sight and then resolve their shooting as normal. This would mean that you would need to check the LOS for potentially up to 20 figures. This would often result in conflicts and arguments between players and thus an effort to provide granularity and simulation in the rules slowed the game down with unnecessary complexity and bad attitude.

In the 5th edition rules the simulation has been scrapped as it helped no one. Checking individual line of sights would suggest to the players that the figure's pose represented a snap shot of their actions on the battlefield which is nonsense. Soldiers do not remain in one pose or even one posture during a battle. They crouch to avoid fire, go prone in craters and charge across streets. Now all friendly units are allowed to fire through each other without any line of sight checks. Instead, the enemy receives a bonus cover save.

This has gone from providing a simulation to creating a metaphor. Instead of being pedantic about the position of a miniature, we imagine that as the Storm Troopers turn to fire at on coming Orks through an allied squad of Guardsmen, the Storm Troopers time their shots as the Guardsmen duck into a crater or dive down as squad leaders coordinate their attack. The cover save that the Orks receive represents the Storm Troopers taking difficult shots through or round a mass of bodies as artillery lands around them and their comrades are cut down.

This attitude sits better with some people than it does others. The entirety of Warhammer is abstract silliness and as a designer it is easy for me to see where they have chosen to capture the essence of the situation and provide the most streamlined experience they can. Games Workshop designers also choose to outright contradict common sense in order to provide a better game.

In previous iterations if a unit wiped out an enemy squad in close combat they would be able to move into combat with another nearby enemy unit. This is pretty dramatic tactically as a specialist close combat unit could very easily destroy a huge amount of squads over the course of a couple of turns. Now they cannot do this which allows weaker armies to have a chance to shoot the rampaging combat monsters and level the playing field. This infuriates close combat players but it benefits the game greatly.

As designers, be it of table top games or videogames, we craft a set of rules that allow players to have an enjoyable experience. The above close combat rule is the 40K equivalent to the rubber band AI in Mario Kart. Is a game more interesting if one player very quickly gains a huge advantage that cannot be overcome by the other player or is it more interesting if it comes to a nail biting finale where two players have dealt blows to each other and kept on equal footing until the exciting end game?

In a fun game the player's advantage should not come from the rules but rather the tactical application of those rules.

But how does this relate to videogames?

Well, modern videogames have a problem with players perceive them as simulating reality. Players often wish the rules of a videogame were different to allow them to perform actions that they imagine their character could do in the real world.

This problem is unique to modern games that have realisitic graphics and that take place in real world locations. This is because the rule system is less obvious as players assume these games are simulations. Someone once described Rainbow Six Vegas as a simulator to me. They argued that because the game has realistic art, realistic weapon handling and took place in a real geographical location that the game was attempting to simulate real life.

This couldn't be further from the truth. R6V has a very definite set of rules that are no different to the set of rules in Mario. No one questions Mario's rules though. How can you question whether it is a simulation when you control a plumber that jumps on the heads of some mushrooms, collects other mushrooms and is friends with other mushrooms and where a family of dinosaurs command an army of ghosts, turtles and grinning bullets?



Rainbow Six Vegas (to carry on with this example as I fucking love the game and have a lot to say about it) is essentially the same game as Mario when viewed in a reductive way. The game provides a setting for the player to move in and combat enemies with a number of tools. The player must learn the rules of the game and use their understanding of these rules along with a selection of tools to get from the beginning to the end.

The difference is that players can relate to the Rainbow Six characters and setting more easily and can impose their own desires and perceptions or reality upon the supposedly realistic aspects of the game. The fact is that R6V is entirely unrealistic. You can disembody your vision and view yourself in the third person, heal fatal bullet damage, the weapons are not at all realistic and instead of neutralising a terrorist cell you kill an entire army.

















The game has a very defined set of rules and does not create what we traditionally call a simulation of combat. Instead it creates a metaphor of a special ops team clearing buildings of terrorists. This is because a game where you rappel through a window, throw a flashbang, shoot two dudes and then order your team to blow open a door and clear the next room is far more fun than trying to rappel through a window to find that there is a knot in your rope and then being shot in the legs and waiting for an hour for the rescue team to clear the building and extract you and then spending days of gameplay in a military hospital.

The former is a metaphor for how we wish combat was and the latter is a simulation of the actualities of combat.

What people actually want is a believable context. They want to perform the actions they feel they should be able to in possibility spaces that feel contextually realistic. When a player resorts to saying "That's not realistic" at a point in a game it means that the metaphor has been broken and that they now view it as a simulation. This is a fine line to tread when we have games that look like Crysis and are the nearest to photo realistic as we have gotten.

Designers must strive to create games that are like the 5th edition of 40K. Games where the players buy into the fantasy and do not resort to wanting a simulation but instead are happy with the metaphor for whatever scenario we are trying to create.

Changing Tracks And Mixing It Up

For various reasons a load of posts on here have been deleted and some have been edited and reposted.

I started this blog to talk more about games than I actually have so I want to refocus it a bit as a way to encourage me to write more about the game design issues I think about all damn day.

Some kind of normal service will be resumed in the coming days.

P.S. One of the devs over at Gearbox has promised that if you send him a picture of you buying Borderlands he will play it with you.

Oh yeah?

Check this out: if you buy Rogue Warrior I will play it with you. If you buy Rogue Warrior and make a donation to Child's Play, I will come to your house (so long as you live in the UK) and play it with you.

More Death From Above

The first multiplayer trailer for Modern Warfare 2 just dropped like a payload from an AC-130. In the same way Infinity Ward started showing off Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer, they have chosen not to do a reveal trailer or a trailer that captures a broad swathe of gameplay. Instead they have chosen to show one mechanic of the game, which is an interesting way of showing people the experience.

This is not a video aimed at the same crowd as the single player reveal but rather it exists to stoke the excitement of people who like to tweak the hell out of their perk selection. Way back in 2007 the first glimpse of the multiplayer game we saw was of what looked like mad haxx0rz. One dude shot another dude THROUGH A WALL. This showed off the game’s bullet penetration and Deep Impact perk and was especially amazing as no game had done bullet penetration to that extent. In an RPG you might choose to buff your Intellect. In Call of Duty you choose to buff your ability to make bullets go through walls into other players.

The new Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer trailer shows off unlockable kill streak rewards. Call of Duty features a ‘the rich get richer’ mechanic where the better the player does, the more rewards they get. In COD 4 after 3 kills the player would get a UAV which would show the positions of every enemy player on the radar. After 5 kills the player gets to call in and target an airstrike and after 7 kills, an AI controlled helicopter gunship circles the map and targets enemy players with a devastating barrage of fire. In Modern Warfare 2 you get to pilot a Spooky gunship.

This system has caused some consternation amongst some players and designers. To be straight up, in the case of Call of Duty I don’t have a problem with the kill streak rewards because I’m not that bad at COD and will semi regularly unlock the kill streak rewards. It is an interesting problem though. Multiplayer shooters have a notoriously high barrier to entry because as soon as a player has played a map they have a large advantage against a new player for the obvious reasons. Newer players are weak and vulnerable in a system like COD’s where those players that have played more of the game are not only better in skill but unlock skills and weapons that allow them to more effectively gun enemies down and unlock circling death machines.

The same system occurs in single player games. Devil May Cry punishes players that struggle with the game by giving them fewer unlocks. Good players will gain more in game currency to buy better abilities and upgrades which will then ease them through the rest of the game. Worse players will gain less currency and thus be able to buy fewer upgrades and will have a tougher time getting through the game.

Some designers take the view that the player should be working hard to become better at the game. Ex Ninja Gaiden designer Tomonobu Itagaki deems that only a select few players should be able to enjoy his games fully as Ninja Gaiden takes a lot of hard work to understand and play. That is a fine view to take as long as you can accept the consequences of lower sales, a niche audience and critical reviews. FHM famously scored the original Xbox Ninja Gaiden 1/5. This is a perfect example of a review catering to the magazine’s readership because most readers of FHM simply won’t be able to grasp and enjoy Ninja Gaiden (I’m not being a snob here, I have never got past the second level of a Ninja Gaiden game) as it is not their play style.

Imagine you are new to Call of Duty and you try the multiplayer. You enter the game, emerge from your spawn point and a sniper drops you through a wall. You respawn, stick low in cover and work your way through a building. An enemy player strafes into the corridor and you both open fire. Despite both having assault rifles, he kills you first as he has unlocked a rifle with a higher rate of fire and has a perk which causes each bullet to do more damage. This gives him enough for an air strike. As you respawn the world explodes around you as the air strike rains down. This gives him the extra two kills he needs for the chopper. As you respawn again you see the names of your team scroll up on the killed list as the gunship hoses them. You creep down an alley and as you emerge, the chopper appears from over head and kills you again. You take the disk from the tray and trade it in. This is not a worse case scenario, this is can happen with worrying regularity.

Maybe you are thinking that this is just something you need to suck up and with time you will be the one calling in air strikes. This is true and after some persistence the rewards come thick and fast but you will potentially lose a large percentage of your player base after their first game. I am something of an advocate of levelling up systems that reward players with cool shit as I am capable of braving the meat grinder of online shooters to get to the sweet candy centre filled with red dot sights and gun ships. But what of the players entering the world of multiplayer for the first time and are being thrown to the heavily armed wolves with only a burst fire M16?

Videogame designers are almost all universally bad at tutorials and I struggle to think of any recent high profile game with a good tutorial.

Note: I use the word tutorial to describe a sequence of events where the game explicitly describes its mechanics to you. I am not counting the games that just drop you in and tell you to go.

Single player portions of games have yet to find an elegant way of explaining the mechanics of a shooter that uses every button on the pad in multiple ways and multiplayer shooters have yet to really start exploring tutorials. A notable entry into multiplayer tutorials is Team Fortress 2 with the intro movies it plays for each map. However these are often ignored and skipped past. Shadowrun had training missions against bots but just thinking about those actually pains me.

Call of Duty more than any online shooter needs a tutorial as it is deep and complex and draws in players who are experiencing online shooters for the very first time. Who knows, perhaps Modern Warfare 2 has a tutorial system but in the absence of any information, let's consider some potential solutions.

The following all use Call of Duty as an example and presume you have some knowledge of the mechanics present in the game.

Until the player ranks up to level 3:

  1. A simple voice over description of the mode plays during a load screen. A non threatening voice is important so don't make it sound like Marcus Fenix.
  2. Enemies are drawn with a Ghost Recon style diamond around them. Players can get used to the sillouhette of an enemy and recognise the shape of an enemy in prone and also behind cover.
  3. All bullets have exaggerated tracer rounds to show exactly where the bullets are landing.
  4. The radar could display all players at all times.
  5. The game uses an under the hood system to determine if the player is exposed or in cover and displays either a warning message or a supportive message when this happens.
  6. The grenades have a trail attached to them or a marker is displayed in the world to help predict where they will land.
  7. Good firing points are indicated in the world.
  8. Perks are displayed by colourising an enemy when the player is in combat with them to show if they are using Juggernaut etc.
  9. Some kind of dialogue is shown when the player dies to explain what caused their death in simple language.
  10. Surfaces are colourised and maybe labelled to show their resilience to bullet penetration.
  11. A warning indicator shows that they are in the scope of a sniper.
  12. A proximity warning indicates that claymores are near (not their exact lcoation though).
  13. The game detects whenever someone calls you a "fag" and mutes them, filing automatic bad rep.

There are a hundred ways we can ease the transition into multiplayer without achingly boring tutorials. All can be optional and they could even fade away as the player becomes accustomed to them. Many of the above would never work in a single player context as they would smash any kind of fiction you are trying to build but a multiplayer environment allows us to not worry about whether we are colourising walls or drawing boxes round characters for the first few matches.

Due to this being the internet and knowing how people often misinterpret what someone writes, I want to be clear that I am not crapping on Call of Duty. Call of Duty is just a good game to talk about as it is at the fore front of modern shooters and its influence can be felt more and more.

Thanks to Sustainability on the Infinity Ward forums who I stole these images from. His analysis of the trailer is something to behold.

Making Your Game Smell Like a Bakery Revisited

I have been on a bit of a cognitive science and consumer psychology kick with my reading at the moment in order to get out of the habit of reading nothing but game magazines and nerd fiction.

I chose to get into some light psychology about decision making and such like because psychology is often over looked by designers and many games are released where you can tell absolutely no thought has been given to the player’s psychological experience. Granted, principles of psychology and cognitive science are hard to get into a game as it can often produce intangible results when you are focused on hitting milestones.

I do not profess to be an expert or even well read on this subject but something I read in Martin Lyndstrom’s (the world’s leading brand expert and neural marketing evangelist) book, Buy-ology, relates to an aspect of games that is often the poorest part of the game.

Did you know that the so-called ‘new car smell’ comes from an aerosol? Or that the smell of flame grilled burgers in burger restaurants is pumped in through the ventilation system? Supermarkets have taken to placing bakeries near the front of the store because the smell of freshly baked bread makes people hungry and leads them to make impulse purchases above and beyond what they came in for. Some supermarkets that don’t have a bakery pump the smell of a bakery in through the ventilation.

The point is that companies start engineering your experience to be enjoyable as soon as you enter their building or start using their product. Most videogames present several minutes of frustration before you start enjoying the experience.

Contrary to popular opinion the ambiguous term gameplay starts as soon as you put the disk in the tray, not once the first level has loaded. Think about what developers and publishers make you sit through before the proverbial rubber hits the proverbial road and you are blowing heads off dudes. You will be forced to look at (often unskippable) legal screens, company logos and will often have to endure a loading screen FOR THE FRONT END. Once those precious minutes have been lost you will probably find that the main menu is confusing, hard to navigate and unresponsive or uninspiring.

To tackle the first issue, can we developers just admit that 99% of people don’t care who made the game they are playing? They don’t want to see a logo screen and they don’t care which middleware we used. Maybe it is my anger management issues but I am instantly enraged by seeing logo screens and legal text. My rage subsides a little bit if you are allowed to skip these screens but the damage has been done.

We are wrongly taught about the Seven Sins. There aren’t seven, there are eight. Having a loading screen for a menu is the eighth. Menus are not made better by loading 3D graphics or FMV. A good menu is clean, easy to read and navigate and also loads quickly. The player is not impressed by a feast of moving objects on the screen; they are impressed by a menu that lets them efficiently get into a game.

There is no bakery at the front of most games, just a few minutes of annoyances before we are able to play the game. We need to start giving the player enjoyment as soon as they insert the disk and stop irritating them with nonsense. I understand that people think certain messages have to be shown and that developers want to show off their outsourced logo animation but let’s think about the damage that does to the player experience.

Anyone that has played The Darkness will remember the opening level. Starbreeze wanted the game to load the level and start the game immediately if no save was detected, assuming it was the player’s first time playing the game. This opening level is pretty incredible and this would have made the first play of the game much more enjoyable. The ESRB, however, made the developer display the online warning message first and scotched the idea. Why couldn’t that have been shown when the player goes into multiplayer instead?

Why can’t company logos be shown in a more artistic way as well? A better idea than the logos before the main menu is to have them integrated into the opening sequence. The first person execution level in Call of Duty 4 has scrolling credits and the Activision and Infinity Ward logo could easily have been placed as graffiti on the walls that the player character passes by. Perhaps a character can where it on his t shirt? Perhaps it can be on a flag? Perhaps it can just be shown on screen as a credits roll?

There is also a psychological technique known as priming and this is where before someone experiences something they are primed to feel a certain way by the use of suggestive words or images. I recently went to see Derren Brown who is a master of hypnosis and manipulation. The climax of the show (no spoilers, don’t worry) involves the audience as a whole making a choice. This choice had been primed by suggestive words being used throughout the act without us knowing. The ‘trick’ worked flawlessly and everyone was left in awe at what he had manipulated us into doing.

In games there is no positive priming. Before a user starts the experience they must suffer logo screens and legal text and then a loading screen for what is often an unhelpful menu. Instead of taking steps to prime the player positively we give them a group of annoyances that, whilst in the scheme of things are slight, negatively prime the player before they even get to control their character.

By trying techniques influenced by cognitive science we can prime the player before they start level 1 and we can also create the supermarket bakery effect by rethinking what happens the second after the disk tray closes. We have a short amount of time to grab the player’s attention and must do all we can to fully immerse the player in the experience we have worked so hard to craft.

Tuesday 22 September 2009

I'm Reloading, Cover Me.

Warning: this isn't the most reasoned post in the world and isn't a necessarily a well thought out argument. I hope it makes my point though.

I've just put the bow on the ODST campaign (Normal difficulty on solo) and I feel like I can wade into to all the nonsense surrounding the reviews that all the internauts are getting so worked up about.

In summary for those who have not followed the parade of insanity, Halo 3 ODST isn't a valid game/worth the cost because:

  1. It is around 6 hours long.
  2. It doesn't bring much new to the table.
  3. The adversarial mode is just Halo 3.
  4. Looks a little bit rough.
  5. Some other nonsense.

Leaving reviews out of it for the moment, I want to go through the list and talk about why I hate videogame ragenauts on the internet.

It is around 6 hours long

So we're judging art (which games are) based on length are we? You know, the problem I’ve always had with the Mona Lisa is that it only takes me a couple of seconds to look at it. Maybe if someone were to pad it out with more space I might like it more. Or maybe blow it up way big so I can't just walk into a room and see it. Make it so I have to crane my neck and take a few steps back. Maybe you could make it so big that you have to put it on the side of a building and I have to go outside and on to the roof of another building. Basically anything that adds length to the experience as that will be better.

To be blunt, anyone that judges a piece of art based on its length is missing the point.

It might only be 6 hours but what if those 6 hours are the most potent hit you’ve ever taken? Are these people saying that if it was longer and full of filler they’d be happier? Length does not mean better. ODST weighs in at whatever length it takes you to finish it and when I played through it (without counting the hours) it felt like a nice neat package. Small but perfectly formed. Sure, I could have gone for some more but that’s because I could play Halo all day.

If you say that you are only going to play through it once and be done and you feel cheated by that, cool. You are missing out on the coop, the collectibles and the harder difficulties in a game that can happily stand multiple playthroughs but good for you. I know some people don’t play online or have friends but that’s not the game’s fault.

It doesn’t bring much new to the table

Anyone that sits on an internet forum postulating that every game has to innovate needs to look at other entertainment mediums. My integrity as a designer was once called into question by someone who said they feared for the industry because I argued that Call of Duty World at War was still a good game despite not innovating very much. For every game that innovates I am more than happy to have a truck load that don’t because I play a lot of games and sometimes I am super cool with just shooting stuff in the same way people watch episode after episode of the same TV show.

In ODST’s case it may not bring much new to the table but by God does it do things right. I’m going to do a study on the level and combat design of the game soon so I don’t want to spoil that but I will say that Bungie have really honed their craft. Over the years they have experimented and iterated on their combat sandbox and every combat zone in ODST is the best they’ve ever done. The placement of cover, lines of sight to enemies and pick up placement is some of the best to ever grace a videogame. If you don’t like Halo’s combat model then sure, you’re not going to like this but for people that do enjoy Halo, the combat here is some of the most thrilling and fun Bungie have ever done.

I doubt you will ever get the feeling of the Silent Cartographer again but get over it.

The adversarial mode is just Halo 3

Do you ever stop to think about whether something is fun rather than how you can dismiss it in the comments section?

The adversarial may be Halo 3 but it is all of Halo 3. All the DLC is included. If, like me, you have already paid for all the DLC Bungie have put out then you are re-buying stuff but think of it like this: as angry as you are now, think back to all the fun you’ve had over the last two years with it and how it was money well spent. I can’t really offer an amazing argument that will change your mind about re-buying the Halo 3 multiplayer but there are poverty stricken children around the world who would do anything to be in a position to whine about the hardship of having the option to buy a luxury entertainment item. Grow up and get over it.

Yes, I realize the irony.

Halo 3’s versus multiplayer is still awesome and is still the multiplayer destination of choice for a lot of people. Just because it isn’t new, doesn’t mean it detracts from the product.

It looks a little bit rough

Ok, you got me there. The visuals are a bit jaggy and the textures a bit blurry. That being said, I adore the lighting in this game. In places it is literally stunning. It really compliments the art direction of the game and there were times when I just stopped and looked at the vistas. Other times I was having fun actually playing the game and wringing my hands about the fact that it doesn’t do native 720p couldn’t have been further from my mind.

Some other nonsense

This is the bit that really bugs me.

Most internet commenter posters and forum members are close minded and are either trying to look cool online or judge and comment about a game they either haven’t played or that has irked them for some random reason. I have commented before about the bizarre mindset some gamers have where they treat every game as something that has to justify itself to them and if the game doesn’t meet some arbitrary standard they have set they deem it offensive and proceed to tell the world about it as if anyone cares.

Someone once told me that Rainbow Six Vegas 2 isn’t a sequel as it doesn’t use a new engine, it recycles some assets and doesn’t add a whole lot new to the franchise. This is like saying that Episodes 5 and 6 aren’t sequels as they both used cameras, the same actors and some of the same props as Episode 4.

In summary

I realize this isn’t the most reasoned post I have ever done and I’m sure I come off as the ODST Defense Force or whatever but I wish more people would realize that 99% of people buying games are not the people whining about the review score and that these fools didn’t garner so much discussion on podcasts, news sites and blog posts.

It annoys me that at the launch of an excellent game, the discussions I’m having with people are about the comments section in the Edge review rather than how awesome the first time you meet a pair of Hunters is. I was basically asked to defend the game by people that haven’t played it but are aware of the reviews and people’s feelings about said reviews.

I’m not saying the game is without flaws and I am not saying that people shouldn’t be discussing all aspects of the game but I wish all close mindedness and immaturity on display on the internet could suddenly become intelligent discussion. Look at the Dyack/Neogaf debacle where a highly intelligent and interesting developer managed to get dragged into avatar wars with forum trolls and that became a news story that overshadowed the games launch.

We want to know why the ‘mainstream’ doesn’t discuss games intelligently. Perhaps it is because the fans of games can’t do it either. This is a quote from the comments section on the Edge review:

“As I haven't played the game, it's hard to comment accurately. But I must admit that my first response, after reading the text of the review, was absolute shock at the fact that the final score was a 9. The review read like a 7.”

Apparently commenting accurately about a game means debating which random number someone gave it.

Jesus wept.

The wine has worn off now and I don’t know if I have properly made my point so let me leave it at this: instead of judging games against random standards based on outdated preconceptions of what a game should offer for a certain price and how you are offended by stupid things like the time it takes someone that isn’t you to complete the game, how it doesn’t change the world and what number some dude wrote at the end of a block of text, judge a game based on how much fun you’ve had with it. And please stop acting so offended by it on internet forums. There’s a whole world out there to be really offended by and worked up about.

You Make Me Break Out

Time for some super niche game design folks!

I want to talk about the importance of animation breakouts in shooting games as some games still ship without them.

So what is an animation breakout (from now on referred to as an anim breakout)?

Anim breakouts are points in an animation that are flagged to allow the player to trigger the playing of another animation. This might be at set points in the animation or the entire animation might allow this. They are used to allow the player to react to situations in the game and change what their character is doing. Depending at which point the animation is broken out of, the benefit of the animation is still conferred to the player despite the entire animation not playing.

Example:
  1. Let’s say that the reload anim for an assault rifle comprises the following actions:
  2. The player character ejects the clip.
  3. The player character draws a new clip from their body.
  4. The player character puts the new clip in.
  5. The player character cocks the rifle.
  6. The player character returns the gun to normal position.

This animation will only take two or so seconds but in a fast paced shooting game, those two seconds can see you killed if you can’t react in time. If you can’t break out of the animation being played to return fire, throw a grenade or melee kill you will feel cheated and frustrated. For this reason, designers allow you to break out of animations like a reload to respond to the game as it changes states (targets present themselves, you come under attack etc.).

Breakouts also allow for a higher level of play as you can (for want of a better word) combo actions. In Battlefield Bad Company every weapon reload has a cocking animation but counts as fully reloaded as soon as the fresh clip is loaded. The heal animation of plunging a syringe of adrenaline into your chest also has about half a second of animation that is played once the syringe has hit your body and you count as being healed. Thanks to the anim breakouts you can hit reload and as soon as the new clip is in the weapon you have full ammo. You then hit the weapon swap button to bring up your syringe. This cuts the cocking animation short and shaves half a second off the reload time. You hit the use syringe button and as soon as the syringe hits your chest, you are healed. You can then hit the weapon swap button to get back to your assault rifle and cut the syringe anim short, losing another half second. In total you have saved a second from the total anim time and that second can cost you a kill/death/the game.


Many games still don’t ship with anim breakouts and this is one of the many reasons reviewers may refer to controls as being frustrating and clunky. Often titles with anim breakouts have controls that are called tight or responsive when they are being discussed and this can often make or break a title’s success. The simple act of being able to break out of a reload to throw a grenade in Call of Duty elevates the ‘fun’ a player has as the game responds in a way that they want.

When a player picks up a game and starts playing they are immediately given a world of choices and decisions to make. As this world changes with the state change cycle, players want to respond and act with total immediacy. Games that don’t let you break out of animations inhibit the player’s ability to react to new choices and decisions and this lets frustration creep in and the player will complain that the game has bad controls.

Not only is it important to have anim breakouts, it is also important that the purpose of the animation is applied to the player at the appropriate point. In the Battlefield example above, as soon as the player character has fully inserted the clip into the weapon, the weapon counts as being reloaded even though the cocking part of the animation may not have been played as the player has broken out of it. Sometimes games don’t apply the benefit of the action unless the anim has completely played out and once again, this is incredibly frustrating.

I’m sure to many people this article is fairly obvious and elementary but having played a number of games in the past few months that don’t have this basic user functionality in, I wanted to post something about it.

Wednesday 9 September 2009

Box Arts

Here are some more box arts that I like. Come, gather round and Regard Things.

Katamari Forever (European flavour).


WET.


WET as a whole is very stylish and should you play the game/demo, take a moment to appreciate the licensed music in it. You can listen the track from the demo here. It is an unofficial Youtube version and most of the soundtrack appears to be there for good or ill. While searching for the title of the track I wanted in Google, I was surprised to learn that most of the hits for dodgy game OST sharing sites are Russian. I had no idea they are so into game OSTs.