SPUDZOOKA on the iPhone?

Unity Technologies announced today that Unity will support development for the iPhone. Probably this means that the ability to build games in iPhone native format will eventually be built right into Unity. Currently it's possible to build games in a variety of formats (including Web player, Mac stand-alone, Mac Dashboard Widget, and PC stand-alone simply by choosing which one you want to build.

There's a lot of hype now, with the iPhone SDK now on the market that mobile gaming is going to take off. It could very well happen, and the Unity game engine is likely to be at the forefront of 3D gaming on the iPhone.

Very cool. Someday you might even be able to play SPUDZOOKA on your phone.

Narrative "modes" in video games

As a follow-up to my last post about differences between Japanese and Western-style RPGs, I thought I would point to another article from Gamasutra (what can I say, they publish great articles) that I saw today. It's an interview with two of the people behind Portal, on which, if you haven't been reading lately, I have a bit of a fanboy crush.

It's a great interview (if a smidge rambly in spots), but the part that's relevant here is the bit about, well, narrative. Here's a quote from Eric Wolpaw, Portal's lead writer:

We had this theory that games tell two stories. There's the "story story" which is the cutscenes and the dialogue, and the "gameplay story" which is the story that's described by the actions you take in the game world. The theory was that the closer you could bring those two stories together, the more satisfying the game would be.

I spent years and years reviewing games, and that's something that always bothered me in games, where the delta between the two stories was real high. I promised myself someday that if I ever got the chance, I'd try to make a game where that delta was almost zero. It was a conscious decision that we wanted to try and keep that world.

This to me is a really important insight and helps explain the special sense of immersion and, for me, empowerment that comes from playing a game where your own actions in the game world are tightly aligned with the narrative being "told" in the game.

I've only played a few games that gave me this feeling. Portal is one; Myst is another. Both are first-person perspective games (where that perspective is never broken), and both are puzzle games. Both present a profoundly coherent sense of place. Seems like the start of a promising recipe. Even Myst, though, doesn't completely close the gap between "story story" and "gameplay story." As the player you wander around creating the "gameplay story." The "story story" has, for the most part, already happened and is revealed as you play through pages you find on the various islands.

In other words, your goal as the player in Myst is just to supply an ending to the "story story." In Portal you supply the whole thing, which is pretty special.

Seems like the same idea could be applied to RPGs in their various incarnations. In Japanese-style games a la Final Fantasy, the gap can be pretty wide. The story might be compelling and the characters unforgettable, but the gameplay mode and the story mode are totally distinct. Gameplay stops when narrative starts and vice versa. Western-style games maybe close the gap a bit, but there's still the sense that your total experience in the game world is much different than the story being told through the main quest line. Sure, I could convert my gameplay experience with Oblivion into a story, but, man, would it be boring.

Japanese vs. Western RPGs; story vs. gameplay

Gamasutra posted an article a few days ago about the 20 essential Japanese RPGs. It's pretty long but worth a skim. I've spent most of my gaming life (until recently) fairly insulated from reviews and online chatter about the quality of games I played. As a result, I knew what I liked, but I didn't know if anyone else agreed. It was fun to read someone else's take on those games.

Turns out I have played quite a few of the ones listed, including:

• Final Fantasy IV
• Final Fantasy VI
• Final Fantasy VII
• Final Fantasy VIII
• Final Fantasy X
• Final Fantasy XII
• Chrono Trigger
• Chrono Cross

Lots of Square games on that list, obviously, but they were only one of two or three outfits creating US-bound RPGs in the 80s and 90s. Plus, I liked all their games, so I tended to go out and buy them.

I've never played Xenogears, but I did play the first installment of Xenosaga, and I definitely agree with this article's take on that game:

Still, once again, the plot [of Xenosaga] was simply far too ambitious for its own good, and the number of planned installments was cut down from six to three, compressing the plot even more. It didn't help that the first two games were saddled with terrible pacing issues, plodding cutscenes, and boring battle systems.

Japanese vs. "Western" RPGs
This article also intrigued me because I'm still working on Oblivion (which will no doubt be a looong process), and I've only just begun to understand the differences between Japanese and Western-style RPGs. This is yet another way in which I'm a little slow, but I have never really spent much time with any Western RPGs before Oblivion.

I tend to like story-based games with interesting characters, and Western RPGs have leaned away from story and more toward gameplay, with their open-ended worlds and emphasis on first-person role-playing.

To avoid launching into a rant about the state of stories in games (which you can find here at Blog of War, and also here and here), I'll just say that so far I still prefer the Japanese model. Most definitions of narrative require an some act of telling (by an author and/or narrator). It's this author who interprets events and helps shape their meaning.

Japanese-style RPGs tend to acknowledge the existence of an author/narrator and adopt a more cinematic style -- they tell a story. Western RPGs tend to drop you in a world and let you, in a sense, create your own story. The trouble with this model is two-fold for me:

1. Most of us aren't good story tellers. The things we do in these spaces probably isn't very interesting. If I choose to spend my time in Oblivion on alchemy, I'll just run around collecting seeds and roots all the time. Nothing riveting there. Sure, I could play the thief or the wizened wizard, but these are just types; they're not characters with flaws and emotions. I want characters.
   
2. There's no one to tell the story to. If a story needs a teller, it also, out of necessity, needs an audience. If a man tells a story in a forest and no one is there to listen, is it still a story? Sorry... The point is that I can certainly entertain myself in a sandbox-type game -- where I'm the story-teller with no audience -- but I find it far more compelling to be an active audience member, using the available gameplay to move a story along.
   

That's my two cents. What's your preference?

Open-ended dialog and moody NPCs

I spent quite a few hours this weekend playing Oblivion. It's reasonably entertaining so far; the size of the world and the number of possibilities for gameplay really are impressive.

The thing that continues to amaze me, though, is the amount of dialog in the game. Seriously, they must have had dozens of people writing dialog what must be thousands of virtual inhabitants. Characters' dialog changes based on what's going on around them and their disposition toward you. It's all so well conceived. Unfortunately, it doesn't work.

Here's a little exchange illustrating how I often feel while shooting the breeze with denizens of Cyrodiil (paraphrased for your entertainment):

Me: Hello!
Sour-looking lizard man: What do you want?
Me: I'm new in town. What's with that paranoid elf guy running around town all the time?
Sour-looking lizard man: I don't know you well enough to talk about that.
Me: [Here I tell jokes and boast about my prowess as an adventurer to get the lizard man to like me. Then...] So, about that paranoid elf guy?
Sour-looking lizard man: Oh him. I think he's following me. He looks at me strangely sometimes, and often carries on about a conspiracy. I try not to let it bother me, but he really creeps me out.
Me: Tell me about the town. Did I say I was new here?
Sour-looking lizard man: The town is ok, I guess. Hey, can you help me gather a rare root to throw into a magic potion?
Me: Uh, sure.
Sour-looking lizard man: Great! I think there are some roots near the trees outside town.
Me: Right. Roots near trees -- got it. I'll let you know when I find some. Good-bye.
Sour-looking lizard man: Leave me alone.

Open-ended dialog systems are a great idea. In theory they create a real sense of place and give the impression that you're experiencing a living, breathing world. The trouble is they involve too much filler and not enough coherent conversation. Real conversation is much too complex for games at the moment, so relationships between the player and non-player characters (NPCs) -- or even between NPCs -- get distilled into grossly simplified numerical values like "disposition" or "reputation."

For a class once I created a dynamic dialog system designed to address some of these issues by scoring relationships between characters using several attributes instead of just one (for example, trust, loyalty, friendliness, anxiety). The idea what that everything you said to or did for an NPC would affect those attributes. Over time you would actually build a "relationship" by spending time with NPCs, and the quality of that relationship would have a dramatic affect on what kind of information they would share.

Aside from the obvious practical issue of writing all that dialog, my grand system and others like it face a pretty serious challenge -- there's too much dialog.

The beauty of closed systems (where dialog is delivered through cut-scenes or one-shot statements) is that they can be more carefully crafted. Sure, they may sacrifice "realism," but let's face it, 90% of the words we utter are unbelievably mundane. Anyone reading this knows it's certainly true about me. A truly open-ended, flexible dialog system would be prohibitively expensive to create and populate with content.

I haven't given up on Oblivions NPCs yet. Right now I find their moodiness kind of endearing, but who knows how long that will last. I'm fickle like that.

A useful user interface, part 2: The GUI

I've been running the play test of SPUDZOOKA for several days now, and I've learned some really useful things. Special thanks to everybody who has given the game a run for its money. It's going to end up a lot better because of it. (If you haven't tried it out yet, you can play here.)

The feedback has been positive overall, but being my own harshest critic, I feel like the game still leaves quite a lot to be desired. I think the concept is a decent one -- a little light-hearted destruction goes a long way -- but there are some tweaks to the user interface that will make the player experience better. Thus begins the second part of my brief series on user interfaces.

The graphical user interface
There are two main elements to SPUDZOOKA's GUI, and probably most games with a play-level-then-upgrade structure (that's a technical term -- you like it?): the HUD (heads up display) and the upgrade interface.

I wanted SPUDZOOKA's HUD (the graphical interface elements that appear on the screen while you're playing a level) to be as simple as possible. In the top left corner of the screen, there's a score display and a timer. These elements simply let you know how you're doing. The timer is most important while playing, so I think it needs to be much more prominent, maybe even moved to the top-center and given a more graphical treatment.

In the lower left there are two elements, a squarish graphic with a number in it, and, next to that, a smaller squarish graphic with some potatoes in it. These are both really important, but I don't think they work very well.

• The button-looking graphic with the number is there to denote which cannon you are currently using. You only start the game with one cannon, and there's no indication what this number means until you edit your cannon for the first time. Even then, you need to build and save a second cannon before the number means anything. Right now there aren't enough levels for that to be necessary. I'm thinking about cutting out the ability to build multiple cannons -- we'll see.
• The small graphic showing the potatoes is there to denote your current ammunition. Again, you won't know what it means until you edit your cannon for the first time (I think that's ok), but a lot of people who played couldn't figure out how to change ammo. The trick is that you can't always change ammo -- it depends on which kind of barrel is attached to your cannon. I think the meaning of the ammo icons didn't translate well from the editor, and people didn't remember whether they had access to multiple ammo types or not. Probably I need to add an icon for each type of available ammo in the HUD and give some indication of the currently selected ammo.

That's it for the HUD. I wanted to include enough elements to keep players informed during, levels but I think I need to go a little further to explain things.

Now onto the cannon upgrade interface. The idea here is that players can mix and match cannon components to create up to three cannons that not only look cool, but have different strengths and weaknesses.

To make this mix-and-match feature work, I needed several elements:

• A way to select components of various types,
  
• A way to buy components that can later be mixed or matched,
• A place to display the current cannon configuration and its stats,
• Some indication of which cannon (of the three available slots) was currently being edited,
• A way to save a new configuration or return to the previously saved cannon in that slot.

The three component selection areas work pretty well and are fairly intuitive. The result of cycling between components is immediately apparent. The data display for the current configuration seems to make sense as well (except maybe the list of available ammo).

Things start to get tricky, though, when players try to figure out the function of the buy and save buttons. The problem is that upgrading your cannon is a two-step process. First you have to buy the new component, at which point it goes into storage, and then you have to save that component to your cannon, at which point it moves from "in storage" to "in use." The previously saved component on that cannon moves back into storage and becomes available for use at a later time.

It's the inventory concept that makes things too complicated. There are (small) text elements displaying the number of each component in storage and in use, and it's clear that buying a component adds one to storage. Nevertheless, the intuitive behavior, I think, is for the "buy" button to save that new component immediately to the cannon. This seems to be what most people expected.

My attempts to hint at the desired behavior probably weren't enough. The background on the component selectors turns red when you don't have enough in storage to use that component in a cannon (meaning you have to buy one). The background of the full cannon display on the right turns red when you haven't saved that configuration, and you can't save it until you have enough of each component in storage (which would cause the background color of the components to be blue). In other words, once everything is blue, you're good to continue on to the next level. If anything is red, you've got a problem.

If I'm going to keep this two-step system, I think I need to create some additional cues in the interface to let people know what to do. I could make the "buy" button flash when an additional component is required and/or make the "save" button flash when the cannon is ready to be saved. Those two things would probably help a lot.

You can probably tell I've put a lot of time into the cannon editor and the GUI for SPUDZOOKA. I think my first go was passable -- players could figure it out after a few tries -- but I need it to be obvious on the first try. And that will take some more work.

SPUDZOOKA play test!

I'm happy to announce today that my first play test of SPUDZOOKA is ready for your perusal and feedback, constructive or otherwise.

Please take a few minutes to play through the game and then write comments on this post about your experience. Feel free to comment on any part of the game, including:

• Overall fun factor
• Graphics/visuals
• User interface
• Cannon upgrade system (could you figure it out?)
• Sound/music
• Any bugs, funky stuff with playing the game in your browser
  

Since this is just a test version, I feel obligated to include a small disclaimer: While the gameplay is relatively complete, you will certainly encounter bugs, and there are probably some considerable balance issues with the various cannon components. In fact, there are several cannon combinations that don't even look physically possible. One final note -- the paint job portion of the cannon editor doesn't work yet.

Ok, without further ado, you can play SPUDZOOKA here!

(To play, you will need to install the Unity Web player, which can be downloaded free for Mac and Windows here.)

New Nine Inch Nails

For all the Nine Inch Nails fans out there, Trent and a few cohorts have put out a new album: Ghosts I-IV. Coming pretty close on the heels of Year Zero, this one follows Radiohead's lead and is available primarily in digital format. Oh, and they're all instrumental. I've always been a fan of the more ambient NIN stuff anyway, so this is quite exciting.

There are several options, including a free version containing just the first 9 tracks (there are 36, count 'em, 36 in all) and a $5 dollar download only containing all 36 tracks, a PDF booklet, and some cool web-ready images. There's also a $10, dual-CD purchase due to be shipped in April.

I went for the $5 download, and it's quite good so far. There's so much music for the price, though, even a mediocre release would still be worth it. It did take me two days to get it, since the web site was so hosed up.

Score another one for the bands fighting against record-company tyranny.