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.

I just finished a very large backdrop, of which you only see a fraction in the screenshot. The backdrop is the average width of about 3 screens, and includes a massive parallax effect as well. Parallax is the effect where multiple images are moved along side each other at different speeds to give the impression of depth. It is a trick that can be seen in a lot of 2D Disney movies. Not all of the animation is finished yet, because there are a lot of characters in the scene. It also contains 3 puzzles, which also still require coding. And yes, I made this picture pixel by pixel.

The giant bridge you see in the screenshot spans between the scrapyard and the dragon temple. I let myself be inspired by various surreal artworks, and the end result is a blend of various paintings translated to pixel form. In the background we can see a massive waterfall with a constant stream of cars tumbling over the side. A large cracked egg lies on the horizon, the sun baking in between the two halves like a giant spilled egg. There’s also a clockwork guardian on the bridge, who serves the Dragon Lady, while penguins wait to be fed down below.

But perhaps I should provide some context. In the game the protagonist needs to visit a character called The Dragon Lady. She lives in a massive temple/pagoda across a ravine. The above screen connects the scrapyard to the area where you meet the Dragon Lady. I’ve had quite a lengthy discussion with Robin regarding the Dragon Temple; How big it should be, number of screens, and how the Dragon Lady should be introduced. We still didn’t manage to decide what she should look like exactly either.

So who is the Dragon Lady and why is she so important? The Dragon Lady is the protector of the dream world. She is a potential ally to the player, but she is also slightly menacing. You do NOT want to get on her bad side. In fact, she is kind of creepy. She plays an important part in both act 1 and 3 of the story. I want her to look like a person of authority, who inspires fear and demands respect. Everything about the area she occupies should reinforce her character. This is why both the area and the character demand a lot of thought.

One of the main things I focus on with the puzzles in Charlotte’s Dream, is the multiple ways in which they can be solved. In traditional adventure games, the players have to think like the designers, in order to get into their narrow mindset and solve a puzzle. This is clearly one of the main flaws and frustrations of point and click adventure games, illogical puzzles. For Charlotte’s Dream it is exactly the other way around. I, the designer, try to think like the players. How would the player approach this problem? And can I turn these ideas into valid ways to solve the puzzle? I am of the opinion that there is no point in creating a classic adventure game today, if you are not going to do things differently.  That is why with Charlotte’s Dream I will be doing things very differently, and breaking quite a few rules that seem to have been set into stone somewhere along the line by who knows who.

I’m confident that this will not make the puzzles too easy. The difficulty of a puzzle should not come from the inability of the player to execute a basic task with the items available. For example, if the player needs to cut a rope, why would he need a pair of scissors, when he also has a shard of glass? A puzzle should not be solved through trial and error, but through understanding of the problem. Cutting a simple rope in this example, would not be considered as a true puzzle for Charlotte’s Dream. The puzzles revolve around a more broad understanding of the problem at hand and this is not something the player will solve by simply going through all the options.

I realise not every player thinks the same way, and this is why there will be multiple solutions to some of the obstacles in the game. There is more than one way to skin a cat, as they say, and this holds especially true for Charlotte’s Dream’s puzzles.

I apologize for not posting for a few days. I normally post an article every week.  The thing is, the desert is really taking up a lot of work. I’ll briefly explain why it is taking a lot of time. First of all, the desert is a maze, with randomly generated rooms. What this means, is that the game will randomly pick a room, and then upon loading it, it will also randomize the decoration in it. Currently I’m working on at least five desert rooms, with about 15 variations of scenery per room. This leads to tons of different combinations, but it also means tons of work. Then there are also the fixed rooms. These are rooms that you can reach if you find the correct sequence of directions through the desert. Of course there will be clues to these sequences in other areas of the game. Right now I have three fixed rooms planned. One of which contains an important puzzle.

Next, there are the particle effects. I don’t know exactly what the sandstorm is going to look like, but I want the desert to look like a really hostile place. I also want the horizon rippling because of the heat, which is something I’ll have to animate by hand. Last but not least, another small addition; Robin suggested adding clickable named zones  to move to the next screen in every room. Makes sense, but takes time to implement.

Oh, and designing the big desert puzzle is also proving quite a challenge. More on that some other time.

Just a small update as I’m working on the design for some of the complex puzzles. I have just finished implementing some minor bug fixes and added a ton of new items. Normally having tons of items is not such a good feature of an adventure game. But keep in mind that there are many different ways to tackle puzzles in Charlotte’s Dream. So depending on your approach, you will not get your hands on all items in the game. Lots of items can be combined to create new items and some items share the same function. There are only a few key items in the game (items that you need to solve a puzzle). Most of the other items you’ll find are simply helpful tools. The real puzzles come from the unique game mechanics.

One of the new puzzles I have designed is one I’ll call the “birthday-puzzle”. It was something that emerged from Robin’s art for one of the new looks of one of the rooms. Basically a bunch of trees are having a birthday party and they have a gift that the player must get his hands on. There are many ways to solve this puzzle, and one of those solutions involves finding the trees a proper birthday cake made from dirt. What is interesting when designing these puzzles, is trying to think like the player. How would the player solve this? Would he talk to the trees and help them? Would he try to steal the gift and anger the trees instead? Any of those ideas are clever, and make for some excellent game play. This is a good example of how Charlotte’s Dream will have multiple approaches for each important puzzle. Since the player can also have picked various different skills, I will also need to take into account that not every solution will be available to each player. It kind of goes back to the classic adventure game Maniac Mansion, where depending on your choices, the way you solve the puzzles changes as well. I’d like to think my approach is a little more elegant, because it does not restrict the player, but does exactly the opposite. Rather than forcing the player down a narrow mind set, it opens up new ways to solve a puzzle should the player seek a different way to solve it.

I’m also taking the time to work on the desert. The desert is a maze-like area, very true to the tradition of games like the Legend of Zelda. The challenge is to create various unique “rooms” for the desert, without actually creating hundreds of unique rooms. I’m thinking of perhaps randomly cycling backgrounds and decoration elements in order to create randomized desert rooms. I also have to work on the particle effects to create an actual sandstorm. I want the desert to feel like a hostile place, where the environment is against the player. In the next couple of days I’ll be working on that, and I’ll try to get the feeling of the area just right.

Work on the Dark City is slowly progressing when ever I feel like it. Creating the dark unwelcome streets of this area is harder than I thought, since a lot of the original art I made as a child is simply not up to todays standards. So I find myself recreating and redesigning a lot of these rooms from scratch. I have decided to only work on the rooms for this area when ever I have a really good idea what it should look like. This means that in the mean time I will be focussing on other areas instead.

Other things on my schedule are tackling the way the crafting materials spawn. I want a better way to control how many spawn over the course of the game and how often they drop. My friend and partner in crime Robin also brought up the idea of adding hotzones for players to click on to walk to new areas. This is a pretty standard feature of many adventure games, although there are also plenty that do without. After carefully considering the pros and cons, I’m thinking of adding them to every room in the game, which will be a considerable amount of work. But it will be a great improvement I’m sure. And last but not least, I have added a classic look to the mouse pointer, so it resembles the kind of pointer people remember from many of the classic Lucas Arts adventures. I like how the loading state is a little floppy disk. No pictures along with this update I’m sorry to say. But when the desert is finished, expect pictures to follow.

I’ve made some minor improvements to the game. As was suggested earlier, all objects in the game now have a default action associated with them. Left clicking any object without choosing an action, will automatically make the character perform the default action for that object. Most items that can be picked up, will now have “take” as their default action. Doors, chests and devices will have “operate” as their default action. Characters will have “Talk to” as their default action. And most other objects will simply have “Examine” as their default action. The main character will also automatically walk over to the object you clicked, which overall just makes the controls feel much less stiff.

Today I will be focussing on a new area (the junkyard),  adding some new items, and adding some logical actions to previous rooms. For example, if the player sees some broken glass lying on the floor, the player might want to pick up a shard. Because various obstacles in the game need you to cut things, something a shard of glass would be perfect for naturally. There are also a couple of poisonous fruit that you could not pick before. But since one of the puzzles demands that you find some poison, I should really allow the player to collect such fruit. As you can tell, creating puzzles for Charlotte’s Dream is an iterative process. While some puzzles are planned on paper, a lot of them develop naturally as I design the world. In Charlotte’s Dream anything that seems natural, should be possible for the player to do. It might end up being one of the most logical adventure games yet, which is ironic, since it takes place in such an illogical world. But do not mistake logical for easy. I have a couple of devious puzzles planned that are far from just a simple item combination puzzle.

I let two professional artists play through the game yesterday and they had a lot of feedback regarding the interface, backgrounds and general user friendlyness. I made sure to write everything down, because there are often things that the designer simply doesn’t see. Which is why it is so important to get constructive feedback from others early on. See how I cleverly got the title of the website in there? I’m such a sly fox.

But anyway, there are a couple of really interesting points I noticed after watching other people play the game. For example, I noticed they tended to left click a lot of objects, without first selecting an action. Now the classic adventure game interface of course takes some getting used to, but I figured perhaps objects just need a default verb. For example, left clicking a door should just always open/close it, and left clicking an item should always pick it up. I’m also wondering if the verb bar should be emptied after each action, like it is now. Because what if you want to examine multiple objects in a row? Right now the game cleans the verb bar after each action, forcing you to click the “examine” button for each object every single time. Perhaps it is best left to the player to un-select what ever button they picked with the right mouse button?

They also gave me some great advise regarding the readability of some of the scenes. Where to place highlights to draw attention to certain areas, and where to better communicate there is a path the player can take. There was also one screen where the control panel tended to obscure an important part of the scene. So I’ll be making some changes to that scene pretty soon.

Right now the two of them are doing a paint over of a different background each. These will be the backgrounds for the alternate/new world of the game.