Best Design Practices

Die Hard Minus McClane

{Note: As of this writing, I’ve not yet seen Richard Dansky’s “Hero-Shaped Hole” talk from GDC 2011. I suspect I’m at best clumsily retreading the same material. If you have access to GDC Vault, I highly recommend giving it a look.}

Game writing is weird. Unless you’re lead on a heavily scripted, character-driven single player game, or game where story choices are the primary mechanic, you won’t be writing a story. All books you read on arranging the plot just-so and playing off the protagonist’s conflicts and motivations to create a complete and compelling narrative, they’re all going to lead you astray.

Game writing is all about writing incomplete stories. You’ll write about Nakatomi Plaza. You’ll work with artists to fill its halls with the appropriate décor. You and the designers will figure out that the basement of the building houses millions of dollars. You might be handed the entire terrorist/thief faction and asked to flesh them out, providing them with personalities, hopes, and dreams. And when it comes time for E3, you get to work with the guys at Blur and storyboard out the awesome scene when the bad guys take over the tower and hold the entire Christmas party hostage.

But that’s where it ends. You set all that up, but you’ll have leave the rest of the story just hanging out, waiting for someone else to do all the fun bits. It’s the player’s role to jump off the roof tied to a firehouse. Aside from maybe work with the LD to place the firehouse in the rooftop map, you don’t get do shit with that moment.

Effective game writing—and this includes world building, dialog, scenario building, etc.—revolves around narrative potential. Your blood and sweat is going into making the ultimate funhouse/sandbox/murder-factory possible. But the interesting bit don’t happen until the player makes them happen. You’ll design a world with a hundred Chekhov's rifles, but only the player gets to pull all the triggers. And that’s good.

So if you find yourself writing the next great American video game, remember to let go of the story threads. You’ll go insane, otherwise.

KotOR Replay 02: Burn Their House Down!

The opening section of Old Republic, the Endar Spire, is a fun little NPE. For those of you at home, an NPE is fancy-speak for New Player Experience, which is itself fancy-speak for the tutorial section of your game. For most MMOs, it’s Noob Island. In Half Life, it was the Hazard Course. Oblivion had the escape from the dungeon. Etc. There’s no set way to do an NPE. Many designers even question the need. Thankfully though, market forces are simply making that breed extinct.

So, Endar Spire. To be frank, this part of the game works pretty damn well. Tutorials pop up where they should. Gameplay elements are introduced piecemeal, so I’m not overwhelmed with five new concepts at once. I’m even provided with a friend, Captain Deadsoon, who will explicitly tell me what I need to do in audio, even occasionally breaking the fourth wall when needed to make sure my monkey brain knows what to do.

I dearly wish more games would break the fourth wall in their tutorials. In everything else, by all means try to contextualize. But when a player is just learning the game, for god’s sake, tell them what the hell button to push. You can have the best world build in the world. If the player can’t figure out what button to push to get to the next bit, they will hate your world, your game, and your bloodline for time immemorial. Give them the poop.

Another thing I will note—which is not a complaint—is that Endar Spire follows the Bioware habit of burning down the player’s starting village. The player starts off in what should be a quiet environment, takes two steps, and BAM! OH GOD ALIEN DEVIL BABIES, KILL TO LEARN! KILL TO LEARN! The player learns the ropes during the battle, but at the end of it the village is destroyed and the player has to go off into the wide world for justice.

It’s a damned convenient device. Bioware gets to create one-use content, which means each bit can be custom-tailored to the NPE’s needs. They establish the bad guys quickly and clearly. Who needs to die? The guys who wrecked up your room and killed your buddies. It throws the player into the fray immediately, getting the hole game and story moving quickly. The last point doesn’t quite hold true in Jade Empire, but it’s not coincidence Jade Empire is the Bioware game I have the hardest time starting.

It’s not always an actual village. Sometimes it’s a institution (NWN), sometimes it’s a quiet homefront planet (Mass Effect), and some times it’s actually your damn village (Dragon Age, Dragon Age 2). But every time, the player gets a quick and guided intro to the game’s mechanics, and they get to scream, “YOU KILLED MY MUDDAR! YOU KILLED MY FADDAR!”

Nothing wrong with that.

KotOR Replay 01: Pre-boarding Rant

Start a new game, and first thing that happens is the game throws six doofuses at me. I get the differences between the men and women pretty quick. I got that far through public education. But the classes aren’t very well defined.

Soldier I get. BLAM BLAM HOORAY! Scoundrel is like a Han Solo then, right? Pretty certain there’s no spaceships. Hopefully he gets some sort of bonus to gambling (Note: he doesn’t. Pazaak is equally useless for all classes. But more on that in a future post.). So Scout would then be like…what? Wicket? Is this the forest yiffer hobo class? And where the hell is Jedi? I was promised lightsabers.

I’m being a little abusive here. I know damn well the classes—and most of the character mechanics—are based loosely on the WoTC Star Wars RPG. From what I recall Soldier and Scoundrel made it through pretty straight, and the Scout is a well-abused Fringer.

But jumping in without previous d20 experience? Befuddleville, home of the Bewilderbeasts. Especially going with the advanced character generation route. Getting a mental hold of ability scores and skills and feats is probably the biggest hurdle for anyone thinking of getting into d20 games. It’s  too many axes of weird shit. And the real summbitch? The machine god will not care if I make an inept one-legged goat-woman as my character. Doesn’t matter if it’s been two minutes or two hours, you don’t get a chance to re-roll. Screw up, and it’s back to Endar’s Perpetually Doomed Spire for you.

Luckily, my original play through in ‘03 went well enough, thanks to the old standby of Soldier/Fighter-plus-everything-passive. POW POW ZAP PUNCH JAB. During that game I learned that if I wanted to have real fun in quest lines, I only had to care one skill: Persuade. Everything else I could pretty well drag one of your NPCs around for. Landmines, computers, locks, wine tasting, whatever. The rabble can handle that.

Talking though? It’s all me. I could have had Frederick Douglas and Cicero three inches away, bored out of their skulls, pleading to get involved, and every damn Persuasion check would be through me. But I know how to manipulate most of the Bioware story machines now. Always max out the conversation skill. Oh, and I need to throw some repair in there, too. HK will need that. All told, that makes Scoundrel the big winner here.
Screw you, Scout.

Give Me That Old Time Republic

You know what’s great? Star Wars.

No, it is.

I’m not saying everything with the Star Wars label is good. There’s a lot of crap. The kind of crap that would kill most properties. That’s probably what’s most impressive about Star Wars: the brand can withstand any number of assaults and ill-conceived additions. When someone hits upon another entry that has that Star Wars feel, everything else melts goddamn away. It’s like the Second Coming, but with lightsabers.

For the X-Box generation, Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic is probably the most memorable rejuvenation of Star Wars. Not that it sold as many Burger King cups as the prequels, or clocked as many hours viewed as the Clone Wars cartoons. But goddammit, it gave you a blaster, pointed you at some stormtroopers, and said, “Save the galaxy.” It let us be either Luke or Vader, and drag the Republic along with us.

Here we are some eight years later. There are people who are old enough to walk, talk, and have opinions on the awesomeness of hitting robots with laser swords who were born after KotOR came out. Is sticking it to Darth Malak with your whiney Jedi and homicidal robot still as awesome?

For the next few weeks I’m going to be revisiting the original KotOR to see how it holds up. There’ll be needless cursing, groundless speculation on design decisions, and more than a few minutes worth of me swinging my pen in the air while I make "vrrrrrmm” noises with my mouth.

The Intro Post

Hello, all.

As I'm relaunching this blog, it's best I do the traditional intro post.

I'm Chris Cowger, Content Developer at CCP Games. If you're familiar with EVE Online, you may know me by my dev handle, CCP Big Dumb Object. This blog is not affiliated with CCP Games. All opinions herein are my own. I have to say that so when I say something outlandish and stupid, we all know I'm not dictating company policy.

"Content Developer" is a bit of a catch-all term, almost as widely abused as "Narrative Designer." In my case it tends to cover most any task related to the implementation of game content, including level design, writing, tools stuff, and internal processes.

I'm starting this blog as a way to get shit out of my head and on to some sort of paper, digital or not. Expect a lot of stuff about stories and video games.

And dragons.