11.28.09
Posted in Game Design at 9:48 pm by Christian
There are some video games out there that are trying to push the envelope with regards to using the medium as a storytelling device. Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy) is probably my favorite one of those, and the same developer is currently working on Heavy Rain, which looks very promising. But I think we could do much better than that. If I had millions of dollars in development money, I’d create the following.
Imagine starting up the game for the first time. You begin a New Story. You select two to four genre modules. These are things like horror, noir, sci-fi, crime, drama, and so on. The genres are assigned each to one of the four face buttons of your controller (say, Triangle on your PS4 controller is now assigned the Horror genre). The game opens with your character in his or her apartment. You can create your character’s appearance or have it be randomly generated.
Now, your character has no predetermined abilities; these will only come up in play. If you go straight to the gym, your character will be athletic. If the first thing you do is sit down on the computer, you’ll have some electronics abilities. And so on. But what matters more is that you don’t have a predetermined story yet. You only have your apartment, and other locations (with other characters) are created procedurally only when you visit them.
Here’s the key component of this game: when you want to interact with someone or something, you face it and press one of your face buttons. The button assignments then pick a random result from the genre assigned to them.
What does this mean? It means that if you open a closet with the Horror button, you may find a corpse inside, or a door to a darker dimension. If you pick the action button instead, the closet doors could open to reveal an assortment of weapons. The Noir button is definitely going to give you some voice over, whatever you find. A single push of the button could lead to a no-event or a minor event. A quick double click of the button triggers an important event.
The core system of the game tracks your choices and maps them to certain story structures. If you find a corpse, you can now ask other characters about the deceased or find info on the computer. If you get attacked, you can now find information on the attackers. If you talk to someone, their importance in the game rises, and they are more probably to be introduced by the system in later scenes.
Now, you may wonder how this leads to a story. The trick in the procedures and algorithms is to have certain core things that snap in place and tie things together. If you find several corpses, then at some point the system is going to make a character you’ve encountered the murderer and trigger a final confrontation scene, which includes a flashback showing that character killing the victims. If you’ve found a secret conspiracy, at some point people will come after you, and the system will make a character ultimately responsible and allow you to figure out through research, conversation, or other methods who it is. I’m actually thinking that a few modules would exist that have pretty specific outlines, and that the roles in those outlines are filled by the characters you encounter. Future updates to the game add more events and more story modules, for a greater variety of possible stories.
Sure, the resulting story might not always make perfect sense; it will require a certain amount of interpretation on behalf of the player to work through it. But it won’t be worse than any given Metal Gear Solid plot!
What fascinates me about this idea is the pure sandbox aspect combined with a story structure engine. You can make your own Horror Noir story. You can pace it the way you want to. You can decide that right now is the time to be attacked or to find that special clue, while right after your character takes a breather and has an introspective scene.
Is it possible? Maybe. But sadly, I doubt anyone would ever risk much money on such a far-out idea.
Could I or someone else design something like this as a face-to-face RPG, maybe a collaborative GM-less game with the mechanics taking over the procedural parts? Now that’s a far more interesting (and unanswered) question… 
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11.23.09
Posted in Anima Prime, Game Design at 11:19 pm by Christian
I am sooo close to finishing up the text for Anima Prime, finally. The part that’s taken me the longest is the setting. I’ve decided to flesh out Ghostfield to a degree that players will actually have enough variety from which to create their unique characters and stories.
If you know me and my games, you know that I have an affinity for tribal groups. I think tribes get a raw deal in many fantasy settings. Most often, the humans are civilized and urban and the evil monsters — orcs, goblins, and so on — get to be tribal. That’s sucky. On the other hand, I know that “tribes as benevolent keepers of nature” is just as much of a stereotype. So I try to make tribal society an equal alternative to, say, mercantile or feudal society: different, but not inherently better or worse.
One thing you may not know is that I actually base the tribes in my games on Germanic tribes. I think many people see Beast Hunters and think of Native American or maybe African tribes. But my inspiration lies in my own culture’s ancestry (and Angga’s illustration of the riding warrior that I posted before). So here’s the section I wrote for Anima Prime, not yet edited, but good enough to give you an idea of where I’m going with this part of the setting. I’m going for “short but evocative” here.
The Northern Tribes
The northern part of Enendia, spanning about one third of the land that’s free from Kanissian occupation, is ruled by three major tribes. These tribes have a long history of conflict with each other as well as the surrounding areas, and tales of their raiding parties are told to scare small children around Enendia and beyond.
The tribes believe that the Gods live in the clouds, and that we can feel their presence when the wind blows. Thus, when the air is still, the Gods are assumed to be casting their glance elsewhere. This leads the tribes to stop all of their activities when there is no wind, for fear that their Gods would not be able to bless and aid them. They also conduct all important matters out in the open and have a strong distrust of closed buildings, which keep the Gods shut out. Anyone who wants to make dealings with the tribes (and survive) needs to remember never to invite them into any kind of enclosed area, or the tribes will feel that they are being tricked or corrupted.
The tribes have no name for themselves; they simply use “we” when they talk about tribe members, their clan, or whole tribes. Most of them are born into their tribe, but outsiders willing enough to dedicate themselves to a clan or tribe can be accepted through the assent of the community. When tribe members die, they are burned, and their essence rises up with the smoke to join the Gods among the clouds.
Two of the tribes are still nomadic, and both of them tame horses for their warriors, hunters, and scouts. They are the ones who adhere to the old ways, while the third tribe has settled down at the southwestern edge of their territory and established more permanent trade relations with the remainder of Enendia (though all of their tents and buildings are always open in respect of the Gods).
The nomadic tribes have a custom that makes their members—all of them considered warriors—recognizable to anyone who’s heard of them. When a tribal child is ready, which it determines on its own, it undergoes this ritual. The child (or young adult) holds an overripe sunfruit in its hand. The left hand is customary for one of the tribes, while the other tribe uses the right hand. A tribal elder now presses the glowing-hot tip of a knife upon the child’s shoulder and very slowly runs it down the arm while the remainder of the gathered tribe members chant praises to the Gods. The ritual ends when the child either drops or squishes the extremely soft sunfruit, and the length of the scar forever indicates the Gods’ blessing upon the scarred. Only very few tribe members can proudly display a scar that reaches all the way down to the back of their hand, and they are often chosen as leaders of clans within the tribe.
There is a legend among the tribes of The Twice Scarred, a warrior who bore full-length scars of both tribes and who led them to victory in times when all of the tribes were in dire peril. The elders say that one day, The Twice Scarred will return to once again unite the tribes in their darkest days.
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11.05.09
Posted in Gameplay at 10:37 pm by Christian
Just a quick little thought that’s been on my mind. I’ve been going over Jonathan Walton’s gamma draft of Geiger Counter on Google Wave, and the character creation part stuck with me for a while. I think there’s an opportunity in that game and in ones similar to it to make neat characters with just a very simple technique.
See, Geiger Counter asks you to make characters according to archetypes. That fits with the horror movie inspiration. I think that what sets good characters apart from bad characters, in horror flicks and other B-movies, is that there’s something about them that breaks the archetype. So you have enough of a template to immediately recognize the character and know what their part is (which is good for horror movies), but you also get treated to at least some variation from the cliche.
In a game sense, you could quickly make up a character’s personality (or role, or whatever) by picking Type and Break. So you’d have Type: Librarian, Break: Boxing Aficionado. Or Type: Hardened Cop, Break: Crossdresser (sound familiar?). Or Type: Prissy Princess, Break: Grease Monkey.
I think gender and other role reversals provided easy breaks here in the past. Type: Asskicker, Break: Female was popular there for a while (see James Cameron’s work), until it became its own type (Female Asskicker). And then you’ve got to find a new break.
What do you think? Have any favorite type/break combos, new or from movies?
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