I've had the opportunity to fool around with some XNA Studio 2.0 stuff at work recently -- mostly using it as a quick 2D prototyping engine for showing people some system dynamic or another in motion.  I have to say, it is pretty slick.  Combined with the joyousness of C# programming, I've been quite pleasantly surprised how quickly I can turn something around from a discussion of a concept to a running app illustrating it.  Of course some of the cool things it can do (like all the Xbox 360 stuff and the potentially-disruptive distribution model announced at GDC) are not really relevant, but they do add to the package for most people.

When I have a little spare time I plan on making a little weekend project of getting a game up and running at home and on my 360, so I can start to talk to my kids about what programming is.  Heck, maybe I'll make a little educational game out of while I'm at it...

Another highlight of the show for me.  Both the speakers were funny and charming, much in the way Portal itself was...

 

---

 

Integrating Narrative and Design:  A Portal Post-Mortem

Kim Swift & Erik Wolpaw, Valve

 

Warning, Spoilers!!!

 

Why should you care about Portal?  Small team, no more than 10 people at once.  Been a commercial and critical success for Valve.  After all is said and done, no regrets.  Unlike the guy with the portal tattoos…

 

By itself, story wouldn’t make much of a novel.  Gameplay on its own would be dry.  Tight integration of story and gameplay resonated.  Team size imposed constraints on our design choices.  Creatively sidestep constraints – Glados as disembodies voice might not have occurred to them if they had the resources to do otherwise.

 

Games tell two stories:  story story, gameplay story.  Lowering the delta between the two will make your story more satisfying.  Games with a high story delta:  Clive Barker’s Undying.  Good shooter, talented writer who cares about story.  Shooting lots of monsters but the game stops you to play one of these cutscenes where you calmly interrogate a member of the staff.  At no point do you freak out and tell them about the monsters.  The two stories make no sense when you smush them together.  Good game being undermined by a disconnect between story story and gameplay story.

 

“story” story must never intrude on the gameplay story.  Less is more.  Ruthless about trimming the narrative fat.  Lean storytelling machine.

 

Process:

 

Playtesting – really important!  To both narrative and gameplay.  Most important thing ever done on Portal.  Watch people play your game.  Find out what your players actually want, adjust gameplay to what players look like they need.  Adjust story to enhance what players are already feeling.  Playtest keeps you objective – expose what isn’t working.  If a player can’t recall the story, it isn’t working.  Fix was almost always to cut more exposition.  Playtest early and often!  First room iterated on from the very first week.  Forcefield that playtesters just didn’t know what it was, traced the edge of the cage and got confused.  Helped us refine our art direction – a lot cleaner and simpler.

 

Advice:  writing a funny game?  God help you.  Tough guy dialog is endlessly macho.  Funny dialog is funny once.  Maybe.  Trust your instincts, don’t despair.  Playtest!  Remember initial reactions.  More playtesting = more hearing people react to your dialog for the very first time.

 

Embed exposition in the environment.  Unless it is in emails or voice recorders.  Reading email = not actually that fun.  Be creative!  Easy to say… Apply a rule set, and be ruthless about the rules.  Choice between embed or cut, makes you really creative!  In portal == wall scribbling behind the scenes.  Put yourself in the position of your characters.  “The Ratman”, a fellow escaped test subject.  Originally wanted you to meet him but had two artists, so not feasible…

 

Evolve narrative out of gameplay.  Write to enhance what playtesters are feeling.  Keep the story “wet”.  Don’t get too attached to anything.  Could disappear at any time.  Don’t get too attached, you might need to cut it and that is probably for the best! 

 

Weighted Companion Cube.  Box Marathon level – long level with the box, in the end put the box on a button.  Take one:  moving list obstacle over a good pit.  Players would destroy the box and had to go back, frustrating and annoying.  Back to the drawing board – remove the lifts and goo pits, added more where having the box was necessary to solve the puzzle.  Cube as stairs, cube as weight.  Take Two:  Gameplay events so you can always see the button.  Still needed something else.  Erik to the rescue!  Hint using the environment – lighting, geometry.  When all else fails, great dialogue is an excellent hint.  Was reading declassified govt manuals, isolation causes association with inanimate objects.  Maybe if Glados needles you a little bit and it worked.  Sometimes goofy ideas tend out to be really good ones.  Incineration station = boss battle training.  Perfect training location, more satisfying level ending.  Players learn better when not stressed (no ticking clock).  Forcing you to euthanize it was great!  Revenge, incinerate Glados the way she makes you incinerate your best friend.  Gameplay > story > gameplay.

 

Sometimes gameplay isn’t enough.  Original ending of portal.  What does a boss battle look like?  Complex puzzle?  Results:  pain.  Attempt one: James Bond lasers that followed the player around.  Lasers = bad.  Boring to dodge, difficult to aim.  Hard to tell if you’re hit.  Abandoned in favor of rockets.  Attempt two:  Portal Kombat.  Lots of testers were hardcore shooter gamers.  Didn’t work out very well.  High intensity = bad.  No one paid attention to Glados, and alienated players who like the slower-paced cerebral nature of Portal.  Attempt three: chase sequence.  Pacing was horrible, players didn’t see where she would go and then only slowly realize how to follow her.  Chase = action packed, instead players were confused.  Failed in many ways.  Complex boss battle = nope.  More complexity = slower pacing, not a good match for the climactic sequence.  So what now?  We’re screwed.  Playtesting to the rescue!  One thing worked well for players – the fire pit. 

 

What made it climactic?  Time pressure.  Makes people think something is more complicated than it is.  Good visual impact – pit of fire!  High drama, for the first time Glados is openly trying to kill you and you first assert control over your environment to escape.  Those things combined made an easy puzzle like a much more complicated puzzle.  Holding on to this idea of a complex puzzle at the end, simply wasn’t true.  Applied all of these things to the time pressure.  Just had a countdown!  Neurotoxin = green particles cheap!  Drama meant we had to write six minutes of decent dialog, previous ones required infinity worth of dialog = sad.  Easy puzzle important.  Wanted people to see / hear the end!  Wanted players to be genuinely happy and leave with a smile on their face.

 

What makes people happy?  Catchy song…  Ultimately a lot of this all came out of constraints.  Couldn’t make a big FMV.  Cost to happiness ratio of a great song was really high!   

 

Embrace your constraints!  Have faith in yourself and in the skills of your team.  Playtest, playtest, playtest! 

 

Q:  Why are audio recordings / emails a bad choice?  Just from playtesting?  None of these are prescriptive.  Just a personal choice they made.  Don’t like to read in games that much.   How often do you use a voice recorder to leave secret messages for your friends and family? 

 

Q: Why does Glados have an incinterator in her room?  Kind of fun… backstory that they weren’t sure if she was going to go out of control or not.  So made this room so that they could incinerate her and get rid of her.  Red phone in there, supposed to be his job to call somebody if the AI goes rogue… didn’t work too well.

 

Q:  Playtesting critical, not outsourcing it.  How do you go about getting new players through that process?  Easy to go to the nearest Gamestop “we’ve got this game, wanna play it”?  Friends and family, Gabe’s kids…  lots of people working at Valve on their own other projects.  Q: People come back for additional tests?  Usually playtest only once but a few at Valve would repeat play.

 

Q:  In the dev commentary, more portal games?  How do you overcome the challenge of not having as many constraints?  Dunno, just want to bask in the moment now without people bugging him about the next one!

 

Q:  Portals shooting through portals?  Not a tech restriction but design one – didn’t want to bypass training, shooting ourselves in the foot.

 

Q:  Why change the look and color of Portals?  Just iteration.  We liked Orange better than Red…

 

Really like the way turrets screamed…

 

Q:  Suggestions for students breaking in?  Try and make a lot of games and fail.  So many times failed at Digipen…one worked out but the others didn’t.  Practice makes perfect.  Shows commitment to the project.  Make games!

 

Q:  Fire pit –shock and confusion of getting past what you thought was the game’s end.  Defying of game narrative intentional?  Some intentionality there, one of the things that never changed in the story.   Vault > Fire Pit > Glados was the most basic structure.  Worked better than they thought.

 

Q:  Why the humor?  Something inherently funny about portals…  In Erik’s comfort zone.

 

Q:  Why kill off the Companion Cube?  I think we explained that… thank the United States Secret Service.

 

Q:  Lots of trial and error in the game, did that have to be smoothed over with management?  Management at Valve is different than other companies, no producers really.  People on the game make those decisions.  Makes for a more satisfied group of people making games.  Commitment to playtesting is the Valve philosophy.

 

Q: Dev background, how did you score your spot working with Valve?  Students at Digipen, made Narbacular Drop, predecessor to Portal.  Expo for graduating seniors, saw it and took them to Valve to show to Gabe.  Asked them what they were doing after graduating… offered them a job on the spot.  Erik did a lot of writing, was hired at Double Fine, freelanced, and then got email from Gabe one day. 

 

Q: Why not submit to IGF?  Narbacular Drop was in the student showcase.  

 

Q: Where did the cake come from?  Was something in there from the beginning… comedy tool to obsess over something unexpected.  Just having fun.

 

Q:  All characters (main character + glados) female?  Working to define that, used to be a balding dude (citizen model from HL2).  Gabe suggested making it a girl.  Just sort of what if… Post feminist, didn’t occur to us not to make it a girl… For Glados we knew we needed a great actress / actor who was good and wouldn’t be offended when a lot of the stuff was just recording text-to-speech stuff.

 

Q:  Is Chell a cyborg?  No, another failure of writing.  Got these crazy cyber future shoes…

 

Q:  Portal is a short game with a lot of success, might make a movement back towards shorter games on the market?  Common complaint is that people don’t finish games anymore, don’t have time…. Plus 40 hours a week playing WoW.  Practical constraints but really wanted to make a game that everyone who plays it can finish it!  Most games just peter out, never finish them.

 

Q:  Dialog cut from the game, any of it fairly final?  If so, going to release it?  Not a lot of final stuff.  Everything went through text to speech as temp audio, mostly got cut at that point.  Other stuff wouldn’t want to give to anyone, or if it’s good keep it for later…

 

Q:  Considerations for making it multiplayer or co-op?  Thought about it… technically possible, just didn’t have the time to think through the gameplay.  Tried it a little, was less fun than you think it is…

 

Q:  Experience balancing keeping it wet and needing to get it done, or having momentum?  Playtesting!  You’ll know right away whether your idea is good or bad.  If you can’t see how to fix it, cut it!

 

Q:  Dev process as a style of painting, what would it be?  Cubist…

 

Q:  Chell and Gordon gonna hook up?  Dunno…

 

Q:  Can make exposition and narrative fun for playtesters?  Less is more… just don’t like it that much in games.  As concise as possible.  Game writer, but games aren’t necessarily the best medium for stories.  Like providing a film score.  Films aren’t about music but they are a useful tool for enhancing, same for writing in games.  Also a lot to be said for leaving mystery in games, people are smart, give them credit!

 

Q:  Black Mesa references in Portal… when did you decide to be in the HL universe?  Middle of development… when Erik joined just one of the constraints for the game because they weren’t sure of positioning and were reusing a lot of assets.  Eased up at the end, didn’t need the G-Man to show up or anything…

 

Q: Best games teach us something, what do we have to learn from Portal?  “The cake is a lie.”  Explore the idea of manipulating space and thinking about 3d space in a different way, look at situations in a different way.

 

Q.  Companion cube kind of silent, any dialog in the sequel?  What is this “Sequel”…

 

Q:  When did you figure out how to market and sell Portal?  At first was supposed to be a 15 minute tech demo.  Further on constraints changed… middle of development started talking about doing the Orange Box and seemed like a reasonable conclusion to package it with these other games that have a lot of clout.  Honored to be packaged with TF2 and Ep2. 

 

Q:  Playtesting as method to test whether players got storyline.  Compartmentalized testing, how did you get feedback if only playing 1-2 levels?  Portal was short through most of its lifetime, never 8 hours… so if someone didn’t finish weren’t super worried.

 

Q:  Storyline, less is more… applies to other genres?  Don’t have a surefire solution for every game but in Erik’s opinion, in general, less is more. 

 

Q:  Portal and HL2 have very different tone and themes.  If they tie together more, how will you resolve that?  Honestly not a big problem, Aperture tone is mostly just from Glados.  Experiencing the world through Glados’ eyes, so if Chell is in HL universe nothing is in contradiction there.  Inside the Aperture Funhouse different tonal rules apply.  Same physics and art style already apply.

 

Q:  Chance of an artbook?  Dunno… talking about doing an Orange Box artbook.  Most of our concept was for the Glados battle.  Compared to TF or HL not a lot of concepts there.  Thumbnails of stuff… but not really great pictures.

 

Q:  Why portals ovals?  They look better than rectangles…  Wanted to fit the bounds of where you’d actually pass through, so filled an oval through the rectangle of where it technically is.

 

Q; Game alludes to a backstory (test subject), how much actually written vs just use your imagination?  A fair amount, 15-page document about Aperture science, some of which is hidden on the Aperture website.   Sent it to Jonathan which helped for the song.

 

Q:  Portal was a triumph of creativity, awards and acclaim and so different.  How does that affect the community of games as a whole?  Approach to making games as a creative medium?  Too early to tell… I hope more people make games like this since we like them!  Independent games are really getting awesome, higher profile and production quality.  Maybe people take more risks on more oddball games…

 

Q:  From a film background… as writers, what are your influences?  Kim Swift:  Miyamoto, Nintendo games… knew she wanted to be a game designer from an early age.  Katamari Damacy.  Wolpaw:  Direct inspiration was a book, “Destination Void”, clones that go into space and tasked to build the AI, failsafe mechanisms to deal with AIs that go rogue. Doesn’t read a lot of science fiction now… Roger Scheckley, funny sci-fi. 

 

Q:  Portal design process was an animal, what would it be?  Joke question…

 

Q:  What the hell is on those slides!?  Friendship…. And fire…. Just pictures we couldn’t fit into the talk in any meaningful ways. 

 

Q: Dev team, female lead is unusual.  How many girls on the Portal team?  2, Kim and one of the artists.  Q:  Does that help in the creativity process?  Dunno… honestly, no matter what your gender you make a game you want to enjoy yourself.  So maybe by extension but should be fun for everybody… Erik:  makes the room smell better….

 

Duelin’ Firemen!!!!

GDC Rant Session 2008

 

Goal:  to make these underground conversations public.  Do these rants direct the work that we do?  Keep a finger on the vibe of issues that are concerning developers.    Last year’s rant helped IGDA create a speaker’s bureau to help our presence in the community.

 

This year: game designers ranting.  2008 is the year of game design.  Great lineup at the awards: Portal winning GOTY.  Indy games being recognized was strange but now it has come home.  Not easy being a game designer.  Often they are listed below the people making the code and graphics.  Other disciplines come from other places, art, business, code.  But game designers are ONLY in our industry.  They are the heart of what we are doing so they have a particular animus about being kicked around and wanting to make our industry better.

 

Clint Hocking:

 

First idea, ranting about creative stagnation.  But such a tired and generic topic, and not even sure there really is one.   Pound for pound the most creative industry in the world.  “Dude, it’s code… we can do anything”.  Being creative is fairly easy.  Having the courage to create something that challenges people – that’s hard.  Why don’t we make games that challenge people, that matters?  Art and books do this all the time.

 

Here’s a game that made me cry, heres a game that means something (Marriage).  Effective budget zero.  Meanwhile, we made a bunch of versions of Duck Hunt in the mainstream.  Why don’t we take those techniques and use them in our blockbusters.  What if the things you did in the game supported those relationships in a systemic way, not a cutscene?  What if the goal was to comfort my spouse and the monster was just a metaphor?  Why can’t CoD actually be about Duty?  Or MoH about Honor?  What would it be worth to you if you could put honor in a box and sell it?!  Not Tom Cruise on the front, but package the experience of knowing what it is to be honorable?  Most people in the world have never felt that but they would love to – and they would have to practice it a ton to get a 5-star honor rating.  What if you could get the Medal of Honor in a game that demanded you be honorable to get it.  How terrible it would be to have people who are honorable because of our games?

 

Meanwhile Passage and Marriage are free.  Sad that these two guys have advanced the industry more than all of us making AAA games.  It’s great that we have little games but I like making big games with 200 people in it.  Not talking about taking action from Halo, but using proven techniques for making emotional investment so that Halo will reach a real audience.  Halo 3 reaching 1/10 the audience of LOTR movies.  The things that move people in LOTR are the dagger that glows and a +5 rope?  People care about the fact that Frodo has to trust Sam.  Mechanics of trust are not harder to model and simulate than the mechanics of rope!  Yet our games are full of rings and ropes and armor and we have this object fetish.  So the most meaningful relationship developed this year is with a CUBE! 

 

Maybe it’s nothing and creative.  Not creativity that is holding us back from being the dominant media.  We lack the courage to make games to challenge something in us besides reflexes.  Lack the courage to be seen crying in the movie theater when he thanks Sam.  That’s the only thing separating us from the mature medium we will become and the juvenile media we are today.  We have the money and the creativity, and the demand.  Dude – it’s code.  We can do anything.

 

 

 

John Mack(?), Indy game designer (Everyday Shooter?)

 

(Everyone stands up and bounces balloons around)

 

 

Another Person, Kim ??:

 

Some sort of rant?  Nothing to be angry about now.  

 

Thus ends John Mack’s rant.

 

 

 

Jane McGonigal

Avant Game

 

We’ve invented a medium that kicks every other medium’s ass.  We occupy more brain cycles and make more content than anyone else in the world.  People are waking up and pouring effort into these games.  Games have already won.  

 

Industry spent last 30 years optimizing human experience.  In the past, our brains for playing games and recently our bodies for playing games.  We know our hearts can play games too.  Our experiences better designed for engaging humans than anyone else.  We basically rule the world.

 

The bad news:  we rule the virtual world.  Reality is too messy and broken, and we don’t want to fix reality, we want alternatives to reality.  For now all of our games work better than the reality.  All our effort into optimizing virtual experience.  We need to change that.

 

Reality is broken.  Our responsibility as the smartest people on the planet to fix it.  How to make people superheroes in real life?  Make the real life more like a game.  Graffiti – “I’m not good at life.”  I don’t wake up every day with missions and purpose.  Can’t be good at reality the same way.  In the games I have all the information I need and skills and people to count on.  Just better than real life.  New field of “positive psychology” – what gives us a good experience?

 

Satisfying work to do

 

Being good at something

 

Time spent with people we like

 

Chance to be a part of something bigger.

 

We are making the ultimate happiness engine.  “Soap Kills Germs”.  Figured that out in 1932.  20% of people in hospitals killed by germs on doctors hands.  Maybe people not on their deathbed but their lives suck – people playing and buying our games, games are their highest quality of life.

 

“Why should we care about games?”  Because life is crap, makes it worth living is art and play.

 

“Games kill boredom”.  “games kill alienation”  “games kill anxiety”  “games kill depression”.

 

Games are the ultimate happiness engine.  Like we invented the written word and decided only to write books, not exit signs.

 

5 things to fix today

 

Running, being on a plane, playing fetch.  Running == leveling up?  Flying = going to die.  Virgin has chat system, why isn’t there a game to play on the plane so that you win when you land?  Social network for dogs?  Play games with our dogs, fetch for an hour every day.  If I could play an MMO for my dog.  Trackstick – records where you go and see on googlemaps.  Virtual environments on commute.  Neurosky thing, knows if you are relaxed.  Zap people who are lighting up my brain.

 

Can make games that interface with reality.  Yes we should fix it. Will we?  I have no idea.

 

Alter your reality.

 

 

Chris Hecker:

 

“take a civil tone next time you speak, and even if you make the same points maybe more people will listen and find that they agree”

 

“Maybe the art that games could be isn’t some sick mishmash of what has gone before?”

 

Computation power is not orthogonal to game design – last year’s rant.

 

Still into ranting… complacency = death.  Games could be the preeminent art form of the 21^st century.  But on our current trajectory, will we get there? 

 

Take our boat and sail it between Scylla of thinking we are all that, and the Charybdis of being too scared to talk to the human condition.  Sextant for this journey is harsh and honest criticism.

 

Ranting has to be followed by acting.  Constructive criticism is the best thing.  But just criticism by itself is valuable.

 

Speak your mind and tell the truth.

 

 

Genova Chen(?)

 

Job is not to start fires, but to make fun stuff.  2008 hard to rant about, great year of games and innovations.  Current talk about input device is just no longer true.  Games are innovative, are art, can engage gamers with emotions.  Digital Distribution, barrier to entrance quite low.  Lots of indy games moving to the console!

 

How to come up with better game designs?  Not just a designer to rant.  But can rant as a gamer, just a guy playing games.  Less games in the past 18 years.  Interest dropping.   Excited to play first racing game , but no feeling at all in new racing game.  Excited to kill nazi’s, but now not exciting. 

 

Learn.  Brain engineered for sucking information.  Games can teach.  But more than toys?  Never say too old for you to read books or play sports, why too old to play games?  Intellectual, emotional, social. 

 

Grown-up gamers?  Don’t want to be abandon game because too old.  Need more mature content for people who still want to play games.  Not talking about manhunt or DOA.  That’s really for 18 yr olds.  Average game age is 33.  What do you need – intellectual, emotion, social content.  WoW == social doing OK.  Last year, feeling.  This year == intellectual.  Can games make you learn something?  Make you think?  We don’t need Three Little Pigs, we need Little Prince.  Make you think about your life.

 

What knowledge do we have beyond making weapons or level design.  Other great art comes from author’s own experience in their lives. Passage is awesome == gameplay makes you think.  Think of gameplay, not story.

 

What do you want to share with the mature gamers?

 

 

 

Daniel James, Three Rings

 

GDC is inspirational.  That’s nice.

 

Played with Lego as a kid.  Now they are making Lego MMO on the internet.  Brilliant!  After Lego, played Elite.  Used to dream of playing that with other people – now we have Eve.  Fantastic!  After that played a Mud.  “go north”.  Chat with people – now there is 10 million people playing WoW!  WTF Amazing!  “The Tomorrow People” – we are in the future.

 

20 million people using this Facebook app!  Totally awesome!  People given money by investor types – that’s incredible.   Sea change in how we bring games to the world.  If US econ fails, hey there is always China!

 

Grandma saying now she plays PP with her grandkids instead of watching TV alone.  Kill TV is a mission we can all appreciate.  Virtual environments set off the same mind patterns as those things to in the real.  Line between the two is very thin.  Puts us in an incredible place.  People do things and then justify reasons afterwards.  How does that apply to you?  Observer is the pivotal point in shaping the real.

 

 

Q:  game design touching real world already in a bad way – frequent flier miles.  Now everyone has it and it’s a leech on the system, you get the money back that you never should have paid in the first place.  What if I just want to run and enjoy the simplicity of things?  People who want to run can run anyways – but a lot of people would be happier if it were less painful or embarrassing.  Making things difficult for people better.  Example of flier miles is great – gamelike isn’t just points or rewards.  Promotion people aren’t game designers.  Beauty of play, those who understand it should be teaching others how to be more engaging.

 

Q: Reviews of Flow give bad score because not enough boss battles.  Failure of discourse?  Role of game criticism?  Game review community needs to grow as fast as the developers.  As designers we are a bit head.  Majority of review can be bought?  How do teach game reviews?  Movies have classes, degrees for this but reviewing games has no education.  Needs to catch up.

 

Q:  Growing rift between hardcore gamers and everyone else?  What happens as we age?  Hardcore gamers are fighting a losing battle.  Want to play games with increasing convolution and that’s cool, but that isn’t where growth is.  Don’t have time to play those games anymore.  Only going to reward XP for time, rather play Passage.  If maker of Far Cry 2 is saying the same thing as the guy who makes Flow, there is something there.  Retaining people when they get to be 35, you need to make it something they care about.  Can get XP in a hundred games, can’t get honor in any of them.  Want to explore that in games, whether we would really stand up in a tough situation.

 

Q: What is stopping us?  What’s the barrier?  Biggest one is what we think about as a “sexy” game, how big and how much graphics it has to have.  Think of other things as being sexy that would be a good start.  Barrier is thinking that there is a barrier.  That there is something you have to do, to do it right.  Figure out what makes you happy and do that.  Tweaking numbers, or complex rulesets – just do it.  Don’t worry about this rift, who cares?  This is your art, your expression – own it!  Make it your own!

 

Taming the Mob: Creating Believable Crowds in Assassin’s Creed

James Therien & Sylvain Bernard, Ubisoft

 

AC is an animation intensive game so crowds deal a lot with animation. 

 

Measuring our expectations: Looking at other games, getting reference from real life footage.  GTA.  Focus more on crowds.  Consoles of this gen weren’t even out yet so hard to know their capacities.  Interesting trailer:  Dead Rising, crowds of zombies.  Showed what the console can achieve in numbers of characters on screen. 

 

To create a realistic crowd:  move in tight areas, realistic contact, proper reaction to the environment.  Incorporate the crowd into the gameplay. 

 

Rich NPCs: every NPC is an individual.  Emergent crowd, not explicit in code except in spawning.  Make those groups of NPCs believable and the crowd emerges from that.

 

Level design and art direction was a real life scale.  Didn’t want Prince of Persia – realistic capabilities.  Did need to cheat sometime – survive a 66 ft drop (20m). 

 

Animation style: keyframe editing, mocap where possible.  Same group as did Sands of Time, brought over animation like walling, but with more realistic touches.  Mocap editing to match keyframe look.  Add overlap, create more impact, adjust posing.  “Stylized realistic” animation style.  Skeleton shared between all characters.  Create opportunity to replace the animations.  Male or female, thin or fat.  Did some scaling if needed (except on legs).  Headache to modeling team to have to fit those meshes onto the skeleton, but was a really good decision.

 

Layering animation – every NPC shares the same behavior system but if want to customize (more feminine) just replace the needed animations within the system.

 

Lots of bones in our characters!  55 in main skeleton (w/hands), 35 in head, 40-80 procedural for hair, swords.  36 bones in the pigeons!  Hinge bones:  simple physics – wind, gravity, momentum.  No collisions, just constraints.  Used for hair and robes. 

 

“Look at” – 3 independent targets: torso, head, eyes.  Eye blink.  Control the eyelids with the characters look up (lifting).  All NPCs doing that.  Small subset of total: IK, lipsync.

 

Movement system – complex graph.  More realistic = controls not responsive.  Really complex = too much impact on other systems.   Separate the walk into 4 stages, each with their own transitions.  Starts from every direction.  Maybe a bad decision, started to explode when linked into other systems.  3 weight poses, so all systems needed to start on those 3 weigh poses, so simplify where possible.  When you release control the animation takes an extra few steps to look realistic. 

 

Went to a simplified version, keeping maximum fluidity.  High / low profile – has a transition between the two to keep it more realistic rather than just snapping.  NPC and assassin use the same animation system.  The computer is like a player, playing against the human.  Apply all of assassin’s animations to random shopkeepers. 

 

122 movement and transition animations.  108 transitions.  14 movement, 10 wait and idle.  Left-front vs right-front versions for movement.  12 cycle breakers.  24 other.  168 total animations.  So every new major version required 168 of them.

 

Movement system – displacement node.  Drives animation forward.   (key point that drives movement).  Crowd swimming, cycle breakers, and walk stop.  Swimming – shifting shoulders sideways.  Makes them look more lifelike.  Torso and arms only animations that don’t need to disrupt the walk cycle.  Can stop for just a moment to show the flow. 

 

Oriented move.  NPCs needed to walk backwards, which the NPC does not do.  Blend from backwards to forward to turn around while fleeing.  Became problematic since the assassin did not do it, and for navigation purpose.  So not actually used in the game. 

 

Environment:  not on a grid, very large.  Navigation not constrained to ground plane.  Totally arbitrary environment, irregular, beams everywhere, not fixed heights.  Detail everywhere.  Generate navigation data from collisions.  2 layers in AI:  behavior and decision.  Behavior shared with the assassin – managing animation and doing fine-grained interaction.  Guidance system – lines with normal information to cast against and interpret those lines in run time.   Extremely expensive, so used only in specific cases like assassin climbing.  Guards chasing use the same code as assassin. 

 

Other data is more AI specific – 2.5D triangle mesh for flat spaces.  Local planning and tests.  On top of that generate a waypoint network.  A* pathfinding on top of that.  Object waypoints and metalinks – jump data encoded ahead of time.  Use guidance data generated for assassin to compute jumps offline and then stored compactly.   Also encode ladders, beams, etc.  Steering pass to use long-term nav data.  Continuous small corrections for avoiding walls, dynamic objects.  Path validation to remove waypoint placement artifacts.  Communicate with decision layer if there is trouble (pushing away other NPCs if stuck). 

 

Level design specific tools for navigation.  Fine for Pt A to Pt B, but need to specify where crowds go.  Crowd flow lines, navigation highways that the level designers place in the map.  Makes wandering very cheap, useful for fleeing.  Only thing they have to do once on the network is decide what branch to take at an intersection.  Fleeing has no specific destination, just want to get away, so they can use that same data with a different decision at the branch points.

 

Interaction with environment:  Unbalance system.  Completely animated, rag doll activated at the last moment.  Ragdoll can look like fainting, but wanted something to feel more like protecting himself and having energy.  Versions for each possible height and speed and outcome (falling, making over, recovering).  Same thing for falling off a ledge – by speed & facing. 

 

Crowd Density:  Spawning in cities – originally just in a sphere.  But as we added NPCs you wouldn’t see them, they would be in streets you couldn’t get to or on other side of buildings.  Also couldn’t see down long avenues – just increasing the bubble just put more out of sight.  2d mesh and do a flood fill.  Pick triangles out of LOS to spawn.  Don’t bias the blob in any direction because player is so mobile.  Just make sure connecting streets always full.

 

Creating variety:  Entity builder.  Mixed attributes on spawning.  Endless possibilities – head structure, textures, color, thin, fat, military, accessories, AI reactions…

 

Crowd composition:  Game play crowd.  Base walking crowds + bench, monks, beggars.  Lots of game play relevant crowd entities.  All this together gives an immersive world.  Had intended more duties but really just did kiosks.  Wish we had more things like sweeping, drinking from a fountain.  Sound faked some of this – hearing someone working metal even if you don’t see it.

 

Interaction:  Physical interaction – soft push, grab and throw, collision, fight, assassination.  Reaction system.  Communicating design to programmers by generating fake footage of the different reaction scenarios.  Reactions:  individual reaction, sound from an NPC, body posture.  Acrobatic reaction creates zones – yellow outer area to just look, grey area to stop and look.  Then people slowly peel off.  People following a fight sequence, attracted as long as no one dies.  Chase sequence with recoil, dodging the assassin.  Some just get bowled over if they don’t notice.  Then generate fake conversations when pedestrians wind up nearby.   Took a lot of work to keep the NPCs attracted to a fight from getting in the way.    Body gestures to match sounds.

 

We often focus on textures and meshes, but the AI and behavior is just as important.  Need to bring the world to life. 

 

Reactions: more than just visual.  “reaction packs” specified by level designers.  Set of response to specific events.  Draw the guards into the fight by reacting to the alert event.  Guard awareness levels – seeing a dead body changes reaction packs. 

 

How do you get lots of NPCs at 30 fps?  Not easy with no LOD on decision or behavior layers.  Lots of LOD on the animations – bone counts drop fast, drop IK, simple look at, simple procedural rigs.  Focus on making common NPCs as cheap as possible.  Don’t do stuff when NPCs out of sight.  Lots of NPCs only pathfinding to get to position or crowdflows.  Load balanced fairly well – a fair number always doing common tasks.   As long as just player and a few guards being expensive it balances out.

 

Concurrency – lots of multithreading.  Started with just render / engine, but not balanced.  Multithread the engine the Wednesday before a big demo…  Animation multithreading worked out well.   Successful so went to a general distribution system.  Filling up the physical threads on the 360.  Have to balance well, optimal result is not the goal, steady frame rate is.  As much SPU use as we could on PS3 but didn’t work quite as well.

 

Conclusion: met our goals of a believable crowd.  Quality focus with good support from management.  Lots of diversity, quality, and quantity.  Harder than planned to incorporate gameplay – emergent crowd interactions hard to manage, difficulty for player to use the crowd as a tool.  Fell short of that goal. 

 

Q:  Size of the team?  Animators, programmers… 150-180 total.  1/3 programmer / art / design split. 

 

Q: When you spawn a character, is the duty fixed for their lifespan?  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  Different types of NPCs, most are fixed duty, but sometimes just released to the crowd.  Bench guys fixed but if they are servants they can get up.  Big system to do simulation but realized that it didn’t matter because the life of an NPC is so short.

 

Q:  Tall AIs and short AIs – how to make climbing work?  All environment detection is dynamic, all at runtime, so it all just worked.  Dynamic responsive to scale. 

 

Q:  What were goals for expanding gameplay for player?  Diversions…  no need to add new types if old types already worked.

 

Q: performance vs memory?  Measure a lot…  did limit variety.  NPCs expensive in many ways.  Tried to make them cheap as possible for common NPCs, but there is a limit to the work you can do.

 

Q: flood fill for spawning… visual test for spawning?  Yes – lots of raycasts in the game.  Raycasts for everything.  Multiple raycasts to make sure NPCs spawn out of sight or whether NPCs should react to something.  Spawning was asynchronous so didn’t matter how long it took.  Iteratively evolved flood fill triangles, since that was expensive.  Took a lot of optimization on that process.

 

Q:  how did you test the crowd system?  Humans, mostly.  That was a problem, systems breaking other systems without realizing it.  Lots of testers, that’s pretty much it.  Looking into other solutions for the future.

 

Q: reaction system, use of period events to represent continuous stimulus.  Created problem with moving player creating reaction as he arrived?  To avoid delay…  solved with brute force.  Not continuous but almost so.  When you start / stop moving sends events, fill in the difference.  All level design controlled, so they could tune and control.  Primary and secondary reaction zones, mostly data driven.

 

Q: duties planned, how many wound up with?  Not much, just orators and kiosks, used to create cluttering. 

 

50 software engineers at the peak.  AI was 15-20.

 

Q: What did you learn from AC to support much larger numbers of participants?  Crowd behavior changes drastically as you increase number of people.  40 NPCs worked, +20-30 more everything broke down. Pattern of motion extremely different as crowd gets denser.  Not just a question of detail, especially for navigation.  Each NPC has their own speed of walk which didn’t make things easy.  Suggest starting with a big number even if you can’t render and see how it works, don’t go incrementally.

 

Q: What sort of solving for complex scenarios like intersections?  Too complex to discuss here.

 

Q:  If there is a sequel, what crowd things differently to fix shortcomings?  Big problem at start was we didn’t know how it will work out.  Now we have the base and we can really build from that.  Expecting better integration with gameplay, going to be a big focus.

 

Do, Don’t Show: Narrative Design in Far Cry 2

Patrick Redding, Ubisoft Montreal

 

Far Cry 1: Invigorated setting of beauty and menace.  First third had a lot of lushness and realism, menace of armies of mercenaries.  Ubisoft decided to buy the brand, take it in other directions as well. 

 

Freedom to explore all the spaces:  systems / spatiality / humanity? 

 

Realism with focus.  Build on that notion of realism, but not for realism’s sake.  Use it in a way to let the player parse the game and its systems not just from the game but because they are human.  Wind blowing in a particular way they can make reasonable and intuitive choices based on that.

 

Immersion with Consequences.  First person can be harder for immersion because you are surrounded by this bubble.  How to selectively overcome that barrier?  Remind the player of their physical presence in the world. 

 

Meaning backed up by mechanics.  About something the player could actually experience.

 

Vision:  Themes > Intentional Play.  What does it mean to be a social animal?    A lot of far cry is around this dangerous setting.  So take other elements associated with those environments, how do they translate into a fast action shooter environment?  For humans… betrayal and subversion are your teeth and claws.  Ultimately you will run around with guns, sure, but this other element could create a human space.  Player input: every bullet counts.  Firing in the real world doesn’t just do health damage – fear, pain, uncertainty.  Causing a disruption of the social order.

 

Island of Dr. Moreau (FC1) > Heart of Darkness (FC2).  Colonial ambitions lost, failed adventures in Africa.  Any human being, no matter how civilized, when staring into the abyss will find it staring back.  Choice between false veneer of civility and the savage truth.  A journey up a river into the mind of a madman.   Modern version: Apocalypse Now.  Brings in a lot of modern shooter elements which are useful.  An irregular battle.  But making just a boat simulator wouldn’t be all that fun:  really just an allegory.  Player is in a fictional African wartorn country to track an arms dealer and terminate them.

 

Theme branches to game mechanics and story.  Red Harvest (Dashiel Hammett).  Yojimbo / Fist Full of Dollars.  Solitary gunslinger, anti-hero, strides into town corrupt and bereft of pity.  Disgusted by the pettiness of the warring bosses he doles out hard justice by manipulating the factions to take it to the guys in the charge.  Perfect model for FC2, could be broken down into great symmetry of gameplay.

 

Surviving in a social wilderness.  By the end of the game if you are piled in bodies you can lose the sense of the stakes.  The sting of betrayal is hard to ever get over.  Augment the stakes of a first person shooter by getting that sense of social survival.

 

Selective awareness of one’s physical presence in the world.  Player not aware of his avatar 100% of the time, focus on times when you DO have to do that, getting into a car, stubbing your toe.  Very scalable, could keep cutting away until we get to the core. 

 

World is not just an Africa-shaped arena.  Savannah, jungle, desert.  Don’t really all exist in one place so invent a fictional place.  All the real African conflicts are loaded with history that we don’t actually want to be tied up with.  Space where it makes a difference that it is In an African setting.  50 square km space with all these different biomes.   

 

How do you present a story when you don’t have any idea where or when the player will be?  Player controls the order + scope of missions.  Player has the hand on the throttle – either directly and consciously or just indirectly through his actions.

 

So what does this say about our story?  Premise: distinct from story.  It’s the thing we do have control over, the formal constraint we are imposing on the game.  The player is going to go to wartorn Africa and set these factions against each other.  Premise as distinct from the story, which emerges from the player’s actual gameplay.  Many ways to experience the story.

 

Enacted, embedded, emergent.  Jenkins: Game design as narrative architecture.  Enacted: as player picks up the box, the traditional story structure.  Embedded:  environmental narrative, dialogue and exploratory narrative.  Emergent:  player has a story that unfolds in their head that is profoundly personal and has everything to do with their gameplay choices and personal interpretations.

 

Illusion of continuity > anything else.  Open world with a lot of stuff, so what is primary function of the narrative?  To maintain that illusion of continuity.  Doing a lot of moving around (in space and systems), lots of chance to trip over discontinuities, so help guide the player away from those.

 

Be stochastic.  Game world that is large and filled with people and activity is a noisy place.  High fidelity environments but struck by how “quiet” everything is – verisimilitude, a dead world.  We want a live world with activity, characterized by chaos.  Not randomness – unpredictability that we still as human beings can parse.  Deliver story content using mechanisms that feel natural.

 

Exploit the urge to anthropomorphize.  Projecting intent on simple / stylized characters.  That weird “Mii” moment of projecting your soul.  Looking at a baby seal.  Very effective tool to offload some of the processing burden onto the player – not their console, but their head.  Cues to suggest a level of depth and intelligence but let them fill in the blanks.

 

Game ingredients > story inputs.  Take as much information as we could from the player based on their use of the game ingredients.  Normal FPS = moving around the world in a Teflon bubble.  Thin pipe / fat pipe