Ok, in this case... willful ignorance.

The new Magic Online set released today, "Dissension".  Since I wanted to play with the new cards, I bought one of their preconstructed decks.  Now, usually when this happens I research all the various decks so that I can choose one that has the best value, or that I'll enjoy the most.  This time, I tried a different experiment -- I specifically avoided any knowledge of the cards in the decks.

As it turns out, the experiment was a wild success!  I had a lot of fun not only seeing the new cards for the first time but constantly being surprised by what was in my deck.  It's a great way to see some of the new content in the latest set with an interesting twist. 

Lack of knowledge is a fun thing for me, I guess.  I like being surprised and dealing on the fly.  Perhaps that is why I always such an advocate of what we called "manly random" in AOM development -- random map, random civ, random team composition. 

It's too bad that there isn't a "make a random deck" option in MTGO.  Hm, it wouldn't take much work to write a program to generate random deck files that could be blindly (to me) read by the game...

I finished Tomb Raider: Legend yesterday... well, at least the main storyline.  Overall I found it a quite enjoyable game.  Some of their visuals, particularly for outdoor water, are just fantastic and the gameplay is quite fun when it focuses on the acrobatics and traversal challenges rather than the simple combat or the sometimes obtuse puzzles.  The game uses a Dragon's Lair / Shenmue style mechanic during some of the cutscenes which I really enjoy.

There are, however, a few boss fights.  They are, for the most part, fine standard boss fights.  Two of them, however, definitely break some basic rules of what I would call "boss etiquette".  Be warned if you are particularly spoiler averse; while I will attempt to remain somewhat general I can't help but give some things away. 

These two problematic boss fights exemplify two different (yet sadly common) failure modes for boss fights.  They are nicely symmetric around the notion of how the user understands the basic mechanics of the fight.

In the first, we have a failure of explanation.  You fight a monster, which is clearly a monster, and you have tools for injuring the monster, yet the monster is actually impossible to kill and you have to do some other thing altogether while the monster annoyingly tries to stop you.  Introducing some totally separate objective with no clear explanation of this change, and requiring a finicky interface to do it no less, is just inexcusable.  If I have to frob the foozle in some specific way, then make that clear and make the challenge executing it, not even understanding that I have to do it in the first place.

In the second, we have a failure of feedback.  This boss cannot be harmed at all normally, and that's made clear enough.  Instead you have to operate some traps to injure him in particular fashion.  Unfortunately, it is possible to activate the traps in the entirely correct fashion, be off in timing by a small factor which is very difficult to estimate, and the whole process appears to fail.  Consequently I spent a while figuring out what to do, determined the correct answer, spent 5-10 mins executing it, determined that it didn't work, and moved on.  So the correct solution was now out of my potential problem space and led to frustration.  If there is going to be a crazy trick to hurting the boss, make sure that the player understands that they are going down a fruitful avenue.  It's fine to add a timing component; but have trick + failed timing provide relevant feedback.

All told I hit up GameFAQs three times through.  In the two cases above, and in another non-boss case where I ran into the failure of feedback problem (a puzzle; which is prone to that failure mode as well).  Thank goodness for GameFAQs... it at least lets sloppy design be an annoyance and not a showstopper.

We've been steadily adopting more and more automation processes over the past decade.  For my current project (still un-announced, sorry) we've really tried to take that to the next level, employing a comprehensive automated build & test framework so that as people check things in the project is automatically built and then reports any problems that it detects.  This process is generally called "continuous integration" for anyone who wants to google around for it.  It has really reduced our accidental breakages of the game.  Whenever the "CI build" (as we call it) fails it is very apparent to everyone and the problem can be remedied quickly.

Today I spent a while digging into some of the test cases to rejigger them for some work I was doing.  It was just incredibly cool to fire it up and watch all my test cases get executed and nicely reported.  Using technology like this to really build our development infrastructure is critical to making larger and larger projects work... plus it's just plain cool stuff to a process geek like me.  :)

My copy of the Limited Edition of Heroes of Might and Magic V arrived today in the mail.  It's a nice double-width box with a horizonal flap, a good solid looking box.  But when I open it up, what is inside but just a regular sized modern PC box.  Huh?  The normal little cardboard sleeves are bad enough, but putting a box inside a bigger box is just plain silly.

I'm glad to hear MS is pushing for more standardized PC presentation.  Stuff like this is wasteful and really not accomplishing anything for anyone.

It's been a while since I've been up until the proverbial Quarter to Three playing an RTS, but that's exactly what happened to me last night.  I was approaching the end of the Vinci campaign in Rise of Legends, and wanted to see both how the story continued to play out but also the game mechanics of the second "army" in the game, the Alin.  While the presentation of the narrative is mediocre at best (a chronic problem in the RTS world, my own games generally included), the campaign format and strong play systems just keep me coming back for more.

I haven't dipped my toes yet much into multiplayer, since I enjoy seeing the mechanics slowly revealed in the context of the single player game much more.  But I keep reading interesting posts about it at QT3 and being tempted to give it more of a try.  I did at least already suffer my way through the 1000 ports you have to open up for their Gamespy implementation to work, so maybe I'll poke around more.

As a fellow Microsoft Game Studios game (and an RTS, to boot) I certainly wish Rise of Legends the best of luck.  They've got a quality game though I maintain that their choice of setting and overall positioning is probably too weak to really be a blockbuster hit.  Perhaps strong word of mouth will build some grassroots support for them, however.

When we (Ensemble) were acquired a few years back, there was basically very little change in our day to day operations.  I was quite afraid at the time that "the man" was going to come in and wreck our awesome high-functioning studio, and fortunately those fears have proven quite unfounded.  Our culture was left more or less completely alone, and we stayed in our cool offices in North Dallas. 

There is, however, another Microsoft office in the area, a much larger branch than Ensemble, that is out in Las Colinas (sort of between Dallas and Fort Worth).  It's a nice complex, they have a nice cafeteria built into the offices, and a convenient company store with lots of Microsoft goodies.  But really, we just don't get out there very much.  Today was an exception for me; recently Redmond rolled out some new high level management policies and all managers (which includes me) had to attend training on it, which was being administered over at the Las Colinas office.  So we all loaded up and invaded the corporate office complex. 

The training itself was, as most corporate training is, 10 minutes of content presented over the course of two hours.  But what I found interesting was just what a different world the "traditional" Microsoft managers lived in compared to our band of rabble-rousers at Ensemble.  I'm quite certain they are effective at their jobs and the environment they promote is the right one for Enterprise Developer Support Communication or whatnot.  But you could just instantly tell the difference between the Ensemble folks and the Las Colinas ones.  It definitely made me think about how lucky I am to be among peers, and how supportive the Ensemble culture is of the odd blend of personalities drawn to game development, and the incredibly flexible approach to technology and art that making games requires. 

Days like today remind me how much I love my job.

My 5 yr old son is really playing the heck out the "New" Super Mario Bros. game for the DS.  Honestly, I'm enjoying it a great deal too, though I am finding it's design overall a little TOO oldschool for my tastes.  Of course now "my" DS is getting appropriated by the kids a lot and when the big brother has the DS, the little brother has to have my SP, even if he doesn't really know how to do anything with it yet other than mash the buttons randomly. 

I am naturally quite looking forward to Super Mario Galaxy on the (sigh) Wii.  In fact, that's pretty much a system seller there for me.  I feel like the "lost arts" of the 90s are as lamentably gone in platformers in some ways as they are on the PC side of things.  Don't get me wrong, games like Sly Cooper, Ratchet and Clank, Mario Sunshine, and Daxter are all amazing games.  But I fundamentally miss the "collect 'em ups" from Rare like Donkey Kong 64 and both Banjo-Kazooie games, the classic Insomniac Spyro games, and of coursethe grand-daddy, Mario 64.  Wow, the N64 really was *the* system to have for that kind of game.

I continue to hold out hope that someday we'll see another Banjo-Kazooie game, or that perhaps Mario Galaxy will harken back to Mario 64 (as opposed to my fears of it being gimmick-laden).  And hey, at least Ratchet and Clank are making the jump to the PS3, so perhaps Sly Cooper will too, or maybe even someone other than Insomniac will make a Spyro game that's worthy of the franchise...

Hooray for Bioshock picking up Gamespy's Best of E3 award!  Note to self: go bug Ken & Jon at Irrational about getting a beta eventually.  It's very cool to see the latest from Irrational getting some great coverage, and it's very heartening to me to see the legacy of System Shock 2 still kicking...

Apparently the lore for the Burning Crusade WoW expansion ran into a little bit of internal consistency problems with the lore established in the Warcraft III manual.  Here's the WoW forum link where the main lore writer for the Warcraft universe provides a mea culpa for the problem.

I find that response interesting for a bunch of reasons.  First, it has a very humanizing and casual tone.  Personally I like this but when coupled with an "I screwed up" message I wonder whether it is putting too personal and fallible face on what should be a completely behind the scenes process.  Second, the fact that they are admitting a problem at all as opposed to ignoring it, handwaving past it, or introducing some additional fiction to explain the discrepancy (the latter option is how Marvel and DC solve this sort of problem all the time).  Third, I'm surprised that there was no safety net or separate continuity editor involved in the process before.  With such any huge and complex backstory the opportunity for an error of this sort is huge -- the fact that it was all just in one guy's head before seems like an awfully precarious position for Blizzard to be in.

I'm in general all for more open communication between developers and players, especially in regards to online persistent games like World of Warcraft.  But I kind of wonder in this case whether revealing the human fallibility so directly isn't a bit disconcerting and undermines some of the conceptual infallibility that a faceless process has.  That is, this error shines light on the fact that ultimately the World of Warcraft "universe" is just a story in somebody's head.  This fact is obvious on the face of it, but the day-to-day presentation of the game is all about building up the world as something that has a kind of life of it's own.  The fourth wall is broken.

I'm not bugged when authors talk to their fans about their characters and worlds, or the process behind the writing, so why does it bug me when the "author" of the WoW fiction does the same?  Nor am I bothered by the game designers discussing mechanics or class balance.  I'm not entirely sure why I have this reaction.  Perhaps it has to do with the fact that so much of what goes into a game is this illusion of a fully realized world.  Game mechanics are already outside the world, but the story in many ways is the defining essence of what makes the game a world rather than just an arena.

A minor procedural note... I'm disabling trackbacks on this blog since the ratio of "real" ones to spam is about 1 : 400.  While I really like the concept of them, I'm afraid the implementation here is just not up to the challenge.  If anyone is interested in posting an actual trackback, contact me and I'll attempt to enable them long enough for that to be established.