Control scheme experiments...

When I started making City, I wanted to do things differently. I had made a whole bunch of games where the control method was "Left click uses/talks/walks, right click looks" - a comfortable, effective control scheme that is very common for modern adventure games. However, I thought I should try to experiment. I had made a couple of short experimental games without inventory or right clicking for their puzzles (Heed and !) and I wanted to try to expand on the idea of having only a single mouse button with which to interact with the world, while still keeping inventory items.

My reasoning was this: For items that players can use, I always write a boring "It's a door" description for the look function, and for items that they can't it's always a detailed description of that thing with a "I can't pick that up" response for the left click. My idea was that I could get rid of the boring descriptions for the things that you can use, and remove the standard "Can't do anything with that" responses for the things that you can't. I would eliminate all pointless feedback - after all, I can *see* that it's a door. I don't need the player to say that aloud, it adds nothing to the game at all.

To counter the fact that some things I wanted to have both responses for, I developed a multi-purpose card that would unlock doors, allow you to buy things and the like. It almost became a sort of additional verb, albeit one that was stored in the inventory and only usable in a few spots.

The problem, however, was that every time you wanted to make a call now, or open a door, you had to mouse up to the inventory, click, mouse back down to the hotspot and then click again. This doesn't sound like much, but doubling the amount of clicks needed for simple, common interactions is pointless. I wanted to keep the look response, and yet I wanted players to be able to do these things (after the first time) with a single click. It simply wasn't working in a way that wasn't frustrating.

Another thing that made me realize the unsuitability of this type of interface for a game where I am trying to put in as much detail as possible was that, in order to have items in my game, I either need to make them automatically used by a player once they have them (not an option I was happy with in this case, though I've used it before), have a hotspot you can mouse over/click to clear the currently selected item (I've put this in an interface as an additional method, but don't think it is intuitive/simple enough to use as a primary one) or, the old standard, use right clicks to clear inventory items back to the standard cursor.

This meant that, although I'd removed right clicks from one part of the game, I still had to have them for this part, meaning that players still had to use the right mouse button. I hadn't actually streamlined my interface... I'd merely made it less consistent with itself and more frustrating.

And so, I went back and put in the right mouse button as the look button, and reworked the whole lot. To counter my initial issue of bland, meaningless feedback for various things, I'm doing my best to write more interesting descriptions for unused functions. It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than having a frustrating interface.

I've experimented with a few different interfaces in my time - selecting specific actions from a list when you click something, using a verbcoin, single mouse button without inventory items - and I still find the "left click does things, right click makes the character comment on them" one the easiest to design around.

I still plan to keep experimenting with them, but for now, this works fine.

Colours of the World

When I first started working on City, I had been playing quite a bit of Metroid Prime, and one of the things I wanted to use was an idea that was directly inspired by such action based games. In a lot of platformers and the like, each world is presented with a unique colour scheme which, aside from giving each world their own theme, also helps to break up the monotony that comes with 2d side scrolling graphics.

As you can see above, I planned to give each of my different areas a different colour scheme. The style I created for the graphics is an extremely simple one in terms of colour palette - I use a single base colour (dark purple) to start with, then work with 2 different highlight colours to paint the scene. It's a 3 colour palette, blended together to create the scene. This still allows plenty of opportunity for different ambient and focal lights, while allowing me to keep the scenes of each area looking very consistent.

When I went back to look at the game after over half a year, however, the first thing that I decided needed to go was this idea, and for several reasons. Firstly, it's hard to get a colour palette balanced just right, especially if you're trying to match it with older scenes. That means that I was spending ages each time I wanted to sketch out a new area just to get the colours right.

Secondly, I based my user interface graphics around the colour palette from the first area. This means that it looks great and matches everything in that area, but as soon as you go to the next area it looks quite out of place. Having an interface that matches the rest of the game stylistically is important, and so this was an issue for me.

The final problem was that it didn't feel exactly like going to a part of the same city, and I really want to keep a consistent feel between areas. There will be a bunch of different areas, but I very much want them all to feel like a part of the whole city.

This means that I'm back to painting backgrounds with a mere 3 colours. I still feel that there is plenty of potential for variety in the scenes - how successful I am with this remains to be seen.

To Hide or Reveal?

As I receive testing feedback from players and start putting together the first parts of the next part of City (the second part, seeing as I have completely ditched what existed as the second part earlier), I start to get the opinion that I have absolutely no clue at all how exactly to build what it is I am trying to build.

Initially the game existed as a linear adventure game with lots of bonus stuff to do just for fun, but the more I've worked on it, the more I've given these bonus things *effect* in the game world, and what once existed as strange easter eggs for the player to find now have real gameplay and story consequences.

But then I realized how well some of these things are hidden, and I realized that some really major subplot stuff depends on players following some pretty well hidden clues.

Now, I love putting little easter egg jokes in games. Absolutely adore it. Nothing pleases me more than somebody saying in a comment or an email that they noticed a little joke I've hidden in the game and knew what it meant. There are some jokes in my games that I doubt a single person has actually found yet, and some that I completely forget about until someone tells me they found it.

But the things in City are no longer just little jokes to make you smile. There are actual *reasons* for these things now, aside from a little wink to the player. And I worry that I've hidden them too well.

Test reports have been interesting so far. It's fun to see someone's reaction when they try something and find a secret and let me know about it - it makes it feel like it's actually worth putting these things in the game. But I think, going forward, rather than making one main path with a bunch of hidden stuff, I'm going to focus less on hiding things and more on simply making more choice for the player. A lot of the choice stuff I've added in so far happens quite subtly and so you may not even realize that an element was triggered by your actions, which I think is in some ways a good thing and in some ways a bad thing. I want players to be aware that the things they do in this world have consequence, but at the same time I want it to feel as organic as possible.

In any case, this morning I added another subtle hint to a thing that provides hard to discover hints for two more things in the demo, one of which makes you a bit of extra cash and one of which (if you make a certain choice) could lead to you changing a character's life later on in the game.

And to think this was originally just a way to hide a fun animation in the game. The possibilities here for additional content are beginning to overwhelm me, and as daunting a prospect as this all is, it's also very exciting.

Once again I find myself with the feeling that I'm not trying to just build a game anymore, but a whole world of which you are allowed to see and influence a part of. That's a very powerful feeling, and one that fills my mind with concepts that I want to try.

Anyway, enough of my rambling, it's time to get back to painting. This world won't build itself, and I have so very much of it I want to let you experience.

Options!

When I first started making City, it was an adventure game. As an adventure game, one expects to get stuck at certain points on puzzles, but the way City is going I really want to make such things optional for players who *like* solving puzzles, rather than a necessity to play the game.

One part of the demo has really been bothering me lately. Everyone who seems to play it gets a bit stuck on this part, and if I was making an adventure game that's fine. I'd usually just adjust what the characters say to give the players a better hint at what to do. In fact, I nearly did that here, too.

But then I remembered, I'm not making a normal adventure game anymore. I want City to be different, to give you choices. So today I am putting in a second path, involving two elements, to beat the demo's obstacle. Where once there were two steps you had to take, you can now choose between two different options for the first step, and two different options for the second step. I plan to adjust them slightly so the less obvious one is slightly more rewarding, but in effect both allow you to finish the demo.

The point of doing all this when I could have solved it just as easily by making one of the characters give you a hint? I want to try and adjust the demo slightly to better fit with the concept I have for the rest of the game. I've been worried that the demo is now too linear, and this removes some of that worry from my mind.

Anyway, time to go for an early morning walk and then go and build my ideas into the game. Release something has now been going for over a week and the thread is full of amazing stuff, so if you haven't checked it out, do so, and maybe even release something of your own. There's also now a release something themed Sprite Jam that even has an awesome City themed entry! What with this and the swarm development activity it's a super exciting time over at the AGS forums, and there's something for pretty much everyone to join in on!

Money?

As I fill City's demo up with the final few touches before sending it off to a couple of testers, there's still an element that I have some uncertainty about.

In it's current form, the game feels to me like a sort of RPG without combat and stats, and while it has puzzles, I'd like to think it will eventually turn into a point and click game where most of the puzzles are optional.

This may leave one wondering about where the gameplay is. My plan is to have you fill the role of a newspaper journalist, who visits certain locations in the city and uncovers little stories to write about. I want to have it so that you may go to an area with perhaps 15 stories, but only really need to find out write about any 5 of them to continue the game further. Most of these will be small self contained stories, like sidequests in an RPG, but I am also deciding how I want to work it in so that some of the stories fit with a major story arc that runs as the game's main plot.

The thing that makes me uncertain now is whether I should implement a form of currency into the game and use it as a play mechanic. I've already had prompts asking you to confirm whether you really want to use your Omnicard (identification, keycard and account access in one card) when you go to use it on things that cost money - such as making a telephone call or buying a soda, and it's something that has been on my mind since I first started working on the game.

Rather than have all the items as one does in a point and click game, I want to have things that you can buy whenever you wish. Upgrades to your character (via "Neuro-Apps" - software that interfaces directly with the brain), items that you can use in the game world to help you in various ways, telephone calls to gain more information on something... I even really like the idea of being able to bribe characters.

Let's say you have a bouncer outside a nightclub and you wish to get in, but he refuses to allow it. Imagine if you could sneak around the back and break in through a window (dealing with certain consequences as a result), or do something for the guard to prove your worth (typical adventure game style) or simply spend some of the money that you've earned on bribing him. If you spend the money, you may not be able to get that neuro-app you wanted but you will then gain access to the club, which has more information to collect, perhaps unique items to buy/find...

It also allows for other similar choices - perhaps a store is selling something you want to buy, but it's very expensive. You could help the seller out with a problem of his and receive a discount on the item - effectively it's another job that earns you money, but in this case the choice of whether to do it is presented under a different guise, and rather than earning you money in general, it saves you money on one specific thing.

There are two problems I've foreseen with this so far. The first was "What if you run out of money and can't ride the train anywhere?" The two most satisfactory conclusions I came to was either 1. That's it, game over, sorry or 2. Make it so you don't need to pay to ride the train (I've invented a story relevant reason). I came up with other options as well; a friend showing up to help you out with a free train ticket (felt too... easy, I guess) and having a way for players to *always* make money in each location (felt too hard to implement), but so far I think I'm sticking with having a story reason for why train tickets don't cost money.

The other, and this is something I discussed in brief with qptain_Nemo, was... is money in this sort of game fun? Does it really add to the gameplay, or is it just another annoying thing you need to keep tabs on?

The more I think about it, the more hopeful I am that money can add another level of depth to the game, and not just depth, but another level of gameplay choice. To me, that sounds... if not fun, at least satisfying, for that's what I'm really aiming at. If I wanted games that were purely fun I'd be focusing on building reflex testing games - I'm aiming for something less compelling in that sense and more compelling in a story and interactivity sense, I guess.

For the moment, I guess I'll try working money into the demo and see how it goes. If it doesn't work, I doubt it'll be too much effort to strip it back out. I'm still not convinced of which way to go, but trying it out sounds like a good way to find out.

As ever, any feedback on the issue would be appreciated! I'm totally new to game design ideas like this, and the concept of focusing on gameplay that isn't just puzzles is not just fresh and exciting, but also a little daunting with the amount of scope that I can see in it.

Time to make a cup of tea and get back to coding and animation, anyway!

Response

Quick note: This contains spoilers for an unreleased game project of mine. If you want to avoid minor spoilers, probably best to skip this for now.

A week or two ago, I spent a bit of time sketching out a 640x480 res scene as part of my weekend drawing practice. It was a snowy scene with a young lady at a train station, the train pulled up because of the snow on the tracks. I went to bed after painting the scene up, but as I was lying in bed I thought "Wouldn't it be fun to write code for leaving footprints in the snow?". I knew Infinity String had footprints for its snow (and beautiful graphics in general, really), and I knew how I'd do it, and thus I found myself coding footprints in snow at 4am in my underpants.

I ended up with something a little bit like this, if you're interested. (although the original walkcycle was much worse, and it took some patience and a decent dose of Muybridge to get it looking like that).

That's not what I'm really interested in discussing here, though. The really interesting part, for me, was when I sent it off to a few friends to have a look at. There were some compliments on the graphics, some jokes about the awful walkcycle but, what I noticed the most, was that everyone I sent it to spent time just walking around leaving footprints in the snow. I'd send it off to them, they'd give me a "hey, that's kinda neat" comment, and then there'd be 5 minutes of waiting for another response while they filled the walkable area up with footprints.

I got into discussion with another AGS member, uoou, about this on Skype. We came to the conclusion that there is something inherently satisfying about being able to leave your mark on a world. It helps the world feel alive, make it feel real. A more reactionary world is a more interesting world because we find ourselves compelled to see how it will react to us.

When I started building City, one of my biggest influences at the time was, believe it or not, Lego kits. When you get a Lego kit as a kid (or, in my case, in my twenties :D) building is only half of the fun. The other fun comes from actually playing with the Lego, and I noticed that the more moving parts and special functions a kit has, the more fun one can have with it. A space ship that splits up into 3 seperate space ships, carries a vehicle inside it, has an alien prison capsule and has a spring loaded missile is more fun to play with than, say, a spaceship that you simply build and fly around making the appropriate noises.

I wanted to build a world that had moving parts, hidden things, exciting secrets to discover. To that end, I've almost abandoned traditional adventure game ideals in my concept of how the game should be designed. Rather than having a set, specific list of tasks that must be completed, I want to have a broader array of things to be done, most of which are optional. The demo I am working on is still very much based in adventure game format, but beyond this point I'd like to have the game broaden out more into a city in which various things can be done, the majority of which are non-critical for game advancement.



Probably the strongest example of how I am trying to accomplish this in City so far is the graffiti I am working on building into the game. In one location in the demo, you can find a can of spraypaint. If there are no other people visible on this screen, I want to make it so that you can tag various objects with the can, leaving much of Specular Street (the street the demo takes place on) covered in graffiti. In one location, as you can see by the screenshot above, you can even write your own tag. This is a gimmick, to be sure, but there's something - to me - that is quite satisfying about writing a little note from myself and leaving it in a game world.

But, I don't want it to end there. There's a news terminal in the demo that has a few news stories for you to read. What I plan to try and do is have a new news story appear on the terminal if you tag a certain amount of objects, reporting on the fact that vandals have run loose on Specular Street, covering it in graffiti. You will also have the ability to clean the graffiti you've done off, with the right items - and if you have done enough graffiti to get this news story, then clean enough of it up, I want a new story on the terminal about how citizens are fighting back against the graffiti, and how they're taking the matter of keeping the streets clean into their own hands.

It's cheesy, gimmicky and kinda easter egg-ish, and doesn't affect your ability to finish the demo in any way whatsoever. What I do want it to do, though, is to affect how certain NPCs react in other areas of the game. Let's say you put lots of graffiti on the walls - the next time you come back, there could be a police officer in the area that otherwise wouldn't have been there, keeping an eye out for vandals. Perhaps if you clean the graffiti off and trigger that second news story instead, there will be a tagger out, fighting back against the "concerned citizens" and sticking it to the man, or a concerned citizen who has shown up to join the fight and clean up graffiti.

It's ideas like this that excite me in game design. Rather than hiding something and when we find it having the game tell us "Achievement Unlocked" or "Trophy Earned", why not change the world a little to reflect our actions?

To be honest, I don't know how sustainable this philosophy is in terms of making a larger scope game. It's obviously going to be a lot of extra effort than simply having a set path of puzzles like I usually make. For the scope of a demo, at least, it's very satisfying to build a game like this, and if it works, I'd love to try and expand it into a larger world than 5 little scenes.

Anyway, I've got graffiti to go and put into my game, and I've wasted enough time here. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the concepts, of course, so please do leave comments!

City

Last November I posted a screenshot of a game I'd been working on for a while under a blog post called Exploring. I'd been working on it for a while, at that point, slowly adding things to it, but it wasn't long after that the project kinda died, as projects sometimes do.

Recently, however, with the release something activity going on over on the AGS boards, I thought I'd go back and polish up the first 5 rooms and release it as a demo of what I had envisioned. I'd always sort of considered it a rainy day project in my brain, and what better time to work on an old rainy day project than for a release something?

Thus, I went back and dug up the old files. Checking the very first scene I built for the game, when I was just starting off, I noticed that the day I started working on City was *exactly* one year from the day I started the Release Something thread, and thus thinking about working on it again, to the very day. With that delightful piece of synchronicity in mind, let me tell you a little about City.

The game started as a setting mish-mashed from a bunch of games whose worlds I loved. Deus Ex, and more so the sequel, Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Messiah, even Metroid Prime to some extent, as well as tiny touches of Planescape: Torment. Though I've only played a bit of it, I'll throw Anachronox in there because the demo of that was an *enormous* influence on me as a young gamer, and I do mean to go back and complete it some day (along with Omikron, the only other game in that list that I've yet to play through).

What I wanted to do was to build a cyberpunk style city that still felt relevant to present day cities. I wanted to make it kinda mysterious, inviting to explore whilst still a little intimidating and strange. One of the major things I wanted to also do was to add lots of optional interactivity to the game, to give greater freedom to the player, and also to be a little bit more fun.

So, as I returned to the build of the game I had sitting on my hard drive, I had all these memories of the exciting concepts and philosophies in my mind... and how disappointed I was.

I got annoyed at the way the main character spoke. I got annoyed at the graphics, at the walkcycle (I spent a full day a week or so ago re-learning how to animate walkcycles, mind you), I was frustrated by the plot which felt shoehorned in because, hey, games need to have plots, right? The dialogues were tedious, uninspired and left me feeling that my game had been turned from a point and click exploration game into some cheap adventure game with a couple of extra gimmicks. Even the control scheme annoyed me. If the actual way you play a game annoys you, how is anything beyond this most basic element supposed to be fun?

And so, I went and I dug in the code. I've been touching up graphics, adding animations, bumping the contrast (I painted these scenes originally on a very poorly balanced screen). I deleted the second part. It felt like it didn't fit, and while I like a few elements, the whole of it didn't impress me at all. I had 17 backgrounds sketched out for the game... 12 of these I now consider unusable. I'm peeling back the fluff, the stuff that I feel is tacked on and taking the game back to how I originally envisioned it.

The plot? Gone. I don't even really know what the current plot is, actually, but the one I had before didn't fit the characters I wanted to create, so it's gone. I have a rough idea of how I can incorporate elements from the original storyline, but for the purposes of the demo, a small introduction, I am satisfied with killing the "complex" (cheesy, bland, uninspired) plot I had and sticking to basics. There's enough story to get you playing, but from then it's more character based that over-arching storytelling for the moment.

I've fixed most of the interface issues that bothered me, although I've still quite a bit of work to do there.

Most importantly of all, to me, I've gone back to trying to make a world that reacts to you as a player. There's more stuff to do, more stuff to find in this small 5 room demo than other games I've worked on. I have doubts that some of the things will actually be found by anyone, but I always get surprised at who notices what in my games. There are puzzles, and there is an end to the demo, but I hope that people won't stick to linearly trying to solve the puzzles. I want to go back to what made adventure games fun for me as a kid, which wasn't solving obtuse puzzles. It was interacting with a world, and seeing interesting things happen as a result.

I don't know if this will make for a fun, satisfying game. I don't know if I will have the energy to expand the game beyond a 5 room demo. But I am *excited* about this, it's reinspired me in a big way. After releasing ~airwave~ - I Fought the Law and the Law One I needed a break, and focused mainly on working on Blackwell Deception and a little bit of tinkering here and there on the second episode of ~airwave~. <3 was built on a whim, and started 2 weeks into the mags month, which is a foolish time to start working on a game, but somehow we built a game before the month was out. After spending a week or two doing Blackwell stuff (not much to do now!) and being a little uninspired in general, it's great to be back working on stuff that feels exciting and inventive.

The release something deadline is the 10th of July, so between then and now sometime, I expect to release a 5 room demo of City. It'll be something of a re-imagining whilst keeping the major things that I wanted it to be. After that, who knows? I don't know if I could ever sustain the energy needed to build a full city with the level of detail that I am trying to fill these 5 scenes with, and I have other projects I want to work on too. I hope you'll try the demo, anyway, and would love to hear some feedback.

I'll let you know when it's ready.

Release Something!

We're having a Release Something over on the AGS Forums!

If you're an AGS dev and you have some old dusty screenshots, animations, tech demos, prototypes, modules, music, demos.... even that old game that is *this* close to completion but you haven't bothered finishing up yet, head on down to see what other AGSers are showing and get inspired!

Deadline is july 10th - and I'm definitely working on polishing up an oldish demo of my own for show!