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March
2001
THE
STEALTH DESIGNER’S HANDBOOK PART 2: FIVE MORE WAYS TO
SNEAK ORIGINALITY INTO YOUR GAME WHILE MANAGEMENT ISN’T
LOOKING
By François
Dominic Laramée
Missed
Part 1? Click here
No time for
a pithy introduction this month; let’s get right to
the heart of the matter. Last time, we discussed five
ways to make a game stand out from the crowd without
straying too far off the beaten track and scaring away
marketing, management, retailers, customers and the
gaming press. Here are five more; some of them will help
you create a better game, others, to make an already
good game more cost-effective (which may in turn lead to
more leeway for you next time around.)
6. Flat Characters Are
Your Enemies
A "flat
character" can be described, completely and
accurately, in a single short sentence. Flatties are
pretty low on the human-interest totem pole, barely
above the spear-carriers and the stereotypes, who don’t
even require a one-sentence description because they are
so cliché that anyone will recognize them at first
glance (and groan). All of them, flats and stereos and
window dressing, are your enemies.
Well, not
always. It’s ok if your "cast of thousands"
is made up of stereotypes. For example, if Cannon-Fodder
Monster 127-B from Sublevel Alpha Bravo Tango is
supposed to look like a zombie and act like a zombie and
think like a zombie, and if your player is supposed to
shoot it on sight, no questions asked, then let it be a
zombie; anything more elaborate would be a waste of the
player’s time, not to mention yours. Similarly, comic
relief, in the form of a dumb sidekick or enemy, is
always welcome; remember Gollum from The Lord of the
Rings, or the Spemin from Starflight (and
their direct descendants, the Spathi from Star
Control).
However,
major characters should be a little more difficult to
define, and here we often do a pretty terrible job. Case
in point: the mad scientist who wants to destroy or
conquer the world for no particular reason had worn out
his welcome even before the time of Plan 9 From Outer
Space. If you need a uber-baddie in your game, try
to give him at least a shred of motivation, like revenge
(i.e., Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze in the Batman
movie) or the need to understand and overcome
unspeakable suffering (like Samuel L. Jackson’s
brittle wacko in Unbreakable).
As for your
heroes, making them disgustingly handsome and pure of
heart works fine if your game is targeted to children of
fairy tale-loving age; and even then, the most popular
video game characters among kids 10 years old and
younger, Mario and the Pokemon, are a rotund little
freak and a bunch of wild and somewhat ferocious
critters, respectively. The lesson: perfection is
annoying. And before you conclude that we have this one
all figured out, consider that the male teen equivalent
of Prince Charming is the absolute badass, impossibly
muscular (or mouth-wateringly bodacious), capable of
performing corkscrew piledrivers and triple backward
Saltos while balancing on a tightrope suspended over an
erupting volcano, talking in Stone Cold Steve
Austin-caliber catchphrases and packing enough firepower
to take out the entire Libyan army. We’ve all seen
enough of those, please move on. Again, remember that
gameplay is at least as much a function of what you can’t
do as it is one of what you can; create a realistic hero
(or even, God forbid, one who has a serious physical
limitation) and you’re going to turn your favorite
genre on its ear in a heartbeat.
7. Vaccinate Against The
1950 Syndrome
If you watch
a lot of old sci-fi B movies, you’ll be familiar with
this one: the far-future world where people travel in
space and deal with hundreds of alien races, but where
everything else works exactly like it did in the
American Midwest when the movie was shot. (Or rather, in
what Hollywood wanted people to believe the Midwest was
like back then; no place on Earth was ever as aseptic
and shallow as Leave it to Beaver. Ever.)
In movies of
the 50’s, galaxyfaring astronauts live in suburbs,
every single male citizen is either a member of the
military or a police officer (and none of them remotely
impeachable, of course), etc. An even better example: Battlestar
Galactica is pretty much unbearable to watch these
days because of all the 70’s crap they crammed into
the show. (Polyester bell-bottoms are flammable;
not the best uniforms for fighter pilots!)
No matter
how much you try, you can’t buy into these movies and
TV shows because the worlds they describe are so
impossible to believe.
Today, the
syndrome’s virus has mutated into a carrier of
dystopian cyberpunk disease. Neuromancer was
groundbreaking, but that was 20 years ago, and the odds
of a complete social breakdown on a planetary scale are
pretty slim, orbital anti-missile shield propaganda
notwithstanding. And no matter what the scientists do on
Mars, they won’t open up a Hellgate and let hordes of
demons flow in. Let’s try to come up with gaming
worlds which make a little bit of sense, and our stories
will carry more emotional involvement (and therefore,
matter to a wider audience).
8. Manage Your Scope
This is
easier said than done, but some of us have been doing it
well: Give the player the impression that the world they
are exploring is infinite, while gently keeping them
corralled within pretty tight boundaries so they’ll
never get lost.
Diablo II
does this very well. The storyline is absolutely linear,
the major quest structure almost so, and yet you never
feel confined because there is always much (but not too
much) to see and do; most wilderness areas contain many
monsters and a small subsidiary dungeon which you can
visit at your leisure, which creates the illusion of
non-linearity, but sooner or later you’ll return to
the main plot.
Baldur’s
Gate was a little more difficult to work through in
that sense, because it was easy to open up half a dozen
side quests or more at the same time and lose track of
what was important. It took me well over 100 hours to
reach the final stages of the game, and sometimes the
main plot didn’t advance at all for long periods of
time.
And at the
far end of the spectrum, a game like Elite II
can be frustrating for the uninitiated, because you can
spend dozens of hours wandering about the galaxy, trying
to pick up a shred of a main plot, and never manage to
do it. (If there’s anything beyond little individual
jobs/quests in that game, I never discovered it, and
that wasn’t for lack of trying.) After a while, a game
which is too free-form will begin to seem pointless and
lose its appeal.
9. Keep The Archetypes At
Bay
Remember
this: the first thing that comes to mind when thinking
about a solution to a problem is usually a cliché. Not
good. If it seems obvious to you, it’ll seem obvious
to the player as well, and he’ll think that you’re
just a hack trying to pass off a rehash of a clone of a
copy as something new.
To avoid
this, try to think of gameplay devices which will turn a
game inside out. For example, how about creating a
superhero character who is supposed to dive in front of
bullets to save civilians, instead of shooting the bad
guys himself? Clay Fighters were a fun
alternative to the traditional fighting games; how about
a real-time strategy wargame featuring Looney Tunes
duking it out with ACME weaponry? Or how about this
personal favorite: say that your game is in fact a
reality show on some TV station of the future, with
instant ratings computed every second, and kill off your
player if the ratings dive below a certain level because
he spends too much time thinking instead of taking
stupid risks for the viewer’s entertainment? Wouldn’t
it be cool to punish the player for constantly using
that Holy Flame-Thrower Of The Bat on every enemy, and
rewarding him for sneaking up behind one with a Swiss
army knife instead (and unnecessarily putting himself in
harm’s way in the process)?
10. Avoid Pointless
Features
Finally, a
personal peeve: if a feature won’t change anything to
gameplay, leave it out; it’s annoying. If the NPC you
meet on the bridge leading to the village has nothing
useful to say to you and will attack no matter what you
say to him, why bother implementing a conversation?
That doesn’t
mean that you can’t have many features in your
game, only that they should matter. Master of
Orion 2 has a bewildering array of weapons from
which to choose while designing new ships, but they all
have their quirks (i.e., some kill extra marines, others
pierce shields and armor, etc.) and therefore the choice
is a valid one from the player’s perspective. As a
corollary, try to assure that one of the features will
not upset your game’s balance too much; if the player
absolutely, positively needs help from a certain lady
NPC to accomplish the quest, make that NPC a forgiving
creature who will accept the player’s apologies (after
a quest or two, maybe) if he makes a lewd pass at her
before realizing just who he’s dealing with.
That’s it
for this month. Oh, before I go: I’ll be hosting one
of the IGDA’s roundtables at the GDC (Editor's
note: See the GIG Spotlight
for details on FDL's roundtable)., so if you feel
like discussing the plight of freelancers in this
business, don’t hesitate to drop by on Friday morning.
(Or, if you see a big oaf with a buzz cut and a goatee
roaming the corridors with a forlorn look in his eyes,
stop and say wazzup, will you?)
Bio
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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