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Last weekend, the IndieCade festival took over downtown Culver City. You can think of it as an art walk where you get to play independent video games.

Gallery halls commandeered by gaming laptops and installations. A firehouse packed to the walls with folks playing really fun, weird stuff. It’s glorious. Brief notes on some of the things I saw:

• AntiChamber – one of the most original first-person games I’ve seen. I imagine this is what would happen if Salvador Dali and Andy Kaufman worked on a game together.
• Desktop Dungeons – I love roguelikes, so of course I love this. Somehow they’ve taken one of the most obtuse game genres, removed the obtuseness, leaving you just the the gooey fun center.
• Johann Sebastian Joust – I consider the Copenhagen Game Collective folks to be the most punk rock of indie games. A motion-control game that doesn’t use a monitor or television? Slow motion ballet-battle? I love it. My best of show.
• Skulls of the Shogun – Turn-based tactical squad game with hard counters and long-term and short-term strategies. This scratches a lot of itches for me (seven of them).
• Proteus – I’ve written before about games that downplay combat and blowing things up, and was really delighted to get to see something like this in action. Do check it out.

 

This is just a few of the showings. For the full list of all the IndieCade 2011 games, check ‘em out here.

One of the most wonderful things about IndieCade is that it’s smack dab in the middle of downtown Culver City, so a lot of visitors were people who just happened to be passing by. There’s something wonderful about such a diverse cross section of the population getting exposed to these games – natch, not just games, but these beautifully daring pieces of work.

If you’re in the LA area, make it a point to visit next year.

I was recently playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It’s well-made, and manages to fill the planet-sized shoes left by its predecessor, the original Deus Ex.

The DX games are renown for giving the player a sizable amount of agency. Naturally, whenever I meet an important story-critical character, I surround them with live grenades.

The grenades detonate. But as long as a character is critical to the story, the grenades don’t leave a scratch of damage. Why? Because, well, the character is critical to the story. Casablanca would be a pretty short movie if Ilsa was killed off after the opening credits.

You need to keep the love interest around because you need to ultimately ride off into the sunset together. You need to keep the villain alive because you need that climactic final showdown. You need to keep the spunky best friend alive long enough to generate a bond, then you kill him off to propel the protagonist into a raging rampage of a third act.

To which I say: yeah, but this is a video game. It’s interactive: you can poke and prod and steer, and the game can respond in kind. What happens if you lock the antagonist’s keys in his car? How will your love interest respond to your secret double-life of underground breakdancing?

One of the most fascinating aspects of games is transferring authorial control to the player. This is certainly not the only way or best way to make games, but it’s something I find most compelling about the medium.

Let’s take DX for example. Under the hood, DX is a variation on a Choose Your Own Adventure story. Decisions you make ripple out and affect other characters and the story.

For every decision fork, the developers have to create more content, resulting in “more” everything – more art development, more animations, more designer scripting, more writing, more recorded dialogue, more bugs, more QA testing – more of everything. It’s a production nightmare. I’m always very impressed whenever a game with branching structure turns out polished and complete.

I’d love to see someone take the general DX framework – an agent tackling problems aggressively, stealthily, diplomatically, what have you – and scale it down. Instead of several cities, make it take place in a tight, richly-detailed area. Say, a hotel restaurant.

On top of that, remove the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure scripting and have the characters behave autonomously (I’m going to be very hand-wavey and vague here, so bear with me). Instead of following a script, story characters “improvise” via granular AI decisions.

Let’s say at game start, character roles are randomly assigned.

• There’s a crew of diplomatic envoys in town to sign the peace treaty. They love getting drunk, they love to party down.
• There’s your jilted former lover, working undercover as a waitress. She has an itchy trigger finger and two strikes on her record.
• There’s an enemy assassin. The sous chef. He’s in the middle of a crippling mid-life crisis.

Drop these personalities into a constrained area. See how they bounce off one other. See how you bounce them around.  On the AI systems’ own accord, various situations emerge:

• The paranoid assassin grows increasingly suspicious. Not at you, mind you, but toward a textiles salesman from Omaha.
• The diplomats party a little too hard. One gets alcohol poisoning and requires immediate attention.
• Against orders, the undercover waitress blows her cover and saves the diplomat. This doesn’t escape the notice of the paranoid assassin. Incredibly, he grows even more paranoid.

 

Now, regarding this mythical game I’m talking about: ideas are a dime a dozen, and execution is where things matter. This is far from being executable. It’s the opposite of bulletproof. It has more holes than a sieve, hence the hand-waveyness. It’s a phenomenal way to lose a frightening amount of money and resources and hair.

And I can’t wait to play it.

Some games that explore these concepts: Hitman, Facade, Alpha Protocol, The Sims, Dwarf Fortress.

 

 

To read Part I of this writeup, click here.

In 2004 I made a Doom 3 mod called Pathways Redux – a mini-remake of Bungie’s Pathways into Darkness. Here are some notes on its development.

Scope control

One summer, I took a television production course. The instructor showed us a pie graph with three sections:

• High Quality
• On Budget
• On Time

He then told us that a production could have two of those things. Just two; never all three. He was a real cheery guy.

Me being young and idealistic, I didn’t entirely agree with him. But it made something click in my head. My hard drive had (and still has) a bewildering amount of incomplete game prototypes. I realized all I had to do was cut the scope of the game in half. Shorter project = less bugs, more polish, higher quality. And you get to actually finish making it!

Pathways into Darkness is a huge game. There was no way I was going to remake the entirety of PiD, so I focused on a tiny section. For Pathways Redux, I decided to tackle no more than an intro sequence and the first few levels.

First Impressions

PiD has a fairly elaborate series of events preceding the game.

• An alien diplomat appears in the White House.
• Your commando team is airdropped into the Yucatan.
• You are separated from your team.
• You make the solitary trek to the cursed pyramid.

That’s a lot of information! PiD starts you inside the pyramid. I decided to have some fun and try to pack all that information through an in-game sequence.

My first thought was to start you off in a military hangar in North Carolina. You and your crew would be briefed on the situation, then board the transport plane.

Then I realized: a slideshow briefing? Listening to some commander-type guy talk about a mission? This was lazy design. It was a boring, unimaginative way to convey a ton of information. Also, I’d already done this in a previous project, Bootleg Squadrog. So that’s strike two!

When I start a game, I want to play it. I do not want to watch a cutscene or listen to inane backstory. So I decided to instead start by throwing the player into the deep end of the pool: falling through the sky with a broken parachute. Way better than a slideshow!

Of course, the parachute sequence is soon followed by a page-long wall of text describing the backstory.  Nope, I have no good excuse for that.

Script-fu

Pathways Redux and Barista 3 (and Barista 1) were my first forays into text-driven scripting. Prior to this, I had used visual scripting systems. Visual scripting generally looks something like this:

  

Objects are are visually displayed. These objects are scripted via GUI-driven windows.

Text-driven scripting is done via plain ol’ text files. Here is the script to Pathways Redux’s first level: pathways_para1.txt

Depending on how your brain is wired, you’ll like one more than the other. Visual scripting gets the benefit of better error-checking and sanity checks, and, well, being able to visually see the connections between your script objects. Text-driven scripting grants you more control and flexibility. Doom 3′s scripting system gives a tremendous amount of control over the game world – it’s remarkable how much freedom you get.

I enjoy both systems, though I lean toward text scripting. Once a level or game reaches a certain level of complexity, I find visual scripting becomes cumbersome. It starts to feel like a middle-man you’re forced to talk to – a mild-mannered, helpful middle man, but a middle man nonetheless.

Level persistence

Doom 3 consists of a series of levels played in a linear order. Pathways, on the other hand, is a series of connected levels the player can visit and backtrack as they please.

The most straight-forward approach was to just connect the levels the same way Doom 3 did. If they want to revisit a previous level, just re-load that previous level. Right?

The problem with that is persistence. For example, let’s say the player picks up an ammo clip in level 1. If the player later decides to re-visit level 1, the game has to “remember” the player had taken that ammo clip earlier. If I just directly re-load level 1, that ammo clip will always re-appear at the same spot – that’s bad.

I got around this by taking advantage of Doom 3′s scripting system. Here’s a sample script chunk when level 1 is loaded:

		if (sys.getPersistantFloat("got_stepammo2") > 0 )
		{
			$ammo_bullets_small_8.remove();
		}

 

When the level is loaded, it checks the flag “got_stepammo2″. If the flag is True (the player has already acquired that ammo clip), then I remove that ammo clip from the world. Otherwise, that ammo clip is left untouched.

Is this a ridiculous way to do things and totally unfit for a production-length game? Yes! But for this mini-production, it was fine.

Dogfooding

When making a game, it’s important you’re also playing it yourself. This sounds like a no-brainer, right? Why would you possibly not want play the game that you’re making? Because: it can get extremely frustrating and demoralizing to play something incomplete, ugly, buggy, crash-prone, and un-fun.

It’s tempting to put off your testing until you get further along into the game. But you’d just be sabotaging yourself. By the time the project is that far along, the infastructure will be too rigid and it’ll be too late to do any course-correcting.

As I play through my own game, I jot down notes on things to fix or add. Afterwards, I address each item one-by-one like a grocery list. Here’s a page from Pathways Redux:

Most of it is written in spur-of-the-moment shorthand. This can get embarrassing when I finish the playtest and don’t remember what something is supposed to mean or find something illegible. On the bottom row is “SKELETON”, followed by a “(?)” because I no longer had any idea what the hell that item referred to.

Cubans

I intended to include Pedro, Juan, Javier and Carlos. Alas, the Cuban explorers never made it into the temple.

Et al

Pathways Redux was the first remake I’d ever attempted. On one hand, you have a clear template to build upon. “Finding the fun” is the riskiest part of game development, and it’s comforting to have that automatically done.

On the other hand, it did come to a point where I got bored on a creative level. I had a lot of fun re-thinking the UI, environment design, dialogue system, and storytelling methods; this was not a one-to-one remake. But ultimately, re-treading someone else’s work – no matter how absolutely amazing that work is, a la PiD – doesn’t have that same spark as springing something brand new.

In Pathways Redux, the action is meant to take a backseat to the story, characters, and environment. This action-light narrative-heavy type of game is sorely under-served. I’d love experience the hustle and bustle of booking guests for a late-night talk show. I’d love to fall into a web of intrigue and deceit in the Holy Roman Empire. Let me know when you finish making that – I’d love to play it!

I was digging through an old hard drive and found a small collection of videos and images from old projects. I’ll share them with you over the next few weeks.

Here’s the first one: a trailer for a Doom 3 mod I made in 2004, Pathways Redux:

Pathways Redux is based on a Bungie game, Pathways into Darkness. When talking about first-person action-RPGs, the usual suspects are games like Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Deus Ex. Bungie’s PiD is often not mentioned, which is a damn shame – it without a doubt deserves a place.

What I found most impressive about PiD was its storytelling and world-building. Here’s your homework assignment: spend a day poring over the Pathways into Darkness Story Page, the Marathon Story Page, and the Myth Story Page. Despite how difficult it is to tell a good story in a game and create strong, cohesive universes, Bungie has achieved wonderful results in PiD, Marathon, and Myth.

And if you haven’t played those three, then you better go do something about that, hm?

In 2004, Doom 3 was on the horizon. I was giddy like a bull in a china shop. I grew up with Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, and was fairly familiar with their ins and outs. From a tech level, all the articles and previews leading up to Doom 3′s release basically said “Y’know all those things that kinda bugged you in the Quake engines? Well, we went ahead and did something about that.”

Models and level geometry now used the same lighting model?  Robust scripting system? Live-loading script changes while playing the game? In-tool lighting preview? In-game tool functionality? No more waiting 20 minutes for the compiler to bake shadows into level geometry? Skeletal animation system? Amazing in-game GUI system?

My mind = blown.  I’m sure it’s a boring feature list to many people – this isn’t stuff you’d highlight on the back of the box. But this is a list of Engine Features Brendon Really Likes.  Plus, it’s id Software, who have a high bar of quality in in game engines.

I remember waking up, driving down to Best Buy in Pasadena, and getting a copy of Doom 3 on its release day. I traditionally play slowly, but I blasted through the game and got modding immediately.

I was most interested with all the scripting functionality and GUI goodies. I made a test project revolving around those things. Barista 3 was the end result. Whenever I work with a new piece of technology, I like to first dip my toe into the water and make a micro-tiny project. Barista 3 was a quick ‘n dirty project intended to poke and prod the Doom 3 engine and see what I could shake out of it.

It was also a fun experiment in making a first-person game without any shooting. Many of the Barista 3 comments I received were some variation of “there’s no shooting, wtf.” I think the intimate nature of the first-person perspective is wonderful for storytelling and exploration, especially when you remove all that extra noise from gunplay.

After completing Barista 3, I felt fairly comfortable with now attempting a more ambitious project.

I spent some time thoughtfully stroking my chin, considering what kind of project I wanted to tackle next. After a particularly satisfying chin-scratching session, the answer was obvious: a mini-remake of Pathways into Darkness, using the Doom 3 engine.

Next week I’ll talk about the gnarly details of how that all went.

Update: click here to read Part II

Last month I was in Seattle for the Penny Arcade Expo, PAX.  Atom Zombie Smasher was chosen for the PAX 10 – a showcase of ten independent games picked by the PAX folks. It was a great honor to be shown alongside such an amazing lineup of games & developers. This was my first time demoing my own game on a show floor, so it was A) very exciting, and B) mishaps aplenty (on my end, not the PAX folks).

If you’ve ever been to E3 or similar trade shows, I’m sure you’ve seen some incredible booth setups with giant castle facades, avenues of monitors, dudes in power armor, bikini girls, monster trucks, etc.

Meanwhile, I had:

• myself.
• two laptops.
• 8.5″x11″ cardboard signs.
• half a roll of scotch tape.

 

Here’s how I set up my area. The awesome PAX folks provided a table, a large television, and a great spot on the show floor:

 

The PAX 10 area comprised of several tables. The PAX 10 games were: Word Fighter (my table neighbor!), A Flipping Good Time, AntiChamber, Fez, Jamestown, Snapshot, Solar 2, The Splatters, Vanessa Saint-Pierre Delacroix & Her Nightmare, and my own Atom Zombie Smasher. Hanging out and chatting with all the devs was great; I get the strong feeling we’ll all be seeing one another again at future events.

At the end of each day I jotted down some random things in my notebook:

• AZS does a really terrible job at selling itself through screenshots and videos. Unsexiness just oozes from every pore. But once someone actually gets their hands on it and starts playing, they really like it.
• I’m glad I added a “Pax mode” that throws the player into the middle of the campaign with all the weapons. During day one, I realized I should’ve also added some sort of “rolling demo” mode that auto-plays the game itself, like arcade machines do when no one is playing. And the gag is, AZS already has a system that does that!  Argh. Next time.
• I should’ve added some tutorial tips to the “Pax mode.” There’s a fair amount of moving parts in the game, and having even just a few “first-time player” overlays would’ve been immensely helpful.
• Manning a booth by myself for three days was silly. Despite drinking water like a fish, by the third day my voice was so shot I sounded like Henry Kissinger (I do not normally sound like him).
• I was surprised at how many people commented on enjoying the Dev Notes at the end of the AZS campaign.  I included it mainly because I love reading stuff like that, but who knew others did too? I’ll be including something similar in my future projects.
• The G4 guys dropped by. Getting miked up with a Lavalier mic is quite an intimate experience.
• You can never print too many flyer cards. I learned the hard way.
• I need to bring a flashlight next time. Television touch controls + really dark room = Brendon never manges to change the volume.
• The tower defense nature of the planning phase instantly creates assumptions. Once the action phase began, people often let go of the mouse, thinking the game would play itself automatically from that point on. I wonder if this is a result of not playing the tutorials, or if this is a common problem?
• It was awkward having the television and laptop display a duplicate image. If there was some way to keep the game going with the laptop closed, that would be ideal.
• I had an interview with Ryan Davis of GiantBomb. I’m a junkie for GiantBomb’s Quick Looks, so this was really wonderful.
• I need some sort of Blendo T-shirt or button or something. It’s off-putting to have some stranger pop out of nowhere and start explaining the game to you.
• Anthony & Ashly Burch stopped by to say hello!  So awesome. Go watch HAWP and Rev Rants, and love ‘em as much as I do.
• About ten feet from me was the Minecraft booth. All day long, for all three days, that area was kerrrrazy party central. I was expecting it to be big, but that was bananas.
• I had my first panel talk, with the fine devs from the PAX 10. We had a great chat, and I’m already itching to do it again.
• I’m glad I had two stations set up. It was a last-minute decision to bring both laptops, and it worked out well.
• One person asked for my autograph. I’m a total e-celeb.

The best part of PAX was getting to physically meet and chat with people and developers I’ve previously known only via email. With video games nowadays oftentimes having no physical media to speak of, beamed directly into your computer by digital voodoo, getting the opportunity to say “hello!” to fans is a rare and wonderful treat.

Here’s a picture of the PAX 10 panel talk. Check out the Blendo Games Facebook page for more PAX pictures.

Huge thanks to the PAX folks for all their hard work. It’s an amazing event – if you have any interest in video games, board games, comic books and the like, check out PAX!