AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! Meets its First Alpha Tester
This is what an informal playtest session log looks like.
DanR was our first playtester. Here's a photo of his ear, because we didn't ask him for permission to show a photo of the rest of his face. He can pretty much kick any of our asses at Quake 3. He represents the hardcore demographic (or, at least the 30+ age group within that demographic -- we're aging). Here's what we found when we sat him down with a recent build, complete with fake timestamps:
7:01pm - We sit DanR down and start the game. He's an FPS fan who still plays various games today. His experience today will be similar to that of the most adept gamers. The big lesson: Just because he "gets" something doesn't mean all our players will.
7:02pm - He starts the game and looks around before he jumps, investigating the various edges of the building. Exploration is completely logical, but it's one of those things we (the level designers) never think about. He lands level 1 with no problem.
7:04pm - On Inward Focus, he had some initial successes, then started pushing boundaries. He ended up dead, until he got a handle of things.
7:06pm - DanR expects the player's bounding box to be smaller. He keeps hitting things he doesn't expect to hit. Broken bones from hitting buildings all over the place, for example. (We've since smallened it.)
7:09pm - The final score -- a number that appears in a vacuum -- clearly had no effect on his perception of success. (We've since added a "stars" rating, and have keyed this to level advancement.)
7:10pm - "What if there were things chasing the players? Or others jumping with them?" Or, in general, moving objects. (We since added rotating fan blade-looking things for starters.)
7:15pm - DanR says he didn't notice that the mountain was something he could jump down, at the end of Your Jackhole. (Possible solution: arrows?)
7:16pm - DanR goes for the shiny scoring plates a lot, which is reasonable. DanB and I generally do that as an afterthought, given how little they're worth compared to kisses.
7:18pm - There's no visual indicator that DanR's deployed the parachute! (Solved it by adding a "parachute fan" with sound effect.)
7:22pm - The do-nothing Jellyfish item disappoints DanR. (Solved by removing it.)
7:23pm - DanR claims that the controls are good, and the hyper-nonrealistic aesthetic works. We've received reasonable feedback on the graphics, lately, so I'm not too worried about that. However, I'd like to give it another "bump" before beta.
7:27pm - DanR likes the sense of momentum, and stresses that good level design is paramount. He suggests that we group levels by theme. Waterfalls? If players are inside something dark, would they have night vision? How about doing a run within a structure? (Tunnel?)
7:30pm - DanR experiments with an early parachute deployment. He wanted to be able to land, retract the parachute, then take off again in order to search for secrets. DanB also thought this was a good idea, but perhaps as an unlockable much later? I don't want to spoil the game's sense of motion.
7:33pm - The Inward Focus level is a challenge.
7:34pm - DanR suggests that there should be many levels. Replayability is key. Secrets allow the player to repeat completed runs? (First step in our solution is the experience system.)
7:40pm - DanR asks if there's a benefit to opening your parachute as late as possible. What if there were other avatars? The player currently has no identity at all. (Solution: ?)
7:41pm - It is unclear to DanR how damage is handled. He suggests a blue-becomes-red (hit-points) interface that doesn't distract. Could we write the game to allow players to hit walls and take advantage of the rebound? Broken bones = less control? (No solution as yet -- whether you bounce or die depends on the angle and velocity of the hit.)
7:45pm - DanR suggests a Marioesque tube that shunts you to a different level, if you know the secret. (We can do similar things within the game already. This is a job for... Level Design Man! DanB?)
7:49pm - DanR always tries to "break" a level, in the same way that Tribes players first tried to ski, and Quake players tried to rocket jump. Experiment to learn some neat trick?
7:50pm - "What if you were tiny, or in a video game?" He mentions the waterfall agaon. What other interesting environments can we come up with?
7:55pm - He likes the game, as a whole, and feels that he could sit and play it for a stretch.
This is the first game we're playtesting this rigorously. Already, it's paying off in the ways we've tweaked the alpha. Our next step is another few closed alpha tests, and then an open one. Fingers crossed.
Tony (aka AnthemAudio, n-Space audio engineer and staff writer at Music4Games) just did an awesome thing -- he recast the AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! Alpha #2 test video with new audio.
Take a gander. Here's the original, followed by Tony's version:
The latter definitely conveys a sense of excitement. Awesome.
With four different areas of information and 14 stats showing at any given time, it was clear that we were overwhelming people:
When selecting a new map to play, players needed to consider...
Their total points ever, forever
Their total "experience" points
Their total jumps attempted
Their safe landings
From those two stats, their failed landings
Their total "kisses" received
Their total "hugs" received
The total number of plates they'd hit
The total distance they'd fallen (in kilometers)
The number of fans they'd outraged throughout their career
The most points they'd received in a single jump
The most kisses in same
The most hugs in same
The most plates hit in same
The most fans outraged in same
...then, they needed to look at the lower-right corner of the screen to see which of those they needed to get where in order to unlock a map. What follows is a photographic re-imagining of what I imagine I was doing before I came up with that scheme:
That's my bathroom wallpaper, by the way. I did not select it; it was here when I bought the house. Anyway, the bottom line is that we kept all that data, but hid it. Here's what we show players now:
The game's still as complex, but the dozen or so pieces of data weren't fun to process when players selected a map, so we simplified.
I Fly on a Jellyfish -- Prototype Song and Saturday Morning Cartoon
I fly on a Jellyfish And your hopes and dreams are with me
Cause it's high time I departed sun- light that shone on our virginal days
Sky high flies a Jellyfish Won't you seek our past beside me?
The years have come between us And the Golden Age of Sailing.
| We'll dig our way back to the surface | Sun by sun. | | Everything's different | If I defy the journey onward
Have you ever cast your gaze down and seen the constellations?
Below our feet's been earth enough; jump skyward to Creation.
> In my visor you can see > Your face reflected astrally, so > > While your hands are sturdy take > ahold of our futurity.
| We climbed our way beyond beginnings | One by one. | | Everything is different for | we had made the journey onward
My skies were a Jellyfish Where your hopes and dreams had brought me
The years have run beyond my own. Leaving you this Age of Sailing.
> In my memoirs you can see > Your future written peacefully. > Resume this story past my years > And make the skies my elegy.
This was a song for a game we'd prototyped called I Fly on a Jellyfish, a year or so back. It was meant to have the whimsy (and, well, shallowness) of a Saturday morning cartoon. Can you see the title sequence, followed by an ad for Cabbage Patch Kids? How about My Little Pony?
Oh, PETA! You use sexuality so well. And we're satirizing you and jeans companies in our latest GDN Dev Diary entry: http://www.gamersdailynews.com/blog-105-How-Much-Sex-Can-You-Cram-Into-Your-Video-Game.html
BORING! -> These are the Stats We Track, We Track -> EXCITING!
Linear level progression is really boring from a meta-game perspective:
You complete level 1 to get to level 2. You complete level 2 to get to level 3. You complete level 3 to get to level 4. And so forth. And so on. Not too bad, if the low-level gameplay is interesting. But in many instances, you can improve the whole experience by offering a good game-atop-a-game. Give players the ability to circumvent the standard level progression by being creative. That's why we track a number of stats above and beyond level completion:
Experience Points
Total Jumps
Total Successful Jumps
Total Failed Jumps
Total Megapoints
Total Kisses Ever
Total Hugs Ever
Total Distance Fallen
Total Plates Hit
What if the player could use these to advance in a number of different ways?
They move from Trainer Tower to I Forgot My Parachute by completing the former. From there, they can go through each level linearly. But they saw that they could unlock Aaaaa!!! by getting 10,000 kisses, there's a chance to make a decision -- and that's fun.
This demonstrates the new aesthetic and a work-in-progress narrator. Some of the VO:
"Watch your step! Oop. You clumsy oaf, you! Good thing you're wearing a wingsuit." - Just flavor text.
"Boom. Ninety KPH." - Player hits a maximum speed via accelerator.
"You're at 10 lips." - Player's "kissed" 10 buildings.
"20 lips."
"We're coming up on halfway."
"Niiiice." - Player "threads the needle."
"30 lips."
"35."
"Ooh! Nice needle. Keep going." - Another needle.
"Landing's coming up." - The player will shortly reach an "out-of-bounds" area.
"50 lips."
"Good! Hit the chute."
"Safe, safe, safe, safe... Nice. Nicely done. AND you didn't even break any bones this time. Stay there; we'll come get you." - The player lands safely.
Again, a work-in-progress; something we hope we can randomize enough not to annoy the players.
GDN Dev Diary #3 - The Details are in the Devils are in the Details are in the Debbbbbbbbbils are in the Details are in the Devils are in the Details.
What is it about small details that grab our attention? Whether it's an easter egg in a game or the scene from the movie Magnolia with frogs raining from the skies, it's often the details in a game, a song, a movie, or even a sandwich that make it memorable. What would the Big Mac be without special sauce!? This dev diary entry relies heavily on media from the soon-to-be released playable alpha to show you some of the flavor we added to the prototype to make it a game that people must play.
Every game developer is asked this this now and again. What do you say? "I program stuff!" "I'm a software developer!" "I write games!" "I... do... stuff with code! Wait, come back here!" It's a tough question to answer. Doubly so if you're an indie game developer. Here's my answer:
There's your handy-dandy guide. Click for a larger view.
How the Hell do we Attract Students to our Breathtakingly Sexy Project?
Pitch:The game development industry is imploding. Help combine wetware and software to bring about its next incarnation.
We have the opportunity to sponsor an MQP project for the WPI IMGD, a great new major available at the undergraduate level. Our goal is now to try and get the best students interested a project for next fall:
In 1989, Peter Molyneux created Populous, one of the best-selling games of its decade. In 2008, he wrote Fable II. Both sold 3.5 million units. The difference? Populous cost $9,000 to build. Fable II cost over a thousand times as much -- and this trend is changing for the worse! In this MQP, students will accomplish what the video game industry has completely failed to do: reign in development costs by empowering content creators.
Procedural content generation has existed for decades, but the industry has only barely begun to use it reduce runaway development costs. While some games use it good effect (Elite, Diablo, and Spore, for example), there have been many failures -- think samey-samey dungeons; uniform, boring terrain; and dozens of identical random encounters. The best successes have come about as follows: don't replace content creators with algorithms -- use algorithms to make the content creators unbelievably powerful. Tools such as Genetica, SpeedTree, and Mojoworld combine intricate equations with the creativity of an actual human at the helm. These are just the tip of the iceberg.
2 art-track and 2 tech-track students will research topics on procedural model/level generation, L-systems, and animation. Based on this research, they'll design and construct a simple system that's general-purpose enough to be used for multiple tasks, with an interface familiar to content creators. Our goal for this MQP is to provide a topic that we believe will be an industry focus over the next decade.
Q: How do we get 4 students interested in slaving away (in their windowless cellars for 12 hours a day) at work we think will benefit us and the industry, and help them land jobs?
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