Month: June 2005 (Page 2 of 2)

Imperfect Information

June 10, 2005 / Damion Schubert

The corollary to the concept of Tactical Transparency is the concept of Imperfect Information, a delightful gameplay construct to mess around with. Imperfect Information can be summed up as what your players DON’T know that they wish they could. Imperfect information creates doubt, keeps the player off-balance and helps keep the little guy in the game.

Game designs run a full gamut on how ‘perfect’ the information they provide. Chess, for example, is a game of very nearly perfect information. All of the information is visible right before your eyes, with the exception of the devious plan resting in your opponent’s mind. Many strategy board games have fully or nearly perfect information — computer strategy games use tactics like ‘fog of war’ to make this information more imperfect. Still, it’s definitely possible to make a classic game with fully perfect information. Continue reading

Virtual Apple

June 10, 2005 / Damion Schubert

If you need me this weekend, I’ll be reliving my childhood.

Thanks to FTA, Kegs, and the online Apple community, you can now relive, play, and enjoy old Apple 2 games and other disks through the internet and web browser. This web site uses an ActiveX application and Apple IIgs emulator to automatically download and play most Apple 2 disk images online. To play a game, just select the disk from the menu and click on Yes to automatically download the ActiveX emulator and disk images. (Note: Requires Internet Explorer and Windows) Don’t worry, there isn’t any spyware to worry about, and it’s completely free!

I remember when the Apple 2 GS was the new hot-shit computer coming down the pike. Now, it can be replicated in an ActiveX browser (albeit only every fifth game or so seems to work). Go play it before The Man ™ shuts it down.

Found via GameDevBlog.

How Players Bore Themselves To Tears

June 8, 2005 / Damion Schubert

This has come up a lot, but it bears its own discussion point: a lot of the time, MMO players simply bore themselves to the edge of frustration.

In a single player game, this doesn’t happen. A huge part of the reason why is that the designer has total control over the player’s skills and difficulties at any given time. In fact, most sophisticated teams will draw power graphs and emotional response graphs for their single player game, in order to draw the players through a riveting experience.

MMOs, by contrast, are an open landscape, where players can go anywhere and do anything that they want. The ability to go anywhere, including back to newbietown, hang with your friends, show off to the newbs and squash the monsters that gave you hell at level 10 in one shot is, in fact, one of the great selling points of the MMO experience. But it also introduces problems. Continue reading

Tactical Transparency

June 7, 2005 / Damion Schubert

‘Tactical Transparency’ is a term I throw around to describe the concept that the player should always know what his options are. This is not to say that the player should always have the right answer – he certainly should have the option of making a bad choice, or be beaten by bad luck, but he should always be able to figure out the odds. Blackjack, for example, is reasonably tactically transparent, but you still have the ability to be screwed by bad judgment or luck.

This term is useful when talking about many things, including combat, AI and 3D graphics. For example, one place where game designers really screw up tactical transparency is in poor use of the heightfield. Most games have an angle of terrain, above which you simply cannot climb – let’s say 40 degrees. Fair enough. But then those games don’t stop worldbuilders from building slopes at 39 and 41 degrees, both of which look virtually identical to each other to the user, which creates a world which feels inconsistent to the user. Continue reading

Nintendo: Gameplay Rules

June 6, 2005 / Damion Schubert

In the wake of a disappointing E3 where Nintendo kept relatively mum about what they were working on, they’ve begun to speak louder on multiple fronts. And the general gist of what they’re saying is: It’s all about the gameplay, man. Of note: Continue reading

He Speaks Truth

June 2, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Nathan McKenzie has this gem to say in the thread that will not die (2014 Damion notes: link to old comment thread in archive.org)

One of the problems, I think, about being a game developer is that we don’t really show our audiences the stuff that doesn’t work. The ironic thing about the laundry list of stuff that players routinely clamor for is that, more often than not, we’ve tried every one of the things they announce loudly that they’d like. And then, after we’ve proven to ourselves that those ideas are not, in fact, fun, new people enter the industry and have to prove those same facts to themselves. Over and over and over.

His whole post is well-spoken. Go read it.

The Combat Rut

June 1, 2005 / Damion Schubert

The AI discussion that Jamie started has started to spread, and its leading some interesting places. One of my own random synapse firings: I think the need to provide a group puzzle is a huge reason why we’re stuck in the Combat Rut. Whether it be EQ’s AI model or another, it’s not that difficult to come up with an interesting Combat model that follows the following parameters:

It differs (albeit mildly) from experience to experience.
It is very social play, requiring cooperation
It provides very clearly different roles between other players that must work in unison.

Nintendo: We’re Not Dead Yet

June 1, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Buzzcut has an interesting article which argues that Nintendo isn’t as hopeless in the console wars as the conventional wisdom states.

In this light, it’s odd how few game commentators seem to understand just how profitable Nintendo really is. With a net margin of over 20%, Nintendo is a financial rock star. Just by way of comparison, General Electric, that monster global conglomerate whose executives write the books about corporate leadership that other Fortune 500 execs read, clocks in with a net margin of 11% Nintendo’s business engine is so efficient that even though they sell far less than Sony, they make, bottom line, about as much as all of Sony, Yes, that’s right. Little Nintendo generates about as much cash as giant Sony—electronics, movies, the works.

Of course, the notion that Nintendo as a studio will simply keep on trucking with the status quo is somewhat challenged by the utter strangeness of the rumored plans for their next-gen controller. Go figure.