So, just how am I going to create this game world? In a programming and design sense?
Programming
1. Randomly generated levels
Eager to remove as much labour from this development as possible, I took a look at this. See the game Spelunky for a brilliant example of this done well. Of course many other games have randomly generated content for dungeons or their entire world, so it's definitely possible. However my aims are quite simple, and I'm an average programmer at best, so although the thought entertains me I won't be going down this route. Seriously, my head would explode just thinkign about how to accomplish this 
2. Fixed levels
Seeing as working out how to do random level generation would require more work than it would likely solve, I decided to go with fixed levels. It allows me to create puzzles and platforming areas with care to pacing and gradually increasing difficulty as the story progresses.
Design
OK, so how do these levels actually exist in the game world? And how many are there?
I originally envisioned the base sitting dead centre of a grid, Doing some brief calculations a 7×7 grid would give 49 levels – almost 50 (!) but a lot of work for me. A 5×5 grid would only give 25 levels however, and would feel quite small. So I settled on a 6×6 grid, with the base offset slightly. This gives me 36 levels which feels manageable and is enough to hold all the collectable 'artefacts the player will need to gather.
When placing these in the game world, my first thought was that each would be sat in a specific grid location, waiting for the player to uncover them. But then I came across the following question…
So how does the player progress in the game?
Well in the current design they have the choice to scan any grid zone in any order (as long as it's connected to the last one) and then pick one of those for drilling. This causes one big problem for a 'fixed levels' design in that I want a narrative! If the player can choose where to dig, they can choose to miss carefully placed, important levels and will get the narrative in the wrong order.
SOLUTIONS:
1. I could make the narrative non-linear, and instead have it in individual 'parcels' of narrative that the player can pick up as and when they find them. Each can be taken on it's own in any order and the player can still work out what is going on.
2. The player can't drill wherever they want. There is a fixed path. I don't like this – one of the main themes of the game is exploration. Therefore, removing elements of exploration are a no-no.
3. The player has the freedom to choose to drill wherever they want, HOWEVER narrative-critical levels will always appear after a set amount of levels have passed. For example the first grid zone they dig is always the 'discover first artefact' level, whichever grid zone they choose. The next two levels they choose are then non-narrative critical ones picked from a pool, until the fourth one which is another set level. This give the player the sense of exploration AND gives me control of the pacing of the story.
I've decided to go with 3 as it's a nice compromise and should be fairly easy to implement.
NEXT TIME: Drilling logic – how it actually works!
I mentioned in my last post that I had a flood of ideas. Lots of “cool stuff” that could go in. However all this detail was starting to become far too unwieldy, not to mention greatly increasing the potential development time with each new idea. This game was only intended to be a small, easy to make game. Nothing hugely detailed and most importantly something I could actually complete and release. It's all very well having loads of great ideas, but if you never actually finish anything they are as useless as a salt sandwich in the desert.
So, time to take a step back and analyse what I'd come up with so far. I had to decided what was essential to the game I was trying to make and what was just 'chrome'. When I considered all the ideas I had for functionality it sounded like two games being crammed into one:
1. A “sim” style game, where the main goal is collecting ore and maintaining the base and equipment to gather as much as possible before your time on the planet was over.
2. A story/exploration game where the main goal is to uncover artefacts.
Now if you add too much of 2 to 1, you lose the simple purity of the sim and create a distraction from the core mechanics. If you had to add some, it would have to be done subtley. If you added too much of 1 to 2, then it would overcomplicate things and could bore the player who just wanted to get on with the 'proper' exploring.
- Sim or Exploration
I really had to tie this one down now, as each different type of game would require a vastly different approach and different mechanics. My own personal preference is for story, or at least an engaging narrative of some kind. A sim could be entertaining though, but adding a story to that would create too much work for me. “Keep it simple stupid!” So I did – I decided to go for the exploration game, which kept the game to just drilling and platforming mechanics, which by themselves were going to be more than enough work to create.
- So far I had four main parts of the game:
1. The Base (computer, gathered artefacts. transport)
2. Driving the transport across the surface to the driling zone
2. Drilling
3. Platforming in caverns.
Now the Base is useful for both a sim or story game – it acts as the player's home, a safe place. So I reckoned I would prefer to keep this. I would have to make it simple though, and use the platforming mechanics for it. If push came to shove however, I could still ditch it and just have an overhead map of the drilling grid, although I feel this would lose a lot of the personality of the game.
The driving section, in reflection, has little point to it at all. I just thought it would be cool to drive a bouncy physics buggy around, while tying the base and drilling sections together. However, for very little gain it would be a hell of a lot of work, so CUT!!
The drilling section is the core concept of the game, so it stays, but I will have to narrow down it's own content further (see below).
The platforming section was thrown in at the last moment, but would definitely be needed to go down the story/exploration route. It also enhances the drilling section giving the player multiple ways to enter a cavern, makes them seek out new chambers etc. It also ties in nicely with the Base as it uses the same game mechanics.
- Drilling: Collapsing tunnels
After some thought I decided to cut this. I tried to work out how it could work – maybe if the player drilled around and left single tiles by themselves, they could collapse, or there could be periodic planetquakes that would dislodge tiles with three or more other tiles drilled around them. In the end I decided that both the logic required to make sure the player drill never ended up inside a self-made chamber and that required to 'find' loose tiles and move them around was going to be too much work for little gain. Also it would be a logical nightmare if I suddenly collapsed a route a player had taken through a puzzle, and meant they could no longer get back to the surfact because doing so would mean having to create a 2×2 chamber. Yep, CUT!!
- Drilling: Collecting ore
This was originally going to be the main point of the drilling, as per other drilling/mining games out there. However, as the artefact collection and platforming elements came to the fore this became less and less important. Let's face it, if you were drilling for ore and started to discover alien ruins and strange artefacts below your feet, you'd quickly forget about rock processing! So, this was CUT!!
There were also lots of other little decisions about things to keep or drop, but the above were the main ones. These decisions are crucial to make early on so that you have a clear idea of where you are going and what you need to do, but also to avoid feature creep towards the end.
I am now certain about what type of game I want to make. Excellent 
NEXT TIME: How to make it!
Once I had decided on the basic idea for the game, I needed to think harder about the actual game mechanics. I focussed on the drilling aspect first of all:
Scanning
- The player would have 'turns' where they pre-program a scanning machine to go out and do a general scan of a few grid zones. At the start of each day, the player would then choose which zone looked the most promising and drill that one.
- The player would be limited to scanning a few zones each turn – otherwise having the entire playing field scanned early in the game would give the player too much choice and confuse them as to what they should be doing next.
Getting to drill site
- Once a drilling zone is chosen the player is then transported to, or drives out to the location of interest.
- When driving they must navigate there, avoiding obstacles such as gaps and rocks and maybe have to use explosives to clear a path?
- Maybe get deliveries of fuel, drill heads, O2 etc. dropped nearby and the player has to drive out to collect them
Drilling
- The player would see a geophysical representation of what is underground when they first arrive at a drill zone. Then when they start drilling, this is replaced by what is actually there, as the drill craft moves around.
- There would be different types of soil tile: soft, hard, impenetrable, flowing (magma, 'water', air), empty (chambers or where the player has already drilled), deposits.
- The player can only move left/right/up/down one grid square at a time.
- The player cannot drill into a tunnel or a drill shaft in such a way as they create a chamber (otherwise could get stuck/wouldn't look right – already this piece of tricky logic reared it's head).
- The player can 'breach' underground chambers so that the player can enter them on foot.
Then more ideas started coming to me: Can the player damage the drill/space suit and need repairs done to them? What about the base – does it need maintenance? Do tunnels collapse – as part of gameplay and/or as part of player drilling pattern?
Then what about a timer/resource element – immediately decided against a clock-based timer (utterly infuriating to me personally) but does the player have limited power in the drill craft, limited air in their suit? Does that mean drilling harder rock will consume more energy? Will leaping around and climbing in suit use more O2?
I felt I had some good ideas, but if I wanted to get this game done before my 40th birthday, I was going to have to be harsh on myself and define exactly what was going to be in, and what was going to be binned.
NEXT TIME: What was dumped
Don't worry, I'm not going to be crowbarring in ABBA songs titles each week 
For this first post, I'll talk about which game I've decided to do and why I picked that one above others.
When I initially came up with the concept (which currently has no name apart from the dryly self-explanatory 'Drilling Game') it was a simple 2D side-on game where the player has control of a drilling machine and has to, well, drill down through the surface to reach goodies hidden beneath.
I was thinking along the lines of Mr Driller/Dig Dug and contemplating whether rocks would fall on you, what types of deposits you would be after and so-on. I was also debating over whether to go grid movement like the above mentioned classics, that is the player can only move up/right/left/down by one grid square, or whether I would be different and have freeform movement.
It was a toss-up between this one and another 2D game – a top-down viewed puzzler. I picked this one as the other game would, by it's nature, require some fancy graphics and animation along with analogue control and quite a lot of AI programming. This one could be grittier and I envisaged a retro look which would be less time consuming to create. From the get go 3D was totally out of the question, simply because of time required to create assets.
The old truth is indeed true: you are best to start off simple if you want to finish anything. This doesn't mean you can't learn a lot by diving in at the deep end, just don't expect to have a completed game when you're done.
However, as soon as I started thinking about this game for more than, ooh 2 minutes, my imagination took over. Here are some of my unedited scribbled notes:
- Play prospector/miner for company on alien world
- Have a base and scanning machine and transporters and drillers
- During sleep send big scanner out on path – picks up general signals
- Then decide where want to dig that day, drive out there (or taken) and start drilling
- When drilling can choose direction (in 2D – 3D would be a nightmare
) and send pulse scans to get higher detail. Then drill around to reach metal deposits and areas of interest
- Areas include: soft ground, hard ground, empty space (tunnels, chambers), metallic deposit (deposit, alien artefact, structure), flowing (magma, water etc.)
- Driving – selects grid they want before head out then must navigate there – obstacles, gaps, maybe explosives?
- Maybe get deliveries of fuel, drill heads, O2 etc – dropped nearby and collect
- Can damage transport/drill/suit and needs repairs?
- At base can access top grid and subgrids and info on each – in drill only have access to deep scan to navigate, then local scan as approach, then actual knowledge
As you can see, this has gone from a simple 2D side-on drilling game where you collect stuff to a game with scanning (of various types), a driving section, alien artefacts and structures, some kind of computer where you can view scans of each area you visit, drill upgrades, possible fuel limits etc, and that's only page one of my written notes. In fact, at the start of page two, my list of player goals are:
1. Scan whole grid around base
2. Investigate all/most diggable zones
3. Collect ore for processing
4. Discover and collect alien artefacts
5. Discover alien ruins
6. Piece together artefacts
7. Unlock centre of alien ruins – platform and maybe drill there
Oh yes, not only collecting ore, but artefacts which can be pieced together and indeed an alien civilisation to unearth under your base! Dig Dug this isn't. Not to mention the little note in goal 7. – platforming. Yes, the idea was slowly coalescing in my cortex to have not only the side-on drilling, and possibly driving, but also to incorporate side-on platforming, deep beneath the surface.
I needed to think on this and decide exactly where I was going.
NEXT TIME: The game mechanics, and yet more ideas surface.
I'm the kind of person that needs a constant push to get anything done. I do have motivation, it just needs cranked up every now and again. So to that end, and to hopefully provide some sort of content on this blog I've decided to:
1) Create a game, and
2) Document the whole process here from concept to prototype to design to programming to art to (hopefully) finished game
And when I say documenting everything, I mean everything. Design notes (even the crap stuff) discussing what I came up with, discounted and decided to use, planning game logic, how I'm going to program various parts of it, concept art and actual game assets, project planning, audio creation all the way to final marketing and release.
The fact I will have to update this blog weekly with my progress will hopefully spur me on to make progress with the game, which will spur me to update the blog again in a nice happy feedback loop!
Previous attempts to create a game on my own have had me burning the 3am oil every other night for 2 weeks, getting to a sometimes pretty advanced stage, and then getting tired and giving up. If being a one-man game designer/creator means anything, it means prioritising and not overloading yourself with work. That is the surest way to burn yourself out and destroy your enthusiasm.
So, I've picked one of my designs which I believe is doable on my own design and asset-wise, and I'm going to be focussing on that, perhaps 2-3 nights per week. I'll update the blog on Monday or Tuesday night with my progress. So here goes – wish me luck!
Just taking a broad view of the industry and videogames technology in general, it is now fairly safe to say that graphical fidelity can't increase any further. There are some incremental gains to be made through procedural animation of human characters, facial animation, environmental interaction and use of lighting but these are technical considerations.
The increased expense of creating high-quality art assets for games has seen two trends emerge: the increased use of art outsourcing and the increasing prevalence of stylised graphics.
But if games are now reaching the era where they can all potentially attain photorealism thanks to skilled outsource companies, they can't all employ a unique graphical style to make gamers buy them instead of their life-like competitors. So what's left? Two things: great game design and compelling narrative.
Great game design will shine through the worst graphics, but doesn't need million-polygon characters to make it work. As for narrative (note I didn't specifically state story, although that is obviously your main narrative for RPG and adventure games) it provides meaning for the player's actions, encourages them, enlightens them and ultimately entertains them. However, we have a problem here, namely the games industry isn't structured for creating these sort of games.
Most game development is geared solely towards tech. Developers and even some publishers have their own 'Central Technology' group to keep pushing that photorealism “target”. Alternatively, Dev teams buy in expensive off-the-shelf game engines that turn out to have narrow applications and surprisingly large costs for trying to bend them to anything unique, so end up creating games that are only slightly different to all the others using the same engine.
In terms of design, it is based around 12-24 month iterations of simliar products and staffed by non-creative Designers whose role is reduced to copy+pasting last year's documentation and adding some extra features, because “hey, it doesn't really matter – the new photorealistic graphics and animations will sell it for us”. Yeah, except that's not going to happen any more as all games can now afford to look photorealistic, remember?
There is a dearth of innovation in this industry with only a handful of companies willing and able to take the next step. Bioware and Bethesda are two companies that are continuing to push design and narrative. EA are to be applauded for taking the financial risks to release Dead Space and Mirror's Edge. However we need more. We need to bring design and narrative to the forefront of game development now that we have reached a level playing field in graphical terms.
I hate Achievements.
If there was an XBOX 360 setting where you could turn off Achievements for all games then I would choose it. But there isn't, and you're stuck with them and I hate them.
There are three main reasons for this. The first is that I only play single-player games. I play for the experience, for the story, for the atmosphere. All of which is completely ruined the moment a “plink!” unwelcomely thrusts itself between myself and the game world. For me, it's like watching The Sixth Sense and having a little banner suddenly appear at the bottom of the screen saying “Ghosties! – You've seen 2 dead people.” – utterly incongruous and distracting.
Secondly, why do I care that I've done 100 headshots? Why do I care that I've finished the first level of the game on a certain difficulty level? I don't keep a tally of how many times I blow my nose in a day or how many times I successfully navigate from my desk to the toilet and back so that I can get bonus Nectar points. It's irrelevant, trivial detail that's been raised to an artificial level of importance by awarding abstract points for completing these non-events. Now every player is supposed to be an obsessive compulsive hoarder. Now the Achievements lists are released before the game just so people can prep themselves for the point hunt ahead. It's the ultimate high score table with no actual skill involved.
The final reason is again because I only play single-player games. I don't enjoy competitive multiplayer experiences, which is now what every single XBOX 360 game has been turned into whether it wants to be or not. It's the constant, nagging feeling of inadequacy that gets me. A throbbing pain behind my temples telling me “You're not as good as them…” when I discover I'm somewhere around 8 millionth in the world in the Achievement points score table metagame. “Oh look, Jason has 450 more 'points' on game X than I do.” It doesn't bother me, yet deep down it really really does. I don't want it to, because after all it's a bloody story-based RPG. Yet it does. Then I end up spending hours trying to find the final two things and repeatedly performing a special attack move just to get the points, completely ruining the experience so I can be arbitrarily “better” at it than someone else.
So come on Microsoft, where is that 'Achievements Active' toggle? I'd pay £30 a month just for that…
And if you hate Achievements as much as I do you'll love the utter pointlessness of Achievement Unlocked.
This medium is still maturing away from the purely technical games design (racing games, RTS, sports simulations etc), away from the cliched, pulpy, teenage male wish fulfilment stories (FPS, pretty much any Japanese RPG) and it has a long way to go. This isn't helped by videogames having a combination of a high barrier of entry and corporate control of the “product”.
Games we all know of, like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, Killer7 and No More Heroes, Rez and Amplitude are triumphs of more than one “USP” or unique visual style (arguably unlike Okami, beautiful though it is). They are the result of a purity of a singular vision from Fumito Ueda, Goichi Suda (aka SUDA-51), and Tetsuya Mizuguchi respectively. Yes, they all work with a development team, but their investment in the game is more than simply creating a design document then sharing it on the company intranet with a comment “Make this!”. These are all games which could never have been made by committee. They needed individuals with creative talent across many disciplines to direct them from inception to Gold Master.
These are the lucky few who have three things:
1) The artistic talent to create such works of art
2) The production ability and people skills to be the “director” of the project and make sure everyone is working towards their vision
3) The corporate backing to be allowed to do something so individual
In the current risk-averse climate it is exceptionally rare that a game developer/publisher gives a single person the confidence (and then the money) to produce such works.
I'm sure there are designers out there who can create works like these. Problem is they are currently rotting away inside development studios, gradually being worn down by the need to “fit” the game to focus testing, demographic analyses, ignorant marketing demands and ridiculous feature requests that they have cried out all their talent, now content to fill in blank “Concept Approval Document” templates with the features they know the board will sign off on with the least amount of hassle.
How can this change? Essentially, the creative side needs to be almost completely divorced from the business side of the industry. Yes, the publisher still controls the money and release schedule and has a say if they think things are going off the rails, but they need to trust the individual to deliver their vision.
How can this come about?
1) We need publishers willing to take risks on talent. Not IP or the worth of the development studio, but artists. There needs to be someone on the board who has a knack of spotting good creatives (because they are creatives themselves) and has the vision to see what the game will look and play like. Someone who understands the creative process and is willing to let those they know have talent make great works and learn to market the results properly. As long as the process of signing games is based purely on product to fill schedules to satisfying the shareholders and the limited focus of what these people know how to sell, we will never see the nurturing of any new talent.
2) Alternatively (and less realistically it has to be said) Angel investors or wealthy mentors could provide backing for those videogame artists whose work they admire. Traditional art history is as old as human history and is an easily recognisable form of artistic expression. Movies are over 100 years old and such arrangements have been commonplace for lower budget films for many years. However videogames are still seen as “entertainment product” meaning most people rarely venture beyond their preconceptions of the medium to start investing money in it.
3) Lower the barrier of entry to the industry. With the millions devoted to crowd-pleasing, competitive graphics the risk has to be small for the publisher, and so the generic flourishes. Cheaper development means bigger risks can be taken. And if anyone baulks at that suggestion saying “My artistic vision cannot be limited by money!” then you are not a true artist. A good artist can be wildly creative with the most limited of palettes, and the analogy follows into videogames.
Things are slowly changing on consoles with things like Wii Ware and the XBOX and PS3 stores where the development costs are less and potential exposure very high. On the PC there are still active MOD communities (although not so much nowadays), Microsoft's XNA Game Studio, several low-cost game engine/studio solutions (such as 3D Game Studio, Torque Game Engine, and Unity) and the simple fact that anyone can learn a programming language, graphics package or try and team up with some like-minded individuals to create their art.
And that's it really. Not complicated, just unlikely 
Relevant links:
Fumito Ueda talks at Nordic Game Conference 2008
Just a wee update – something to bear in mind for your string table.
For those unsure what a string table is, essentially it's an excel spreadsheet file that contains all the text strings used in your game in all languages. The game then accesses this in real-time as required – pulling out the strings it needs to display on screen.
Now for us English-speaking devs it's tempting to re-use the same text for different contexts, after all it's the same word/phrase in English. But unfortunately for us, English is one of the laziest/most flexible languages that exists. So while we can use exactly the same word in different places and the meaning can be intimated from the surrounding words or screen layout, in many foreign languages this isn't the case.
In my QA experience this is one of the most common and time-consuming issues discovered during language testing (along with shortening over-long strings). A case in point is the current title I'm working on:
In English in this title there are three places in the front end where the word “Completed” is used:
1) Preceded by a “tick” icon to denote that a game area has been finished
2) Followed by a colon and then a percentage figure to denote how much of an area has been finished
3) Followed by a variable that denotes how many minigames were played in a game session
In the string table there is only one entry for the text “Completed”, and this one line has been used for all three occurrences above.
However in locations 1) and 2) the single line translation does not make sense in context, particularly in Italian and Spanish. The solution was to add a new line to the string table with a different translation for these two locations.
Now in the grand scheme of things, not a huge issue as it was picked up during the pre-arranged language testing phase anyway. However it's worth bearing in mind that while English is flexible enough to be abused in such a way, other languages cannot be assumed to be.
The lesson: always use a separate line for each individual piece of text in the game, even if in English it appears to be the same context. You'll probably get away with screen titles/discreet names, but for everything else best be safe.
Yes, text translations are paid for by the line, but language testers are paid for by the hour and are particularly expensive – so you'll be saving yourself money in the long term.
I can’t wait for Team Fortress 2. Not just because Team Fortress Classic was the first (and only) game I played online in a clan (team FuS ftw!) and not just because it was superbly balanced (when various exploits were fixed). But mostly because it was simple to play.
Now I also played Battlefield 1942 online and at work. That and the Desert Combat mod. Superb, simple, shooting fun (yet with nuances of combat and control) that encouraged you to work as teams to capture objectives.
Then I tried the demo of Battlefield 2 and I didn’t have a clue what the hell was going on. The HUD was filled with so many boxes, bits of text, arrows, indecipherable symbols on the map and indecipherable symbols floating in front of my eyes it looked like an explosion in a sprite factory. Not to mention the constant barrage of audio clips warning me about various things, as well as those activated by teammates. Also the ramp-up in graphical detail had made it a factor of 10 harder to spot where enemies were. They now nicely blended into the backgrounds.
Needless to say I didn’t buy the full game.
Same issue with Quake/Wolfenstein and the new Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The originals were good fun with simple objectives and clean visuals. Playing the ET demo I was constantly bombarded with new ‘missions’ and new ‘objectives’ while I had to sit and study the HUD to work out which of the half dozen or so bars was my health! Add into that the ramp-up in visual detail making it … you get the idea.
Increased depth in games shouldn’t mean increased complexity for the player. Adding specific objectives for classes, multiple objectives for all players and so on is great. But it has to be done so that the player isn’t overwhelmed by information. Naturally, new maps will take time to learn, but I remember when when you could download a new multiplayer map and you’d instantly know where and what your objectives were, even though you didn’t know the layout itself. The key idea here is to only ever show what’s relevant to the player at that moment in time. For example if they are standing right next to Objective 1, they are not going to need that massive arrow + text string ‘Objective 1′ hovering in their field of view are they? If they are a medic and a friend is needing healing, do you really need a huge, detail obscuring icon on the mini-map PLUS a huge icon hovering in the game world too? Especially at the same time as a main objective is being attacked by the enemy (cue mini-map icon, game world icon+text, audio cue) and a sub-objective or team created weapon installation is being attacked too (cue mini-map icon, game world icon_text, audio cue).
As for visual detail hindering enemy identification, well this is something utterly crucial and basic to gameplay, yet is always forgotten in the rush to create gorgeous surroundings and beautifully detailed characters. My love for the Unreal Tournament series has been fast dwindling specifically because of this. You’re playing a game where one of the main goals is spotting and killing enemies. In a fast-paced shooter, the player needs to be able to do this quickly and easily.
Now I played Operation: Flashpoint online for years, and that is as hardcore as they come. You would often be killed by someone over 1km away. Hiding in a forest. Superb multiplayer game, and the reason I didn’t mind being killed by an enemy I couldn’t see was because the game was intended to play like that. The gameplay was slower paced, more realistic and involved having to scan the horizon for enemies before making your move.
But in something like ET:QW, that’s not how it should be. It’s a run-and-gun FPS with tanks and a big stompey robot. I don’t want to be killed by an enemy who is only standing 20m away yet is invisible to me because the colour/pattern/detail of their armour makes it impossible for me to distinguish them from the colour/pattern/detail of the ground/wall/foliage/vehicle.
Also, the fact that better technology has allowed for larger game maps and longer line-of-sight doesn’t appear to have been taken into consideration with these types of games. Fast, shootey FPS + big outdoors levels + masses of visual detail = not fun.
In a developer article about Team Fortress 2 I read that the characters were designed deliberately such that each class type was immediately distinguishable from it’s silhouette alone. That combined with the clean graphical style, smaller levels and simple objectives should = fun.
Can’t wait. I’ll be the soldier in defence handing you your arse.