Music as a source of inspiration, Part 1: Lost Coastlines

Many things inspire specific game ideas for me. In fact, hardly a day goes by without some crazy, ill-thought-through idea planting its seed in my head. It normally starts with a desire to create a feeling or an emotion. For example, today I was watching a film called Speed Racer (surprisingly good actually) and I wanted to recreate the thrill of racing at absurd speeds requiring stupid reaction times where you had to jump, spin and smash your way to victory. I had even started mapping out the controls and how the single player would work by the time the film ended.

In the following two posts, I will be outlining a couple of game ideas that have been inspired by pieces of music. As with everything else, what normally happens for me is that it conjures up an image in my head, that then translates in to a game play concept.

The first song is an obscure song that was released on the Single of the Week offer run by iTunes. The song is called Lost Coastlines by Okkervil River (Spotify Link). My idea started at the end of the game, I, however, will start at the beginning.

It is a RPG of sorts set on the seas back when wind was the main means of getting around. At the start of the game, you have a simple choice, are you a right honourable sailor, or a pirate? You then arrive in a port and you are tasked with choosing a crew for your ship (which you inherited from your father who died at sea). In the port there would be about 100 people. (This is where the fact that I don't intend to build this in the coming weeks comes in to play): Each one of these would have a in depth and varied history and personality.

The basic game play would consist of a number of potentially unrelated quests separated by expanses of time. This comes back to an idea I discussed on GD.net, with a more "real" world and potential for more varied quests. I'll do a post why I think this kind episodic game play could work at some other point, however, it is not really relevant to this post.

If you're listening to the song, you are probably wondering, other than the vague sea theme, how the song inspired me to make this. In truth, most of what I just said existed before I heard the song, the sea theme is what made the following element glue with the rest of it.

Through out the game, there would be vague hints, mad ravings and general NPC chatter about a "Lost Coastline". At the start of the game, I imagine most players will completely ignore it. However, I hope, as the game develops, and the references are repeated, people will pick up on it. There would be stories of sailors who went mad looking for the coastline, there would be hysterics who claim to have seen it etc. The only thing in common is that everyone who knows anything about it, says it is the most beautiful place ever and that no sailor has been known to return.

Once you complete the game, as with many RPGs, you are free to continue looking around. It would be an open world in which you spend most of your travelling time auto sailing between ports and using maps to find known destinations. However, it will be perfectly possible to freely sail anywhere. Somewhere in the vast sea of the game, there will be the Lost Coastline (of course) and players can try to find it.

At first you are probably repelled by the idea as being cheap. However, if it were easy to find, the whole point would be destroyed. I also regard it as in addition to the main game; for most people, the game will end without more than a cursory search. As it will be so hard to find, I envisage a giant internet cult spawning to try to find this beautiful lost coastline (I love designing without reality messing things up!).

Then one day someone will find it, and it will be a beautiful experience for them. They would be the first person to set foot on the lost coastline. The first person to see all the wonder. True discovery is something that few in the 21st century have experienced. I would employ an artist specially to create it (who would be killed after development is finished, obviously) While I have mapped out what will happen, I don't really feel comfortable typing it out. Suffice to say it would poetic, or at least try to be.

Afterwards the person would run and tell the internet all about it and everyone would rush there, but the magic would be lost. But for that one person, I (hopefully) would have created a unique experience that they will treasure for the rest of their life.

Inevitably, it would be found by some stupid spoilt kid who played the game for five minutes, constantly tried to skip the damn thing because he was bored, until he found out he would be internet famous, but that's life!

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Now playing: Okkervil River - Lost Coastlines
via FoxyTunes

Games as a form of art

This is a very hot topic at the moment and one that a lot of people have posted opinion on. I have my own opinions, but they basically boil down to that a good games makes you feel something (be it excitement, intrigue or success) but an art game makes you feel something that is not necessarily regarded as a positive feeling. For example, you could make the case that Fable is an art game because you feel responsibility, sadness at loss etc.

I have more to say about it, but I really posted this to link to an interesting post of the Zen of Design about this topic.

I largely agree with what it says. I think it is practically true that just because we have plenty of games that definitely aren't art (Gears of War 2) the same is true for all artistic mediums. In books, we have the Olaf Stapledon but then we also have Andy McNab. Does that mean that books can't be a form of art. No. There are hundereds of pictures that are just well painted nice landscapes, which I wouldn't call art. Or rather I would, which is part of the problem, as I see them as the painting eqivalent of Gears of War, nice to look at but won't make you think.

That is also the other thing, everyone has a different deffinition of art, which futher complicates the matter and risks reducing the arguement to one of pointless semantics.

[Sorry for the lack of posts recently, been on a French Exchange and going back to France in two days!]

Twitter - Not Just Jumping on the Bandwagon

Technologies come and go on the Internet and I like to think I only sign up for technologies which I can actually think of a use for, rather than just what everyone else is using.

For example, with Twitter, I wanted to use it to post updates on the development on Frozen Kangaroo. I often found that I had made progress in its development and wanted to keep a record of this, but it was not nearly enough for a blog post. In that sense, Twitter was ideal.

However, today I found another use for it. I can't work out if Twitter is actually any good at this, or whether this is basically what forums have been doing for ages. Basically, there is now a #gamedesign tag where frequent discussions about different game design topics take place. Its been going for a few weeks now, but I only really got involved today (discussing professinal gaming as a public sport, after I watched some of the Star Craft final live). It was then I realised how fantastic it was.

I think the reason it is good is because it forces people to express short points, which means it is easy to keep up with it, instead of having to read pages of text, as is often the case at Gamedev.net. Also, Tweetdeck does live updating, meaning you don't have to keep using F5. As a result, any games designers or wannabe games designers, if you are looking for an excuse to join Twitter, here it is.

(Oh, and make sure to follow me @thk123)

Go with the Flow is Audiosurf...

A while back I posted a game idea I had for a rhythm based platformer called Go with the Flow. The basic premise was that it would be a platformer that went at such as speed you had to use the rhythm of the music to predict what you had to do. A raise in pitch would signify a jump and a lower would require you to dive. Whilst I tried to implement it in Flash, timing the level creation proved near impossible and my work in to byte interpretation of a song (where the program would look at the binary version of the song and calculate whether the sound was a raise in pitch or not) was not making sufficent progress to use

I posted the thougths to Gamedev.net and while I did get some game suggestions, no one suggested a game I later found out about (reading an unrelated blog post) called Audiosurf. If, like me, you haven't heard of the game, you control a little ship and must collect things to the rhytm of the music.

While it isn't a platformer, and you don't really use the music to know where to go, it captured the essence of what I was trying to explain with Go with the Flow. I also realise that this basic concept is also in Guitaur Hero. It is simply a more involving way of listetning to music. It is like tapping your fingers to the tune, but slightly more interesting.

Anyway, just a short post today, just wanted to have a go at all of you for not reccomending it to me.

Driving Games: Change we need

Apologies for lack of posting recently, my exams are over, so I really have no excuse.

Racing games, in my opinion, are no longer designed. While racing games aren't my favourite genre, I certainly enjoy them. For me, however, I believe the game play is beginning to get stale. Obviously the racing component is essentially right; it's the rest which I have a problem with. In this post I hope to explain exactly what I have a problem with and what I think can be done to fix this.

When new racing games are released, the major focus is the physics engine that can realistically model the cars. This seems to be almost exclusively what is demonstrated. Now don't get me wrong, of all the genres, racing is the one where the physics engines are most important. And it is important, as I discussed in my post about excessive graphical focus on Veteran Gamer, it increases the tension within the race, making it much more enjoyable.

However, there is more to a game than one aspect. And a genre needs change, not just improvement. Every racing game follows the same basic plan. Loads of realistic cars, extensive realistic modding for said cars, hundreds of realistic tracks and a realistic physics engine. With the exception of Mario Kart, all racing games seem to target the realistic market.

On top of that, the game play does not change. You race, you earn money to buy cars, you do more races. You fail a race, you retry. The game is always linear but without a story. I don't think racing games need a story, but if it doesn't have a story, why is it so linear?

One of the things I would like to see is a more believable world with a fixed calendar of events. Obviously you wouldn't have to wait months to play the game, but if you loose a race, you might have to wait a game year to play in that race again instead of instantly retrying until you succeed. Make individual failures acceptable and you should make the game less frustrating.

One of my favourite off-track racing experiences was in some formula one racing game on the PS1, where you had to qualify for a tournament and you were given 12 game hours to do so. In that time, you had to get a qualifying time, fix any damage done to your car whilst doing this and do any upgrades/changes you wanted. This made the game feel more real and made the race more tense as you had already invested a considerable amount of time and effort in to it.

At the moment, racing games lack interesting decisions, you race as well as you can in every race, if you fail, you just restart. There is no reason to do anything else. If however you had a calendar, you may have to choose between two tournaments (with different rewards, one might come with more money, the other with more prestige or a rare cup).

And that is just an example. There are surely many ways to mix up the game play so it is not all the same. Take, for example, Burnout: Paradise, where you had an open world to explore.

Another thing that seemingly all racing games do (Mario Kart excepted) is use super-realistic cars. While the real world is often a very good source to base your game ideas on, it certainly shouldn't be the sole source in a whole genre. The world lacks variety (there is, after all, only one). However, if you delve in to the fictional, your options are limitless.

But even sudo-realistic universe could be significantly better in game play terms. In real life, cars are made to be as good as possible at everything. In a fictional, albeit similar universe, this could be impossible and instead cars have to be highly specialised or or below average in all areas. This would make choosing and tuning a car not so much a matter of finding the best, but the one best suited to the race ahead.

However, I am not optimistic we will see this any time soon. As I've already said, good physics are important in a racing game and these are still expensive to create. This means that indie developers who want to try something new can't choose this genre (or else fail on the racing part, which is more important, no matter how I try to argue this). Publishers will not want to invest in other areas of the game that they cannot so easily demonstrated, particularly if it means cuts to the physics development or their own profits.

Thoughts and opinions welcome. Have I missed the point, are racing games fine?

Posting hiatus

Well you will have probably noticed posts seems to have dried up. To avoid the situation which happened last year on my other blog I am posting an official hiatus notice. Due to exams, posting on this blog, (and my game news site) will halt. Posting will resume on June 15th with a post about the resource model in Frozen Kangaroo.

In the mean time, I will leave you with some links.

I am really enjoying the Three Moves Ahead podcast from Flash of Steel. If you want a taster of what the podcast is like, my favourite one was about symettry and asymettry in games. The podcast is well worth a subscribe because it combines genuinely interesting discussion about games design with some funny personalities. Better yet, it doesn't just focus on the latest game release.

Finally, an odd link. I am linking to this site primarily so that it can be found by Google. It is a website I designed (email me @ thekileyenator@gmail.com if you fancy one for yourself) and so I need Google to index it. However, if you are looking for plants in your work place, and you are based the home counties, this is the site to go to - Renaissance Plants

Frozen Kangaroo Concept: Nuclear Weapons

In a series of posts I intend to explain the more detailed elements of Frozen Kangaroo, the real time strategy game that I am working on. You can read an executive summary here. I hope to make it so that the posts only rely on things explained before them. However, please excuse me if my posts either digress to explain some concept, or don't make any sense because of no digression. If you have any questions, leave a comment (if it is an old post, I would recommend posting it on a newer post) or email me @ thekileyenator@gmail.com

As with the real Cold War, nuclear weapons will play an important part in Frozen Kangaroo. Not only do they add a devastating weapon to your arsenal, they can be used as a diplomatic bartering tool and even a direct path to victory.

Types of Nuclear Missiles

There are three types of nuclear missile in this game, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. They are: long, medium and short range nuclear missiles, or ICBM, err normal, and tactical nukes. Sadly, Blogger doesn't support tables, so I will have to explain it in paragraphs.

The long range nuke has, as you might expect, the longest range. Indeed, it can shoot anywhere on the map, including the proxy nation's colony cities (Will explain this in a later post, but they are basically where the civilians live. Each proxy nation has an associated colony city which contains millions of civilians who have been moved to keep them out of the way of the war). These missiles also inflict the most damage. Sadly, the pay off is in cost and speed. Cost is fairly self explanatory, but the effect of speed I will explain in a moment.

The medium range missile can reach most of the map, but cannot reach the proxy nations colony cities. Damage is similarly weakened, although it is still very powerful. However, it is faster and cheaper.

Finally the short range missile, which can only fire in provinces within a 4 province radius (subject to testing), and deals far less damage, particularly to buildings. It is, however, significantly faster and cheaper.

Missile Launchers

To fire these missiles you have three options; fixed, mobile and submarines. Fixed missile launchers can be constructed by your builder units. They can fire any of the above missiles.

The mobile missile launchers are a trainable unit. They can be moved about on the map, but need to be "deployed" before they can fire. These can only fire medium and short missiles.

Finally, the submarine is a normal unit. It can carry two small nuclear missiles with it. Further nukes must be collected from a port. However, it does not need to set up. Also, as they are water based, they can quickly manoeuvre very close to key enemy provinces and threaten them before they have a chance to respond.

With the exception of the sub (which needs to take its nukes with it) the launchers can only store one nuke at a time. Further nukes must be stored in a silo and then transported to the launcher. These silos come with stationary launchers, so you don't have to constantly arrange the transport of nukes. Trucks carrying nukes can also be "parked" in to either of the launchers, allowing all the connected nukes to be fired.

However, if you wish to use a mobile nuclear launcher to target deep within the enemies territory, you will have to advance it with a truck carrying a nuclear missile. It may also be wise to accompany the truck and the launcher with some form of defence, as neither have any attack capabilities.

The Nuclear Missile Management Screen

So how does speed factor in to all of this? Well, nuclear missiles aren't instantaneous. When you fire a nuke, your opponent is immediately alerted to this development and are taken directly to their nuclear missile management screen. On this screen, for each of the provinces there is a count down till the missile will hit... if its been targeted. The opponent, however, does not know which province has been targeted and so all provinces will have a countdown clock running. I hope to make this quite a tense screen to be on, with flashing red lights, constantly ticking clocks and maybe even a siren!

What can you do with this information? Well, each one of your provinces can be sent into "bunker mode". This significantly reduces the damage done by any potential nuclear strike. However, going into and coming out of bunker mode takes time. During this time (and the time in bunker mode) all buildings production queues halt, units stop moving and you can't enter the province.

You must then decide which provinces to put into bunker mode. Obviously, the opponent is more likely to target high value provinces, but if one of them is producing something very important, does the nuclear missile pose a big enough threat to warrant halting production.

This is also where the speed of the nukes comes into play. A short range nuclear missile gives the player virtually no time to react, let alone put any of their provinces in to nuclear bunker mode.

The other important thing with nuclear weapons that I want to cover in this post is retaliation fire. When a nuclear missile is sent your way, you have the option to hit a big red button marked FIRE. Prior to any nuclear strike, preferably during a quite period of the game, you can target your nuclear missiles at specific provinces. Then, whenever you hit the red button, they all simultaneously fire at these predetermined locations. This means that if the opponent launches a huge, devastating barrage of missiles at you, you can retaliate before they even hit.

From the nuclear screen, you can set up retaliation fire, deploy provinces in to bunker mode and watch the approach of oncoming nukes with suitably tense flashing red lights.

Nuclear missiles are clearly a very powerful weapon. However, they come with a severe cost. Using nuclear missiles is highly frowned upon by proxy nations and their colonies. As I explained in my post about the proxy nations, firing nuclear missiles, particularly in a province associated with them, has a strong negative impact on your relations. If you fire at their colony city, that will make them sworn enemies to you, and will strongly effect everyone's opinion of you.

I will be explaining this is more detail, but nukes are, in some ways, more useful when not fired. You can use them in diplomacy to threaten your enemy or "persuade" other proxy nations to join you, lest they fall foul to your rain of terror. Also, as I said earlier, you can use them to win. Although I will be covering ways to win more fully, if you manage to significantly out-build your opponent on nuclear missiles, you can force them in to surrender.

For my next Frozen Kangaroo concept I hope to be covering either the resources or diplomacy (including how you can use nuclear missiles in diplomacy - I never said it was friendly diplomacy).