Examining Horror in Video Games

So, I had started to write a post about my own thoughts on horror in video games. I was going to cite my experiences in playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent, as a great example of horror. Then, I remembered that the developers had written a lot themselves about horror! I started looking for something that they had posted and came across a terrific blog post by Frictional Games  co-founder Thomas Grip about horror in games. Instead of writing my own thing, having never worked on a horror game, I'm just going to link to the blog post and do a, "what he said".

Ten Ways To Evolve Horror Games

This short blog post is also brought to you by me having to handle a lot of things and also having written another blog post entirely before this and not being terribly happy with it. For those curious, it was a blog post about how I should have written the Roy Cooling arc in City of Heroes. The answer was that I needed more than an hour to think of it, because every time I came up with a re-write, I had another idea to fix that re-write. Such is the life of a person who tries to think of himself as a writer! 

So, long and short, sorry for a short post! I'm hoping that by next week I will have an idea for Roy Cooling. Or, I might post about my theory of a proper way to write time travel. Who knows?

MMO Theories: New Content Alert!

My theory is in this test tube.

Every Sunday after going to mass, my fiancee and I go to a great restaurant nearby for lunch. Every month the restaurant rolls out new specials for people to try out. Outside of the restaurant is a large sign that gives a detailed list of the new specials, and they have a separate menu given that details out what is new. We always look forward to seeing what's new at the beginning of every month, or, if we haven't been there in a while, seeing what has been added in the past few weeks.

What does this have to do with MMO's? Everything! Or, maybe you're not asking that question, at which point, I no longer sound smart. The dilemma I'd like to talk about today is revealing new content in your MMO to both existing players, new players, and players who may be coming back to your game. This all was triggered after I tried to get back into the Secret World over the weekend, and it got me thinking about how we tried to handle the situation on City of Heroes. As a warning, this post doesn't contain much in the way of "experienced" advice, but more of my own theory, which, as a theory, is still flawed and also unproven. To the example!

I really enjoyed the Secret World when it came out, but unsubbed after barely playing it for a month for various reasons. I had some spare time over the weekend and decided to check it out again; I knew that they had roughly four months of updates that they had added on, so I was curious to see what was new. I resubscribed for a month, updated the game, and hopped in. I was then greeted by... nothing. There was no indication to me, as a lapsed subscriber who was coming back, that anything new was added. I didn't know where to look for the new content and didn't really want to go website hunting for where the new content was. I played for a few hours, stumbling around to see if something was new or just a quest I could replay (since you can replay quests in the game). I found one new quest, which was the rocket launcher, but only because I hopped out of the game and looked up how to find the rocket launcher quest. All in all, however, there was nothing in the game to indicate that anything really had changed, however, they had added a ton of cool things; the ability to change your face/hair, adding height sliders, new missions, new alternate weapons, etc. As someone coming back into the game, however, none of that was apparent.

Someone told me I could get a chainsaw. Where does that happen and how soon can I have it in my hands?

This leads into a problem that I feel a lot of MMO's suffer from, which is communicating to players when new content has been added. What is the difference in your game from the day before a huge content patch is added and afterwards? The content can be the best in the world, completely ground breaking, but if no one knows that they should go to this place or this person for new things, then it's just going to get overlooked. Something as simple as giving players a sign that they should go somewhere can make or break months of work that a team has done. Of course, your hardcore players will know where to go, but what about the casual player? The new player? The lapsed subscriber who is returning to try to be your prodigal son?

It's OK, we forgive you, all that matters is that you're back. Have you seen where you can spend money?

In City of Heroes, we handled this with pop ups. Lots and lots of pop ups. Players will remember that at level 20 you were barraged with pop ups that new contacts were available. It wasn't the most elegant solution and it was one we weren't terribly happy with. We tried to implement a new solution, the contact finder, but that had its flaws as well. The main problem was that you, as a player, did not know when to use the contact finder. We never gave an indication that there was something new to look for in the finder and did not train the players that, when you had no idea what to do, you should use the contact finder.

What is the solution for games like Secret World? I have a theory, one that is totally unproven. I believe MMO's would benefit by having a, "updates" section that is clearly on the main UI and that flashes or does something to indicate it has been updated. This section would tell the players about major updates to the game, the details of what has been added, and where that can be added. I really wish Secret World had this, as I was grasping at straws and frustrated at having to hunt through websites to find what was added in updates 1, 2, 3, and 4. I think it would be a great impression on a return subscriber to click on this and see just how much has been added to the game and where to begin. It would've been great to test this in City of Heroes and divide it up by the issue updates; imagine being able to see, in-game, a detailed list of what was added with each issue update.

Good GOD! They added an END GAME?!

I'd like to emphasize the fact that this is all theory. I could be completely wrong about all of this, but I'd like to think I'm at least mostly right about the fact that it is a problem communicating new content to players in the game. Secret World's method of adding content is easy for a new player to see, as they're going through the game and just seeing the content, and current players will most likely be chomping at the bits for what is new. However, subscribers looking to come back to your game might be on the edge regarding whether or not to come back, and you want to do as much legwork as possible to convince them that the game as it is now is more awesome than when they left.

I would be really interested to see a game try this out, or, if anyone knows of one, a game that does something like this. I don't know of one off the top of my head, but I'm not foolish/prideful enough (yet, give it a few more years) to think that my idea is completely original. Of course, if it is original, then I just posted it for free on the internet for anyone else to use and take credit for it. But please, if you're thinking of stealing it, keep in mind, I like being able to pay for dinners and lunches for myself and my fiancee. Would you really steal an idea from a guy trying to buy a nice lunch for his soon to be wife?

=(

Lessons I Learned: The Rule of Three

Not the Book of Three. But that book was also amazing.

I was working on Issue 17 of City of Heroes when I learned this lesson. I wanted to have a sort of metroid-esque escape scene at the end of one of the villain arcs. I knew that the game did something similar at the end of another story arc, where the player team had to escape from a volcano collapsing on itself. I thought that was amazing and wanted to emulate it. I asked Joe "Hero 1" Morrissey and Vince "Dark Watcher" D'Amelio about how to use that same technology for this. Unfortunately, I discovered that scene was hard-coded. This meant that the code was written in such a specific way that it only worked in that one specific instance.

In my eagerness/youth (ah, the days of youth) I asked if we could write a new script that could be used in this instance to do what I wanted it to do. That is when I had the following conversation with Vince:

Vince: What are three ways you can use this script?

Me: Huh? Like in the mission?

Vince: No, in general. Where are three other places that either now, or in the future, you will use this script? It's the rule of three.

I then had to snatch a pebble from his hand to request the script.

Vince's question made me think hard about how this script would be designed and used. Granted, a lot of the design for the script came from Joe, who was my mentor at the time, but the idea of the rule of three stuck with me. The script that I wanted was to just have explosions go off at different times during a three minute countdown. The script we came up with was one that allowed the designer to set a timer duration, if it was visible or invisible, an objective that could stop the timer, an objective that fired off when the timer was complete, and objectives that would fire off at intervals specified by a designer. It was a Very Powerful script and we ended up using it in a ton of missions in Going Rogue and afterwards. If you looked through our excel sheets, you would undoubtedly find the Timed Objective script in a lot of places.

This story shows the benefit of trying to follow the rule of three in what you do as a game designer. It's a lesson that is especially important when designing MMO's, which require you to be firing out content in a rapid pace manner, which means programming time is always a precious gem that you must use to its highest. However, this rule doesn't just apply to programming; it can apply to the use of character and environment art time as well. However, artists work can be a bit more nuanced with the rule of three; after all, a lot of the time you're requesting things that are very specific set pieces or environments. The rule that I tried to follow was, "the rule of three, or the rule of awe". Sounds very professional, doesn't it?

Just a bunch of professionals, looking professional, doing professional things professionally.

This rule simply comes down to, are there three places I can use the pieces of art that are given to me? No? Well, then will it cause awe when the player encounters it? Examples of this can be seen all throughout the first signature story arc series that I worked on. We had examples back and forth of this. There was a new lava texture made for the first arc, which looked really great and leagues better than our old lava. There were also charred islands made for the first map, as well as a dark obelisk. The new lava helps add to any scene it's added to (easy rule of three application), the islands aren't so specific that they can't be used in other places (rule of three), the obelisk is very specific story-wise and may only be used once, if ever, again, but it is gigantic and stays in your mind after you see it (rule of awe). Then, there was the finale of all the arcs, which takes place on a giant island in space facing off against a large, unique entity, Rula-Wade. Rula-Wade, for sure, could only be used once, but he sticks in the player's mind. The island, story-wise, could be used multiple times, along with just the entire Earth scene.

Fun fact: The Earth scene was used again in Issue 25! Players would be on top of Shiva who was floating near the earth, fighting its transformed Shivans. The map, made by Addison Delany  Barnes was amazing, and had an easter egg of the floating island from SSA: Ep 7 in the distance to give a feel of where the player was and a callback to a previous story.

Now, the main danger with requesting art time is balancing that "awe" feeling with the amount of time an artist is going to put into their work. If you make an environment request that takes 3 months to finish and it results in about 5 minutes of "awe wow!", then the rest of a player's hour is filled with the same hum-drum stuff, then that was a bad call. However, if that 3 months results in a, "HOLY OH MY GOD I NEED TO SEE THAT AGAIN WWWWOOOOW!", then it's a good call. So, as you can see, not terribly objective! An example of this was the Avatar of Hamidon, which I wasn't involved in. This beast of a guy took a while to make due to various complications, but in the end it was something gigantic and impressive, a guy that you (well, at least me) wanted to see again after your first encounter with it.

Can't... look.. away...

So! The rule of three. Living by it in game design can help not only you, but your entire team, and that's something not to be taken for granted. When you work as a designer, you should strive not to have your work be additive, but to be multiplicative; that is to say, your efforts don't just life your own work up, it lifts everyone's work up. I strove to do this when I was making LUA scripts; they would make my own arcs even more awesome, but I wrote them in a generic, rule of three way, so that they would help everyone else.  A small team working in this way can crank out the same high-quality products that a large-scale team working alone would accomplish, and that's definitely something worth thinking about.

Joining Cryptic Studios

I work for them now. Imagine that!

This will be a short post, spoilers! As many people may know, I have been hired by Cryptic as a content designer for Star Trek Online. It's exciting for many reasons, least of all being that I get paid again and I have a job to do now! Joking aside, it is very cool to be at Cryptic, to see a lot of the folks that got the ball rolling on City of Heroes. I've already met a lot of great people - like the designer who originally wrote and designed the Radio and Television arcs!

It's also really interesting because it's unknown; in a way, the entire experience is like Star Trek, except I'm boldly going where many men and women have gone before. However, there's a sense of wonder, for me, regarding going towards something that is a (relative) unknown. Before, I was a figure of authority on the City of Heroes team (next to Black Scorpion, Andy Maurer, Rob Anderberg, Positron, War Witch, Second Measure, Protean ... OK, so maybe not a FULL authoritarian figure). Now, I go into the great unknown of Cryptic. How do they do things? What sort of ways can I make content? What will I learn? This last bit is the important part, and it's something that, during my search for a new job, a good friend/mentor of mine told me. He said never stop learning, and that there's always the possibility to learn something from even the smallest task. This, he said, was the sign of a great designer, and I think it's true. Now, the call is to actually live that in earnest.

I don't know what challenges and experiences await within Cryptic. Well, I do, but I can't legally talk about it, or else my next post will be, "What to do to get fired". I do know that I'm looking forward to the continued broadening of my skills and understanding of, well, everything that I do! I hope that all the people who are reading this will enjoy watching my progress in this new position. I can't guarantee that I'll do everything perfectly, but I can guarantee that you'll be watching me apply everything I learned from City of Heroes towards Star Trek Online, then learning all the new lessons, methodologies, etc. that come from, well, just continuing to be open and educate myself!

I promise my next blog post will be interesting. Well, that's a broad promise, because it'll be interesting for me to write, but not necessarily for someone else to read; after all, I wouldn't post it if I thought it was a dull. I hope.