Raptor Racers: Week 2

Progress on the game has been going fairly slow, as our group has had relatively unproductive meetings in terms of content output. However, we did talk about concepts and the future of the game itself. As usual, I was tentative to have my 'head in the clouds' (as Lindsay put it) when it comes to thinking of different game ideas and what we want to accomplish for this semester. In retrospect, yes, most of my ideas were too far fetched. Having different kinds of raptors have special abilities (each requiring their own animation to use, sometimes even a particle system) would've been neat. They also could've had their own individual textures/addons (mainly feathers). Maybe I'll just save these for another post.

Since the group is in general confusion, and now working on their own thing (mainly assignments for other classes), I have decided to focus on animation. Our raptors need an animation for jumping, getting hit by something, breaking (as in, losing speed, and not literally breaking in half), and it is my job to start making them all in Maya. My philosophy seems to be to create more poses and utilize them as much as possible along with the few cycles that we have. Something like a crouching pose blended with the running pose to give the effect of preparation for a jump. That same pose can also be used when the raptor lands. The animation would start out 100% on the crouch pose and gradually let off until the raptor is running again. Or when a Raptor is running and grazes an object. It would be nice if the raptor actually reacted in some way, like getting hit. The reaction would be blended differently depending on how far in the object went. Maybe that's a bit too much, I guess speed could be a good parameter, but I'm not sure. I'll have to play around with the numbers and see what looks right. Hopefully things will turn out looking relatively smooth in the end.


I guess this is also the time to mention that our team has scrapped the idea of having skeletal animations in our game as of last meeting. It was deemed to be too much work for the payoff. The final product was going to look exactly the same anyway, so we decided that we shouldn't spend our precious time doing it. I think we would rather have various shader effects/sound to be in our game and relatively polished, rather than something that no one will be able to tell is in the game (unless we told them). I feel like having something other people can look at and be in awe is more important than a technical detail that only a few people will be impressed about (that is even if they find out).

10 Min exercise

The game chose for this exercise is Crackdown for the 360

When I first started to play this game, I was introduced to a fairly lengthy comic-book style introduction sequence, explaining that the police have formed something called the 'agency' and I was one of their prototype agents. The city is in a state of war against crime, and I am some sort of super cop fighting against the bad guys. There are three major 'kings' or lords that control 3 major gangs that I am supposed to eliminate, but in order to get to them, I have to eliminate their generals first. The narrator then told me that he is my only friend, which was kind of odd, since I am on a police force full of people who are supposed to be trying to help me...

Anyways, the game starts and I am in a cylindrical garage of some sort. The narrator was talking, but I was busy trying to figure out what each of the buttons did rather than pay attention. Since the game kind of dropped me in this place randomly with no pre-cursor as to who I actually am (character wise) or where I am.

Looking around felt very rigid, and the running looked kinda goofy, but the animation for jumping looked cool. I noticed now that the game uses a cel-shaded look, and figured that the physics aren't really meant to accurately reflect real life.

Right as I got the hang of the movement controls, I heard the narrator say something about a car, so I ran around looking for a vehicle and found some police cruisers. Where to go wasn't really mentioned, so I started do drive to the nearest gate. The narrator said that this area is 'too dangerous' for me, and this happened with the next gate. I guess this was intentional? Was it foreshadowing the dangerous road that lay ahead of me? Or was it my own fault for not knowing where to go?

The gate opened up, and now I am driving at full speed in a tunnel, presumably to the surface. It's lit like a cartoony racetrack, with strips of neon lights at the sides of the walls. I'm following the contours of the track, and I am beginning to get the hang of driving, and it seems pretty fun. The car is responsive, although the camera sometimes gets in the way. I was about to go off of a jump at the end of the tunnel, but a pop-up stopped gameplay and fed more story to me. Something about my next target, or who I'm supposed to kill. This broke the flow, especially right as I was about to go off of a jump.

After the pop up vanished, and I landed the jump, I saw something purple on my mini-map in the lower left. I assumed this is where I was supposed to go. The narrator has just told me I need to take back some sort of weapons cache. So I start driving in that general direction. Without knowing it, I apparently entered some sort of race, and upon realizing this, I immediately drove in the direction of the white icon on the mini map, where my destination apparently was. Go figure.

Getting to my destination, I saw some sort of shootout between the cops and the gang members, but not knowing the combat controls I kind of ran around unproductively and took potshots at them by pressing the right trigger. I learned that the left trigger was lock on, which made aiming significantly easier, but also felt kind of cheap, because it does all the aiming for you.

The gang members eventually fell, and I had to get up to the balcony they were shooting from. Conveniently the architecture of the building kind of looked like giant stairs, and that the supercop I was playing as could conveniently jump just as high as each step.

At the ledge there was an orange marker, when I walked in, a UI popped up, asking me whether I wanted to re-fill my ammo, or travel to another part of town. I chose the former option, and continued on with my mission. Trying to jump off, I accidentally pressed one of the bumpers, which caused my character to throw a grenade off the building. Hearing screams down below, I was fairly sure I killed a couple of civilians... Oops.

The car I entered in this fight was gone, and I took some random hunchback that was parked nearby and drove around pointlessly until the 10 min timer went off. I think I managed to get some gang members killed, but I probably terrified the civilians more than anything.

Some games just miss the point

Introduction

Eve online is my chosen game that I found not to be fun, and I think is one of the more boring games I have played for a number of reasons. I'm going to be mainly discussing the poor choices of interface design and game play design that were used, as there are many.

To give a brief description of the game, it is an MMO where players pilot spaceships in a massive galaxy, where each star system of the galaxy is an actual space that can be visited. There is a space for newer players in the center of the galaxy to learn how to play the game, and how the game world works. This space is protected by Police like vessels that enforce the rules. On the fringes of the galaxy, the space has no laws, and players are free to do whatever they want.

Players can pick what race they are, this has an impact of where you start in the galaxy and what types of ships are available to you. This is really only for style, as different ship types are the same throughout the different races (small & stealthy, big guns, drone carrier etc.). You can bother customizing your character (the pilot) but this is pointless, as nobody really sees your character anyway, and only sees the ships you pilot. The ships all look the same though, you can add different guns on to them, but their appearance mainly stays the same. So you essentially just blend in with a lot of the other players who are relatively in the same position as you (ex. newbies who are just starting out). 

Once you actually start playing, there are your generic "go here and kill this" quests for 'agents' that you can do. The game provides back story for them, but there are mainly only a couple of different types. Once you find a mission you can do, then you're all set, killing things in video games is usually a fun thing.

Usually, but not when the UI looks like this

 Seriously, not only do the little window boxes and the many different icons look like they belong in an excel spreadsheet, the actual combat is mind-numbingly boring. To give perspective, you're supposed to pick a target from that giant list to the right, click on it, and press a few buttons to make your guns fire. That's it. That's all of the combat in this game. You don't aim anything, you don't control anything, hell, you can't even move. You can tell your ship to be a certain distance away from somebody, but that's just hacking it. So to sum the combat up: you click a few buttons, and sit there and watch. If part of your exciting combat system is 'waiting for something to happen', then I think you've got a problem on your hands.

It would help if the things you're shooting at were actually visible in some way. Enemies are represented by their name, and a red cross icon to tell me that they are hostile and put inside a giant list. Yeah sure, there are icons on the screen too, but that's just making the problem worse. Now you've got a cluttered up visual space with a bunch of icons that are supposed to mean something, in a screen space which already consists of the oh-so-fun looking windows forms. The problem is that nothing that I am doing feels relevant in any way. Sure a text box can tell me that I've hit something for x amount of damage, but I don't get to see the results of my actions.

Reminds me of a text adventure

I could also talk about mining, but that is even worse than combat. Your ship just goes up to an asteroid and fires a laser for 20 minutes. You get to see a number go up next to an icon of some type of ore, and that is the extent of mining. Sure the time may be exaggerated, but that is certainly what it feels like when you're doing absolutely nothing. They could have at least added a mini-game, maybe scanning one, and if you find a rich chunk of an asteroid you get to blast it with your mining laser or something.

Mass Effect did it, and it worked fairly well

The rest of the game is like this too. All of the interactions with the game are done in these odd looking blue-grayish forms. I get that it's supposed to be 'space age', and try to look futuristic, but 'bluish-gray' doesn't really convey that well. Some of the options actually have windows 'folder' icons instead of something relevant.

No really, I am not kidding.

It could have been a picture of a drone, a hangar bay, a door, anything but a folder. It's as if they forgot they were making a game. There are lots of instances of this, which completely breaks immersion, because this just screams out loud "you are just sitting there in your chair clicking buttons" when you're supposed to feel like you're in a game world.

It makes me sad though, because I really want to enjoy this game. The concept speaks to me. I would love to be in control of a spaceship, being a part of a massive world out there that is ripe for exploring. It's just that a lot of the UI and other design issues are such glaring flaws that I can never get into this game, the fun of that concept is just sucked right out, and I can't bear to play this game any longer.

Fun that stands the test of time

Introduction
 
'Master of Orion', created by Simtex Software, released in 1993, is my chosen game that definitely deserves to be put in the spotlight as one of my favorite (and obviously fun) games to play. Despite the game being almost as old as I am, and lots of other brand new and shiny video games out there today, this game still finds its way to my computer screen every once in a while. Something magical about it just keeps me coming back, and I have a creeping suspicion that this happened entirely by accident, as I am usually not a huge fan of slower paced strategy games or older strategy games in general.

The graphics aren't great, but still pretty impressive for 1993.

 

To give a brief description of the game, it is a 4x (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) turn-based strategy game that is set amongst the stars. The game starts by letting the player choose what size of galaxy he/she wishes to play in, the difficulty, and number of opponents then picking a race to play with (each with their own game play bonuses). In the first turn, the player is given a half-developed home planet, and a colony ship to boot. The goal of the game is to ultimately be the 'master of Orion', or for a better choice of words, master of the galaxy. How you achieve that goal is up to you, as there are lots of different ways to achieve victory. 

The reason why I like this game is almost entirely because of the game play mechanics it employs. The game play offers a very good balance between structure and randomness, and does not let micromanagement get in the way of making important and often game-progressing decisions. The design hits that sweet spot where there is just enough elements for the player to manage that he/she does not feel overwhelmed by all of the game's elements at once. A lot of older (and even newer) 'civilization/sim' games are guilty of violating this, where a new player is apparently supposed to have taken an entire course on just how to navigate the UI.

Providing Structure

 

At the start of each game, Master of Orion gives a player a crash-course in its UI system. Simple text boxes explain what each of the menu options do, what buttons do what, where to find certain menus, and most importantly, why certain numbers appear where they do, and what they mean. The buttons are also laid out in a way that the most important button (Next Turn) is at an intersection of two different 'strips' of information. The vertical being planet info, and horizontal being game play feature info. The eye can easily glance up or to the side after clicking the next turn button to start planning what to do for the current turn. I feel that even simple things like this can go a long way to help ease in players into your involved and complex strategy game. After all, you can't use a feature if you don't even know it exists.

 

 

Higher difficulties do not bother with displaying this info to you however.

After the player has learned his/her way around the UI, the fun begins. The key here is that this game allows you to manage multiple star systems very easily by means of different 'ratio sliders'. Most other strategy games have players running chores, making them navigate from town to town to make sure everything is going the way they want to. This game on the other hand abstracts this out into something very simple. Just set a few progress bars to tell the planet what needs to be done, and then go on your way. Even new colonies will automatically flourish into useful assets to the empire without the player's intervention. However this does come with a trade off, while letting systems automatically develop is nice, the player can usually bring the colony up to full speed much more efficiently. For example, a player should often send colony transports to new found colonies to help them develop faster. Non-tended to colonies will get basic industry up and running, and having the population to man it. After that is done, they will default into producing research points for your empire. The player has to specifically tell planets to produce ships, or develop defenses. If you want the colony to develop defenses, or build factories, or produce your starships, all you need to do is set a slider. 

 Easy and simple, this allows the player to focus on developing higher level strategies without too much micromanagement in the way.

With the town management neatly abstracted, it is time to focus on how your towns play into the big picture. Each planet has a production level, which it can use to either help research, or build ships/defenses. Now, research is structured in a similar way to planet management. There are 6 sliders that represent 6 different areas of study. The total amount of research points from all of your planets are divided depending on the sliders. If you are falling behind in a certain field of study, or simply need a technology from a field of study, just increase the slider. Only 1 slider can ever get 100% of the research points, so it is up to the player to decide which technologies they want the most.

 This screen also provides information on the various technologies you have researched, the last entry is one that is currently being developed.

Here I have accumulated enough research points to discover this technology, and this message pops up in game play automatically.

 

 

 After a discovery, the player tells the scientists what to focus on next. Notice how at the end of the description the research points required are shown. Simple and easy, no need to worry about micromanagement.

 

When the player is happy with their tech level, they usually start designing ships to defend their planets and invade the AI opponents. There are no pre-set units in this game. Every star ship is designed by you. This aspect of the game is my favorite. Here is where your effort and research becomes something tangible. The player puts personal investment into the designs, and thus feels more involved in the game world.

 

 Here is a design for one of my ships. The design menu is intuitive, and the design options are extensive. You can even give a custom name for this ship class.

 

 

Now the player needs an enemy to fight (or befriend, it's really your choice). The computer AI manages to effectively be good competition to the player. It makes all the same choices you do, and even makes it's own designs of ships to counter yours. A neat touch is that every race has it's own happy/neutral sound theme and an angry theme, depending on what you were discussing with them.

 

 The races screen, a quick look at what your relations are to other AI players. Me and my opponent do not see eye to eye at the moment...

 

 

Adding Randomness 

What separates this game from the others for me, is the way it adds a certain randomness to the game play that is worth playing over and over again. Every time you start a new game world, every planet location and type is generated randomly, so exploring never feels old. Some planets offer bonuses, like being rich in minerals to mine to boost production, others offer special artifacts that benefit your research. Other planets may not be so desirable. Some are hostile and you need to develop special technologies to land on them. And one star in particular is in every map, and hold lots of technological secrets should you ever land there, but is guarded by a powerful and ancient machine that you fleet needs to defeat first.

 

Another aspect of randomness being added into this game is the type of enemy you will encounter every time you play. The computer only has 8 or so races to choose from, and on top of that, they can have different personality types that influence the way the progress though the game. Militants often build large fleets, and research weapon technologies, Diplomats usually trade with other species and are more inclined to enter non-aggression pacts with you. Each personality type can also have a suffix, such as 'pacifistic' or 'xenophobic' that adds further depth to the AI players. This also defines how aggressive they are, or whether they are wary of other alien species etc.

 

 

 My opponent happens to be a 'xenophobic diplomat'. I guess that explains why he hates me.

 

Sometimes, random events happen in the game, which either help you or an AI player, hinder your progress or add an interesting touch on game play. For example a single extra-galactic life form can come into your galaxy at any moment, and they are usually bad news, that is unless they happen to spawn in your opponent's corner of the map. They are powerful 'ship' that can wipe out entire fleets and level colonies in a blink of an eye. Or a wealthy merchant can donate to either yours or an AI opponent's cause. These events are designed to keep you on your toes, and always be thinking of the strategy you are employing.

 

 

 I got lucky here! Yes, that is a news robot.

 

Little bits of ingenuity like this is what makes me come back to this game. Master of Orion doesn't necessarily contain the traditional type of narrative that is found in today's games. Rather, the player forges his/her own story in the process of playing the game. Each event that happens is what happens in your narrative. There are small explanations of back story in the technology descriptions that help your mind fill in the gaps.

 

This kind of simple and easy to use design, coupled with a very unpredictable world is what keeps me coming back to this game. No 2 games unfold quite the same way, and there is always a unique story to tell after you have won or lost a game. This is why this game is still on my computer even after almost 17 years after release.