More on Choice; Info-dumps

Well, I think I found a point for my last entry: games are more interesting when you can't win using just one strategy. That's the key to interesting combats; it shouldn't always be viable to hold down the "Okay" button and keep making normal, physical attacks at the nearest enemy until it dies. It's also the key to an interesting game in general. Lufia II, for example, tended to require a lot more thinking both in- and out- of combat than most CRPGs do, and aside from the times when I was very, very stuck on a puzzle, the variety kept my attention longer. Deus Ex is also a good example of how the viability of different strategies makes an interesting game. It's an FPS with RPG elements. Going through the game without killing anyone is quite possible; so is going through the game killing everyone in sight. Of course, interesting games are also harder, because things are more interesting when you have to actually think about them. In some ways, more recent console RPGs seem to be heading for less interesting gameplay, throwing inane puzzles in the player's way to make the game appear harder when you can really just cheese the combat system to death. They seem to be trying to compensate for this by adding shinier graphics and giving you less control over the player characters' actions, so that it's more like watching a movie with combat and puzzles spliced in.

Hmmm.

I'd also like to talk about the trend of triggering info-dumps on players of RPGs. I think this is a little more rampant in non-professional works. You know what I mean. You'll find a library or some other building or compound that can act as a database of information, and there'll be more of the world's history than you can shake a stick at. And maybe, if you're lucky, some clues to secrets and sidequests. Some small fraction of the history does help uncover or elaborate on the storyline, but most of it is in there for flavour. Think about the library in Myst - lots of pretty journals, but all that text for only a handful of clues to solving the puzzles. Yes, they added flavour. I'm not against flavour. But think about how people use spices in cooking. When you add cinnamon to apples when preparing them for pie, you don't put in a quarter as much cinnamon as there are apples. That's far too much; it'll just be bitter. That's the way it is with these info-dumps. I suppose it makes it "harder" to find secrets if you have to wade through history books to find the clues, but there's a difference between tedious and difficult.

Payoff Matrices and Choice

Okay, I've been horribly lazy about both this blog and NaNoWriMo. That project I last mentioned didn't help, and then the week after that involved 2 midterms and another mini-project (actually, it was a homework assignment, but I turned it into a project because I do things like that...) and an assignment I should have done much, much earlier.

In any case. Games and game design.

I've recently been reminded about payoff matrices. These are a concept that shows up in game theory, a branch of math that examines and tries to find winning strategies for types of games. Usually the games are really simple and abstract and maybe even not recognizable as games, but the theory and techniques are an interesting way to look at the choices you give the player of a game you've made. If you didn't bother following the link, a payoff matrix is a table for a 2-player game where the rows show all the possible strategies one player can make, and the columns show all the possible strategies for the second player. Each table cell contains the "payoff", i.e. how much will be lost or gained, for each pair of strategies.

The book Game Architecture and Design uses payoff matrices when discussing how to make (simple) strategy and fighting games that are interesting. That made me think about how to apply the same techniques to CRPGs. The first thing that occured to me was "How on earth am I going to do this with an RPG?!" I immediately thought of individual rounds in combat between players and computer-controlled enemies, probably because of the fighting/strategy examples. The thing is, that gets really complicated really fast, especially if you include all the possible skills or spells or special attacks each player and enemy can use. There's also the point that it's not entirely clear what the values in the cells of the payoff matrix should be. For example, you might be able to blast a Slime to kingdom come in one round by using your "Ultimate Doom" spell, but wipe out half of your mana while you're at it, when 2 melee attacks will kill it just as well, although you might sustain some damage in the process. From that example, with only 2 choices for you (not considering what the hapless slime can do), there are three different factors that you might worry about - amount of time taken, amount of mana, and amount of damage sustained. (You can substitute any miscellaneous resource for "mana".) There might be more, depending on how complex your combat, damage, and special ability systems are. And since not everyone will place equal weight on each of those factors, if you want to do a thorough job, you should probably make a matrix for each factor! Ugh!

In any case, I think I'll leave that kind of thinking to the people who're more concerned about combat than I am, or at least not think about it for a while. I'm more interested in general strategies for CRPGs. Fallout 2 had a pretty good example of this; at the beginning, you can either pick from one of 3 pre-made characters, or design your own. The characters are a warrior who's good at using brute strength and not good for much else, a thief who can sneak around and dodge a lot, and a trader who can talk her way out of many fights. The game is playable as any of the three template characters, which is Really Cool, although the trader will have a harder time with some of the sidequests, which tend to involve fighting. Fallout 2 I think tried to make all three options viable for all of the game, which is rather hard. In a way, the game had 3 modes - the "fight your way", "sneak your way", and "talk your way" modes, and each of the characters would do better or worse when the game is in a particular mode. In general, you can make different situations in your game have different modes, if you want to stress different aspects of the characters, or perhaps different characters if you allow the player to control more than one. Okay, so this seems like an obvious result. Most CRPGs don't do this, or prefer to think about the "I can do a great deal of damage very quickly but use up resources and am really frail" (spellcasters, mostly, think about it...) versus the "I can do a fair amount of damage less quickly but I'm really tough" dilemma instead.

This post had a point but it got lost. Will give reward of virtual chocolate if returned.

I thought a project was due on Thursday instead of Tomorrow/Today.

Therefore, no new entry. Sorry.

Maybe later I'll do an edit or a retroactive post or something like that.

Sometimes you get stuck for ideas for characters or adventures or plots or what-not.

That's where random generators come in. I would caution against using the output of a generator straight-out, but they can be a good way to give your creativity a kick-start. Random name generators are probably the most common type, and they vary a great deal in quality.

My favorite name generator for a while has been Johan Danforth's Name Generator. He also has NPC and Village generators, which can be nice starting points. For some reason his page takes a long time and a lot of processor power to load; I guess there's something about the Java menus he uses.

Another fun site is the Page of Generators. It has generators for random anime-style characters, quest items, dark ritual names, lost civilizations, and many, many more.

Finally, there's Stupid Plot Tricks. Basically, this is a guide to using random selections from a categorized version of the Evil Overlord List.

NaNoWriMo progress: 3815/50,000 words = 7.63% finished

You know, it comes to mind that NaNoWriMo and this blog are not working together very well.

In any case, the treat for today is The Nine-Act Structure Homepage.
It contains a description of a particular structure for movies and games - the Nine-Act Structure. The author goes quite in-depth about what he means and why his way is the best. The Nine-Act Structure revolves around a "two-goal" format - characters in the story start out pursuing one goal, then some sort of revelation make them realize that their first goal was not the right course of action, so they start pursuing a second goal that is.

It's an interesting way of viewing things, and it certainly seems to work for movies. Does it work for games? I'm sure it helps, but at the moment I can't think of any CRPGs that actually use it. I suppose Chrono Trigger might, with what happens after you reach Magus' castle, but the reversal to the second goal usually comes late in the game. It's probably a problem that I haven't finished all that many CRPGs, for one reason or another.

NaNoWriMo progress: 2057/50,000 words = 4.102% finished

Sloperama
Lots and lots of advice on getting into the computer game business from someone who's been in it since before the Game and Watch days.

Okay, this is a really really sad excuse for a game design blog entry, but I forgot and stuff and I need to get to sleep because I have a tabletop RPG session at 9 am. >_<

Errrr...

Medieval Demographics Made Easy
It's a very cool site describing population densities, numbers of cities and villages, and similar things based on the size of a country. It has links at the bottom to pages with calculators for his method.
I don' t know about other people, but sometimes I'm a sucker for accuracy and detail. It does seem awfully unrealistic sometimes how few random NPCs show up in most CRPGs, but it is an awful lot more convenient. At the very least, I think the cities should be more crowded...

A game feature idea I had after reading this article and playing Tales of Phantasia was to have a "money pouch" and "roads." Basically, you would have a "money pouch" that you could put some money in for spending money, similar to putting food in the sack in ToP. Then, while travelling over roads, it was assumed that you would be using the money to buy food and lodging at various places, and therefore regain HP and MP as you walked. Roads would also have a drastically reduced monster encounter rate compared to the wilderness.

Aaaand NaNoWriMo starts... But I really should do homework first or else NaNoWriMo will suck all of my time, not just some of it.