Video Game Theories: Crafting a Character's Story Through Choice

Today I wanted to post one of my many Video Game Theories. I had tons of these before I went into the industry. However, these theories have (somewhat) of an authority to them, now that I'm in the industry!  Please keep in mind everything I'm saying here is my opinion; if I say, "that wasn't good", insert a, "in my opinion, that wasn't good". Today, I wanted to talk about crafting a character's story through choice. The theory I have is that a good story for a character in an MMO, or even any game if you don't want to outright define the character, is defined through the choices in the game that help define the player character.

I've noticed a trend with some games such as RIFT, Aion, Secret World, and Guild Wars 2, where the writers create a back story for the character. Some of these are minor, like in Secret World. Some of these are major, like in Guild Wars 2. These are all done to help the player get attached to the story of their characters and to give the writer something to base the story around. How else can you write for a character who has a blank slate? The best example of this is in Guild Wars 2, where you choose several background details about your character. Depending on what you choose, your character receives a different quest after the first initial one.

I thought this character was a girl for a good 2 minutes when I was just mashing buttons through this.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of this method in Guild Wars 2. I didn't feel like it was my character that I was playing; it felt like I was playing with one of the characters that the game gave me. I was choosing one of three sets of character personalities that the game was saying, "These are the stories that you will see." It was also fairly obvious, at least from the human perspective, what story would come from that. Don't know your parents? That'll be the story. Wanted to join the circus? That'll be a story as well. Granted, the game offers several other permutations to that to spice it up a bit, in their defense. The whole bit for the humans of, "I never joined the circus", however, felt extremely random and specific to fit into many character's story. The entire world of Guild Wars 2 felt shrunk into several possible background options I had for my human character.

In City of Heroes: Going Rogue, we established the character's background as being someone who has super powers and is from Praetoria. Because you have super powers, you're automatically in the Powers Division. This was the extent to which we defined the player character. The fact that you were in Powers Division was one you could contest and ultimately ignore depending on one of the 4 branches of story that you chose. Each of those branches also had smaller choices you could make in them. For example, one branch is called Power (one of my favorite next to Responsibility), in which you're essentially a super-powered celebrity. One way to play this branch is basically a power mongering maniac who is willing to lie, cheat, and steal to be number one. Another way to play this branch is a person who becomes famous, but honestly believes what they're doing is right. I'm saying this from feedback we received from players on this branch.

Desdemona made a choice to wear hot pants. That choice has haunted  her forever.

I think this is a way that, going forward, developers can establish a stronger story and have players feel more attached to their characters. A good way to encourage this is to have a field to write a biography for your character. I loved this in City of Heroes, Champions Online, and Star Trek Online. It made me pause for a moment and think about my character's background. It could be anything. As the player goes through the game, choices that they make will help define their character to the developer and to themselves. As the developer, you don't know what motivation the player has behind running a specific branch of story and maybe the player doesn't either. However, putting a choice in that branch to make the player decide why they're doing this helps the player flesh out their own character's story and helps the developer see what kind of character they have.

Here's an example. In Going Rogue, I wrote an arc given out by the contact, Transmuter. You had assembled a number of other super-powered comrades to form your own group to hunt down someone who was killing members of the Powers Division. At one point, you are chasing down a big name in the Resistance who might be behind the killings, while your team is out investigating another lead. You get an SOS from your team, saying that the killer has appeared and is attacking them. The player has a choice in this instance. They can stop the mission and go save the team, letting the member of the Resistance go. Or, they can chase after the Resistance and sacrifice members of their team before going after the real killer. This (theoretically) makes the player ask themselves several questions. Why am I teamed with these people? What is my goal, justice or fame? Do I think the ends justify the means?

But what if I want to be a famous cop?

The answer to this choice puts the player in a different mindset than before, and future choices that they make will be done knowing this. The great part is that, as a designer, you can then make reference to this choice later on. It doesn't have to be big, simply small dialog that crops up referencing the choice your character makes, NPC's treating you one way or another. Granted, these are similar to choices presented in game like in the Guild Wars 2 character creation, but we as the developer never told you what your character's story was. That was your call, we simply gave you an avenue to flesh out the character you made.

I'd like to use an analogy for this, comparing it to a person's life. When you're born, you have a certain amount of things that are predefined: your gender, your skin color, your parents, your name, etc. Some of your "story" is already written, in as much as the family you're born into. However, your life is then defined by what you do, the choices you make, the things you pursue. Imagine if this way of thinking was applied to an MMO or any other game! The Mass Effect series did this pretty spot on, where Commander Shepard's background was defined a little bit, but her main story was punctuated by the choices you made in the game.

Unless you're me, and didn't care at all about the human value of robots or AI. Bye bye, Geth!

This way of design takes more work, as stories are no longer "stand alone". There are opportunities everywhere to reference a player's previous choice. Is this bad? I don't know, as we didn't do it very heavily on City of Heroes. It definitely calls for a much more organized design group and story. Personally, however, I would love it if I did side quest A in a zone, made a choice there, and had a quest that was completely different from that one later on make a reference to it. It would make me feel like I'm playing in a world where my decisions are remembered, and my character is defined by the choices I make, not the ones made for me before I even bought the game.

There's a lot more to crafting a character's story than this. You need to create an atmosphere that encourages the player to explore their own stories, create branches off of established lore, etc. Of course, this is all under the assumption that the player cares about story. If not, well, then lolwords.

YOU'RE LEVEL 50! WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'WHAT IS PARAGON CITY"?!

Video Game Realities: Players

I am not licensed to teach. That said, feel free to pay me more than a teacher. 

I was looking through feedback that people have given me about this blog and one of the requests that came up was to talk more about the experience of being designer to help out others who want to get into the field. I'll go ahead and write about Video Game Realities, and the first reality is this: players. It's an aspect of the job that can elevate you to the best heights and also slam you down into the darkest pits of despair. 

I was a rabid fan of City of Heroes before I joined the team. As a developer, my goal was to do what I could to put a smile on the player's faces. I was going to listen to ALL the feedback and do ALL the things and make ALL the people happy. THE END! 

My work first debuted in Issue 17, where I did the Positron TF revamp, Dean MacArthur, Leonard, and took over the Agent Keith Nance and Jenni Adair arcs from another mission designer due to his own time constraints. All in all, it was a great success; players loved it and feedback for it on the forums was fantastic! I was riding high.

Living the good life, and it was all legal!

However, there were other areas of the game where I couldn't match expectations. I wanted to do more for Mission Architect, but the resources just weren't available for me to use due to the push to release Going Rogue after Issue 17. Mission Architect players weren't happy, and when I read their posts, I took it as personal attacks against myself. Actually, that's only partially true - I read their feedback and took it directly as, "Sean McCann, you have failed us and let us down you terrible person you". Granted, no one said that, but that's how I would take all negative feedback in the beginning of my career.

It's a terrible feeling as a designer when you try your best at something and the feedback is all negative, or even just if some negative feedback is given to you. You always end up remembering the one bit of nasty feedback instead of the ton of praise. I always felt like I let a player down when I saw negative feedback. Most of the talk from players regarding my work has been pretty positive on the CoH forums during the time to try to save it, though there have been one or two players who have pretty decisively insulted me specifically by stating things like it's a good thing I don't work on X game because of Y reasons. Even to this day, feedback like that still hurts. It makes me wonder, what is up with this person that they would say something like that? Back in Brooklyn (where I'm from), that would demand a fight! The second thing, and the more important lesson to take away from this, is asking the question: are they right about their feedback? Why are they saying these things, both positive and negative?

And why are they pointing a gun at me?

The questions of "why" and "are they right" are the most difficult ones to ask when receiving both positive and negative feedback, but they have to be considered. You have to try to put your feelings aside to judge what that person is saying. In the case of the person above, when you dig past the insults, there is some truth to what they say regarding my writing and where it can be improved. I say some truth because the rest of their statement was just blatantly false, and the one that is true was blown out of proportion to make it seem like it was an issue in all of my writing, when it was only an issue in some things I've done. However, that doesn't change the fact that it's an area that can be improved. 

An example of this that I'll actually go into involves work I did in Issue 19. Players who had become Incarnates had to fight level 54 Malta, a previously established villain group in the game. Some players didn't seem to mind this, while other players were very adamant, to the point of insults, about why this was terrible. 

(As an aside, Issue 19 was an interesting one for me, feedback wise. Someone posted that whoever wrote the Roy Cooling arc (me) should be fired. The same poster then continued to say that whoever wrote the Vincent Ross arc (me) should be given a raise from the money left over from firing the previous guy (me). Granted, Roy Cooling had some problems which the poster was partially right about, which will be brought up in a future blog post, How I Should Have Done It: Roy Cooling.)

The main feedback was that they didn't feel very powerful fighting the same looking guys from before, especially when there was no reason why they should be more powerful. This was a case where the lessons mentioned above came into play. It would be easy to just discard what they were saying because it was insulting and small. But I had to ask the question, what if there's a good point there? The answer was yes. What was the point? It was that players can be be given powers systems-wise to feel powerful, but it means nothing if the enemies you're fighting look the same and fight the same with no lore reason for their increase in powers beyond just, "they're level 54 now".

These level 5 gangsters are now level 54. No reason at all, no new powers. Deal with it. (This is not the way to do it, by the by)

Now, on the flip side, there's the positive feedback. This can be just as dangerous as negative feedback, so be careful! The more negative the feedback, the harder it is to see why the player is saying that. The same is true with positive feedback. You can read all the positive feedback in the world, but if you stick to, "people LOVE ME!", then you won't move very far in your design work. The best way to think of things is this: your design, your story, your work is a thesis. You're saying, "I have done all of this, and my thesis is that this should be fun." This can be stuff that you've done a thousand times, but it's still a thesis. The reaction from players gives you the answer to this thesis, but only if you pay attention. You need to understand what was the essence of what you did to see why people thought it was awesome. Example? Example!

Enchantment? Example!

In Dark Astoria, I introduced a mechanic where there were several missions set at the highest difficulty possible. In order to support players through this, I had 7 allies spawn. Granted, they weren't using my handy dandy LUA revive script because LUA didn't exist yet, so there were faults there with allies dying etc. However, before the missions, players had the option to choose not to take the allies and go it alone. I honestly put this in as an attempt to add more achievement badges to the game, because I liked achievements that mean something other than just playing the game normally. The feedback I received was that many players loved this part because it made them feel epic. Cool, right? People liked what I did, done deal.

I couldn't leave it at that. I sat down and asked myself, why did this make players feel epic? Couldn't they just do that by setting the difficulty to its maximum regularly? I read a lot of posts and eventually came to a conclusion. The story and system of the game were set up to tell players, "You can only do this if you follow this path that we've set for you." However, putting in that option, "... of course, though, you could try to do it in a totally crazy way that we don't at all recommend" makes the player feel awesome because they are choosing to take the awesome route. They are saying that they are better than what the game and story believes, and when you come out on top putting that idea forward, you feel great.

I couldn't think of a good image, so here's an American flag.

A designer making judgments like this will find their future work is stronger. The risk is to just copy and paste what you did before because that was great, so it should be great again. But players won't accept that for very long. You have to innovate, understand why something was good or bad, then move forward with that in mind. If you do this, you'll find your designs are stronger with players. Of course, it all hinges on your opinion of players as a designer.

Every person who works in the game industry has a decision to make - how do you face players? Some people ignore players and do their own thing and are content with being proud of their own work; other people hang on every word the players say and are defined by positive or negative feedback. I've gone through both during my time in City of Heroes, and I've eventually reached a happy place, as you may or may not be able to tell from the novel I've written here. You have to accept that you're not going to make everyone happy, but that you can do your best. If you fail, you fail! You get back up and try again. You don't let it affect how you see yourself. If a random person on the internet says that you should be fired because your arc was terrible, ask yourself if he's correct about his criticisms, and if so, why? Discard the feeling that he's personally insulting you; he is, but why should you care? Is he your friend? Does he know your life story? No? Then his opinion can't affect your life! But is he an adept player of the game? Yes? Then his opinion of the game absolutely has value!

To wrap this up, other players are the reason why I make games. I want to deliver amazing stories and game play, have people experience things, have fun, and maybe even have a stronger desire to go out and live life. Without players, my career would mean nothing at all. I'm here to deliver great experiences with my theses, and players are here to help me correct my ideas going forward. I will tell any aspiring game designers that dealing with player feedback is never easy, but you can't give up. You can eventually get to the point where every feedback, even the worst ones that de-humanize you and treat you like you're an object, is a chance for you to improve yourself and your design skills. Just remember that you're more than just a game designer, you're a full person, so don't let negative feedback affect your entire life!

Oh, and don't argue with players posting negative feedback. That won't get you anywhere. There's nothing profound to this part, it's just a rule you should follow. Even if you think the player is absolutely wrong, just let them say it. You know whether they're wrong or not, and that's all you need.

Or, you can track them down and punch them in the face. But then you'd no longer be a game designer. You'd be the defendant in a grievous assault case. And no one wants to be that guy.

You could get this guy to defend you, though.

Studio Stories: Black Scorpion's Town

Black Scorpion

Black Scorpion was a character in City of Heroes that we all loved to joke about. Early on, I went through a training program to learn how to make missions with the game's internal tools. I was told to make a sample mission, so I made Black Scorpion's Guide to Being Cool. I had a lot of fun with it, and we all enjoyed just running wild with crazy Black Scorpion ideas.

One of the last ones was regarding his personal story. I was working on a personal story series for another character when I decided to do a fun exercise. Many other characters have more... compelling stories than Black Scorpion here. What could his story  be about that would make him interesting? The answer that popped into my head wasn't useful at all, but that's the point of some of these stories; they're not useful, they're supposed to be funny. I thought immediately of one of my favorite episodes of Firefly: Janestown.

I'm going to assume most people know what Janestown is; after all, how did you get this far and enjoy video games without knowing that? Anyway, the personal story for Black Scorpion was essentially the same plot for Janestown, just with Black Scorpion. I burst out laughing at my desk at the idea and stumbled over to John "Protean" Hegner's desk. I calmed myself down and threw the pitch at him and the two of us began laughing, throwing out incredibly dumb ideas about an area where Black Scorpion was considered a hero. The entire group of Arachnos patrons could be really freaked out, and Black Scorpion would just be angry at people not fearing him and paranoid that his armor was being tampered with.

We would never actually do this story, of course. But it was fun to joke around about. You'll all find that many of the Studio Story segments are going to be like that; ideas that we would never dream of putting in the game, but we absolutely love joking around and going into way too much depth about them.

Proud Moments: Dark Astoria

Dark Astoria. Things are gonna go downhill before they get better.

Dark Astoria. I smile when I think of the name. We released the revamp for this zone in Issue 22, and it's one of the things I'm most proud of during my time in City of Heroes. Let's get down to the nitty gritty and talk about the development process for the zone! First off, a who's who of the people who worked on the zone:

Design:
Sean McCann - Story, Mission Design, Mission Map Design, Entity Creation (Partial)
Cord Carney - World Design, Supported Story Design
Christopher Behrens - Supported Story Design, Systems Designer - Created all the villain groups for Dark Astoria.

Art
David Kirchmer - Senior/Lead Environment Artist
Addison Delany - Environment
Nathan Choi - Environment
Don Pham - Environment
Jay Doherty - Character Artist
Eric Chyn - Character Artists
William Balzer - Concept Art
Keetsie Braz da Cunha - FX Artist
Leo Braz da Cunha - FX Artist

Forming our party to tackle Dark Astoria!

We started our planning with Dark Astoria with the story. What story were we going to tell? There were several mandates that we had to meet:

1) The zone would be the first solo endgame area.
2) We had to have an endgame trial.
3) We couldn't spend more than 3 months of art time on the zone.
4) It had to be a co-op zone for heroes and villains.
5) Reveal the Letter Writer's identity. This was an enigmatic figure whose true identity players had wanted to know for several issues.

I researched Dark Astoria to see what we could do. The zone was already a favorite of mine from back in the day. The challenge with writing for an 8 year old game is that you don't want to stomp on anything that's been established. I was a big proponent on no retcons to established lore, but instead expanding upon what was created in a manner that made sense. There were a lot of spawns in Dark Astoria that spoke of releasing the sleeper, Mot, beneath the town. I looked up all references to Mot, and the most that was mentioned was that it was banished at one point, the Circle of Thorns wanted to keep it sealed, the Banished Pantheon wanted to awaken it, and the Tsoo wanted to also keep it sealed.

I then looked up what we had in our story bible. The bible was old and outdated at that point, but since we had done so little on the Banished Pantheon, it could be used as a potential source of information. I found out a lot about the Banished Pantheon, and an interesting bit about Mot, which was that a piece of Mot was originally from the Roman time.

When in Rome - deal with a God of Death.

I began to work on the story, running it by several designers as I worked on it, until I got what I wanted. In a nutshell, Mot had risen from his slumber in Dark Astoria due to the vast amount of wars that happened from previous City of Heroes updates. The Circle of Thorns were beaten. However, the Midnight Squad and Tsoo were out in force trying to fight off the Banished Pantheon and the mysterious Knives and Talons of Vengeance. Players would pick up the story by hearing about several people who had vanished. The one thing they all had in common was being from Dark Astoria. We would solve the main plot of the story through solo story arcs, then have a mission that was a connection to the endgame trial. (This mission was later removed due to player feedback.)

We then set to task of working with David Kirchmer to get the environment set up. Several things from the story had to be cut because they would take too much time. We wanted to avoid this 3 months being full out crunch for the environment team. Melissa Bianco, our team lead, was very adamant about that. Crunch time is no fun time and you don't want to bleed the work out of everyone. After some talks, we were able to figure out the best use of environment's resources while also getting the support needed to make missions unique. The environment team would take one part of the zone and revamp that with new assets. These new assets would have smaller  versions of them made so that I could prop them in mission maps. The team would go also go through and re-prop some things in the zone and spruce up some older textures. The size of the new area would be determined by Christopher Behrens, who was working on the endgame trial which would heavily use this area.

Finally, there was character art. Jay Doherty was handling the majority of our art requests. He regretfully had to leave Paragon while we were working on Dark Astoria, but not before he made some awesome characters. Eric Chyn took over, but some character work had to be cut, as it wasn't part of his schedule originally to do this. Chris Behrens took a big lead in this, using the City of Heroes costume creator to make a ton of unique costumes for the Knives of Vengeance, Banished Pantheon, Talons of Vengeance, and Tsoo. Eric Chyn supported Chris with some additional costume pieces. I'm getting ahead of myself though. Concept art!

Art by William Balzer, http://billbalzer.4ormat.com/

William Balzer, Chris Behrens, and myself worked closely on the concept art. Matt Miller, our deisgn lead, helped make sure we were all on the same page. The goal was that Bill's concept would set the tone for environment and character art, so we worked closely to make sure the concept art reflected the story we wanted to tell. Mot's look was very much tied to the story, and this would impact how the Banished Pantheon monsters looked, as well as the new environment.

In the end, we knocked Dark Astoria out of the park. Environment art made the zone amazing. Below are comparative screenshots of the zones.

Before Revamp.

After revamp.

The enemies came out amazingly. Cord Carney, who came on a little later into the project, was a huge help in helping me smooth out story elements and also setting up the world and atmospheric spawns to help sell the story of Dark Astoria.

Lastly, the story was terrific to work on. I worked on making each individual mission map for that series, which totaled to something like 30 maps. It made each mission feel unique, something which City of Heroes had been dinged on in the past. Players traveled from corrupted sewers to the inside of Mot to a burning version of the Roman era. I wanted it to feel like an epic journey where you didn't know where you would end up next, and I feel like we succeeded.

People have asked me a lot what I'm most proud of in City of Heroes. It's a no brainer for me - Dark Astoria. It's not only the story, however, it's how well all of the team worked together to get it done, without any crunch time to boot. (Hopefully I'm right on that and no one crunched without me knowing about it.)

Why I Loved: Paragon Studios

Will this get tearful? I think so!

Paragon Studios was an amazing place. It was a studio that took chances on people. Many people who shared their experiences with Paragon had talked about this. People who were QA were now designers, developers who wanted to flex their muscles in another field or area were given the chance to do so, and the studio gave some kid from Brooklyn a chance to really make games. That was me.

Paragon took a risk on me; it's because of this that a lot of things in my life changed. I want to specify something here, because it's not like Paragon went out and found my lovely fiancee or amazing group of friends, although our HR department did try very hard on the former. Paragon was the method through which all of this happened; if it wasn't for them hiring me and keeping me out in California, I wouldn't have been in this place to have all these amazing experiences. I decided I wanted to do a post explaining why I loved Paragon.

Paragon Studios was a place where (mostly) everyone was friends. Sure, we all fought and got angry at each other every now and then, but there wasn't any sort of hatred or bitterness between people. It was never oppressive and always felt like we were in a family, even on some of the worst days. I joked around that Melissa "War Witch" Bianco was like our mom, Nate "Second Measure" Birkholtz was our dad, and Matt "Positron" Miller was the cool uncle (who I would go to try to get things from when Melissa or Nate said no). Joe "Hero 1" Morrissey was the successful older brother who went off to college since he was working on the next project.

The cool uncle, Matt Miller.

There were never any real divisions between different sections of the studio. Artists could talk to designers, designers could talk to QA, QA could talk to programmers. Programmers could talk to anyone who understood robotic, which was pretty much no one, but they had the option. It was a family atmosphere, if I didn't get that across. There was a meeting we had once, and I hope I don't get in trouble for mentioning this. Someone in the studio had to leave because he had to handle various things with his family. Brian Clayton, the studio head, looked to all of us and said (if I remember correctly), "I want you all to remember, family comes first before the job. Family is always first."

I knew I was in the right studio when I heard Brian say that. Who wouldn't want to work for a guy who sincerely believed that? Parents sometimes brought their kids in when they couldn't find a babysitter, and that was totally OK. I sometimes felt bad, however, as I may or may not have dropped some curse words around those kids. But they'll live and learn, and it was good training for me to try to clean up my act for the future.

There's so much more I could say, like our frequent Ultimate Frisbee outings or our races in the bouncy obstacle course, but I'll keep this brief. I also should probably keep these posts shorter in order to avoid building up unrealistic expectations for more posts in the future. Paragon Studios was an amazing place, and it left a permanent mark on my life. I know I'm going to do my best to remain friends with as many people as I can at Paragon, and we even have a facebook group that we're all part of to help keep in touch.

If you're sad, that's OK, we're sad too! But, Paragon was given to us, and it was amazing. It being gone now doesn't mean that something else even more amazing isn't out there. So, you can be sad, but don't despair. Plus, now an entire studio of amazing developers have been let loose into the wild to spread our awesome abilities. Instead of all of us working on one game, we'll be working on a TON of games, and that's exciting to think about!

Goodbye guys! We'll see you all again soon!

Lessons I Learned: Vincent Ross (City of Heroes)

Vincent Ross. You were the bane of my existence.

City of Heroes Issue 19: Alpha Strike, was a great issue for me. We released it back in November of 2010 and people thought it was great. I had done the Apex and Tin Mage task forces, Praetorian repeatable missions, new maps for Mission Architect, a new hero arc, and a new villain arc, given out by a guy named Vincent Ross.

Oh, Vincent Ross. I had such grand plans! You were to be my greatest creation, my Requiem, sans me dying. However, you betrayed me. Or rather, I betrayed me (!). I relied on dirty hacks to try to do cool things. You were my lesson in how to be a better game designer, because you utterly destroyed me. You will be part of my first, Lessons I Learned series, where I look back on my previous work and reflect on the lessons learned from it. I should note that I still love the story and the arc in Vincent Ross to death, but man, I think I earned a few years in Purgatory for the anguish I put our QA team through trying to get it done.

That's me in the Proud section for thinking I could pull this off.

The goal with the Vincent Ross arc was to have several side stories going on that the player could do. It was going to be amazing. Players could choose one of six contacts in Sharkhead Isle to see their point of view on the story. You would still play the main story with Vincent Ross, but you would also have objectives from the side contact you chose to work with. It was going to be extremely replayable - imagine! You could have 6 possible stories in 1 storyline.

I figured out how I would do it. We had gotten the technology to do Optional Delivery Contacts on a mission. It was simple. You attach a flag on a mission to say that, while you're on this mission, you can also talk to this contact out in the world to hear something special. We used this very sparingly for our expansion, Going Rogue, and it was mainly with our undercover agent system. I decided that I was going to go ALL OUT with it in Issue 19 and Vincent Ross.

THERE'S NO WAY THIS WILL GO WRONG!

I should've realized the problem from the get go. You could talk to a contact out in the world easily enough. However, that contact couldn't set an objective in the mission. Plus, I had to add a clue that the contact gave you in order to stop the dialog and remind the player what was going on. It's an easy fix, I thought. I'll just add a radio at the beginning of the mission for you to communicate to your contact. I'll use a dialog tree to check which clue you have, and then that clue sends you to the appropriate page for the side contact, and that page triggers an objective. You beat the objective, get the clue for completing it, and you rinse and repeat for the remaining missions. I'd just have to add to the next require statements for the contacts that you had the previous clue from the previous mission. Plus! I'll add a BADGE for completing one of the contacts side missions completely!

If you're looking at this and thinking, "Sean, this seems reasonable!", then you're wrong. It wasn't reasonable at all. Oh, I thought it was. I was so proud of it when I finished working on it. After the milestone ended for this, I had gone on a four day weekend vacation to Lake Tahoe. However, while I was gone, all the things broke. I came back and saw a stack of e-mails detailing where all the things went wrong.

"I had a fun time at Tahoe! Wow! What's with all the e-mails in my inb-"

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!"

So many issues cropped up from this. First, it was clunky. The contact told you what you had to do, then you had to talk to them again via this weird radio in the mission, which, also, was always spawned in the mission because there was no way to tell it NOT to spawn. So if you chose not to do anything, this weird radio was just hanging around.

Another issue was that it just flat out broke when the whole "multi-player" aspect of an MMO came to play. City of Heroes had an option where a player could auto-complete a mission if they felt like it every 3 days, or if they were on a team that completed this mission. If a player was trying to do the contact side missions and then auto-completed a mission, they would be stuck. This meant that the best way to do this was to either not team, or repeat the mission again after your friend completed it. To top it all off, there was no messaging that indicated to the player that they did something wrong.

Lastly, QA discovered something that was surprising. I had about 50-60 clues on my mission to keep track of the 6 side contacts. As it turns out, the mission system in City of Heroes had a max clue limit of 32 clues per story arc. We found this out pretty far into the development process. This meant I had to shave off at least 2 of the side contacts, if not 3 of them, after having written all of their dialog in the missions. Even after doing that, my test plan was so complicated for this that most of the QA team had a hard time even understanding how this thing was supposed to work.

We got Vincent Ross out the door and working, ish, by making some concessions, namely that all you had to do was have the first clue that started your work with the contact. You could not complete any of their side missions and still talk to them again. The worst part? With all of this work and effort, most players of the game didn't even notice that there were these side missions. I didn't make it clear enough to them and they didn't notice anything changing because they didn't participate in it.

I went from Mozart to Salieri in one fell swoop.

What lessons did I learn from all of this?

1) If you get a new system that you think is cool, don't go hog wild on it. Test it out first, understand it better, make iterations on it and proceed carefully with it. Once you've gotten a better grasp of it, you can then do the CRAZY things with it.

2) If you're going to give players a choice, make sure they know that choice exists, how to get to it, and that things are changing because of that choice.

3) Don't do hacks. If you're jumping through 4 or 5 hoops to do one thing, then you're Doing It Wrong. Talk to another designer or a programmer to see if there's a better way to do it. You might think you're a clever designer for figuring out how to connect the dots between systems, but players won't see that cleverness. They'll only see the clunkiness.

I'm very happy that Vincent Ross happened. It was a turning point in my career as a designer. I was burned badly by the hacks I did in the arc, and I vowed never to rely on those things again. You were my Bane, Vincent Ross. You broke my back and tossed me into a hole. But I climbed out of that hole and swore never to be the Hackman ever again.

I don't think that analogy really works.

Why I Loved: Final Fantasy 4/2

Final Fantasy 4, which, back in the day, was Final Fantasy 2 (I'll refer to it as 2 from now on), was one of the earliest RPG's that I played. I had seen it once in FuncoLand and told my parents that it would be really amazing if I could get it. I must have been nine or ten at the time. We didn't get it then, but a week later my mom came home with a present - Final Fantasy 2! She managed to snag the last one at FuncoLand. I was on cloud nine, thinking my mom was awesome, life was awesome, and Final Fantasy 4 was going to be AWESOME! I loaded up the game into the SNES, played through the introduction, and was instantly captivated when this prologue sequence played:

I could write entire books about why I liked the original Final Fantasy 2, but I'll keep it to one main point, which is that it was a game focused on a true journey.

JOURNEY

Final Fantasy 2 has a pretty big cast of characters that cover a wide spectrum; there's Cecil, a Dark Knight, Yang, a kung fu master, and Edward, a cowardly bard, just to name a few. Each one of the characters had their own battle quirks to help them stand out and support their character background. Well, except for Cecil in the original American version. Yang had a special kung-fu kick, and the cowardly Edward could hide from  battle to protect himself. His cowardliness was amplified when you considered another member of the party was a little girl.

What was really great about Final Fantasy 2, which is something I feel not a lot of games do lately, is that they weren't afraid of telling you, "This character is now out of the story." Characters evolve, leave, rejoin, get injured, and die throughout the plot. However, no characters felt like they were just throw away characters. Edward, the cowardly prince, grew to find courage in his own story line, but was then lost during an attack by a giant monster. You bought gear for him, leveled him up, and then he's just gone, along with everyone else in your party. When you awake, Cecil is by himself, and you have no idea if you're going to find those characters again. The beginning of this youtube video shows the scene, though it's not from the original SNES version.

The story of the game progresses, with new characters joining and leaving your party. You eventually do find out what happened to Edward, Rydia, and Yang on that boat. Rydia and Yang rejoin the party, but Edward was injured and can no longer adventure with you. That's just it, no more Edward in your party, because that's how the story went.

A lot of similar things happen in this manner, some extreme, some not so extreme. The most extreme part is when the main character, Cecil, sheds his Dark Knight armor and becomes a Paladin. It's supposed to represent a complete change in Cecil, him starting over as a new person. What does the game do to help represent that in the system? Cecil starts over at level 1. It's extreme, but he also levels up pretty quickly, and it's pretty symbolic as well. The remaining party, consisting of an old man and a pair of young twins, must defend Cecil in battle and help him level up until he becomes a character that's strong enough to protect them. Even when he's reformed as a Paladin, Cecil wouldn't survive without the help of people who, in most cases, shouldn't be needed to help him at all.

When I finished Final Fantasy 2, I felt like I had been through one intense adventure. There were points when I didn't know if characters were going to stay or leave, live or die, remain loyal or betray Cecil. There was no status quo of, "Well, this character needs to stay in this party because of the art time spent on them". Everything in the journey was fluid as you went along until the very end when your final party solidified. There's a great part in the final battle where your party is essentially wiped out and the prayers of your former companions keep you going. 

This is why I like Final Fantasy 4 so much. When I think about it, there have been a lot of people in my life who have come and gone, people who have passed away, friends who I'm no longer close to, new friends who I'm closer to than ever before. And my fiancee! Did I mention she's great? People who I never imagined I would meet. Final Fantasy 4 was the same way; you end up meeting characters you never thought you would meet and seeing characters who you held very dear go away. Not only that, but you reunite with old characters and continue your adventures together. I like to imagine how cool it would be if one day all the people I ever met in my life appeared to help me in some situation; hopefully it's just posts on facebook about something and not because I'm on the moon fighting the embodiment of evil.

I'd love it if more games did this, where characters come and go, revolving around the story of your main character. It would be difficult, of course, to do this. You would have to balance it so the player just doesn't bother to form any emotional attachment to characters because of this nature. If you can nail it, however, I think you can get a story and a journey that's even better than Final Fantasy 4. And that would be amazing.

The Question of Why

Hello to anyone reading this! Which, as of 9:00am on Sunday, September 16th, is me (hi me!)

I feel it's important to start any project of task off with the question of, why? Why am I doing this? Without a good reason, it would be akin to building a house on sand. The sand in this analogy is the conviction to keep doing this and the house is the blog. The sun is still there, though, that's still just the sun.

Okay, so maybe it looks fine in this example.

The reason why I'm doing this is because I love video games, always have, always will (hopefully). When you love something, you want to get to know it better, know the ins and outs of it and figure out why you love it so much, what makes it great. This is what helps me be the best video game designer I can be. Every game I play, I wonder why is it so good (or bad), why did I feel X and Y when I played it, and how can I replicate that and do it better?

I grew up playing video games, starting with the original Game Boy and Nintendo. The guys from Paragon Studios will probably laugh at this and say that I'm young, or anyone else reading this blog. Well, guess what! There are some people out there now who grew up playing NINTENDO 64! Think about that!

This is old school for some people now.

The goal of this blog is to explore that love of games and also my own work. I want to use this blog to understand games better. I could just do that on my own, sure, but writing down a judgment on a game or subject is something that'll stick much better for me than just thinking about it out loud. Plus! I could look very smart making said judgment. Or, incredibly dumb. That's the excitement of the whole thing.

What I'll be doing is posting my thoughts on various games, old and new. It'll be on anything and everything about it, from their story, to their systems, all the way to the level design. It's all stuff that I've worked on and have a passion for. I'll also be posting critiques on my previous work on City of Heroes, things that I particularly liked, things that could have gone better. Lastly, I'll be touching on some things regarding LUA occasionally  because I love LUA.

I love LUA. I... I love LUA.

So! I hope anyone reading this will sit back and enjoy. I'll be doing my best to update this every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, for the sake of appearing professional. Also, since this is being posted on a Sunday and I want people to actually stick around, you'll notice that I've put a post up already! Enjoy!