thedextriarchy
Adi joined
Games journalist, writer, and modder in Source and HPL.
My Blogs
I've got more documentation: This time, we've got a whole gameplay overview up, with some basic information about combat, story, and class and weapon information. There's no official timeline, but we're working on putting together a team and getting some concept art, as well as getting the basic programming that underlies the game working. For now, though, it's words, words, and more words from me!
Check it out--it may be relevant to your interests.
Don't worry--I'm still working on Siege, even if it's been like pulling teeth the last week. But I'm also doing a bit of writing for a side project, an as-yet-untitled multiplayer FPS/RPG. I've got a brief synopsis up over at lancer611's blog:
The idea's a take on classic spires-and-apocalypse tropes that seem, oddly enough, to mostly show up in young adult fiction: Uglies, The Giver, House of the Scorpion, and so forth. Our basic starting premise is an economically and politically fragmented society much like our own, with the minor difference that they have conquered death. That's right, the mechanic that underlies the entire FPS genre has now been codified!
It's still in its nascent stages so far, but we've got a strong design document, and will be working in the upcoming weeks on concept art and further codifying the mechanics. Epater la bourgeoisie!
As I mentioned in my recent update, I'm working now on the puzzles in my Amnesia mod, and it's a curious feeling. One of the most difficult things in a game is integrating the gameplay and the story: I've seen many a game with an atmosphere and story marred by gameplay completely unsuited for it, or a game with great gameplay and a completely unrelated, pointless story. Unfortunately, I'd be being overconfident if I said I knew I was going to avoid these traps.
Complicating this is the fact that I'm working with Frictional's props and items, which provides me with a great toolset but also circumscribes what I can do with gameplay. One of the things that plagued the original Amnesia was a sort of hypertrophied version of Chekhov's Gun: If you saw anything that could be picked up, you grabbed it and could be reasonably confident that it would be used within a couple of levels. If you saw a lever, you pulled it. If you saw a valve, you turned it.
An aside: The puzzles weren't the sadistic fiendishness I've come to expect from adventure games--the only things I found truly difficult were a couple of slightly arbitrary bits where I got it into my head that one thing would work, it didn't, and I just kept trying it.
In many ways, this helps the game avoid the insane dream-logic that Old Man Murray skewered so many years ago. You don't have to set yourself on fire or use cat hair to construct a mustache, even if you do have to do some things that range from merely distasteful to downright grotesque (there's a reason that bone saw is in your inventory.) But there's also less of a sense of discovery each time you solve a puzzle--it feels a bit like marking time, unlike the Penumbra series, which really made you work for your progress.
Overall, however, I'm all right with the Amnesia puzzles, primarily because they really do fit the atmosphere of the game so well. The beauty of Amnesia wasn't that the puzzles were hard, it was that the game scared you so much that even simple things became difficult, because you were running around hiding in the dark from monsters that weren't even there. It's not Dear Esther by a long shot, but Amnesia verges in places away from traditional gameplay and towards an interactive story based on atmosphere.
Part of that atmosphere, however, was that of a place that was barely lived in. There was nothing in Amnesia to suggest that anyone but you, Agrippa, and the Baron regularly inhabited the castle--the few flashbacks were of prisoners, and even those were of people who had been brought to the castle, not those who lived there. I'm trying to provide a different feel--one of the castle as a recently-living place, a place with people whose worlds were, even through the siege, vibrant and full. And that may require a different kind of gameplay.
In writing my latest mod, I've repeatedly come up against the problem of creating a world with a compelling story that still allows for discovery and takes advantage of the medium. I face a pair of warring impulses here. For someone used to traditional writing, there's an incredible pull towards the cutscene-heavy and the cinematic: I keep trying to shoehorn the game into another format, to make it a comic or short story instead of a game.
On the other hand, I'm perhaps too familiar with the tropes of first-person horror and science-fiction shooters (it's a first-person adventure game, a custom story for Amnesia.) Nearly all the games in the genre I'm working in, including Amnesia itself, share two features: An unfamiliar environment and a blank protagonist. Sometimes the environment is new, and sometimes you're amnesiac; in either case, you the player are free both to define your character as you want and to have your character discover new information as you discover it.
When Isaac from the first Dead Space or Jack from Bioshock hears an audio log, he's not coming to the table with any more information than you are, and his character isn't expected to have an opinion on the matter--or, if he is, it's supposed to be filled in by the player. In a film or short story, we might have a page of exposition to talk about the backstory to an event, or to show the effect it has. In a game, we have only the event.
But what do we do, then, when the character is supposed to know things the player isn't? On a purely practical level, it means that they already know about timed hits, so to speak. Any kind of tutorial needs to take place between the world and the player, but that's not too difficult. The really difficult part is getting the player to learn the rules of a world--what does it look like? How does it work?
Fallout 3, in particular, gives you an entire childhood in order to create a unity between the understanding of character and player. But how do you do the opposite effectively: Drop a player into a character and a world and let them figure both out as they go along. That's what I'm trying to do, and it's something that's standard for all other media--so why not games, I suppose.
This means that, in general, I have to do two things. I have to give enough context that players can function in the world, and I have to give enough exposition (through text, events, etc.) that players can relate to the character and the later events of the story. The first, for me, isn't all that different from the way it would be done with most games--it's your standard post-apocalyptic game in many ways, even if the apocalypse is more personal than most. The second is the real problem.
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