February 2001

THE STEALTH DESIGNER’S HANDBOOK PART 1: FIVE WAYS TO SNEAK ORIGINALITY INTO YOUR GAME WHILE MANAGEMENT ISN’T LOOKING
By François Dominic Laramée

Huddle up and hear me out, brothers and sisters, because today’s topic is a painful one.

How many of you have ever thrown your hands up in the air and screamed in agony at the unfairness of a system that forced you to bury your most precious mental jewels, in favor of the fourth sequel to yet another gothicpunk shooter? How many gave up hope of ever being able to shove a truly original design through the distribution channel and into players’ hands, and drowned their sorrows night after night in an ever-growing pool of Red Bull? I feel your pain, my brothers and sisters. I do, I do. Which is why I must say this:

It’s all our fault.

No, don’t frag me yet. Listen.

There are loopholes in the wording of that particular law of nature. Loopholes which would allow our games to stand out from the crowd like Ozzy Osbourne at a state funeral, if only we exploited them properly, without straying too far away from what the market is ready to accept. And after years of slaving in dusty alcoves and poring over long-forgotten grimoires, I have identified no less than ten of them. Enough to keep us entertained until a real wizard finds the magic formula for infinite shelf space, or until a ludo-terrorist drops industrial quantities of Risk-Loving Potion into the Los Angeles water supply just before E3.

Here are the first half of the lot; I will discuss the rest next month.

Sometimes, all that is needed to make a game unique is to set it in a fully self-consistent background. Operative word: Fully. This seems obvious, but it is surprisingly difficult to do well.

In Hollywood, there are people whose full-time jobs consist of looking at films and TV shows after they get out of the cutting room (but before release) to make sure that there are no continuity glitches anywhere. And even then, glaring blunders sometimes sneak onto the silver screen. Like the famous Norse invader in an old historical movie, who sounded the charge by lifting his sword high up in the air, thereby revealing that he was wearing a wrist watch. Or the Roman generals who discussed strategy while a plane flew in the background.

In games, something as innocuous as a misaligned texture can ruin immersion, and I don’t think I need to point out what a bad voice-over artist (i.e., the entire cast of Diablo) can do to an otherwise remarkable product. But far more important than continuity glitches are the internal logic mistakes which crop up all the time.

For example, consider the case of the teleportation device. Any society sufficiently advanced to develop cost-effective teleportation (if such a thing were possible) would have no need of such things as cities, cars, airplanes, the postal service, department stores, convenience stores, or immigration laws. Another case: a collective consciousness (i.e., a hive mind, like the Borg without the culture-absorption feature) will most likely won’t understand the telephone, the radio, the internet, or even the concept of speech, which would make communicating with them a terrible chore.

If your sci-fi game involves a revolutionary idea like this, think of what it should do to the social fabric of your world, and design it accordingly. You’ll have a highly unusual, truer setting, and your game will benefit immensely.

A common mistake among beginning designers is to try to create the uber-game, and have it be everything to everyone. Beware of the completely open-ended RPG with different Pulitzer-prize winning storylines generated on the fly every time you play, high action, incredibly deep strategy and a cast of millions. If a game like that were even possible to make, it would be unplayable.

Remember that entertainment more complicated than real life is no fun, except for the weirdest of the weird. How weird? Well, most of us are probably more than a little off-center ourselves, and honestly, I don’t think that many of you would go out with someone who kept track of food, copper pieces and encumbrance in his or her Dungeons and Dragons campaign. (Would you?)

Sometimes, the best way to stand out is to go for less, not more. After all, the age of the big-budget blockbuster was already well established when Tetris took over the world. Going for Zen-like simplicity may sometimes (ok, nearly always) make for a harder sale, but if it works…

I was recently involved in several very interesting email conversation about the virtues of certain types of user interfaces. One of my correspondents claimed that, in some genres, mastering the interface was the gameplay and the actual source of enjoyment for the player; therefore, making it as obfuscated as possible (but still marginally usable) would be a good thing. This went against everything that I believed in, but his arguments got me thinking, and by now I’m more than halfway convinced.

Consider the fighting game, the perfect example of "immediate response" experience where you control one and only one entity and where what you do with the controller is reflected on screen without delay. If powerful moves require complicated button-press combinations and perfect timing, great; once you become nimble enough to enter a six-button sequence in 1.2 seconds, you are rewarded with a spectacular corkscrew moonsault legdrop, and your opponent, with a great death scene. The rush is incredible. Same thing, more or less, with first-person shooters.

Now, on the other hand, in games where you must take care of a variety of tasks in parallel, the correlation between what you do with the controller and what happens in the universe is not so immediate, and a simple interface is a must. If you have 50 units to control on the battlefield, wrestling with the joystick for even 0.5 seconds to give orders to an archer is too much, because by the time he has reached the location where he is to perform, you will be involved with 2-3 other theaters of operation. Therefore, interface mastery isn’t reinforced with immediate success, and doesn’t cause the same type of adrenal release; instead, having to repeat command sequences or search menus three layers deep quickly becomes a chore. In a "breadth-first game" like this, the interface must disappear and leave as many of your brain’s CPU cycles for strategic thinking.

The most difficult thing in the world to do is to design a proper control scheme for a squad-level game; either you ask the player to micro-manage each character, as in Baldur’s Gate, and the pace slows to a crawl during fights (i.e., exactly when it should pick up), or you rely on AI as in Daikatana and the player’s allies run into walls or make asinine decisions at every juncture.

The lesson: pick an interface style suitable to your game genre. Grim Fandango’s was just about perfect. Age of Empires’ achieved a nice balance. And there’s a lot to be said for Deer Hunter’s, too. Really.

Star Trek gave us alien races made up of trillions of individuals who all think exactly alike, all of which look suspiciously like human actors in bad costumes no matter what their home worlds’ gravity fields and atmospheres. We have Star Wars to blame for the jungle world covered with the same vegetation from poles to equator, where it rains everywhere at the same time, and for the ice planet with native animals who probably feed on snow because there isn’t a single green leaf growing anywhere. Tolkien wrote about entire races of beings doing evil for evil’s sake, without any sensible motivation; not one of them ever stopped to wonder why they hacked every elf in sight to pieces or why they should want to live in a world bent under the Dark Lord’s dominion.

Someday, I would like to be able to praise games for getting rid of these tired metaphors.

Why is the Other always so much simpler in structure and context than even a five-year old’s make-believe stories? Why should Earth and humanity be the only things in the whole universe not built from solid blocks? We need more depth!

Of course, this particular "problem" will never hurt a design per se, because players have come to expect it and because an entire race of outer-space information vendors is conceptually easy to understand and manipulate as a gameplay device. But we are missing an opportunity for so much more.

Inspiration is a strange beast. It comes in unexpected bursts, when it wants to, usually when you least expect it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t sit too well with the game development process. If a brilliant idea comes to you during pre-production, great: you feverishly write it into the game design document before it goes away, and your product gains that extra spark which can make the difference between an also-ran and a classic.

But what if you get the same brilliant idea 6 months into development? Or 12?

Well, if your design is one monolithic behemoth, you’re stuck. The brilliant idea will have to wait for the sequel. However, if it is modular enough to accommodate changes in mid-stream in a relatively painless fashion, you may have a shot.

This is only one of many reasons why you should design defensively, in clearly separated and connectable modules, as if you were making plans for an object-oriented software system. Design with extensibility in mind, and make sure that the programmers build that flexibility into the code base. This way, if you come up with something great at an inopportune time (or if DirectInput 12.4 suddenly ships with an amazing mind-link interface which you would just kill to implement first), you’ll be able to add it to the project in a few days instead of six weeks, and the added sales will leave you smiling all the way to the bank.

François-Dominic Laramée is a freelance interactive game designer, developer and producer.  He has been involved in one form or another of the game industry, whether PC, console, online, set-top box or even play-by-mail, for the past decade, including more than 8 years of experience as Head of Studio, Game Designer, Software Engineer, Producer and Quality Assurance Manager in the interactive entertainment and spoken dialogue interfaces industries.  Learn more on his website at: http://pages.infinit.net/idjy/ 

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