To commemorate writing about death, I killed all of the pictures that I was going to use in this blog post.
Death can be a controversial aspect in story telling. There are a plethora of ways that death can be done poorly; many of which I myself am guilty of. However, I have my own policy about death in stories which I try to adhere to, which is this: the dead don't come back to life. There are a few caveats to this rule and a bit to explain about, but the long and short of it is that the rules of death in your story can seriously impact the believability and tension in a negative way if you're open to the idea of people coming back.
First off, why do I believe that people who die in a story shouldn't come back? Mainly because characters who return from death tend to cheapen it for "the rest of us". If someone is very clearly dead, and then they return, then that opens the door for everyone to return. You then lose your tension, at least when the threat of death is on the table. Is someone captured by a villain? Don't worry, we'll just bring 'em back to life, no harm, no foul.
This is especially true if a person's death was supposed to mean something or be very impactful. You remember that character's life and the way in which they died, the death is used as a tool to motivate other characters and to move the story forward. However, if that character then returns (looking at you, Superman), it cheapens their death and makes all of the emotion meaningless; going forward, your readers won't take any other deaths seriously because they know that at any point that character could be brought back to life. There's no permanence in the actions of the author.
This is why a return from death would have to be done very carefully. Gandalf in Lord of the Rings is a great example. He was thought to have died, but actually returned specifically because he's freaking Gandalf. No one else could have done this, so the risk is still there when Aragorn is in danger or when anyone else is in danger, because they can be killed. However, if someone comes back in a way that seems can fit multiple people, you have the problem of, "well, this new character was revived, why not use this method on this other character who is dead?" "Because." "Because...?"
The question of "why" in this case is also important. You should rethink things when you find yourself coming up with very complicated explanations as to why a method of resurrection would only work for this one character. The more complicated your explanation, the more holes can be poked into it for other characters, although likewise, the simpler an explanation, the more unbelievable it would be. There needs to be a good middle ground; Gandalf came back from the dead because of the nature of who he is. Not so simple, but not complicated in the sense of, "well it was the right time of the month, the moon was in the right place, etc."
Returning from death is only one part of the problem - killing a character in a proper way is another. This is something that, anyone who is familiar with my writing in City of Heroes will know, I'm very familiar with. When you're trying to kill a character off for good, their death has to be believable. I was sad about a certain character's death in LOST, but then when I thought about it, I felt, "wait, that could have EASILY been avoidable". That bit there takes the sting out of it a bit. If you want someone to feel for a character's death, you can't have that "oh man they're so stupid" idea. On the other hand, however, if that stupidity is due to an inherent character flaw, i.e. pride, lust, etc., then their death is tragic. It goes from a, "they could've easily avoided that" to, "they could've easily avoided that... if that person wasn't the way they were."
Statesman and Sister Psyche's deaths are ones that I think about a lot; not in a, "their faces haunt my dreams" way, but in a way of looking at how they could've been done better. I'll say it right now for everyone - in retrospect, their deaths could have been done better, but I am happy with how they turned out. The two of them show the difficulty with killing off powerful characters - how do you explain their deaths without opening up the, "but wait, they could have done...". I can't say that the ways I killed them covered all of that, but I did my best. This goes into my final point, actually!
When you're writing a character in a scenario where you want death to be taken seriously, ask yourself if there would be too many ways where they can "cheat" death. Sister Psyche is a great example - there are literally a ton of ways that she could have avoided her death, even with all my "but's" and "if's" put in there. How are you supposed to kill someone who can jump into other people's bodies at will without it feeling like a cop out? Even catching her by surprise isn't fully gratifying, as I saw from feedback from players. Granted, there were probably more holes I could have covered with her and Statesman's death, but it's an example that you should be careful about writing characters who are so powerful that you need long, complicated explanations for their deaths. You should keep your deaths and character's abilities simple and balanced.
In the end, death is a very powerful tool for story telling, but one that needs to be used wisely. Too much death makes people not care for characters, i.e., "oh there's a new character that I like, I bet they're going to die. Sigh.". This is something that I've been guilty of in the past. However, too little death takes out the tension if you're trying to use it as a tool. It's a very complicated subject, one that I admit I don't fully have a handle on (as I try to admit about most things on this blog - I'm not a master. Yet.). However, I'm looking forward to exploring the nature of it more and trying to understand better how to use it as a method of storytelling that is believable, useful, not cheap, and meaningful for the story. My last rule of death, and this is my own personal one, is that it must have meaning. A meaningless death for a major character is just depressing, in my opinion. That meaning doesn't have to be clear right away; it can take a while for it to settle in, but there should be a meaning to it.
This could also get sad. Also, this'll contain spoilers for LOST!
Going Rogue was an intense expansion to work on. I could write several blog posts about it, but I'll save that for later. We were in a situation where a lot of content had to get done in a short amount of time - we're talking roughly the equivalent of 44 story arcs in about 2-3 months. John "Protean" Hegner and I were on a break neck pace making these in what you would call crunch mode. We'd both get in at around 8 am and leave around 11pm or midnight, sometimes even 1 am. But, we did it because we were excited about what we were doing and knew it was going to be better than what was originally planned. One of my favorite memories during that time was working on the live and death of a character, Aaron Walker, who I had based a bit around Charlie Pace from LOST.
I was handed the responsibility and warden storylines in Neutropolis, mainly because I had written the power and crusader ones in Imperial City. Nate "Second Measure" Birkholtz didn't want me stuck in a rut where I wrote the more selfish content. I looked over Aaron Walker, who was set up as this smarmy hacker whose brain could move a mile a minute, making him a genius. I don't know why, but I instantly connected him with Charlie Pace from LOST. They were connected in the sense that both had a past where they basically messed around and didn't do many useful things, Charlie being a drug addict and Aaron Walker being a powerful hacker using his skills to just annoy people. Both characters, however, had the chance to put themselves to use - Charlie helping people get off the island, Aaron Walker helping the resistance fight the regime of Emperor Cole.
Everyone wants to fight the man.
Charlie's fate in LOST is that he was killed. Now, his death was something that really made me sad, but you also sort of saw it coming; there was a character who literally said that he was going to die. Charlie spent most of the season running from it, but eventually accepted his death in order to help save the people he cared about on the island. I looked at Aaron Walker and wanted to try to improve upon that, mainly since I thought Charlie's death, while being pretty intense, also had some holes in it.
I decided to set up Aaron Walker from the get go as having a death sentence; his brain was moving too fast due to experiments done onto him, so he would eventually die. After his main story arc, I wanted Aaron to periodically appear to help the player out, after all, he was the best hacker in an area that was primarily run by a scientist who relied on technology to keep things under control. I wanted Aaron to be fresh in the player's mind after his first arc and not someone they forgot, or else his death wouldn't further motivate the player to push on.
The hammer came down in an arc down the line where you're supposed to talk to Aaron Walker, but he's gone, kidnapped by the Praetorians because of all the help he's been giving the player character. The player runs to rescue him, but discovers that even through rescuing him, they can't save him; his brain condition has been overloaded by Neuron, meaning he will die at any moment. The key point here is that I didn't want his death to be meaningless, otherwise I'm just being a jerk and going, "haha, I killed your dude". I wanted Aaron to show the player that he wasn't really sad about his death, and that somehow, even with him dying, things were going to be OK. Here's the dialog from his death, thanks to the guy over at paragonwiki.:
Aaron Walker's eyes dart back and forth wildly, his arms shaking violently.H-hey... Character... didn't think I'd see you here... funny you're the l-l-last person I see, huh? N-n-neuron, he caught wind of what I did... what we did... I c-covered up for you, e-erased any track of you helping me. B-but Neuron... h-he accelerated my brain... it's m-moving t-too fast now. G-gonna... it's gonna snap any minute now... t-then I'm a goner... t-that's gonna be it for me. Hang on, Aaron, I'll get you help!Aaron reaches up to grasp your shoulder.It's too late! It's... too late... Aaron slumps down to the ground.No time... no time left for me... just minutes... seconds... then I'm done for... I'm not sad, though... I'm actually... kinda happy. Weird... huh? I was always... just doing random things, never really... fought for anything. But you and me... we did something good... right? We put a stop to some of Neuron's freaks... we saved James Noble... that was good... wasn't it? I got to finally do at least... one good thing for someone... before everything came crashing down. Just focus, Aaron, I need you to-Aaron cuts you off.I-I know why you're here. You're here to find out what's in that data. Aaron laughs sadly.T-that's how N-neuron got me... I found out everything... he zapped my brain... pulled it all out of there... but t-there's a guy, t-there's a guy who can help you. I-I wrote it down... before Neuron tapped my brain... Aaron hands you a piece of paper. On it is written the name, 'Steve Sheridan is here'Who is Steve Sheridan?T-that Dark Watcher guy'll know... Y-yeah... I know he's here. I'm the... I'm the best, r-remember? Aaron's body jerks wildly before coming to a rest.T-the T.E.S.T... T-they're coming... They're coming to get you... I'll... I'll do one l-last thing... one l-last thing to help you out... Just... just... remember me... okay... Character? R-remember me for... the g-good stuff I did... not for all the.. r-rotten... useless... things I did with... m-most of my life. P-please... please... Aaron Walker lets out one last gasp before his body lays motionless....I'll remember you, Aaron. And I swear, I'll make Berry pay for this.You hear the sounds of several PPD T.E.S.T bearing down on your position!
After this, a huge squad of soldiers ambushes the player. However, I wanted to give the players that last thing to remember Aaron Walker for, to remind the player's that he was, essentially, a jerk hacker who was on their side and enjoyed making jokes. As the soldiers were swarming in, I had several large Clockwork robots activate to help defend the player, who, if they were solo, would get absolutely destroyed by the ambushes. I had the Clockwork say the following phrase, which I'm still pretty proud of:
THIS IS THE LAST, BEST, FINAL PROGRAM BY AARON WALKER HIMSELF.EVEN IF PRAETOR BERRY KILLED HIM, HE'LL NEVER BE ABLE TO BE BETTER THAN WALKER.REMEMBER TO TELL THE WORLD. BERRY IS A LOSER. AARON WALKER WAS THE MAN.
So! There you have it. Aaron Walker. I wrote his finale probably around 10 or 11 o'clock at night, but I was spurred on almost through the entire Neutropolis arcs to get there. I won't say it's perfect, because it's not, but I'm pretty proud of it and I look forward to trying to outdo myself in the future after everything I learned writing for Aaron Walker, who was the man. Oh, and a fun fact, I listened to the following music as I was writing Aaron's final dialog, which ended up almost making me tear up. But I didn't, because I'm a strong person.
PS:
Something that people in the studio would sometimes tease me about was that we were going to bring Aaron Walker back from the dead. Or, really, anyone else who was killed in my stories (Statesman, I'm looking at you). This almost always got an infuriating reaction out of me, as I was a very hardcore believer in characters staying dead, something which I'll wrote a blog post about sometime.
Yelling, "Why won't anyone STAY DEAD?!" didn't help me look less villainous to people in the studio.
Sorry for the lack of pictures and the shortness of the post. Sometimes, a man needs to admit when he's defeated, and I admit now, I'm defeated. For now, I'll need to pull back my postings and keep it to 1 post a week, which will either be Monday or Wednesday, but most likely Monday.
Missing the blog post on Wednesday made me realize that I was trying to churn out too much stuff on a weekly basis, which was starting to hurt the overall quality of the posts, and I don't want that. Plus, I've been starting a side project of mine, which is working on a novel about super heroes. Why not? I'm pretty excited about it, as I've gotten to page... ten. ...sigh. But it's something I'd like to work more on!
In addition to that, the big thing in my future is MARRIAGE! My fiancee and I have been preparing for things, which is all very exciting.
So, basically what I'm saying is that I'll be pulling back the posts on this blog to be once a week instead of three times in an effort to up the quality of the posts and also to maintain my own sanity while preparing for marriage and working on some other things. I still have a list of ideas that everyone wanted to see, and I promise I'll do my best to make posts about as many of them that I (legally) can!
Many games come out with selling points that they will have difficult decisions for the player to make; Mass Effect 3, the Fallout series, Infamous, etc. (I could be completely wrong on this, but stick with me). However, making an honest to God difficult choice in a game can be, well, difficult. The choice can sometimes end up being too black and white, or such a useless choice that it doesn't even matter at all. What are some ways to make your choices difficult and still compelling? I'm going to use The Walking Dead series by Telltale Games as an example of difficult decisions done right. In an effort to keep my blog down from a novel, I'll be keeping this brief.
A key to difficult decisions is that said decision helps define your character. Another is that both choices come with good and bad consequences, along with the fact that the story can continue with either choice. Nothing screams "bad choice" than one that sends you to a dialog tree saying, "try again". One example from the Walking Dead is a dilemma between two factions in the survivors camp; one faction wants to leave the camp to go to a better area. Another faction wants to stay in the camp, as it has been proven to be safe and is the best way to survive. The game has set up that both people representing the ideas have their good points and bad points; neither one of them is the clear winner, or at least in my case, I didn't see a clear winner. Whichever choice you decide defines the character you're playing, Lee, both to himself and to the others. The choice is making a statement. That choice is then carried on, and people remember what you did, giving your choices more weight. Characters in the game bring it up later when other decisions are being made, making you realize your choices have an impact on the story.
Small talk or cursing someone out. You decide.
This is another big point with difficult decisions. If they're not going to impact your story at all, then they're not difficult; they're weightless. Of course, the player may have difficulty making the decision at that point, but when they realize that nothing has changed because of that decision... well, then the rest of their decisions in the game won't be taken seriously. The Walking Dead has a story that has to progress from environment piece to environment piece, so your choices don't necessarily change the story dramatically, but it changes how the characters in the story react to you. The game, being a very character driven story, feels hugely different when you know a character is reacting to you based off of the choices you made. Your choices feel important, and your future choices force you to pause and think, is this really what I want to be known for?
To wrap things up with this, either choice should lead to an equally interesting result. They don't have to be the exact same event, but the player shouldn't feel cheated that they made a specific choice. I can't remember the game I played, but I remember I made a certain choice that ended a mission. I found out if I had made the other choice, I would have gone on to another ten extra minutes in the mission to see a cool scene; needless to say, I felt like I had made the "wrong" choice because I didn't get to see anything cool. This can be a difficult thing to back as a developer, but it'll be rewarding to your players when they discover that both choices lead to something interesting.
This theory, much like my previous two theories, is far from complete; that's why it's a theory and not a law. It could very well be that I look back on this in a few years, months, weeks, or days and see that something I said was incomplete or outright wrong. But that's the beauty of learning - you're always going forward and trying to understand more. I love designing choices in games for players, and it's something I hope I can continue to do and to refine; it's never going to be perfect, but that's what makes things interesting - it can always get better! I hope people reading this impromptu trilogy enjoyed it and got something out of it. If not, I promise I'll do better in my next trilogy, which will help expand on the backstories of several major and minor characters in this series. I will also go back and edit these past series of posts to be done in the way I had originally envisioned it but could not deliver due to budget restraints.
Remember that great blog post I wrote about how to make the player feel villainous? Well, one method for making the player feel heroic is similar to that of being villainous. That method is choice. However, this is a bit more difficult. If you have a character base that is supposed to be heroic, i.e. the character is a super hero, then you don't want to necessarily give them the choice to do something outright evil. It wouldn't make sense from a story perspective that your superman would kill the old woman instead of rescue her. In my experience, I've found an interesting addition is what I call the "do the crazy thing" choice. I'll give an example.
In the Dark Astoria arcs (I'll make sure you're all tired of me referencing these), I had a mission culminate in two characters being held by a bunch of enemies. The situation was that they were going to kill both of them. However, they tell the player that, defacto, they'll just let one of the characters go free, but the other one dies instantly. The player is given another option, which is to try to save both characters. The stipulation is that the player has two minutes to save both, and if they don't succeed, both characters die. The choice here is take the sure answer and let one die, or take the risk of both of them dying to save them both.
At its heart, it's the choice between the safe answer and the dangerous one, where the dangerous one risks losing everything. The feedback from players regarding this was very interesting; many people found it thrilling to have to go against the odds to save everything and knowing that they chose not to take the safe route. It's what a hero does, right? If they're given the option to save person A or person B, their option is the third one, which is to save all the people, even if it means losing everything. Of course, this is totally up for debate - it might not be terribly smart to try to save both people. But in this case, super heroes are supposedly to defy every day "smartness" to do the incredible.
I'm looking forward to exploring more about this theory and using it in different ways. It's important that it's not just a theory of, "put a time limit to make them feel heroic", but that the essence is putting the player in a scenario with a safe answer vs. a risky answer. Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of creating a difficult choice, one that has a person chewing their nails over which is right and which is wrong. I'll cover that in my next post on Monday, which will probably be a bit longer too!
Antagonists in stories have always interested me, especially the ones portrayed in a way that you see they were just one choice away from being the hero. I think that's why I always liked running good content in City of Villains, particularly ones that handled villains who fit this characteristic. It also drove me towards a theory as to how you can make a player in a game feel villainous, specifically a player who is on a faction or side that is supposed to be villainous. The rub of the theory is that giving the player an option not to be villainous is the exact way to make them be villainous.
The idea behind it comes from a conversation I had with a friend in high school regarding the nature of sin (Catholics!). Basically, it boiled down to sin being something that is a choice to do what was evil when you knew what the good was. Very simply, this is what makes good villainous content - making your villain have an out to not do what's wrong, what's evil.
You know he's evil because of the goatee.
An example of this was from my very early arcs in City of Heroes. The player villain has a cloning facility that is being destroyed. They're fleeing from the burning wreckage and come across a dying clone. The villain has the option of killing the clone, saving the clone, or leaving it to die. Now, there were two ways of writing this. There could've just been one option, "kill the clone", since you're supposed to be the villain. The second way of doing this was providing choice. I believe by providing choice, the player character can feel more villainous by consciously choosing to do what is wrong; on the other hand, they could also feel really good by consciously choosing to do what is good. The feedback I received from the arc helped to emphasize this.
This isn't a be all and end all solution, however. Some games do well with making the player feel villainous, others need a more grey moral quandry, like we did for our expansion, Going Rogue. A lot of complaints have been levied against games for having black and white moral choices; this theory doesn't really solve that. What it does solve is when your game outright creates the "bad guy" race and is trying to cement those players who want to play them.
I'll actually be making this a three parter, something which I decided one minute before typing this sentence! The topic of making compelling/interesting choices in a game is one that's really fascinating to me, and I would hate to just leave it be. Tune in on Friday for my theory on making players feel Heroic, and on Monday for my theory on making difficult decisions in your game. See you all then! Maybe?
Find out next time if I still have anything useful to say!
Monthly content. It's the holy grail for MMO's. It's the thing that keeps players around between big releases. I haven't played many games that have done monthly content, so I'll only be speaking about my experience when we worked on monthly content in City of Heroes - specifically the Signature Stories. This isn't covering things like additions to the Paragon Store, bug fixes, etc. In a nutshell, monthly content can be incredibly rewarding if you can pull it off, but it's also very difficult to pull off, as it requires a very focused effort on the part of nearly every department in the studio.
PS: I'll be talking about the experience of writing the signature story arcs in a different blog post. If that was the reason why you were reading, well, thanks for increasing the post count anyway!
The Content Plan
First, we make it awesome. Then, we make money.
We knew we had to get everything done ahead of time to pull this off. We wanted to release 2 arcs a month for 7 months; this means that we should be roughly 3 months ahead of each arc. This was a big deal, as I was also working on finishing up content for our free to play release, as well as getting ramped up for Dark Astoria. Now, before anyone thinks I'm saying it was too much work, I wasn't - it was the amount that I personally agreed upon. However, there was a plan. In order to avoid work overload, we decided that we would try to split the arcs between multiple designers. I would do the first episode, another designer would work on episodes 2, a third designer would do episodes 3, 4, and 5, and I would come in to finish off episodes 6 and 7. This was done to avoid overloading my schedule and allow me to focus on major releases. As I was working on episode 1, I was helping the designer working on episode 2 get caught up up for how the story should go, what the plan was for everything, etc., making sure we were all on the same page.
Unfortunately, this didn't really work out. I took over work for episode two, as the designer who was supposed to work on that was too swamped with work to do it. While I was working on episode two, I was getting another designer, up to speed on where the story was heading, what the future plans were, what beats had to be hit, etc. He started work on episode 3 while I was wrapping up episode 2 and continuing to finish up work on our free to play release.
I was already feeling a little bit of the heat/realizing what I signed up for after working on taking what was the equivalent of 3 arcs from start to complete on top of everything else; I say 3 instead of 4, as the hero and villain arcs were roughly equivalent. I was relieved to get reprieve from the other designer doing arc's 3-5, although I was worried, as I realized we had a lot of ramp up time to get him up to speed for the arcs; this was not his fault in the slightest, as he was busy pounding away at other content. I wondered if that time would've been better spent if I had just done it myself, looking at the amount of time spent getting two designers up to speed for the arcs.
One day, Matt Miller called me in to a conference room. He said he had bad news for me. The designer who was supposed to work on episodes 3, 4, and 5, was not going to have his contract renewed due to the titanic commute (almost 2 hours) he had to take to work each day, and that I would need to get those arcs done. This is roughly what I looked like when I heard the news:
I'm Jim in this picture, not Pam.
I still had to do all my other work, as that all had to get done. However, I had now inherited what were essentially 6 story arcs on top of that. I realized that these arcs, along with the ones I was working on, needed to be handled smartly. I scoped down parts of the arcs that were a little crazy and focused on using core features that wouldn't break (hopefully). I also enlisted the help of Jeff Hamilton to help with some of the systems work for episode 3. I won't lie, of course, there were a few late nights, even with this, and the occasional coming in on the weekend - I specifically came in on a Saturday to finish the last mission for arc 4.
This was how the rest of the signature story content work fell into place. The scheduling wasn't pretty, but it was done. I wrapped up signature story 7 while also working on Dark Astoria. However, one thing I didn't account for was testing.
I found that my work on the arcs were never quite done. You never truly find all the bugs in content on the first pass, and since we didn't release it to the test server before going live (something that we changed for the second signature arc series), we ended up finding bugs that weren't caught the first go around. So, while I was technically working on arcs 3 and 4, I was also working on fixing arcs 1 and 2. And on the new player tutorial, and Atlas Park, and Mercy Island, and the Death From Below trial. I'm not saying this to garner sympathy from anyone or to pin the blame on producers; none of this was anyone's fault. I'm saying this to demonstrate to everyone the realities of monthly content development. It was a constant stop-go-stop-go of development, working on arc 5, stopping to fix some small thing in arc 2, starting again to do arc 5, stopping to work on Atlas, etc. etc.
This also involved a lot of falling on my part.
Now, this is all just purely from a design perspective. Next, we'll handle a tougher part: art.
The Art Plan
Myself, David Nakayama, and Andy Maurer had implemented what we called comic book loading screens for the new tutorial. We were trying to think of a way to convey the story of the tutorial without using a cutscene, as our lumbering beast of an 8 year old engine couldn't do that. I came up with the design for a comic book loading screen, which would be a versatile system that could be used in any mission or zone. Andy Maurer implemented it in lightning fast time, and David Nakayama did the art for it.
I mention all of this because we used the same system to do our loading screens for the signature story arcs. We wanted to have a comic book cover for all the loading screens in a particular issue. There was also a request that each signature arc contain at least one new piece of art. Finally, we had the two big death cutscenes to handle - Statesman and Sister Psyche.
The main issue with art is that it can take much longer than design work. This can kill you with monthly content; a brand new final room or completely new enemy can take an artist more than a month to do. We had to use our time wisely. We formed a strike team of artists to handle the workload for signature stories.
Character art: Jay Doherty
Environment art: Chris Gregory
Animation: Colin Brown
Effects: Keetzie and Leo Braz da Cunha
Audio: Adam Kay
Composer (Statesman and Psyche's death music): Jason Graves
Doesn't have much to do with party formation, but it's Suikoden, and Suikoden is awesome.
The very first thing we did was scope the art needed for the entire series. Custom rooms and entire characters took a long time to make compared to props, and this was all work being squeezed in to current schedules.
Environment art would make a new lava geo, lava islands, and a dark obelisk for arc 1. We put a bit more into this as it was the first arc, aka our season opener. We wouldn't use environment art again until arc 4, and there we were taking a room that was made for end game content and re-texturing it. Arc 5 was the next big work for environment art. We were going to take an existing map that was supposed to exist in Roman times and "modernize" it as ruins. This was also done to save time, as not a lot of new geo would have to be made. Finally, environment art would deliver the final set piece, which was a giant floating island in space. Luckily, the very talented Ryan Roth had already made the Earth for previous content which was cut, so this saved us a lot of time.
Concept art was entirely done by David Nakayama. He, myself, Matt Miller, and Nate Birkholtz would get together and talk about our ideas for each comic book cover. David began work on the comic book covers around the same time that I would begin work on the arcs. I can't comment about how hard the pieces were for David, but I know we saved him time by never requesting more than two characters on the covers. He also gave us a ton of support on character concept art, which you'll see up ahead.
Character art was a tricky beast. We wanted to do a new villain group, the Rulu-Shin, a new character, Marshal Blitz, and a final end boss, Rula-Wade. The Rulu-Shin and Rula-Wade were going to need concept art. Concept art is, in general, extremely helpful for artists. It saves them a ton of time, as they have right in front of them how the character or environment should look, so they can just get to work right away instead of doing research on what they need to do. We saved time with the Rulu-Shin by making 3 or 4 costume pieces for them instead of an entirely new character; I built the base of them with existing assets, then worked with David Nakayma and Jay Doherty on what I thought the new pieces should look like. Jay confirmed that it was all do-able with the engine, and David went to work busting out a concept by drawing the new pieces on top of the current in-game models. Jay then banged out the Rulu-Shin in no time flat. Rula-Wade was done in a similar way. We took an already made costume, Rularuu, and altered it. Jay also prettied it up while he was there since it was a little older.
Animations and effects were focused mainly on the death cutscenes for Statesman and Sister Psyche. This had to be done way ahead of time, as this needed approval from basically every important person in the studio. Our art lead at the time, Gilbert Martinez, and myself story boarded both cutscenes on a whiteboard around the time that I was working on arc 1. We worked with Colin Brown to make sure none of the animations were too crazy, then got it approved by Important People. Once we were set on that, we put the requests in. Animation was done around the time of arc 3, and the cutscene was all hooked up when I was barely working on arc 4. Keetsie and Leo came in and did the effects once they saw how the cutscenes were supposed to go. The final bit was audio.
This was not our audio booth. But imagine if it was.
We had a contract with Jason Graves ( http://www.jasongraves.com/) to compose new music for the signature arcs. Adam Kay and I sat down and talked about what the music pieces should be like for the cutscenes. Adam then spliced together existing pieces of audio behind the cutscene music to give Jason an idea of what we were looking for. In the meantime, Adam was also working on doing the ambient sounds for the cutscenes - footsteps, rain, thunder, etc. Jason nailed the feeling of the piece on his very first try and only needed to make slight alterations to it - this was a big help, as it saved us a ton of time on iteration for both pieces. Below is the piece done for Statesman's death.
Fun fact: I had been trying to get a piano piece into the game ever since I found out I could make audio requests. Adam Kay teased me at the end of this, "All it took to get your piano piece was killing off the main character of the game. I hope you're happy."
That just about sums about the art time for the signature arcs! They involved a lot of pre-planning and smart usage of art. We had to see how we could get miles out of work that wouldn't take months, and I think we pulled off the art really well. The last part of all of this is publising.
The Publishing Plan
Signature arcs were going to run separately from our regular content updates, meaning that we had to publish them to the live servers every month, followed by patches for them, if needed. We also needed to make sure that they were up properly on the Paragon Market. I wasn't too familiar with the amount of work done for this, but I know that it was no walk in the park for our team, as the arcs wildly deviated from our regular content schedule and were their own beast to handle. Towards the end, however, I know we worked our a good system for getting them in, especially when we decided not to worry about contacts being in the game ahead of time.
Overall Lessons
This was the first time that most of us on the team attempted to do monthly content. I can only speak for myself regarding the lessons that I personally learned. A lot of these lessons were also learned talking with Melissa Bianco, Matt Miller, and Nate Birkholtz as we were finishing up the signature stories and figuring out how to move forward with the process.
Become one with the monthly content.
First, if you're going to do monthly content, you need a small, dedicated team to get it done. This team should be focused purely on monthly content. It shouldn't be a large team, however, as monthly content needs to be lean and fast. Concept art, effects work, and programming should be considered a shared resource for this team, programming especially! Adding new code can be risky, especially on a month to month basis, so you'll want to be very cautious with the amount of new code you're doing. The team should consist of one designer, one environment artist, one character artist, and one QA tester. (This is purely my opinion, by the way.)
Second, play test early, play test often. We didn't have as many play tests as I would've wanted, and that's my own fault. Your core team should be playing what you've done several times throughout the arc's life. This'll help give your arc that polished feel and bring the team together in the project.
Third, don't keep the same team forever. Developing monthly content is taxing work, as you're working on smaller projects with a faster rate of iteration and production. It's nice to be able to catch your breath and work on content that has a bit of a bigger and longer scale. This part is the one that's more opinionated than based off of experience, as there are dangers with team swapping; we had switched designers for signature series 2, but still were shuffling around artists etc.
The main takeaway with this is that the team designing the big ticket content items that are delivered every 3 to 4 months in an MMO needs to be different from the team making your monthly content. Your monthly content guys are the ones helping to keep users around month to month. Your big content guys are the ones who will release something to help generate new users to come in. Then, those users are kept around by the monthly content guys. It's a circle of life! Unless you mess up, then it's a line of death. And no one likes lines or death.
This will either be boring, or fascinating. You deci...yaaaawn.
In my effort to sound authoritative and feel like there's actual some use to this blog for interesting game developers, I'm going to talk about the general work schedule we had in Paragon Studios. This is something most studios have, even outside of the game industry, although it something that was completely new for me when I first started. These are schedules that are important not only for producers (the guys who set them up), but also for workers to know in order to pace themselves. So, without further ado, here are some of the basics for the work schedules in a game studio! ... Why does that not sound very exciting?
Milestones
In the grand overview of things, we have milestones. Every studio is different, but every studio should have milestones. Think of these as semesters in school, only much shorter. These can be as little as a few weeks and as long as a month or two. This is the time in which you'll be getting your work done. The studio will set up a goal that a zone or such needs to be done by milestone 5 or 6, and you're on milestone 3.
It's the responsibility of both a producer and of a designer/artist/programmer to have a base understanding of how long it'll take them to do something. For example, when we were setting up the new content for Issue 24, I was confident that I could get 7 story arcs, a zone event, develop more LUA scripts, create several entities, create 30 new maps, and around 10-15 mini-maps, in 3 milestones. I had set up in my mind how long it would take me to do roughly each of those, then added buffer time for QA testing. This is the most important part to remember.
Let's say you've got a month of work for a milestone. You almost never want to schedule yourself so that it's going to be a photo finish when you're done working. Because you're never done working when you finish your last mission. You still have plenty of work to do based off of feedback from other designers and QA. Those people will definitely find bugs, even if you've combed over it a million times. No one's perfect, so don't worry, but you need to leave yourself iteration and bug-fixing time at two crucial points in milestones. This is a nice tie in to the "quality" section of milestones.
You're ten miles away from polish, don't take a wrong turn at screwed.
Rough-In, Playable, Polished
Milestones will have different goals for where content should be. You have rough-in, playable, and polished. The precise definition of what these are varies from studio to studio, but here are the broad strokes for each.
Rough-In means that you have the base framework set up for your mission. This is where things can radically change in your arcs and big additions/swaps can be made. Arcs get removed, added, etc. Your stuff doesn't necessarily need to work in this state. You just need to have the base foundation built to see what you're going to be working on next. For City of Heroes, this meant that the main encounters, maps, and characters in missions were created and put in without any grievous errors popping up. No errors appearing meant that the system was theoretically OK'ing your work, but it didn't mean it worked.
For Issue 24, this meant having the main "what's going to happen" parts of the missions done. Things like ambient spawns, music, exact details for cutscenes, etc. didn't have to be finalized. Think of it as making a blue print for building a house and laying down the initial foundation. The rest of the building of that house, the little details etc., aren't done, but you know the road you have in front of you and what you have to do.
You still have to figure out where to put the torture chamber.
Playable means that you have to take everything you did in rough-in and make it playable by a human being. There should be no SHOW-STOPPING bugs, which is another term for progressing blockers, although show-stopper is a more terrifying description. This means QA should be able to play your mission from start to finish without a problem. The level of testing here can vary. This was a stage where we had a first pass of text in, cutscenes were hooked up and working, maps were in, objectives were all set up, etc. Playable is the stage where you build the foundations and walls for the house. People should be able to walk inside and have the electricity working.
The playable milestone is where some aspects of your missions can change. No new work should be added, just building upon existing work, but it can be allowed as long as you're confident with your schedule. Producers will not be too gung-ho about it though, and you should consider yourself as walking on glass if you're adding new things to do during the playable stage.
Now, a mission can be playable, but that doesn't mean it's ready to ship. How many missions have you guys played in an MMO where it's missing things like waypoints, ambient spawns, or other things that make you go, "this needed something extra"? That's where we get into the POLISH stage.
Not that kind of Polish.
Polish is where all the fun things happen. This is where you decorate the house and actually make it look nice for people to live in. Cutscenes get better camera angles and music, environments get touched up to look pretty/textured, small side bars are added to dialog trees, waypoints are added to make missions smoother, etc. This is a stage where nothing new should be added unless you're a cowboy. There's a lot of temptation in polish to try to add completely new things because, hey, wouldn't it be cool if there was another mini-arc of 2 missions to do on the side here? The answer is yes, it would be cool, but you'd be starting from scratch, and you run a huge risk of neglecting your current work to get it done.
Polish can be the best stage and the worst stage; you need to exert control over how much you're polishing and how much you're adding. This is where QA goes through things with a fine tooth comb to squash any and all bugs. You shouldn't be changing anything to how your missions are completed; it would be like decorating a house by tearing down part of the support structure.
In Issue 24, this meant adding extra say dialog to the allies you had in your missions, sprucing up the environments in maps with extra props and NPC's, putting depth of field and music into cutscenes, adding extra side dialog options into dialog trees, etc.
By the end of polish, you should be just about done with your work. You need to leave yourself some extra time when planning the next milestone for the occasional bug fix here and there, but if you've done everything right, it shouldn't be anything major; most likely a grammar issue here, a small balance tweak there. If you've done something incredibly "hackey" and not full proof, then your 3 milestone deadline just turned into 3 1/2 4 milestones, and you'll find yourself behind on the next project.
That's all for today. Either you're asleep by now, or busy taking down notes. Next time, we'll go over the proper usage of keyboards and how the right mouse can make the difference between not crunching at all.
Strap yourselves in, this is going to be a long one.
People around Paragon Studios talked a lot about Demon Souls, the prequel to Dark Souls, and how tough it was. I wanted no part of it. The stories of frustration and agony didn't really appeal to me at all. I was done with games that were out to destroy me. However, I was curious. The stories had a certain appeal to them. I resisted, though. It wasn't until Dark Souls came out that my resistance lowered bit by bit. Cord Carney, the world designer who worked on Dark Astoria and the Summer Event in City of Heroes, regaled me with stories of Dark Souls. He insisted that it was a hard game, but it was fair, and that I would enjoy it. I eventually broke down and purchased the game. Then, it all began.
I was prepared to die when playing Dark Souls, but I was not prepared to be as scared as I was when I played it. I feared for my poor player character's life. I was amazed by the world and the little bits of story that were put into it. I played tons of hours, the exact amount being something I will never fully admit. I don't play it now anymore, but I still rate Dark Souls to be one of the top games I've ever played. It's my job as designer to ask why it was so good in order to help myself become a stronger designer and writer. There are several things that made Dark Souls amazing, and a few points that could have been stronger:
A World Connected
The level design and world design of Dark Souls was amazing. Nearly everything in the world was connected, save for Anor Londo and the Undead Sanctuary (that'll come up later in the weaknesses). There's a great sense of scale when you look up from the bottom of a swamp and see, miles high, one of the landmarks of the Undead Chapel. You feel like you're playing in an actual world. There are shortcuts between places that help emphasize the connectivity; the Undead Chapel has a hidden elevator that takes you to the Firelink Shrine, the Giant's Tomb has a view showing the underground lake. The connectivity made me want to explore the world more to find little things and possible connections between areas. This exploration would come at a price, however, moving to point two... Fear of Death
You will know this man a lot in Dark Souls.
I was genuinely afraid of dying on my first play through. The reason was that I didn't want to lose my accrued souls and I didn't want to go through the challenges I had just faced. Exploring the world of Dark Souls meant, at certain points, longing for a bonfire, a place to spend all my hard earned souls and a place to rest and regain my Estus Flasks, items that were used to heal. There were many moments (Blighttown, I'm looking at you) where I was begging the screen to give me a bonfire, only to be met with more monsters. It wasn't a frustrating moment, however; it felt like a challenge, and when I found that bonfire the victory was all the more sweeter. The monsters were tough, but skill was a factor. Gear was good to have, but the best gear in Dark Souls wouldn't protect you if you didn't understand how the enemies fought and how to counter them. This leads into the third point...
Hard but Fair
For the most part, the enemies in Dark Souls are hard but fair. I say for the most part because I'm sure there were a few that caused me frustration. The enemies rely on patterns when they fight, patterns that you watch, learn, and use against them. There is a feeling of accomplishment when you defeat a new enemy; you know not to attack when they adopt a certain pose, you know that when they jump back they're going to charge, etc. When I died in Dark Souls, I knew that it was because I did something wrong, but I learned from it. Every death was a learning experience, and it made me a better player of the game afterwards.
Ref, come on! That stab clearly missed my MAJOR arteries!
I especially enjoyed the combat because there was weight to it. Slamming down a giant claymore feels powerful and IS powerful. Wearing heavy armor burdens you down, makes you move slower, but adds damage resistance; wearing light armor lets you move faster and dodge attacks easily. It's because the combat has decent weight that I cared more about my character and the story that he was in, which leads to my next point...
Mysterious Story
You meet a depressing man after the game's initial tutorial. He tells you that there's a legend that when you ring two bells, one at the top of the castle, and one at the very bottom, something will happen. No one knows what, but it's supposed to be part of the undead pilgrimage. That's all you know going forward, and it's up to you, the player, to piece together the puzzle of the story. I was excited by this; there was no telling what could happen when those bells rang, what was up ahead, or why these bells were even around. I had a sense of wonder going into the story because there were no figures of authority detailing why things were happening in the story. It was up to me to pay attention and find out. The game gave out hints about the storyline through the descriptions of items, which made me want to dig even deeper into the story to figure out what was going on. Unfortunately, this leads into some of the game's weaknesses... Really Mysterious Story
Dark Souls has a very obtuse way of following the story lines of characters in the game. Some character's stories have slight hints the game to give you a heads up, while others leave you scratching your head going, "How was I supposed to know THAT?". Here is an example from one of the game's wikis to show some of the more obscure parts. Note that the directions of, "go to this place" are not given in any UI for the game.
"Drop into the pit and kill all but ONE of the octo-demons. Then head
back up and speak to Siegmeyer. He will offer to help you out. He will
jump down and start fighting the last demon while shouting an epic
battle chant. Jump down and quickly help him kill it. Make sure
Seigmeyer has MORE than 50% of his life remaining. After killing it.
Speak with him and he will take a nap. You are done here. Carry on with
the level or warp back to Firelink Shrine and speak with Seiglinde. Tell
her you have seen her father again and she will thank you. Warp to Path of the Dragon Covenant Bonfire in Ash Lake.
Head to the first bonfire in the area and you will find both Seigmeyer
and Sieglinde alive and well. Speak to them and you will receive a
Titanite Slab. You want this outcome as after its all said and done you
can kill Seigmeyer for his ring. Be careful though as you will have to
fight both of them at once. END QUEST LINE"
This was one of three options on the wiki page. And part 7 of the series.
The obscurity is good for certain points, but when it's so obscure that you have to look up what to do next in a wiki, you've pulled me out of the immersion of the story. In addition, the sense of mystery goes away when you meet a character called Kingseeker Frampt. At this point, you've rang both the bells and are about to go into Sen's Fortress to see what's next. Everything is still mysterious and you still have no idea what you're getting into, but you're beginning to piece together the story. You meet Kingseeker Frampt, who goes:
Frampt: Ahh, hello. Was it you who rang the Bell of Awakening? I am the Primordial Serpent, Kingseeker Frampt, close friend of the Great Lord Gwyn. Chosen Undead, who has rung the Bell of Awakeing. I wish to elucidate your fate. Do you seek such Enlightenment?
Very well. Then I am pleased to share. Chosen Undead, your fate is... to succeed the Great Lord Gwn. SO that you may link the Fire, cast away the Dark, and undo the curse of the Undead. To this end, you must visit Anor Londo and acquire the Lord Vessel.
This was a bit of a dissappointment for me, as I was very proud of piecing together bits of the story, only to basically have a giant chunk of it handed to me. However, Frampt's proposal leads to another issue in the game, which is whether or not it is good to help him out. The game has two options to go with - Frampt, the supposed good guy, and Kaathe, who is supposedly the bad guy. However, here is Kaathe's dialog explaining the situation from his end.
Hmm… You are astonishing.
The truth I shall share without sentiment.
After the advent of fire, the ancient lords found the three souls.
But your progenitor found a fourth, unique soul.
The Dark Soul.
Your ancestor claimed the Dark Soul and waited for Fire to subside.
And soon, the flames did fade, and only Dark remained.
Thus began the age of men, the Age of Dark.
However…
Lord Gwyn trembled at the Dark.
Clinging to his Age of Fire, and in dire fear of humans,
and the Dark Lord who would one day be born amongst them,
Lord Gwyn resisted the course of nature.
By sacrificing himself to link the fire, and commanding his children to shepherd the humans,
Gwyn has blurred your past, to prevent the birth of the Dark Lord.
I am the primordial serpent.
I seek to right the wrongs of the past to discover our true Lord.
But the other serpent, Frampt, lost his sense, and befriended Lord Gwyn.
Undead warrior, we stand at the crossroad.
Only I know the truth about your fate.
You must destroy the fading Lord Gwyn, who has coddled Fire and resisted nature,
and become the Fourth Lord, so that you may usher in the Age of Dark!
This is an interesting problem, to be sure. Is the Age of Fire directly opposed to the Age of Man? There's no real clear answer here. There are a lot of debates on the internet regarding this, as the game didn't make it clear. That's not a bad thing, to be sure, but it leaves the player's in a bit of a sticky spot. At the end of the game, kindling the fire leads your character to physically burn to death. Choosing to not light the fire leads to a more triumphant-ish ending, where primordial serpents bow and proclaim you the Lord of Death. The former ending has no more fanfare other than that, which feels a little cheap, all things considered. The new DLC for the computer, which I haven't played yet, apparently clarifies that an Age of Darkness is NOT an age of man, and that Kaathe is indeed the bad guy. If that's the case, then the good ending still feels like a bit of a rip off.
This post is going fairly long, so I'll try to tie it up with a small bit of how I would have done it. I won't address the issue of Kingseeker Frampt explaining everything to you, but I will address the good ending. I enjoy the fact that it's still a little ambiguous as to which is the truly good ending. However, it would be nice if there was a little more to it than, "you die in a fire." Here is a video for the original good ending:
How I would have done it is that during the fight with Lord Gywn, he steals away the player's humanity, if they are human, turning them undead. After he is defeated, the player lights the fire, just like in the ending above. However, it focuses back in on the player, who is now human and alive. The fire being kindled has literally burned away the undead curse from the player and, assuredly, the entire world. Kingseeker Frampt's voice echoes in the area, telling the player that the darkness has been pushed back, but it has not been vanquished. Someone must take Lord Gwyn's place as the Firekeeper for the Kiln of the First Flame, the most important flame in the entire world. It is now the player's responsibility to ensure the curse of the undead and the Age of Darkness never returns. The player character nods and walks over to the fire to begin their vigil as Frampt declares the player the, "Firekeeper of the World".
I feel like this ending has a bit more explained and is a little more uplifting than just "die in a fire". There are probably a few problems with it as well, like being a little too happy/explainey. It should still also keep the ambiguous factor - is this a really good thing, or would it have been better to be a Dark Lord?
Whoever is still reading this, congratulations! You've made it to the end. In summary, I loved Dark Souls for its mysterious story, atmosphere, and weighty combat. It relies on the player to pay attention to everything, both combat and story. The story has some weaknesses, but I always find myself wanting to know more about it, so that can't be a bad thing. And, as always, I am prepared to die and be terrified while playing Dark Souls.
Our amazing programming team hooked up the scripting language, LUA, into City of Heroes in Issue 24. I wanted to take a moment to explain how it was used to not only make missions cooler but that the knowledge of scripting can help you make your stories much stronger than they previously were.
Before we start, I decided I'm going to try to make a thing out of posting the "developer party" that hooked everything together.
Programming
Rob Anderberg - Lead Programmer, proposed the initial LUA integration.
Jason Lee - Programmer, helped implement and support LUA integration
Tim Sweeney - Designer/Programmer, helped implement and support LUA integration
Party formed! How long can I use Final Fantasy as an analogy?
The beauty of LUA is that the language acts as a sort of negotiator between hard-coded C+ programming and regular design work. An example of this is the code that was made to change the skies in City of Heroes during invasions. That was "hard-coded", meaning that if we wanted to ever do that anywhere else, a programmer would need to do it each time. If we wanted to do it on the fly, a programmer would need to create a tool, test it themselves, hand it to a designer, the designer tests it, and if we need more with it, the programmer would have to do more work.
LUA, however, helps solve that. All a programmer has to do with LUA is write in what is called "script hooks" for the designer to use. They use hook up a command in LUA that accesses the system that is hard-coded, test it out, then they're done. A designer can now use that function in whatever way they wish in LUA in whatever combination with anything else. In the old way, the programmer would have to write the tool to do things like activate on objective complete, etc. In LUA, it's up to the designer to plug it into whatever they want, giving them a much bigger toolkit to work with; you can tie changing the skies to ANYTHING you want. Here's an example of how changing skies looked in LUA:
How does this all work to help the story? In Issue 24, I wrote a story detailing the formation of a new group - the New Praetorians. We had done group formations in the pass, possibly too much, but I wanted to give a new spin on the idea. I wanted the player to feel like they were actually fighting side by side with these new characters, both during the recruitment stage and afterwards. However, our ally system in City of Heroes wasn't terribly expansive, and the AI tended to do weird things.
Enemies nearby? I think I'll RUN STRAIGHT INTO THEM! AGGRO TRAIN!
The idea came to my while I was playing Diablo 3. One of the things I really liked was how their companions worked. You learned more about their story while you adventured with them and they never permanently died. There were some issues, of course, with things like repeating dialog, etc. These were all things that I could improve upon. The biggest goal I wanted to hit was the following:
1) Set up a LUA script that would prevent an ally from permanently dying.
2) Make the LUA script generic, so that it could be attached to ANY entity in the future, even ones who weren't your allies.
3) If all of this works, attach dialog for the allies to say throughout the mission to reveal their story as you went along and avoid pausing the action.
I went to work on the LUA script. I knew we had all the tools to do this from my already limited experience with the system. Jason Lee and Tim Sweeney helped me with several logical issues. After several iterations, the script was complete. I'll start with the issues it had first, then move on to the successes, because I'm Catholic and I think about all my flaws first before my successes.
I had to create a unique costume type for any entity used. Most characters in City of Heroes vanished about ten or twenty seconds after their death, and they also rag-dolled. I had to make a one-off version of the entity's costumes that would stop them from vanishing and make their death animation be a "take a knee" animation. If we had more time, I would've requested the ability to dynamically edit an entity's death animation and their time to vanish period, but that would've been a MAJOR undertaking given how deep that code is.
The other issue was that allies who couldn't die would be very over-powered. I added a power onto the unique entity that was already being made to reduce their power. This could have easily been done with existing tools in LUA. We had a function that could add and remove powers to entities. If the tech from the last paragraph was feasible, I would have added this power through the LUA script.
THE THINGS I WOULD HAVE DONE!
Now that I'm done bashing my own work, on to the good part of it and how the script worked! The designer attached the script to an encounter in a mission and specified which actor it would work on. The designer then could detail what the entity should say when they die, what they say when they revive, and how long it takes for them to revive. Also, when the entity revived, they would run straight for wherever the player was. This required changing the escort script on them so they would never lose the player and also work towards following them. I have to emphasize this was all done through iteration. The first time the script was made, I just had the death/revive dialog exposed. As I played it, I realized it would be good to have the timer exposed for other designers. As well, I noticed my own behavior in testing was to wait around for the ally to be revived, which wasn't fun; adding in the "go to player" aspect allowed me to fire and forget and keep going with the ally playing catch up.
In the end, the script was used on the New Praetorians in the majority of the missions they were featured in Issue 24. In my personal, unbiased opinion, I think it worked well. As you went through the missions, the New Praetorians would make comments on objectives you completed and after a certain number of enemies were killed. You would learn more about how they were evolving and moving along, too. This was the first iteration on the idea, so there were plenty of things that could be improved upon. However, I was really happy with how it turned out. This wasn't just a simple script I made - it was now an entire system for new allies in the future, and it was awesome.
So! What were the lessons I learned from this?
1) LUA is amazing.
2) Give yourself plenty of time to iterate.
3) Enjoy your success, but know that you can never make anything that is perfect. There's always room for improvement. (even now I'm thinking of several things I would've liked to improve upon)
4) Even though nothing is perfect, you've got to get what you're working on to a state you think is good and MOVE ON. The rest of your work will suffer if you stay on one thing, and this is what leads to the dreaded CRUNCH.
LUA is great, hands down. I was able to do all this without bugging the programmers too much. This allowed them to work on the bigger projects that had to be done for the sake of the game, while still allowing design to make interesting missions. I would highly promote LUA usage in many studios, simply because of the sheer power it gives designers. However, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. LUA must be used in a responsible way and only when needed. It could be made to do amazing things, or great evil.
