Minecraft and Terraria

So in anticipation of Starbound, I have recently started properly playing Terraria.  Until recently, I had only played in short bouts and quickly gone on to something else, but this time I decided to read the wiki and really try to make some progress.

20 hours later, I have come away from Terraria with a renewed appreciation of just how wrong it would be to call it "Minecraft in 2D." So much so, in fact, that I'd like to muse for a while about how they differ while still fitting into the broader worldshaper genre.  These thoughts are in reaction to my own experiences playing both games, and I don't think they are by any means exhaustive of the meaningful differences between the two.

The huge, huge difference that everybody instantly notices, of course, is that Minecraft is a fully 3D game (more so in fact than many other games with 3D graphics, since the gameplay is also truly 3D), while Terraria is absolutely grounded in two dimensions, graphically and systematically.  As I consider the differences between the design of both games, I have come to see just how important this difference is in shaping the gameplay as well as the graphics.

Construction, Crafting, and Progress

When I first started playing Minecraft, one of the things that struck me was how naturalistic the game's progress felt.  Progress, in Minecraft, is not moving from one scene to another along a linear path; it is the slow, organic increase of one's abilities and resources, every step forward made possible by the last.  You go from having no tools to having wooden tools, which allow you to craft stone tools, which allow you to craft iron tools, and so on.  You go from having no food sources to having access to a tiny farm that grows and grows as you harvest it, and exploration uncovers new crops for you to use.  Your base goes from being a hole in the ground to being a respectable house, to becoming a town or fortress with its own mining operations, docks, and so on.  On the surface, Terraria is little different; the various tiers of weapons and tools build off of one another, and achieving each tier of assets widens the scope of your possibilities while rendering your oldest assets and tools useless.

At least one difference, to me, was how different the role of architecture in that progress felt.  In Minecraft, building the grand physical shell of one's base feels like the primary accomplishment; in Terraria, base-building feels like an annoying formality that must be dealt with in order to continue exploring, exploiting and growing in strength.  The extra dimension Minecraft features plays a huge role in this; it allows us to reproduce structures that are familiar to us and that take full advantage of our ability to make clever plans, while Terraria's limited range of options mostly reduces us to constructing an optimized series of boxes for storage, crafting and NPC habitation.  If that sounds harsh, it is; base-building, to me at least, is much less fun in Terraria than in Minecraft.

However.

I don't know whether it's related or not, but Terraria's crafting and gear progression system is much, much more involving and motivating than Minecraft's.  In Minecraft it's the opposite; finding better gear and resources is an annoying obstacle in the way of building a glorious, self-sufficient fortress of solitude.  In Terraria, though, the main draw is all about the gear and character progression, much like in many MMORPGs and ARPGs.  I dread starting a Minecraft game where I need to spend hours building up a basic ability to gather all the resources I need, but I relished the chance to dive into Terraria and work the mines and the mobs to get gear that's just a little bit better.  Currently I have just forged a Molten Pickaxe and am trying to gather enough Hellstone bars for a suit of Molten armor and a Flamarang; and there are still several tiers of weapons above that.  I don't doubt that when my power eventually plateaus, I will lose interest in the game, but what a ride it will have been.

Journeying through Hell, for fun and profit.

Much of this is due to the fact that Terraria simply has far more static content than Minecraft - more mobs, more crafting recipes, more resource types, more armor, weapons and tools.  Beyond that, though, Terraria also has more variety in its crafting; armor coalesces around the three gameplay prototypes of melee, ranged and magic.  Weapons include magic spells, wide-area swords, short stabby swords, ranged ammo-based weapons, throwing weapons boomerang-style weapons and explosives.  Tools are crafted not only with ores and wood, but also with animal parts, plants, and hidden objects only found in special chests.

Terraria's sense of progress, then, mirrors that of well-established genres like MMORPGs, with progressively better armor and weapon tiers.  While Minecraft's crafting system pays lip service to this idea, the item tiers are much more incidental to the game's sense of progress, and the constant degradation of items makes the power obtained by superior item tiers feel ephemeral.  Minecraft's sense of progress, to me, seems to more closely mirror that of strategy games, where progress involves expanding your effective territory and improving the infrastructure you have access to; it feels more naturalistic than Terraria's, but it is also less clearly defined and qualified.

Combat in Two and Three Dimensions

Both games feature combat against a variety of enemies; however, for a number of reasons, I think it is fair to say that combat plays a different set of roles in each game, though those sets may occasionally overlap.

In Minecraft, the third dimension adds a huge, huge amount of difficulty to melee and ranged combat, when compared to Terraria.  Simply aiming at an enemy becomes a challenge in some cases, especially when you are attacked from behind.  Minecraft has enemies attacking you from all directions all axes of 3D movement - and half of your surroundings are invisible at any given time.  You need to find your enemy and strike at them, and if you are swarmed, hitting several at once simply isn't an option.

Compare this to Terraria, which features exactly two attack directions in melee - left and right.  You can mow down enemies efficiently by constantly swinging a broadsword, or even a pickaxe.  It is extremely difficult to suddenly get overwhelmed in Terraria, except during a Goblin Siege, since you can see enemies coming from all around you and can't really be taken by surprise.

Ranged combat, too, is much simpler in 2D, in that you really only have to aim up and down.  Additionally, Terraria doesn't feature bow charging times, so you essentially click to fire; the number of throwable weapons is also considerable.  I fact, in the early Minecraft game, it can be difficult to come across arrows without access to tons of gravel and chickens, and one might tend to use them conservatively as a result; arrows in Terraria, on the other hand, are dirt cheap.

For a number of reasons, then, Terraria makes combat something that is more alluring to the player, whereas Minecraft makes it something that is more of a solution to a difficult problem.

The Economics of Combat

Durability is another factor with broad-ranging implications both in combat and in other areas of the game.  Weapons and tools in Minecraft degrade over time, meaning you need to constantly craft them to maintain your progress, and defending yourself from attack becomes a cost-benefit analysis; can I afford to degrade my bow in order to kill these enemies, since I have a hard time coming across string, or try to melee everything with cheap swords?  Do I really need to let them get within scratching distance of my expensive diamond armor?  Occasionally, such as if you use all your stone and then break your last pickaxe, you are even demoted down the technological tree to more primitive tools.

None of this is true in Terraria, where your weapons and tools remain until they are made obsolete by better ones (except in the case of ammunition).  The risk of death is the only cost of combat.  The result is that Minecraft, as an experience, more strongly encourages you to be timid in your use of tools and weapons than Terraria, even when it eventually becomes very easy to craft most of those tools, because merely using them incurs a penalty.

In short, combat in Minecraft is tense, fearful, and heavily influenced by economic considerations. I die out here, can I get back to my stuff before it disappears?  Should I try to melee that creeper even though he's standing next to my wall?  What if my bow breaks now, and I need it later?  Can I afford to put on my diamond armor and let it degrade?

Combat in Terraria is the main focus of the crafting and economic system, though; it generally does not negatively impact that system (unless you die and lose your things), and it encourages the player to participate by making combat easy, methodical and relatively risk-free.

Torches and Fear

Stumbling across this was scary. Also, I was killed 30 seconds later.

Another small difference with big consequences: torches in Terraria are much, much easier to craft in massive quantities than in Minecraft.  Minecraft torches require coal or charcoal, which are somewhat rare and require sacrificing other very useful applications.  Coal can be used to smelt tons of metal or other materials, and logs, instead of being turned to charcoal, can be converted into highly useful wood.  Sticks, too, are widely useful.

In Terraria, on the other hand, torches are made with regular wood, which has relatively few uses other than extensive decorating, a limited number of crafting stations, and doors; and gel, which is dropped by the absolutely bloody prolific Slimes that constantly harass the player, and only has a few niche uses beyond torches.  The end result is that I run out of torches in Minecraft much more often than in Terraria, where I regularly have 50+ torches on me at any given moment while spelunking.

So what?  Well, when combined with Minecraft's infinite terrain, three dimensions and human-scale graphics, the relative rarity or expense of torches helps make the world a heck of a lot scarier.  At any moment you could turn a corner in the tunnels and run into a creeper or a poison spider spawner just beyond your sight, and you need a lot of torches to cover the meandering, confusing tunnels that you discover underground.  In Terraria, the world is confined to two dimensions, players can see through walls, and they can plant torches along almost every square inch if they want to, removing the threat of darkness easily and quickly.

The result is that in Terraria, you have a much stronger feeling of mastering the world. than in Minecraft, where that mastery feels tenuous and confined; no matter what you have accomplished in Minecraft, you are sitting on the edge of wilderness and danger.  This means that the player's arc, from powerless to powerful, is much more clearly defined by how the player can change the world in Terraria than in Minecraft.

Conclusion

The various mechanics I talked about above (two- and three-dimensional construction and combat, durability, the crafting recipes of torches), and many more, help make the two games very different, despite their shared "The world is a grid of blocks you can change at a whim!" premise.

Neither approach is better in a broad sense, of course; without a particular and limited set of criteria to measure them against, they are merely different.  But the mechanics in question do influence the kind of experience the game ends up being, and future designers of worldshapers or other sandboxes ought to consider such differences when targeting a certain kind of experience or player.  The number of dimensions you choose to set your game in matters for more than aesthetic reasons; implementing durability can have a huge impact on how the world's systems feel and interact; the crafting recipes of various objects gives them rarity and places them in antagonistic relationships to other recipes or gameplay systems.

While I continue to explore both games, I am most eager to see what future games descended from the Minecraft-driven worldshaper boom do (though at this point, the first wave of post-Minecraft worldshapers and similar, such as Terraria and Towns, are also contributing to the inspiration).  Starbound is raking in cash with their pre-order page, Stonehearth just surpassed its Kickstarter goals in 3 days, and Castle Story is now in beta.  Assuming the overall continued health of the PC as a gaming platform, worldshapers look like they have a bright future ahead of them.

If anybody else reading has played both Terraria and Minecraft, what are your thoughts on the differences between the two, and how they relate to the genre they are in?  I'd be interested in hearing about other differences that I overlooked here.

Addendum - The Power of the Wiki

Perhaps the saddest point of comparison of both games, from my perspective, is how strongly reliant on their respective wikis they both are; this is a huge point for future entries into the worldshaper or sandbox genres can improve on.  Arguably, less static content in Minecraft means that you more quickly get beyond needing the wiki in that game, while it will probably accompany you through Terraria till you do all there is to be done.  But in both cases, I frequently find myself alt-tabbing out of the game to go read the wiki; heck, I only managed to get interested in seriously playing Terraria by reading the wiki.

Nowhere in either game is there some kind of indication as to the possible things you can build.  I would never have guessed there was Jungle Armor in Terraria, or a Daylight Detector in Minecraft.  Terraria at least could plausibly be said to allow accidental discovery, because merely standing next to the right crafting table with the right materials is enough to see the crafting option; but this ignores the limited size of Terraria's inventory, and how quickly it fills up.  I dump all non-essential loot into chests as soon as possible to avoid clogging my inventory while out exploring, which makes it hard to accidentally stumble onto crafting recipes.  Minecraft is even worse, because the layout of the items is key to the recipe; you would need to actively try random combinations to discover things.

This is unfortunate, because it is, at least to me, immersion-breaking.  Every time I alt-tab to the wiki, I am reminded that this is a program running on my computer rather than a virtual world I am exploring.  The game feels incomplete.  I hope that future worldshaper games are less extensively reliant on external wikis, though of course good wikis are almost always a useful supplement to any game.

Why I am Excited about Starbound

A Floran character

So the team behind Starbound recently started accepting pre-orders for the game (here!) and, Kickstarter-style, they have different tiers for different amounts of money, and with different rewards.  So far, they have amassed over 400,000$, and that number will surely continue to grow.

I've mentioned before that I am very excited for Starbound, but I haven't gone into detail about why.  Here, then, are a few of the things I'm looking forward to, some of them possibly delusional and based only on the vaguest notions of what the game is about.  But hey, dreams are fun.

Planetary Space Romance Opera

Star Wars was one of my favorite movie series growing up, and one of the things I loved was the sense of exploration involved in watching the characters bounce around on multiple exotic alien worlds and dozens of cool space ships and stations.  I've always wanted to play a game that combines interstellar space with planetary surfaces in gameplay, but distressingly few have scratched that itch.  Spore was one, Star Wars: Empire At War was another, and Planetary Annihilation is looking to, maybe, be a third.

Starbound, of all of those, is taking a different route entirely, since it is a much more embodied and avatar-based experience than any of those games.  I look forward to exploring new worlds and space stations, meeting new aliens, and discovering new technologies and architectures.

Humans, One Among Many

An Avian character

While I can't say for sure, it seems to me like humans are nothing special in the world of Starbound - all the races are scattered throughout the universe, and you can just as well play a member of any race. 

That, too, is something that appeals to me - unlike the worlds of many other fiction franchises such as Mass Effect, The Elder Scrolls, or Star Wars, where humans are given special (and in the case of Mass Effect, even mythical) privilege by the plot.  I like the feeling that other sapient species are on equal footing with humans, and that there is no inherent "humans-are-special" narrative, as is so often the case in science-fiction that features aliens.

Procedural Generation

I am a huge fan of procedural generation as a content creation technique in games, and the Starbound team is using procedural generation to create a huge variety of creatures, items, and locations.  From what I can tell, they appear to be using recombination of modular parts, but the advantages over fixed content creation remain.

Many games create procedurally-generate items, of course, by giving them random stats, and perhaps colors (Diablo, for example, or Borderlands).  There aren't many games that procedurally generate levels, though, and precious few have dared to procedurally generate creatures or quests, even though these don't need to be any more complicated than random assembly of modular parts.  Starbound is daring to do so, which will allow the few devs to make a far larger world than fixed content creation.  I can't wait to see the results.

Crafting & Construction

What can I say?  I love games where you can build things, take them apart, and reassemble them.  The worldshaper genre remains surprisingly sparsely populated, and it's great to see another entry in the genre, especially one with a focus on missions and quests (i.e. events and actions) in addition to creation and exploration.  Starbound will feature crafting as well as building, and I am holding out hope that the crafting experience may even be more complex and flexible than in Terraria or Minecraft.

Age of Empires II - The Old-School RTS

So the HD edition of Age of Empires II, one of the defining games of my childhood and the most formative franchise in my life as a gamer, was just released on Steam.  I've been playing a few matches, and I'm immensely happy Hidden Path has resurrected the game and made it compatible with modern machines.  The graphics hold up remarkably well; for a game that was first released in 1999, that says a lot about the art direction the game enjoyed.  Kudos Ensemble Studios, and rest in peace.

But I don't really want to talk about graphics.  Instead, I want to talk about old-school RTS game design, as exemplified by this pillar of the genre.  I'll start by differentiating between old-school and new-school RTS games in this post.  Why?  Well, because much like the term RTS itself, the term "old-school RTS" is a label for a particular kind of experience people talk about, and I think it's important to try and get an idea of what subset of RTS games we mean when using the old-school label.  I'll contrast it mostly with modern or new-school RTS experiences, rather than non-RTS experiences, so unfortunately, this might be alien to those who have never really played any RTS games at all.

In another post, I'd like to look at the strengths and weaknesses of old-school RTS design from my perspective, with Age of Empires II as my case study.

What Is an "Old-School RTS"?

What exactly do I mean by old-school RTS?  I can't speak for everyone who has ever used the term, but my understanding of the notion of "old-school" RTS gameplay is that it refers to a kind of RTS gameplay that was dominant before the rise of smaller-scale, control-point-based games like Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, and especially games like Dawn of War 2, Tiberium Twilight, and World in Conflict, which are sometimes marketed as RTS games but are so different that they are also often classified as another genre entirely, RTT.

What groups all RTS games together is a three-pillar approach to gameplay based on 1) base building, 2) resource management, and 3) conflict.  What separates old-school from "new school" or alternative RTS games is a fuzzy set of criteria at best, but here is my understanding of the distinction, formed by my experience playing lots of RTS games and noticing a set of characteristics that cluster along a spectrum that seems to fit the old-school/new-school divide.

Note that the two categories here are not binary, but spectral; there are old games that fit into the “new-school” and newer games that continue to fit into the “old-school,” as well as many games that are mostly one but borrow features from the other.  A prototypical old-school RTS would be the Age of Empires and Empire Earth franchises, while prototypical new-school RTS games would be Dawn of War and Company of Heroes.  Other franches, like the various Command & Conquer games, the Blizzard RTS games, or Total Annihilation and its spiritual successors, might sit somewhere in between, often tending more towards one side than the other.

Dynamic Strategic Geometry

Most prominently, old-school RTS games have a different strategic geometry to new-school RTS games; the former are continuous and exploitative, the latter nodal and regenerative.  This is most true when comparing  games like Empire Earth or Age of Empires with games like Dawn of War or Company of Heroes, and looking at the distribution of resources in levels.  The old-school RTS games have the resources scattered around the world more or less randomly, levels tend to be open, there tend to be some resources that are found in large fields (sometimes trees, but other things like tiberium also appear in field-like distributions), and resources are exploited and eventually depleted.  New-school RTS games feature tightly-designed levels that don’t change; resources are gathered by holding nodes that provide more or less infinite resources, and are strategically placed between the players.

This isn’t a superficial difference; it’s radical.  In an old-school RTS, the strategic value of any given point on the map changes throughout the course of a game, and players need to reconfigure their economic and military infrastructure to respond to changes in the environment.  In Age of Empires, you can plop a mill next to some berries and harvest those, but when they disappear, you can either build farms around that mill, or push out looking for other food sources.  You can cut down forests for wood, but the forests are also (mostly) impassible barriers that protect you by controlling the movement of your enemies; cut them down, and you need to build walls, which generally aren’t nearly as effective as forests for keeping enemies out.

Walls can easily be knocked down; forests, not so much.

Gold and stone disappear, forcing you to build infrastructure further and further from home, and if I setup a mining camp next to a gold deposit, every second my villagers spend exploiting that gold makes that gold less valuable to the enemy, since there is less and less of it.  And so on; different but equally interesting things could be said about the gameplay role of tiberium in Command & Conquer, for example.  Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds actually allowed the Gungans to build swampy canals through the terrain, allowing passage of watercraft through what was once dry land.  In general, the strategic geometry of the level is dynamic, responding to player activity and requiring player response in turn.

New-school RTS games, on the other hand, have mostly or entirely static environments (and, to me, those environments often feel over-designed); at any given moment, the strategic value of every point on the map is more or less the same, other than in their proximity to player-owned structures.  Resource nodes either provide infinite resources, or deplete incredibly slowly, such that by the time they deplete, the game is well into its end phase.  Company of Heroes, with neutral buildings that can be occupied or destroyed, has a more dynamic strategic environment than Dawn of War; but even then, the economic value of points remains constant, with only tactical considerations changing much.

In short, then, old-school RTS games feature an (often open) environment of constantly changing economic and strategic value, where economic activity influences both economic and strategic opportunities; whereas new-school RTS games feature dense and static environments on which tactical competition takes place, with economics and strategy more strongly segregated.

Military Value of Economic Targets

Another seemingly minor but important difference is that old-school RTS games feature an economy based on what one might call “harvester” units, such as villagers, tiberium harvesters, and so on.  The focus on individual harvester units also makes the economy a more tempting military target, increasing the synthesis between military and economic activity; diverting two or three quick units for a quick in-and-out strike to kill a few villagers, or a tiberium harvester, is both feasible and valuable.  Economic assets become valuable military targets.

An Aztec village, ripe for raiding by enemy forces.

In new-school RTS games, though, the lack of harvester units, combined with the time it takes to capture control points and the very low unit cap, means that a “quick” strike to disable or steal a control point far away from the locus of battle is more difficult and diverts a lot of resources, especially if the point has been fortified, and very often not worth the trouble.  This encourages players to focus on enemy military forces as a primary military target and economic assets only as secondary, to be claimed once enemy forces have been removed from the area; this further reduces the interplay between economic and strategic gameplay.

Large Scale

Finally, another major design difference between the likes of Age of Empires and the likes of Dawn of War is the (potential) scale of the game.  New-school RTS games tend to be strongly clamped and restricted; DoW and CoH support only a few dozen units at a time, if you consider a squad to be a single unit, whereas the original Age of Empires games allowed for upwards of 200 individually-controlled units, and many games, like the Command & Conquer series, didn’t impose a hard cap on units at all (though in later C&C games, the level design tended to result in games where few units were present at any given moment).

Because we are the HUNS!

The scale of the maps is also drastically different between something like Age of Empires, or Empire Earth, and newer RTS games; combined with the more strongly corridor-based design of levels in DoW and CoH, old-school RTS maps feel, to me, to be much larger than new-school ones.  Even the larger maps in new-school RTS games are so obviously designed for a given number of players that playing on them with less players doesn’t feel much more open.

Old and New

The differences I outlined above, then, suggest that new-school RTS games are tight, focused experiences centered primarily upon frequent military conflict within a fixed environment, whereas old-school RTS games are complex experiences centered on the interplay between economic expansion and military activity in a reactive, dynamic environment.  Economics in a new-school RTS functions mostly as a tool to restrain the pacing of the military activity that is the focus of the game, like mana in an RPG; in an old-school RTS, economics are a sphere parallel to warfare that motivates, rewards and modifies the player’s military activities, and is in turn modified by warfare itself. 

One might say that an old-school RTS game is a game about playing two games at once, an economic-strategic and a military-tactical game.  For me, this is what offers the game depth and complexity and makes it interesting, but for others, this distracting and unfocused.  Some of the criticism and praise of the genre is undoubtedly motivated by personal preferences, but in the next post, I'd like to try to approach things from a broadly appreciative perspective, and suggest criticisms that remain consistent with the genre's core, without turning it new-school.

RPG Renaissance, or RPG Swan Song?

With the recent success of single-player RPGs on Kickstarter - Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns, Project Eternity and now Torment: Tides of Numenéra - some have been saying that we are in the midst of an "RPG Renaissance" (PC Gamer suggests as much here) and that single-player RPGs for the PC are back.

Much as I would like to believe this, I worry, because I feel we don't have some of the most important data we'd need to actually make a statement like that.  And also because I am paranoid.

If there is one thing that these RPGs banked on during their Kickstarter campaigns, it was "nostalgia," the cynic's buzzword that has come to mean "the promise of bringing back an old style of game that is not being funded by mainstream publishers anymore." One game is a direct sequel to one popular old game and spiritual successor to two even more popular old games; one is a game set in the same universe as two popular old games; and two are spiritual successors to popular old games.  They all marketed themselves that way, and the gaming press certainly talked about them that way too.  And that may be a problem.

It's All About Demographics

Seeing that kind of marketing approach, I start to wonder who exactly is backing these games.  Looking at the lowest-grossing of the four, Shadowrun Returns, reveals that 4378 backers chose the 60$ tier, and 4247 chose the 125$ tier, despite the game being available starting at only 15$ (chosen, to be fair, by over 15k backers).  These aren't people who are pre-purchasing a new game that looks interesting to them; these are fans of the original games who really, really loved those games and really, really want to see sequels.

So what may be happening - again, we don't have the data on this, so to either assume or deny this is conjecture either way - is that the game's fans from 15-20 years ago, presumably children or young adults back then, have grown up, gotten jobs, and have the cash to throw at a throwback to the best games of their youth.  Thus the sudden outpouring of cash for single-player, fiction-driven RPGs on Kickstarter.  If this is indeed the case, then this may not be a renaissance in RPG development - it may in fact be the single-player, fiction-driven RPG's swan song.  RPGs may bloom for the next decade or so at most, but after that, they will go extinct for good.

Why?  Well, what may be happening is ultimately that old people are funding games that young people aren't buying anymore.  It may be that publishers are idiots who don't know a cash cow when they see one (given the absolutely shocking lack of publisher-backed Minecraft clones, this may well be true), but it may also be that a steady stream of competitive multiplayer shooters, and free 2D mobile games designed for 10-minute sessions, has drawn in the attention and spending money of a generation that might otherwise have been interested in long-form fiction-driven RPGs (and grand 4X strategy games, and RTS games, and all the other genre staples from 10 years ago).

And if that is the case, as those who grew up with such RPGs get older and shrink as a market, the gaming industry will be left with a cohort of gamers who grew up playing Call of Duty and Angry Birds, and who have no interest in or nostalgia for single-player games that take longer than 5 minutes to play, let alone games that try to include some kind of fictional world.  I think that would be catastrophic, because I think that single-player games in fictional worlds is the place where the most dramatically new and culturally influential experiences could be created.

Sustainable RPG Fandom

Of course, the picture I painted above is alarmist and far too generalist, and assuming people will behave as a single mass is never a good thing.  With more and more emerging markets like China and South America (and possibly Russia and India in the near future, who knows?) earning enough disposable income to turn to video games for entertainment, in 25 years we could end up living in a world where 3 or 4 billion people live in countries considered to be markets for gaming.

If there are 3 billion adults who might buy your games (all following numbers are made up for illustration only), then it doesn't matter if, say, 95% of those adults are all off playing distractionware and competitive killing games; the 5% left who might want your game still represent 150 million players.  Fractured over different platforms, because the game industry is hamstrung by greedy hardware developers who want to make it difficult to develop cross-platform to maintain exclusivity (seriously, can't we all just use one graphics and audio API and stop screwing around?), you still might have a market of 30-50 million gamers on your chosen platform, of which you might only need to convince 5-10% to buy your game.  That's not looking too terrible anymore.

But the devil is in the details.  Of the 0-5 year-olds today, will there really be even 5% of them who somehow come to be interested in single-player, fiction-driven RPGs?  Will the costs required to localize your game for Europe, China and Latin America overwhelm the profits you might make by gaining a foothold in those markets?  And even those questions assume, of course, that the world doesn't suffer massive ecological or political collapse, and that gaming isn't superseded by a different form of entertainment, like, I don't know, legal and high-dosage LSD injections or something.

What I'd Like to Know, and Never Will

What we need, before making highly optimistic (or indeed pessimistic) declarations of the single-player RPG's future, is data.  I'm not convinced that the RPG is going to die soon, but I'm not convinced this is its triumphal return either.  There are probably lots of places we could look for the kind of data that might clear things up; if I could choose, here is what I would want to know (I know full well I am never going to see these numbers).

• A breakdown of how many people in each age group backed the big new RPGs.  How many under 20?  Under 30?  Under 40?  A similar breakdown of post-release purchasers would also be great.
• A breakdown of what devices 3-16 year olds in industrialized nations are interacting with in their homes, broken down by age group.  How many only have tablets and phones?  How many don't have a PC, or a console, or either?  How many use a variety of devices regularly?  What do they game on?
• A clear understanding of how young people under 16 learn about new games and game platforms, in what numbers and at what rates, broken down by age group.
• Sales figures and market information on paid-for single-player games in emerging markets like China, Russia and Latin America over the past ten years at least.

What good would having this information do?  Well, it might help more effectively market single-player, fiction-driven RPGs to future audiences who, given only tablets by their aunts and uncles at Christmas, might never have heard of an RPG at all.  It might help developers figure out whether they can afford to stick to more powerful platforms for their games, or whether they need to rush to figure out a way to translate long-form RPGs to the touchscreen to survive.

It might also help the younger of us figure out whether there even are enough fans out there for us to make a career out of building the games we love, or whether we should just give up now and start cranking out mobile apps that help people keep track of garbage day or figure out how to maximize their pet's social media presence.

Inevitable - A Brief Summary

So I recently mentioned (or, er, not that recently...) that I am working on a simple, experimental game called Inevitable.  I called it a twin-stick arena shooter about human mortality and life extension science, and that remains an apt if perhaps misleading description.

Part of the experience the game is being designed for is discovery, so there are things I can't say and things the game won't tell you up front, but I can provide a basic gameplay overview.  The player controls something - what exactly it is isn't clear, but it can take on the shape of plants and animals - which exists in a large, open field which contains plants, animals, and a few landmarks of various sorts.  From the edges of the field, a blight encroaches on the map, slowly eating inwards, killing all living things as it goes.  The player's avatar, though, has the ability to fight back the blight, as well as to interact with the terrain and plant life in basic ways.

That's about all I can say for now.  It's not a score- or optimization-based game, but is rather experiential.  Multiple playthroughs are core to the gameplay arc, but I suspect that the more determined players will be able to discover all there is to discover in just a few hours.  It's quite a small game, as befits a first foray into game development.

I have recently started implementing sound, and have realized that I am an awful sound designer, at least at the moment.  Some graphical assets remain to be created, but most of the gameplay is complete. I might be able to release it by early summer.

Unfortunately, I am not dedicating all my development time to Inevitable.  Another project, which will be my second game, is also in the works (and is coming along rather well).  This project, which I am calling Florealis, is the first project to be written using my 3D engine, and will make more extensive use of procedural content generation.  It will also be simple (as 3D games go), but it will help to provide the foundation for future 3D games I am planning (I currently have a roadmap of around 5 games, each one focusing on developing one specific aspect of the 3D engine).

So that's all I have to write for now.  I am going to leave my current full-time job in about three weeks, after which time I will hopefully be a lot more productive on the game development front.  This summer (June), I am off to start a course in Game Design at the Vancouver Film School, which should be a lot of fun.

Have a nice week!

Where's the Fun in Winning? (Part 3)

Narrative Context in Games

I've recently been writing about the distinction between what I'm calling optimization play and aesthetic play, and today I'd like to go into one of the areas where these styles of play color gaming experiences differently, and where design speaks to or alienates one style of play or the other - the ever-controversial topic of narrative in games.  I'll start with an example.

I was recently playing two tower defense games, Fieldrunners and Defense Grid.  The two games work similarly; you have an array of tower types that you can place around the map, while enemies of various sorts (fast, flying, extra tough, etc.) navigate the map.  There are some differences - Defense Grid is much more focused on pre-set routes and keeping power cores from being stolen, Fieldrunners is mostly an open field, and players must use the towers to construct their own routes for the enemy to follow (as in the old tower defense maps in Blizzard RTS games).

In my eyes, perhaps the most significant difference is the macroscopic gameplay progression.  In Fieldrunners, you have an open field and must survive 100 successive, clearly marked waves of enemies, after which you are victorious.  You may unlock further fields, but there is no particular relationship between then; and you are awared points in a raw fashion.  In Defense Grid, on the other hand, you play through a more traditional setup of several levels (somewhere between 15 and 20, I believe), each of which follows on the previous one.  There are less waves of enemies in each level (up to around 30-35), though the waves can contain multiple enemy types, and there aren't very clear delineations between the waves; interestingly, Defense Grid also incorporates basic narrative elements, while Fieldrunners does no such thing.  Defense Grid also awards the player with points, but these are not visible during actual gameplay.

Fieldrunners bored me pretty quickly, and I had to force myself to finish a single field, just to see if anything interesting happened.  Defense Grid hooked me, at least until I finished the story mode, though the many added challenge modes didn't seem compelling, and I didn't try any of those.

Now, I think we can agree that Defense Grid would not have been "better as a movie/book", a frequent criticism of games that incorporate narrative elements, or recommendation lobbed at players who enjoy narrative.  It is unabashedly a mechanics-oriented game; there is not a single dialog option, and there is only one NPC, if you can call him that.  And I was never really driven on to figure out what happened next in the "plot" - it was fairly clear from the onset that the aliens would eventually be pushed back and defeated in a final fight, and that the world would be saved (Spoiler!  The player wins the game!).  Yet the narrative elements in Defense Grid was important to my enjoyment of what I was doing, and lack of narrative motivation was what made me uninterested in the various challenge modes.  Why?

When talking about aesthetic mode of play last time, I mentioned that aesthetics-oriented players often want to feel like they are acting in a particular fictional role, or participating in a particular fictional world.  Fieldrunners makes zero attempt to cater to that king of desire.  Who are these people my towers are mowing down, and where are they trying to go?  Who am I?  Where am I?  The answer doesn't need to be a serious, almost tragic one like in Defense Grid, but I want some kind of answer.  Without any answers, ultimately, I didn't feel like there was a fictional world to participate in; just a heterogeneous collection of sprites and rules.  I didn't really care much about the outcome of the game, and was not motivated to try out new fields or entirely new gameplay modes (in my second attempt to finish the game, I did play on the unlocked extended mode, but mostly since I couldn't bear the thought of playing the exact same game again until the end).

Narrative - Reward or Resource?

It has been said that narrative often works as a reward in games, with gameplay progression being associated with unlocks of little tidbits of story.  Sometimes this is painted as an inherently bad thing, because... success is supposed to be its own reward, I suppose?  There are probably worries about corrupting a gamer's relationship with the medium of games, too.

But while that might be partially true of my experience with Defense Grid, I don't believe that sufficiently describes the situation.  I think there is another way of conceptualizing of things that is just as important for a complete description, if not more so.  Here is an analogy.

Imagine playing Starcraft II, except instead of the 3D sci-fi graphics, everything consisted of flat colored shapes on a monochromatic 2D map.  The shapes are mathematically optimized to be as readily distinguishable from one another as possible; there is no mistaking one unit for another.  Gameplay is identical.  The only sounds you hear are the ones that convey gameplay information; no music or voice acting.  Everything is pure audiovisual minimalism, but the gameplay remains exactly the same.

Notice I didn't mention story at all; my analogy here is with the art assets, so let's forget about story for a moment.  From an optimization perspective, or a "real-games" purist perspective, the fictional world that maps to the Starcraft gameplay is entirely incidental, and might as well not be there (at most, one could argue that it serves a sort of mnemonic purpose during the learning phase).  Chess only has abstractions of the fiction it portrays, and Go has essentially no fiction at all, being pure gameplay; both are often revered from the optimization perspective as some of the greatest games ever.

Yet for many people, the game-only version of Starcraft I described would be decidedly unappealing.  Why?  Well, the fictional Starcraft universe lends the gameplay a lot of context that makes the various elements of the game - the nouns and the verbs - more compelling or relatable.    The Protoss just don't have the same character if they are stripped of their sleek alien aesthetic - their character goes beyond the optimization of gameplay and into aesthetic considerations.  A big oval launching little ovals just isn't as interesting or fun as a Carrier launching little Interceptors.

For many people, narrative is a similar element.  I find Fieldrunners dull not necessarily because there are no story rewards for good gameplay, but because there is no fictional context to make sense of why there are enemies flowing onto the field, and why I should care about holding them off.  While my example above with Starcraft imagined to the nouns of the game being devoid of fiction, my problem with Fieldrunners is that the verbs are devoid of fiction.  The things the player does, and the things the characters do, don't have a fictional, representative layer that makes them compelling or enthralling.

So narrative isn't merely a dusting of crack cocaine rewarded by a Skinner Box, as some critics might accuse (I actually did see a comment on the Internet compare narrative in games to rats being given cocaine).  It is also, much like art and sound assets, a way of wrapping abstract and often uninteresting objects and events into something that humans can meaningfully relate to on an aesthetic, emotional and cognitive level.

Fiction, the Double-Edged Sword

Defense Grid has a lot of extra gameplay modes, as well as non-story map packs.  New constraints, new map layouts, new challenges!  Everything a gamer should want, according to the fun-as-overcoming-challenges school of thought.  Unfortunately, I wasn't really motivated to try any of them out. After the several hours it took me to complete the story campaign, I felt I had had my fill - though I gladly bought the two story DLCs, You Monster and Containment, and intend to give those a spin soon.

What this story-based play is about, in a sense, is exploration: exploring the fictional world the game games place in, and exploring the paths the game's events might take, be they one or many.  Sometimes this might involve the ending being uncertain, but that is not necessary; in Defense Grid, I was driven to discover new players, learn more about the narrator and the alien invasion, discover new towers and alien types, and so on.  Part of that was narrative as reward, but part of it was also the exploration of the fictional world.  The difference here between exploration and narrative-as-reward is perhaps subtle, but it is there, in the same sense that exploring a forest for fun and exploring a forest in order to take pictures of nice locations isn't the same.  Gameplay can be a chore that must be completed, a ritual that must be performed, or an obstacle that must be overcome to unlock more fiction (grinding quests in an MMO, for example); but it can also be a means to traverse through and experience the fiction, or indeed a means of generating fiction itself.

When that exploration is complete, there is little reason to return to things already discovered - places, backstory, characters, decisions, and so on.  For some players, then, the game ends when there is nothing new left to discover - or when discovering new stuff becomes too much of a hassle (some criticisms of The Cave point to how, in order to experience all the character's special areas, you need to visit two other special areas twice, in addition to visiting all the generic areas three times).  So unlike for optimization players, aesthetic players can potentially experience all they want to experience in a game, and then lose interest, moving on to something fresh.  Pure optimization play, though, would only really arrive at such a conclusion if the player became perfect at a game, something highly unlikely to happen.

This is, I think, related to the win spectrum games reside on; on the one hand, some games (like Tetris or Go) can't be finished or beaten; instead, they are played again and again, with the player frequently aiming for constant self-improvement, or optimization.  Other games, though, lose much of their luster after being played and fully explored (not only in terms of space, but also in terms of the options available, such as different dialog choices, classes, or gameplay strategies); they are mysteries in which the process of discovery, wonder, progress and/or exploration is what is enthralling, and once the mysteries have been solved and the unknowns made known, the player has finished what they came to do.  Of course, many games can be played both ways, or include elements that appeal to both approaches, but the different kinds of experience are certainly there.

Conclusion

The presence of narrative or fictional elements in games is something that appears to aesthetics-oriented players, while not being particularly interesting to optimization-oriented players (except perhaps as distinguishing features of various verbs and nouns).  When people hold up Chess or Tetris as examples of perfect or proper games, they are suggesting that such narrative or fictional elements have no real value - that they are merely a skin, so to speak, around the core of the game, which is a system of rules to be learned and interacted with as optimally as possible.

But for many players, the narrative is not just the skin - it is the meat and, for some, even the bones of the experience, one which is predicated on experiencing sensations and stories related to a fictional world, either novel ones or ones the player comes back to enjoy again and again.  Playing efficiently, or even winning at all, are only of value insofar as they contribute to the player's aesthetic experiences of the fictional world.

Addendum - Penny Arcade on LoL

A while ago a rather topical comic came out of Penny Arcade on this subject.  For optimization play (and the LoL community certainly seems to skew in that direction), picking a character you like and playing with its unique skills simply isn't the proper way to approach the game.  Penny Arcade had another one dealing with the same issue in Pokémon, but I can't seem to find it anymore.

Pseudolanguage Generation

Murloduf davom jub ap pimnam, imevad jedum mam pimnalninmel gam amulbam.

How language-like would you rate the above phrase?

The game engine I am working on, which has a heavy focus on procedural generation, now features a basic system for generating language-like strings of text.  Each language has its own basic rules of phonotactics, its own phoneme frequency tables, its own affixes, and its own variant spellings of certain phonemes.

There are currently no semantics underlying the system, which is why I say "language-like".  However, I am looking to start incorporating basic semantics in order to aid in generating proper names.  The engine could analyze the surroundings of a town, for example, and give it a name depending on its environment.  A town in the middle of a lush, mossy forest might be the fantasy language equivalent of Greenwood (or indeed, the English term itself); a town on a hill in a pine forest might be Pinecrest; etc.  Obviously, this could be expanded to factors beyond the natural environment - history, trade, politics, economy, etc.

Other features I'd like to implement are the generation of language phylogenies; improved phontotactics; dictionary generation with various word types; and grammar-driven morphological rules.

This is a low-priority feature I am only working on right now because my GLSL shaders won't compile at work, so I can't work on graphics-dependent features during downtime, since I can't see anything.  Still, it is a nice break from trying to debug shaders and VBOs.