Dev Take Tuesday - Characters and Causes

I recently started watching The Expanse, a SyFy television show adapted from a series of Hugo Award-nominated books. Interestingly, the sci-fi world of The Expanse originated as a backdrop for an MMORPG, and later a tabletop game. Funny how a narrative spark can travel through so many mediums until it finally catches fire. I adore the show so far and especially its worldbuilding. I think there’s one big game dev takeaway from the show for me, and that is the clear and clever distinction between characters and causes.

Before I continue, I should explain that I’ve only seen the first several episodes of the first season so far. My current opinions of the show and its characters could very likely transform as I watch the rest of the first season and move on to the second. That being said, I doubt that the general principles I see at play in The Expanse will disappear, as they seem essential to what makes the series—and the world—tick.

Anyway, the show makes sure to distance its key characters from any of the causes in the show. The near-future world of The Expanse features three principal factions at odds with one another: Earth, Mars, and the “Belters,” people who live in asteroid belts and whose bodies are fundamentally different from a constant low-gravity environment. Each of these factions looks out for itself first, which leads to a lot of moral gray areas. At this point in the series, none of these factions’ causes seem entirely trustworthy or completely just.

Expanse characters Josephus Miller, Chrisjen Avasarala, and Jim Holden (image found on Ars Technica)

However, there are characters to root for. Like each of the major factions, the show’s main characters— Belter detective Josephus Miller, ice hauler Jim Holden, and UN executive Chrisjen Avasarala—also meander through moral ambiguity, but ultimately they act as independent agents from the systems they’ve been placed in. This agency allows them to follow a personal moral compass instead of a dogmatic creed—a premise that seems to drive the show.

As a game dev, I want to make stories that pair well with gameplay mechanics. I think that the narrative principles at the heart of The Expanse also apply well to the main characters in a video game. It’s fine to include powerful factions in your video game narrative—the power of these types of factions creates a potent friction that advances plot in meaningful ways. A random non-essential NPC can represent a fanatic cult. An enemy grunt can characterize a powerful political machine. But key characters, and especially player-controlled characters, should be distinguishable from their causes. If these characters are freed from your game world’s larger forces, you’ll empower your players and allow them to exert their own force in your interactive narrative.

Indie Illuminator - Retro Date Night

Today I’d like to do something a little different with the Indie Illuminator. Instead of spotlighting an indie game, I want to spread the word about a Twitch stream that deserves attention: Retro Date Night. The stream features a married couple playing classic games together, and you can expect wild voiceovers (probably my favorite part), good gameplay, and plenty of jokes.

So far, Retro Date Night has been playing Zelda games.

Retro Date Night started off with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and this Friday (May 25^th) they’ll finish Majora’s Mask, the second playthrough in their series so far. They interact plenty with their audience on Twitch chat, so if you have a few minutes to spare, stop by their stream—they should be starting around 10:00 EST on Friday—give them a follow, and say hi. You can also watch recorded episodes right on their Twitch videos page or their YouTube channel.

Dev Take Tuesday - DFYF

As I mentioned in last Thursday’s Indie Illuminator, indie game Guild of Dungeoneering was free over the weekend. I wanted to get a clear picture of what the game offers, so I played for several hours. I had a great time building my dungeoneering decks, beating bumbling bosses, and listening to the incessantly sarcastic bard who sort of narrates the game.

As is often the case when I play games now, I was also doing research. It’s difficult to play a game now and not think as a designer. One small detail that caught my “designer eye,” was the ability to go back to old completed sections of the game to redo a boss battle. Why include this as a feature? Certainly it’s always fun to go back with new knowledge and kick the trash out of an enemy who beat you several times before. And perhaps that was part of the reason that developer Gambrinous included the feature. But I think its key function is to act as a failsafe.

Since one of Guild of Dungeoneering’s central conceits is that all the heroes are simply dungeon fodder for you to make money, you can’t really get permanently stuck on a level like you might in another game. But if you didn’t spend your money wisely on upgrades to your guild, you might find yourself in a frustrating spot. Instead of forcing you to bash your head against that frustrating quest over and over until you’re fortunate enough to win against the odds, the game gives you a different option by allowing you to fight old boss battles and earn extra money for upgrades. The boss battles provide a failsafe for the game’s strategic layer—providing a way out if the player is caught in an undesirable loop.

Upgrading your guild is essential to reliably progress through new quests. (Image source: Pocket Tactics)

It’s vital for a designer to always consider failsafes, because when a player doesn’t feel like there’s a way out of the situation, he or she will simply quit. In Alkanaur, we’re using one of these failsafe mechanics as a replacement for the “grinding” mechanics in many other RPGs. Grinding (fighting easy enemies over and over to gain experience and/or money) certainly works as a failsafe, but it can also paradoxically cripple players sometimes as they spend too much time fighting repetitive battles so that they feel “safe.” Side note: this is me in every Pokemon game ever.

Instead of random encounters, every city in Alkanaur has an arena that will let you fight a small, randomized battle to gain powerful, one-use items. The arena doesn’t grant experience or cash, so its use is only to gain a one-time boost for a mission you can’t get past. One of the other rewards from an arena battle will provide a different failsafe: a tonic that allows a character to relearn their skills. So if players don’t like the skill choices they made earlier, they can put a little extra work into an arena battle to hit the reset switch. We hope that the arena battles will help our players who feel stuck without the “dangerous” allure of overleveling.

So to our fellow game dev friends we say: DFYF. Don't forget your failsafes.

Indie Illuminator: Guild of Dungeoneering

Dungeon crawls are the potatoes of fantasy games. They’re a staple. They’re comforting. They’re versatile. And just when you think you’ve tried every variety out there, a new type of potato dish or dungeon crawl emerges.

What’s a dungeon crawl? You’ll find them in video games, board games, and pen-and-paper role playing games.  The first example of a dungeon crawl might be the Greek story of the labyrinth, the deadly maze designed by Daedalus and inhabited by a grumpy Minotaur. Essentially, a dungeon crawl involves a group of adventures exploring an underground, maze-like structure full of traps and treasure. Oh, and goblins. Usually there are goblins.

Screenshot of Guild of Dungeoneering (found on the game's Steam page)

For this weekend you can try out a new potato dish for free on Steam: Guild of Dungeoneering. Apart from the unique art style, Guild of Dungeoneering adds some fun new gameplay changes to the traditional dungeon crawl, while incorporating aspects of tabletop RPGs, card games, and—of course—video games. Instead of controlling the hero, you build a dungeon around him or her, ensuring the right balance of challenge and reward. In between dungeon crawls, you help build up your guild of heroes with upgrades and new adventurers.

I’ll definitely be giving this game some time this weekend. If it sounds interesting to you, check out their Steam page for more details.

Dev Take Tuesday: A Video Game Dev Learning from D&D

Note: this Dev Take Tuesday post ended up a bit longer than most. I apologize in advance for the lengthy introduction. If you are short on time or despise superhero origin stories and their ilk, I’d suggest you skip to the first bolded section for the actual lessons learned.

Rewind about two decades. My two greatest concerns at the time were finding friends who own an N64 and how the Utah Jazz would fare against Jordan’s Bulls in the NBA finals. I spent most of recess shooting hoops, to relative success—being short didn’t matter as much when nearly everyone is less than half the height of the rim. Whenever there was a break in the action, I paid close attention to a small group of kids sitting in a circle. They were all older than me, and strict playground politics prevented me from approaching. So instead I watched. One kid in the circle would tell some kind of story, and the other kids listened and occasionally offered their own input. Everyone wielded pens and paper—notebook sheets filled with stats, skills, and HP bars.

From that point on, I’d caught a contagion in my mind that would never leave. With no firm knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons or other roleplaying systems, I tested out my own homebrew RPGs with my younger siblings. Later, a middle school friend named Tommy showed me his 3^rd edition D&D books. I admired the leather, brass, and gemstone design of the cover, and the fantasy illustrations within. I designed a character—a highly charismatic, badass half-elf bard (everything I wanted to be, but wasn’t)—and we played a couple short one-off sessions, but never started a true campaign. Board games like Hero Quest and Talengarde enthralled me, but in the end they only made me long for a true D&D campaign with an experienced Dungeon Master.

In high school and college I let my desire to play D&D fall dormant. I had nerdy friends. I had story-loving friends. I had gamer friends. But it never seemed like I had the right group of friends for tabletop RPGs. Consequently, I resigned myself to a lifetime without the connections I thought I needed to start a D&D campaign.

Then, several months ago, a Critical Role stream showed up on the front page of Twitch. After watching Matt Mercer and his fellow voice actors play I was hooked once more. I quickly began to binge-watch episodes of the online D&D campaign so I could catch up with the story (with over 90 episodes available on YouTube I still haven’t quite caught up). Add to that the numerous D&D references in many of the shows my wife and I love—Community, Stranger Things, and Freaks & Geeks, to name a few—and the craving to play returned tenfold. With a sparkly degree in creative writing and a current job as a game designer, I decided the easiest way to play might be to adopt the mantle of DM myself. So I did, after I found a few fabulous friends and a wife who were all willing to play with a first-time DM.

We haven’t played long, but the experience has been wonderful and exhausting, fun and frustrating, and above all: illuminating. It’s obvious that D&D teaches good narrative design principles for game development, but I was surprised by how much I learned about non-narrative game design from D&D in a relatively short time. I want to briefly share some of those insights here.

My first DM session (please ignore the hastily-prepared DM screen)

1. Don’t be an evil designer.

As we started our first game, one of my players recounted a previous campaign that was ended on the first night. Apparently, the DM ambushed the team of first level players with an entire army of goblins. They were, of course, summarily overrun. Unfortunately some DMs view the player/DM relationship as inherently antagonistic. This is only partially true. The DM might create antagonists to challenge the player, but the end goal for a good DM is for his or her players to have fun and tell a great, collaborative story. Likewise, good video game designers should take care not to view the player/designer relationship as antagonistic or competitive. A correct mindset could be “how can I help the player have fun or become a better player,” whereas a problematic mindset might be “how can I show the player how clever my design decisions are.”

Of course, as is often the case, exceptions to this rule exist. As part of his ongoing informational YouTube series, Matt Colville spent one video discussing funhouse dungeons. These are dungeons deliberately designed to beguile, vex, and stymie the players through ingenious traps and madcap puzzles. As Colville outlines in the video, a funhouse dungeon disrupts the “evil designer” rule because the players expect to be beguiled, vexed, stymied, and even killed. That is part of the fun. Some video games, such as the Dark Souls series, rely on a nearly antagonistic relationship with their playerbase. But even funhouse dungeons and brutally tough games should always keep their players’ enjoyment in mind.

2. Balance tension and release.

For a long time, my understanding of D&D largely revolved around combat encounters and skill checks. I saw the story opportunities, but the plot seemed to exist only to prop up the dice rolls and tactical (or not tactical) swashbuckling. Then I watched an episode of Critical Role after the party defeated a dragon, and my mindset from the previous two decades suddenly reversed. DM Matt Mercer and the players spent around four hours collecting loot and recovering in the bard Scanlan’s magical mansion. I saw how D&D, along with other roleplaying games, could serve as a vehicle for storytelling and character building. After a very tense battle—who wouldn’t be tense after defeating an ancient dragon—the characters very naturally decided to recuperate and blow off some steam.

I think watching Critical Role or DM-ing a campaign can help a game designer get a feel for the balance between tension and release. As a designer, look for chances to both ramp up the tension as well as opportunities for your players to relax. Cutscenes are a common choice for emotional release, but I think minigames, house building options, or even crafting loot can work just as well or even better.

3. Give players the information they need.

As a DM you quickly (very quickly) learn that your players will often either look past information you intended to be important or hone in on details you never intended to be important. I’ve learned that it’s good to include a few “failsafes” in the campaign to give your players multiple chances to catch an essential plot detail. As a DM or game designer it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking your players will act the way you would. You might think the solution is obvious, but there’s a decent chance that’s not the case. Try and give your players multiple chances to see or hear the information they need.

When we brought an early demo of Alkanaur to an exhibition, I thought most people would win the little 3-on-3 tactical battle handily. I was wrong. Nearly everyone who played lost to the 3 A.I. opponents in our demo.  I failed to realize how my own personal experiences, including a wealth of familiarity from playing similar tactics games, were not part of some Jungian collective consciousness that all gamers share. Of course you’ll have reasons to obscure some pieces of information in your game. But whenever you make a conscious decision to hide information from the player, make sure to pause and ask yourself “why?” Can’t find a good reason? Perhaps you should consider including that info in the game.

4. Not all bands are Rush.

I’m shamelessly stealing this from Matt Colville’s excellent video on D&D player types—I highly suggest watching his video to get the best understanding of the reference. But essentially, Mr. Colville meant that it’s not easy to find a group of people who will all enjoy telling a collaborative story together in the exact same way—just like it’s not easy to find a group of musicians who will all enjoy playing the same type of music for decades. If you find a group of players like that—awesome! But DMs shouldn’t feel like a campaign’s shortcomings fall solely on their shoulders.

On the other hand, Matt points out in his video that it’s not the players fault either—and this was the part of the video that really clicked for me as a game designer. Players love games for a wide variety of reasons. At the game exhibition I mentioned earlier, we had a few young children try our Alkanaur demo. I was tempted to explain to them that they might not “get” the game, but it turns out they probably had more fun than any of our other playtesters—even if that fun simply came from moving around the game’s battlefield and giggling as the enemies gave chase. As a game designer, you don’t need to convert all gamers to your definition of fun. Realize that your game might not appeal to everyone, and also recognize that players might find new ways to enjoy your game, and that’s okay.

I look forward to more adventures run by Matt Mercer on Critical Role, as well as more tips from Matt Colville and the other wonderful D&D content creators on YouTube. And of course I’m especially excited to continue my own campaign as a DM. If you, like me, are a game designer that was always curious about D&D but never got the chance to experience it, give it a try! Watch a D&D live stream or a YouTube video. Reach out to a local game store about opportunities to play, or start your own game like me. I’ll wager that you’ll learn a lot about your craft and have fun doing it.

Indie Illuminator: Eagle Island

I love to develop games. But I also love to play them. Whenever I see another indie project that interests me, I want to share it with anyone who follows our game. In the past I've been doing that on our Showcase Saturday posts, but with Alkanaur's development ramping up, I'll want to focus those posts on our own project. So now I'll be using Thursdays to start a new blog series called the Indie Illuminator.

The first game I'm dying to illuminate is Eagle Island by Nick Gregory. Take a look at their Kickstarter page, and you'll quickly see why the game caught my eye. The pixel art sprites and animation are so charming and fluid. The game mechanics borrow inspiration from Zelda, Metroid, and Castlevania, with a unique focus on falconry. Ever since the Animorphs books by K.A. Applegate, I've loved falcons and other birds of prey, so I think that including a controllable owl companion is pretty darn cool.

Screenshot from Eagle Island's Steam Greenlight page

Their Kickstarter project is coming to a close in the next few days, and with several hundred backers already, they're quite close to their funding goal. If this seems like the kind of game you'd love to get your hands on, consider stopping by their Kickstarter campaign and looking at their various backer rewards.