Constructive Feedback

One of the biggest challenges for Charlotte’s Dream so far, has been the dangerous npc called the Dragon Lady. This notorious figure in the world of Charlotte’s Dream, can be both ally or foe. The player must choose his/her words carefully, because the Dragon Lady is easily offended (which then quickly results in death). Designing the exterior and interior of her pagoda (AKA the Dragon Temple) took weeks to develop, because the interior also doubles as a boss room for the final chapter of the game.

In Charlotte’s Dream you can ask any of the important npc’s about any other character, puzzle, or quest you’ve encountered. The dialogue trees are updated accordingly, so it may worth while to revisit npc’s if you get stuck somewhere. With the Dragon Lady however, there are also other mechanics at work. The player must be very careful which dialogue choices he/she selects. Because the Dragon Lady has an anger level that rises with each thing she finds insulting. The player figures this out right away, when Charlotte forgets to take off her shoes when entering the temple. Charlotte has a limited number of excuses. Once you reach that limit, the Dragon Lady will no longer forgive your mistakes, and her anger will rise with each one. She also repeatedly insists that you drink her tea, and every time you delay doing this (depending on how you delay it) might anger the Dragon Lady more. On the other hand, drinking her tea makes her anger decrease slightly. So the player is constantly trying to balance curiousity, with the kind that killed the cat.

Another thing worth mentioning, is the odd blend of asian cultures at the temple. Since this is a dream world, everything is a strange mess of partially Chinese and Japanese culture. This was all done deliberately, because the Dragon Lady and her temple are all fantasy. Also, the Dragon Lady likes to eat barbie dolls. Yeah… weird.

It has been a while since I worked on the game Spooked. The design document for the game is now several years old, yet I still find myself coming back to it from time to time. I know this game will be made eventually, it just has to be.

Just a quick summary for those unfamiliar with the game, it is basically a game where ghosts and ghost hunters play a game of hide and seek in various spooky locations. Without giving away the rules, there is one thing that always bothered me a bit. Last time I talked a little about games being a cohesive whole. In my opinion, Spooked has not reached this point yet. Spooked is a round based game, much like Counter Strike is also a round based game. In order to keep players invested, I added the option for ghosts to gradually unlock spooky powers, or new looks. While this is all fine and dandy, what about the ghost hunters? What do they have to look forward to?

In some drafts of the design document I had brought up the idea of “level stories”. The idea behind this is, that each level has a spooky story that the ghost hunters can gradually uncover. Each level would have a unique story, which would allow ghost hunters to unlock new rooms/locations within the levels. This would eventually lead to a grand finale for the level. However, what this finale would be, I have no idea.

As I was thinking about this, my first worries were about how the story would span several game sessions. I figured the players would collect clues that randomly spawn inside the level. Clearly the players would need to have an overview of their collected clues for each level as well. And there would have to be riddles. For example, I could imagine the player finding a page from a diary, and upon picking it up the text is read to the player. It might tell the story of one of the servants inside the ghostly manor, who heared strange scratching noises from the basement. This would be your first clue, and the player would have to go and find the noise before more clues spawn at all. In other words:

Explore level -> Find clue -> Find location – > search next clue

But this raises the question when and where these clues would spawn. Would players fight over them? Or would they be dedicated to one player? What do we want these clues to do for our game? How do we make this a cohesive whole?

One of the main ideas behind level stories, is to encourage exploration, and lead the players away from their safe areas. We want players to split up, and we want them to enter creepy dangerous rooms. Additionally, if at all possible, we want players to stick around till the end of the round.

So perhaps clues should be dedicated to a player. Because the last thing we want, is players rushing through the level, trying to find clues before someone else does. Perhaps that player is the only one who can see the clue. Perhaps more clues spawn depending on how many players are in the game. Perhaps, much like in TF2, players that have died and are waiting to respawn are given a view of where their next clue is. This would encourage players to stick around for the next round, even if they are dead. In TF2, players also receive new items randomly with large intervals. So perhaps our distribution of clues could work in a simular way. Eventually I will have to figure out how to bring all this full circle. When you complete the story of a level, what does it give you?

I had a short discussion yesterday with an aspiring game designer, and the topic was punishing the player if he/she dies. To put this in context, he had a concept for an RPG/MMO, and was trying to figure out a system where the player would receive some form of penalty for dying.

The point that I brought up was, why would you want to punish the player? If the answer is, I want the player to do better next time, then surely there are other ways to encourage the player to rethink his strategy? Why immediately leap to the idea of punishment, just because so many other games do it? In the end, isn’t the goal of any game to have fun? Once you establish fun as your goal, and think hard about it, you start to realise that not all of your initial ideas are in line with that goal. This is what I like to call, a “cohesive whole”. When your game design is a “cohesive whole”, this means that the sum of all the rules work together towards the same goal. They all form a perfect circle. And punishing the player is a concept that does not necesarily lead to the goal of having fun.

Team Fortress 2 is a great example of how to approach the way players die differently. In TF2 the player respawns rather quickly, but on top of that if the player should die, he receives a short view of the player that killed him. This allows the player to adapt his strategy. And if that wasn’t enough, the game even encourages the player to do better, by telling him how close he was to beating his previous best. For example: “You killed more enemies than your previous best”, or “you almost destroyed more buildings than your previous best”. This is the perfect example of how to encourage the player to improve his strategy without punishing him. Fun and humour are the goal in TF2. And to bring humour back into the mix, the game even points out all your body parts shortly after you died. TF2′s design is a cohesive whole.

Are we as game designers getting too soft on the player by not punishing him enough? I don’t think so personally. I think we are in fact closer to achieving a balance, where unexperienced and expert players are both playing together, and they are both having fun. I don’t think every game needs to be as difficult and punishing as for example Ninja Gaiden or Demons Souls (to name just a few). Those few games that are really punishing to the player, reach out to a small select group of gamers. There is a place for such games. But overall, I think games should just be fun to everyone.

While exploring Dublin, I passed one of the many SWIFT train stations, and took some pictures for the game. This is exactly the kind of neo-classical style I was looking for. An old train station, with rusty support beams, loose wiring, and a grand hall. This is why I also took some pictures of seemingly silly details, such as the wires. I’ll later use these details as inspiration for the fictional location in the game. At the point of writing, I have yet to create the train platform, and the train station for the game. I want the train station to give the player a feeling of being lost in an abandoned place. In the game the location will be in the furthest corner of the world, where a terrible secret is hidden away in Charlotte’s  conscience. Innitially only the train platform will be accessible to the player. It isn’t until Act 2 that the player gets to ride the train, and visit the train station on the other end of the track. These photos will provide an excellent frame of reference once I start working on the ingame location.