Right now we’re working on the different levels or “areas” for Liferaft. We’ve never really done that before, not in this scope, and it’s scary. We fleshed out “level 1″ with a fair amount of detail here but that painted us into a serious corner given that we haven’t used our extremely precious friend-playtest-kleenexes yet. It took a very serious conversation and a bit of collapse on my part to realize we need to scrap that entire level and go back to the drawing board with a different approach. It was difficult, but those are the kinds of moments that we must concede to in order to make the best game we possibly can. It also helps with sanity.

Back at the drawing board Mike pointed to the Valve approach towards level design. It’s hard to argue with Valve when it comes to level design. Essentially they ward against putting in any detail into the level before it’s been well tested thoroughly and gone through whatever incredible gauntlet they have over there. The tough part about that for us though, is the gauntlet. We don’t have a gauntlet to stock with dozens of testers nor the time to build or even manage one. Nonetheless, the nugget we can take away from their process is to simply make quick drafts, undetailed “debug-mode” platforms on a black background. That’s how we’re designing levels now and it’s already starting to be a relief. What was once a gigantic task to create the all of episode 1 bit by bit is now something that we can visualize by playing these “skeleton levels.” Even if they’re bad, it’s still something.

Beyond that, there was also some trouble with the manner in which we thought about the levels.

Mike

Let’s think about levels as structures for gameplay and reduce them down to their core values in order to better teach the player how to play the game. We can’t just expect people to understand everything about our game, we don’t want them not knowing about an ability they could always use only to find out from a friend and have a worse experience.

Greg

Let’s think about levels as a physical structure and a real building. Goss grew up in isolation for decades, let’s make it less like a playground and more like a prison with a flood of new and exciting experiences all at once to drive home that feeling of freedom when she finally breaks out.

So those are basically our thesis statements for the argument and it came down to a matter of stamina really. It was a very hard fought dispute from both sides and in the end I think we made the right decision to go with Mike’s idea of focusing on usability as opposed to drama.

While the graph on the right is more interesting, it doesn’t mean it’s a good starting point. By having a clear-cut stairstepped graph to go from and be confident with we can then have more freedom to make modifications as we edit the levels so that the graph on the left begins to look like the graph on the right. But I guess we’ll have to see. Like I said, we don’t really know what we’re doing.

I guess part of me relies on my art background to rationalize this direction. When drawing it’s always best to start with a loose structural sketch of whatever it is that you want to draw. Using the simplest shapes to organize the form into something that may eventually tell a story is always a great starting point when drawing/painting. Between these two methods proposed above, I think it’s clear now that I have taken a step back that the more organized form would be Mike’s way. Sure it’s less romantic, but there’s nothing romantic about perspective drawings or boxy figures. They’re purely functional, you add the story/drama/detail later. Ok, well there’s something sexy about gesture drawings…

Hmmm, what is the game equivalent of a gesture drawing? Cactus? He is the Zen master.

If you’ve never played it, chances are you take full-speed swings at a few balls on The Range and call it a day. That’s fine, but it doesn’t scratch the surface of golf’s depth. My Dad started teaching me around 7. Learning how to golf that young is quite a feat since golf is so incredibly mental that at a young age results become… sporadic. Without any kind of emotional fortitude, lessons would soon degrade into frustration and whining etc. These lessons were important to me appreciating the game [and building my own character] though, without this basis I would never have grown to a skill level high enough to appreciate the finer and deeper lessons the game had to offer.

Skip ahead a dozen years or so and I’ve grown enough as a human being to understand how to control my mental state. In fact, my particular philosophy on life [Taoism] plays directly into succeeding and enjoying the game of golf. You see, through my whole prior career as a golfer [junior tournaments, high school varsity squad etc.] I never once understood the proper mental frame of mind necessary to be consistent on the course. I remember one tournament I played in I came out of the gates 2 under par on the first three holes at an incredibly difficult course for my age [Eagle Ridge's The General]. I was so excited that I began worrying about losing the streak I had going. I hesitated on my putts and soon that incredible score ballooned to something in the mid to low 80s [well over par for 18 holes]. Not a terrible score for me at the time, but a terrible disappointment for someone watching my first few holes from the gallery.

It has been this journey of learning how to control my behavior, collecting my attitude no matter what the previous shot dealt me, that has been of the utmost importance in golf. As just the slightest bit of mental minutiae can alter the smallest fraction of your swing causing a chaotic chain of events that will ultimately leave the ball in a less than desirable position. That’s where the Tao comes in.

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.

A truly good man does nothing,
Yet leaves nothing undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done.

[...]

Tao Te Ching #38

It’s these words that seem so laughable, such a paradox that why would anyone even attempt to buy whatever this stanza is selling; it’s this that unlocks the secret to controlling your temper on the course. To play golf without a memory of the last shot or the next one. Living in the moment for the sheer enjoyment of being there. To play just to play without caring. Some people have witnessed this, often by accident. Perhaps you have sunk a long distance hook-shot throwing away a crumpled wad of paper without even thinking about it. Then your office mates say “you couldn’t have done that if you tried.”

It’s true. You couldn’t have. Now I’m not going to discount effort here. Effort is huge. You certainly could do better by constantly practicing that shot day-in-day-out but my point here is that at that moment in time, it behooves you not to try.

It’s only when I forget the long checklist for the golf swing that I can be consistent. Analyzing a putt, working it over and then reworking it once I’m over the ball seems like a logical and necessary exhaustive process for making it. But if I do that and then somehow discard all desire to actually make the putt and simply hit the ball, I’ve found I’ll be much happier with the result.

This is just one application of Taoism. In this case its put to golf, and quite effectively in my opinion. While I think the Tao is neat and all that, to me, what’s very interesting about this little tangent is the implication of getting deep meaning and learning long term life lessons from a game. I’ve talked a bit about what football has taught me, and now golf.

I’m not going to cram it all in this post, but I think there’s something here. Maybe it can’t be applied to simulations on a video screen, and if not, then it’s just as important to rule out what can’t make a meaningful video game as it is to point out what can.

More on this later…

Oh yea, back to football. A lot of my friends don’t understand my passion for football [of the American sort]. Some of them watch it, others even follow a team or two, but most care not to “lower themselves” to view such a primitive spectacle. I say that pretentiously here, but I do understand their view. By all rights, football is the war replacement that feeds the public’s need for resolved conflict through some kind of mock-violence. I get it. And I don’t care, because that kind of sociological crap works well on paper, but rarely in practice. Plus, it’s boring and no fun.

Growing up young, I was always pretty athletic, a bit of a natural at a lot of things to do with physical coordination. By the looks of my trophy case, I’m a natural born basketball player, but the reality was, and still is, that I loved football with every bone in my body. I wanted to play. My grandpa was a star quarterback for his high school, even made his high school’s top ten athletes of the century. My dad, also a quarterback for his high school. He taught both my brother and I how to throw a pass. We watched college football players like giants, and their coach a god. Every game I watched either televised or in person was the biggest thrill of the week, and perhaps some of my happiest memories were of large come-from-behind-down-to-the-last-second victories shared with good friends and family.

But that’s not the real reason I love football.

In seventh grade, there was flag football. I was a star. Running the option with our star quarterback, we went undefeated. It wasn’t uncommon for me to have 2-3 touchdowns a game. But then came 8th grade. Pads. Helmets. The whole outfit was cumbersome. I was small, quick and nimble. The once perfect model for a flag football player, now the bottom-of-the-barrel tackle football player. But that was good. That is where my love for football starts.

I had no chance to make the A squad. Since last year, it seemed like all the players were now a full foot taller and I had shrunk. Peering out my helmet, I could barely see past the linemen hunched over the line of scrimmage. So I settled into my spot on the B team. I played defensive back and returned punts for the first half of the season. It was alright, but what I really wanted to do was return to my halfback spot. It was a different animal. The option [pitch pass left or right from a quarterback roll-out] was no longer in our repertoire. We had to hold onto the ball. In practice we ran drills for this kind of thing. Two of our gnarliest linemen would stand on the 2 yard line, stomping their feet in anticipation of the next in line. I wanted it. My heart is racing just thinking about this while I write. The coach handed it off to me out of the blocks and i barreled through them, fighting and pumping my legs, never quitting. I didn’t make it into the endzone, but be damned sure I wanted to.

I did it again. And again. I didn’t stop. I loved the challenge, the odds stacked against me. The coach recognized this and he pointed it out to our A team that practice. My fellow teammates knocked me on the helmet in celebration of my perseverance. That is why I love football. The bonds it can form, the character it builds and the lessons it teaches to those who give in to its greatness. From this one season, I gathered a sense of duty, accountability, work ethic and discipline that I would have had a hard time finding elsewhere. Few other places is this offered than in the competitive war-zone of American football.

Now. If you’re too old to play football, or just not impressionable enough. To understand the beautiful things that this sport can offer, I recommend going out and watching the movie Rudy. It is the only movie that I have ever actually cried at. I’m not trying to be macho here, other movies have choked me up, but Rudy made me weep when I was 11 years old [prime number].

What does this have to do with game design? Have you lost it?

~confused reader

Well no, I haven’t lost it. I was thinking about all this in terms of what it is I want to players to feel/come away with from playing a game. Then I got to thinking about football due to my wounds from a recent game, and thought: “Well, what did I learn from playing football?” Well this is it. But video games these days don’t attempt to instill honor and sacrifice into the latest version of Madden do they? But why not? I’m guessing if people played a game like that, they’d love football quite a bit more and probably would start a petition to ban any and all half-time shows full of glittered bimbos and pop-stars for the sake of the integrity of the sport, but that’s another post…

With the advent of Second Life, various virtual worlds, MMOs and now Spore, it seems like game designers just want to play God. Is it that surprising? In a way, throughout its history, art has attempted to imitate life, or at least its issues. Whether it was the fact that some hunters killed a few bovine grazers that day [cave paintings] or a statement in opposition of war through abstract poetry, art often attempts to have something to do with our lives representational of our issues. Kandinsky or Duchamp don’t seem to have anything to do with imitating life, but they in fact do. Their underlying philosophies in relation to the form of art were certainly within the realm of “life”. Duchamp’s “descending a staircase” has everything to do with the new-found invention of film, and he was responding to that through static imagery, among other things. Kandinksky responded to the picture plane as an image, and not some representational “trick-of-the-eye” portal to another place in time. They were artists for artists, dealing with the issues of art itself.

This has a lot to do with games. Traditional art, photography, literature and film all have their limits, which were met relatively quickly. But games, what’s the limit there? And really, when I write “games” that’s a misnomer, really this involves all interactive experience. Because personally, I don’t consider Second Life a game, nor do I think many of its users. But, frankly, I’m going to continue to use “games” since I don’t think it’ll hurt anyone’s feelings. So since these games are attempting to imitate life more and more, what will really stop them from completely imitating life? All around the world, we’re developing immersive realities, control systems and headsets to try and feed our every input into the game so that we may truly recreate the experience of “life”.

The most interesting games at the forefront of this effort use tools and environments like a blank canvas for players to inhabit. Much like the Christian God created the world for which all things to inhabit. Setting the rules and creating the arena, waiting to see what the folks on his new Earth would do. Well they screwed it up, but if this were actually true and some being did create the world we live in, then wouldn’t games be the ultimate form of art. Art not just imitating life… but creating it.

Maybe gives new meaning to the line:

God created man in his own image.

Genesis 1:27

The remake is flawless, and any additional work that went into it only added to the experience that was Bionic Commando for the NES. NOTE: I may be a bit biased here, since Bionic Commando NES is one of my favorite games of all time, so giving me a super-fun, faithful and semi-nostalgic revitalized experience got all my circuits going. GRIN did an excellent job with the menu system, the execution of the gameplay and the added features of co-op multiplayer, and multiplayer deathmatch.

That all said, I want to touch on the bigger picture here. The title of this post. Why shouldn’t a remake of an awesome game, taking all the fine-tuned gameplay elements verbatim be awesome? The NES version was just as awesome. When remaking a game verbatim, updating it, the only way to go is down. But this is a great case study in what makes games fun.

It isn’t the 3D graphics, the remixed music, the improved interface and usability, or even the added features like challenge rooms or co-op. It’s the core gameplay. The feel of your avatar swinging from the grappling hook, and your ability to control that and own the sprite’s movement on the screen as your own. That’s what the original had, and it’s emulated to perfection in the remake. But why is this lost on so many games today? They’re simply too complicated. The Halo series is a perfect example.

Halo: Combat Evolved.

A perfect example of relatively simple gameplay. Two races of weapons. A single player mode and same-screen/LAN multiplayer. It was obvious that Bungie went to great lengths to fine-tune the feel of the game. Halo was the first FPS to get that right on a controller. Both thumbs attached the player with the avatar’s movement completely. And with only a few options for direct action [grenade, gun, melee, switch] all things were available at all times to the player. This is something hard to explain in words, since the balance is so delicate, it’s a feeling better felt than heard.

Halo 2

Much of Bungie’s effort here was probably centered on the net-code and revitalizing the IP with a new race. The brutes. Enter duel-wielding, swords, completely new weapons almost entirely across the board, and an expansive multiplayer ranking system with gamecast features. The energy was put into the added features, not the core gameplay. But that would have been fine if the gameplay stayed the same. And to the untrained eye, it did. But the feel had been lost. Play felt more frantic and jittery now that there were way more options.

Halo 3

The latest installment. It seems here that Bungie decided that Halo 2 most certainly was better, probably because it sold better. But that’s largely due to artificial features such as the multiplayer architecture, given X-box Live making its way onto the scene, giving players a huge reason to come back day-after-day. Halo 3 added items. And didn’t change much else from Halo 2. Also, notice how the marketing grows more and more fascist and iconic as the series progresses… Ok, that was unfair.

Now this is all well and good. Features are good. They make players happy and keep them around longer, and I’m all for that. But the Halo series is a great example of the core-gameplay, that tiny nugget of immaculate worth, being drown out by easy-to-design features. Super fun games are hard as hell to design, and when we find/develop that, never compromise the fun for anything. It is paramount.

Back to the BC:Rearmed review. There’s only one thing I don’t completely love. The graphics. I know I’m crazy, and I do like the graphics. They are really well done. I just… I dunno, 3D models in a completely 2D game. Kinda weird… But this doesn’t really have any bearing on how awesome the game is in my opinion.

ps. On that note… Diablo III looks awesome. If you don’t think so, then please never come back here again, I don’t want your kind here. I am not one of those, nor will I entertain them at this blog.