Small Worlds
David Shute’s Small Worlds is an entry for JayIsGames’ “Explore” competition. It is a great example of simple storytelling in a game.
That might seem like a loaded statement when you consider that the entirety of the piece has no dialog, two lines of text, and features a protagonist that is three pixels tall. It’s mechanically simplistic too, only allowing you to move left and right and awkwardly jump. But that’s enough. Through your own explorations it slowly reveals the world and leaves it to the player to infer what happened and what is happening, building on all of that towards an effective ending. A simple story, but one well told within the confines of the system. And one that is told by the players’ own actions.
When I talk about narrative via gameplay, amongst the likes of Super Metroid and Left 4 Dead and others, this is exactly what I mean. It’s an extreme example, stripped down to the barest of elements, but a persuasive one.
Conflict-free Competition
As I plunge deeper into the world of (mostly German) boardgames I develop a new perspective on my long entrenchment in the videogame world. Their game designs and themes are a breath of fresh air relative to the constant frustrations and repetitiveness that competitive videogames are providing. The highest rated and most popular of these games (according to BoardgameGeek), Puerto Rico and Agricola, are especially profound because they are highly competitive without ever having direct conflict.
Take Agricola for example. This is a game about growing a seventeeth-or-so century farm by planting grain, breeding livestock, having kids, and taking on side jobs. This is a solitary job. You mind your own business. The closest there is to any interaction with any other farmers is when each of your family members does an “action” that claims a resource or ability from a shared, global supply (basically, the town.) Once something is claimed no other player can take it for that turn, but they can do anything else that is available. This is what I mean by a lack of conflict. You can’t go into the other player’s farm and burn their crops, or poison their cows, or have sex with their wife. Their farm is theirs alone and whatever they build or do there, with those common resources, is theirs and theirs alone. This might sound like a boring rule-set for a multiplayer game, but it is surprisingly competitive, strategic, and fun.
While there is no direct interaction between players, everyone is competing to create the best farm in the allotted number of turns. The challenge, and all the strategy, emerges from how you use the shared, and limited, global supply. As an Agricola player you need to be aware of what everyone else is doing, what you think they are trying to do, and, more importantly, how this might affect what you need to accomplish your goals. If everyone is constantly accumulating wood to build pastures and stables and new rooms for their house, it might be more beneficial to change your plans towards growing grain and gathering the clay that everyone else is busy ignoring. Of course the nuances of Agricola are far more complex than this and require a lot more writing to properly explain, but the basic idea is just that: manage the resources you need to grow your farm and feed your family amidst a dynamic market, trying to anticipate other player’s needs and the demands they create. It’s, basically, an economic game without the money. It’s also really fun.
I try to think of equivalent designs in the modern videogame world, especially in the commercial spectrum, and I can’t think of one popular, competitive multiplayer game that is strategic with no direct conflict. Not a one[1]. The genre is dominated by shooters (war, violence), fighting games (violence), real time strategy games (war, violence), and turn based strategy games that, too, are often war based. If there are equivalents, they are obscure. It’s a single-minded market.
Amongst some people, there is talk of so-called Ludonarrative Dissonance, about how videogames have a hard time conflating the mechanics of a system with the narrative elements behind the motivations in it. It’s a fine challenge to tackle, but it seems to me to be a lesser issue than the overall thematic bankruptcy that is present. As technology advances, allowing for improved dynamic situations and presentation and control, the vocabulary developers have at their disposal increases. But if it’s applied to nothing but more elaborate ways to shoot people in the face, what’s the point? You are still using the exact same metaphors as one of the oldest videogames: SpaceWar!
This is why boardgames are so fascinating. Free of those technological advances they’re forced to explore mechanics and rule-sets and player interactions rather than new ways to present the same thing. Granted, it’s a specialized market with an audience (and publishers) that’s seemingly willing to try new things. From the boardgamers I’ve met, it’s also generally an older market, one that’s not obsessed with the blockbuster fly-by-wire explode everything attitude that permeates every pore of the videogame biz[3]. That’s not to say that boardgames are without their own set of problems, but not having billions of dollars at stake every year certainly minimizes them.
Market demands and audience considerations are good excuses for a little while, but videogames already are big enough to allow for diversity. There are developers, and scenes, that focus on niche markets and do so with success. So why is it that even they, when creating multiplayer games, stick to the same metaphors of conflict?
Perhaps the general consensus amongst videogame publishers is that non-violent multiplayer games can’t be as exciting, and can’t sell as well[3], as their war-mongering counterparts. Maybe they think there could never be enough competition, excitement, betrayal, surprise, defeat, skull-daggery, and general griefer-worthy assholeishness in a game without direct conflict. But the last year’s worth of news out of Wall Street tells a different story. It’s a tale of a system corrupted from the inside by the scheming, cheating, gaming of a few powerful and greedy individuals. If this is not prime material for a videogame, I don’t know what is.
So all this might have been the build-up for a self-serving question, because this is something that I want to play, but I have to wonder: in this economic climate, where are all the economic games?[4]
- Not counting things like global leaderboards and indirect competition like that. I’m talking specifically about multiplayer games based on such mechanics.
- There’s a culture of one-upmanship that occurs in the battle for those dollars: every big million seller needs to be topped by an even bigger one.
- Settlers of Catan has sold over 15 million units over its life. Suck on that Killzone.
- This is why I’m curious and excited about Cities XL.
One Day Game Prototype, Flash Actionscript
Adobe Flash is like the mafia to me: just when I think I’m out, it pulls me back in. This is the “problem” with doing something for so long (eight years this month[1],) you get good at it and then you get known for it. Well, it’s a “problem” for me because I like to diversify. For years I was the “flash guy” and it’s a title that’s become hard to avoid, especially when there are bills to pay. Or airline tickets to buy.
I have a love/hate relationship with that tool, though I’ve realized that most of that hate is purely by association. It’s the web production equivalent to it’s not the band I hate, it’s the fans. The Flash plug-in is mostly unobtrusive, Actionscript is a great little language that is useful to know (especially with recent javascript developments,) and the Flash IDE is more than competent when it’s not crashing. The issue is that in its ubiquity it is, and has been, highly exploitable. Flash has seen its excessive share of security and privacy violations, dubious “content”, unwanted noise, pointless animations, complete disrespect for basic web usage, et cetera, et cetera. I know, because I’ve had to build some of those things. That’s why I burned out on it and why I’ve been avoiding it, with great success, since the spring.
Despite all my negativity, Flash is very good for things like video, visualizations, and games. It is particularly great for one little subtle aspect of game making: prototyping. It’s one part scripting language and one part — its original foundation — animation tool, and these things combined make it perfect for creating quick, working versions of ideas without any of the complicated rendering and display issues of other pure scripting languages[2].
These factors kept me on top of what was going on in the Flash world even when I wasn’t using it, and my increasing desire to pay bills has brought me, this week, back into its fold. The quick prototyping that Flash allows was one of the motivating reasons for this, even if it was a convenient excuse for getting some of the rust off in hopeful anticipation of upcoming contract work. As I’ve subtly alluded to in previous postings, I’m attempting to take a more active “do or do not” approach this year to the things that I’m interested in[2]. This is one of them. Inspired by numerous sources, and an interest in participating in the global game jam at the end of the month, I wanted to see if I could prototype a working game in one day.
Turns out: I can!
I sat down a little after noon on Sunday with nothing more than an idea and by 2am I had a sent out a working link. It was tiring and exhausting and I don’t want to look at Flash again for another week, but it was great to feel that creative instinct flow through me for a day.
Here’s the playable version. Guide the red squares to the green goals using left and right arrow keys to move, and up and down arrow keys to activate teleporters. Use the yellowish teleporter to kill any square you can’t save. Try to get an A+ rating.
It doesn’t look like much, but the core functionality that I wanted is there and that, in itself, is the most useful part of a prototype. A working example can tell you more in a minute than a design document can in a hundred pages. Whether it works or not, or where I can take it, I don’t know yet. But I do know that having made it, I am now one day, and one game, more experienced than I was last week. Ideas are good to have, and I have had plenty, but they’re useless braincrack unless executed.
So yes: executed, learned from, new ideas gained, new code for for future executions[4]. Huge success. Well, the action; maybe not so much the game.
See also:
- How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days, a now three year article but a timeless reference.
Build the Toy First
was my main strategy. World of Goo emerged out of this. Buy it, it’s great. - Kloonigames’ list of articles about rapid prototyping. Or the whole kloonigames weblog, where he attempts to create a game in seven days every month. Not all succeed, but eventually something good comes out of it: Crayon Physics Deluxe should be available for purchase today.
- Game Design Sketchbook, where Jason Rohrer releases (or did release) a game every month.
- Indiegames’ “Best Freeware Games by cactus 2007″ and Indiegames’ “Freeware Games by Jesse Venbrux” because if you make enough content to warrant its own top ten list, you’re doing something right.
Whoops: I posted the wrong link initially. Here’s the prototype. This here’s an updated version made on Monday where I was trying various things, including ugly pixel art. It has two level sets; the second one emerged out of various ideas I was trying out.
- Christ, has it been eight years already? If I wasn’t so aloof with the industry I’d probably have a senior position somewhere by now.
- It helps that I know my way around it, so I can spend less time figuring out the tool and language and more time implementing ideas. And in their defense, there are useful libraries for other languages that do simplify visual tasks.
- No resolution was made. Void where prohibited.
- Another reason to do this frequently. Eventually, you might be out of ideas but you’ll have a massive code base to draw from and maybe some diamond in the rough ready to be polished.
