game design – Guns of Icarus Alliance

Gameplay trailer in-depth

November 26, 2011

By now, everyone has seen the trailer. We’re very happy with it but we also want to let everyone know that there is more to come. We know you’ve all been waiting a while to see something new, and while our teaser was a looker we knew we’d get people clamoring for gameplay footage. This is a more technical post to give everyone a thorough update on all our core mechanics and what state they’re currently in. Some things are were in the gameplay trailer, some things are so new that they didn’t make it in.

The one thing that just came out of the oven is new ship controls. More specifically, we’ve erred on the side of realism and created an honest to god ship thrust model. We have friction, drag, and all the goodies that comes with real-world physics. Of course, we’ve simplified a few things so gameplay doesn’t get too out of hand. The main one is that all ship motion assumes it has a left and right engine. We decided not to try to model a rudder system so having two engines on either side of the ship becomes essential in turning. You can put your ship into discrete levels of forward or backward thrust, so far 7 to be exact (from -3 to 3). This basically means both the left and right side engine(s) are at the same power. Turning the ship lessens the thrust of one side and increases the other. With this, you can expect realistic ship movement. For example, it’ll take some time to come to a full stop but we’ve toned down some of the realism to ensure maneuverability and a fun control experience. But since everything is still based on a realistic system, everything just operates as you would expect it to a phenomenal degree.

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Game For All: Min/Max Edition

October 21, 2011

So one of my favorite games has to be Diablo II. Yes, it’s basically click all the things. Yes, there are too many ways to fail in the skill tree. Yes, I always defend this game because I played the hell out of it. How many characters did I roll? How many mules did I have that were full of Stone of Jordans? My Hammerdin was awesome. My Bowazon destroyed everything. If I put points into the wrong skill, I just transferred my items with the help of friends and power-leveled my new character and kept trading for crazy items. Don’t even get me started with items… that was what put the frosting on the cake.

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Dirty Prototypes

October 7, 2011

Originally this post was supposed to be about prototypes in general, but with the popularity of scrum and agile these days I think everyone knows what prototyping is about. What I want to emphasize dirty prototypes. What I mean by this is creating extremely low fidelity prototypes. I think a lot of time is wasted when people get carried away and start paying attention to adding in details, me included. If I took this lesson to heart earlier in my career, I think I would have been able to catch many more mistakes earlier.

Why I advocate for developing tests quickly is to get results as soon as possible. You ask a question, you want those answers now in order to stay ahead of the curve. These answers may even tell you that the direction you’re going in is also just wrong. And because you’ve spent so little time invested in a wrong idea, you’re more likely to set it aside and revisit it later while moving on to something else.

I think the practice and habits are obvious. Scribble things on paper. Only spend a couple of hours coding something, hacking, in a separate Unity project. Get those cubes dancing. Get it out to your peers and coworkers and get their opinions. As a game designer, you must be ruthless and always follow a crumb trail of where tests lead you. Create a dirty prototype with your gut instincts (don’t spend hours looking for damn metrics, that can also waste your time) and test. That test is your metric. It will tell you if your idea is good or bad or needs some more work.

Relentless. Ruthless. Ever-producing.

Pacing Actions

September 2, 2011

I’ve been playing a lot of Deus Ex 3 lately. Most of the office has. It’s got me thinking about how its different mechanics are spaced throughout the game. For the topic of pacing, I’d categorize them into core and intermittent mechanics. The core mechanic in DX3 is the sneaking or not-sneaking around buildings–taking out and shooting included. You spend most of your time doing that sort of stuff. The intermittent mechanics include both hacking and the talking/negotiation game. Intermittent is a good way to describe it because both hacking and talking stop the core mechanic from happening for a time. When you’re hacking, you better not be trying to sneak as well because you’re always in danger of someone seeing you. When you’re talking, you’re automatically always in a non-hostile area. Therefore, the core mechanic is put on hold for the duration of hacking or talking.

(Minor Spoilers Ahead)

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Ship Feel and Control

August 9, 2011

I always felt that there was much to be desired from controlling vehicles in some of the top shooters. I remember playing some of the first shooters where I could control a fighter plane. I think they got a lot of things right in that the controls weren’t incredibly responsive like usually how driving a car would be. Turning was slow and difficult, risky even. Sure, it’s close to reality but that doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable. Maybe there wasn’t enough intermediate feedback. Either way, it’s concerning because vehicle driving is a core gameplay element in GoI: Online.

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Choose Your Own Wasteland

July 28, 2011

The world of Guns of Icarus is in an interesting place, historically speaking — a grand civilization devastated by relentless war and sunk into a post-apocalyptic ruin, so much progress and knowledge and technology lost, the people who remained scrabbling and struggling and surviving, barely.

notthefuture — Dust and sand is mostly what's left

But that’s not where we enter this world. We enter it later, as the tides are changing and something new is shifting beneath the surface of the restless sands. As more and more airships are built in makeshift dockyards in villages scattered across the Burren, as young men and women leave their homes and take to the skies to crew them, traders and adventurers and daredevils and visionaries, a new class is arising, with the potential to change the world. Airship captains and their crew are the new knights errant, the new merchant class, explorers and ambassadors and warriors. As trade routes open and formerly isolated communities come into contact with the wider world for the first time, a seismic shift is underway, and nothing can stay the same. Not that it will be easy. Not that it will be peaceful. Not that anyone knows what it will be like.

Because in the multiplayer campaign mode, those new adventurers changing the world are you, and we don’t know what you’ll do.

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When Dimensions Are Added

July 28, 2011

3D, The New Frontier? — We're definitely getting there!

This is something that I’ve been not only thinking about but experiencing myself. The opportunities and problems afforded and created by the addition of different dimensions (mostly in the traditional sense like 2D to 3D but the definition is loose) becomes both amazing and daunting. I’ll keep this confined to map and level design.

Starting with making 2D Flash games, level constraints are quite straight forward. You only have two degrees of freedom (x, y axes). Take for example the ubiquitous platformer: movement is defined by floors. 2D platformers are easy to grasp whether due to its simplicity or its commonplace nature in games. I remember drawing Sonic the Hedgehog levels before I could spell Sonic without looking at the box. Walking on terrain is a simple game that we all know because we’ve played these games as children–skipping over cracks in the pavement, hopscotch, and etc… Creating levels for 2D games are fairly straightforward and are easily produced on paper by drawing simply lines to represent the ground. There is easily a standard for designing with these constraints. The information that is required to effectively convey the workings of a level can easily be read and drawn on a piece of paper for an everyday platformer.

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