T w e n t y S i d e d
Wherein I make the case that adding a win button (a game-breaking cheat or hilariously easy difficulty level) will make a game more fun without ruining things for the die-hards.
Heresy. Yet true.
Stolen Pixels #128: Quotas
A bit of a cross-over here, as Star on Chest appears in a Stolen Pixels.
About the thing depicted in the comic: Don’t pretend you haven’t done the same thing.
Heroes of Champions Online II
I’m afraid I’ve let you down again. No Fuel / procedural content post today. No good excuse, really, except that I’ve been playing a grotesque amount of Champions Online. Here, let me show you:
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| This is Concealed Carrie. Her bio: My mommy says it’s wrong to hit people. So I shoot them. I’m also not allowed to talk to strangers. So I shoot them, too.
Are you a stranger? |
I’ve spotted a few other people going for the “cute little girl superheroine” concept, although most people mess it up and just make their character small. She ends up looking like a tiny adult. If you want a little kid:
- Go short, obviously.
- Make the head nearly as large as possible.
- Eyes should be really big. 90% -ish.
- Eyes should be as low on the head as possible. You’ll need to move the cheeks down a bit as well to keep them from interfering.
- Ears should be a little large.
- Turn muscle way down, and body mass down.
- Maybe nudge the feet and hands up a little in size.
- Shorten the limbs.
The common approach is to have a little kid with a really violent superpower like swords, claws, dark magic, or somesuch. Concealed Carrie is a munitions character, and she became my main the moment I discovered the joy of the Lead Tempest power. Did you see Christian Bale in Equilibrium? How they did that gun kata thing? Well, you get to do that. And it is awesome. Especially as a twelve year old girl.
I’ve pretty much built the character around leaping into groups of guys and then shredding the group from within in a fountain of bullets. I also use the assault rifle for when someone gets ornery. A lot of people swear by the minigun, but I haven’t run the numbers to see which is better from a time / power drain / damage output perspective. And even if I’m not getting 100% combat performance out of her, she’s still a lot of fun.
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Thematically, she should absolutely use speed or (even better) acrobatics as her travel power, but I learned the hard way that the designers of Champions Online have a cruel and malignant hatred of non-flying characters and have designed this world in order to torment them. The guys on buildings, the inexplicable cliff in the middle of the city, the rat-maze canyons in the desert, and the un-scalable mountains in Canada: These are things that will impede you on the way to fun if you cannot escape the embrace of gravity. Really, they should give speed runners the ability to run up walls for a short distance, and acrobats should get some sort of Prince of Persia style wall jump that angles upward. Both types of travelers need a way to move without needing to wade through every damn mook in the world while their flying compatriots effortlessly cruise by overhead. If you’ve never tried to go up six flights of spiraling steps in a third person game just so you can see if the guy you’re looking for is up there, then you’ve never really understood what it means to suffer. The camera doesn’t know what the hell to show you.
For Carrie, I compromised and went for swinging. Swinging is still slower than flying and is useless indoors, but at least I can get over the walls of the maze without straying too far from my character concept.
I’m not sure what inspired me to make her. I think after going through The Path I wanted to balance things out and play a little girl who could kick some ass.
And speaking of Little Red Riding Hood, here is someone Star on Chest ran into in the starting zone:
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And here is someone else, in the same zone at the same time:
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And here is the conversation they had:
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The puns on these two made me laugh:
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I love these wings:
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You have to see them in motion for the full effect, but I think they’re magnificent.
EDIT: And here is the world’s most awesome tooltip:
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Yeah. “DSP” turns “DSP” mode on and off. Awesome. Good thing every single person in the world will instantly know what DSP is and why they might want to make it on or not on. I mean, naturally I know what DSP is. Naturally. I’m not some rube who goes around being ignorant of important things like DSP. But what if – and I’m just being hypothetical here – what if you met someone who didn’t know what DSP was? I mean, that would be hilarious, right? But how would you explain DSP to that person? Not that I’m asking. I mean, there’s no need, since I already know all about DSP. But I’m just wondering how some people would explain it using plain English.
FUEL: Defining Procedural
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| If it were possible to jump off your vehicle, Fuel would have the makings of a fairly thrilling base jumping game. |
Some people equate “procedural” with “totally random”. It’s true that it can be random (within the limits of a computer’s ability to generate “randomness”) but it doesn’t have to be. It’s fairly trivial to make the computer generate the same sequence of random numbers, thus having a “random” area appear the same each time you visit. In any case, it’s true that there will be aspects of the world which were created without direct participation of a human being. The placement of objects will in that sense be “unpredictable”. But this unpredictability – this loss of direct control – is one aspect of the tradeoff we’re making when we aim for procedural content. The more specific you want the content, the more it needs to be built by a human being. Do you have a rigid expectation of where each and every tree should stand? No? Then let’s not waste an artist’s time by making them place the things manually.
On one end of the spectrum is the hand-made world: An artist (or a team of them) will use shaping tools to sculpt the topography of the land. Then they paint it in some meaningful way. Grass over here, dirt in this valley, exposed rock on steep surfaces, etc. Then they populate the land with trees, shrubs, rock, grass, and whatever else the game calls for. You can do something like this in an hour or so if you’ve got good tools and you’re only filling in something modest in size. On the other end of the spectrum is the purely random world: Have your world-o-matic moosh a bunch of random noise together to make generic rolling hills, and then randomly sprinkle vegetation around.
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| Remember this building. We’ll be seeing a lot more of it in a later post. Also: Is anyone thirsty? Me? I could drink. |
Placing each and every tree is time consuming and needless. Instead, you observe that trees do not grow randomly in the real world, but behave according to observable rules. There are rules about where trees grow, how they’re spaced out, and how big they get in different places. Trees don’t generally grow on steep hills, and if they do they don’t get very big. Dense trees tend to choke out undergrowth. Undergrowth prefers soil to rocky terrain. Grass gets tall anywhere you don’t have tress or undergrowth. Some trees grow denser than others and have different preferences for elevation and moisture. Etc etc etc. A programmer can bang out a few rules like this and add them to the editor. Now instead of the artist saying “I want a tree here, and another here, and here, and here, and I hate my job, and here, and a couple here, and I wonder if McDonald’s is hiring, and now onto the shrubs…” The artist can just say, “Given the rules for trees, I want a forest over this region.” Boom. Forest done. Now instead of planting trees and bushes, the artist is placing forests and grasslands.
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This is where people who love to haggle over definitions will jump in and say that this is no longer art. They argue that once you distill a process down to rules and numbers, you’re no longer expressing or communicating, you’re just imitating. But I see art in making the code that makes the world just as I see art in using the tools that make the world. I see the compiler as simply a very strange paintbrush. But fine. We don’t have to call this art and there’s no reason to derail ourselves by going for another trip around the “how do you define art” mulberry bush. Art or not, the goal is to create a space that feels plausible and aesthetically pleasing.
I think Fuel pulls this off.
Stolen Pixels #127: Prison Break
In Champions Online, if you’ve got the strength you can pick up and throw vehicles. You can lift a truck and hurl it into a group of bad guys, sending them flying and very likely insta-killing one of them. If you just really hate the taxpayers, you can pick up a police car and use it to pummel another police car.
I really like that they didn’t simply make it possible to use the scenery in a fight, but they actually took the time to make it an interesting, balanced, and worthwhile part of combat. Thrown objects are a good opener, but it takes a few seconds to lift the really big stuff so you can’t just throw cars repeatedly until you win.
I have to give Champions Online credit for a really clean and stable launch. I’ve logged over a hundred hours already, and the game hasn’t crashed once. No broken quests. No game-killing bugs or griefing exploits. It’s by no means perfect, but as MMO launches go, this is about as good as it gets.
A Star is Born:
Let’s Play Champions Online Pt. 1
I’m enjoying Rutskarn’s Morrowwind series so much that I’ve decided to do one for Champions Online. This will run every Tuesday-ish until I get bored with it, people get sick of it, or I cancel my account. Or I forget. Or I die.
Starting off, I decide to create the quintessential silver-age superhero. Not one of these brooding black-caped, spike-covered, angst-ridden antiheroes like all the young people are into these days. I want someone wearing classic tights and using classic iconography. But not, you know, operating under the same silver-age idealism and respect for all life. Heavens no. I’m going to have the same approach to fighting crime as The Punisher. I’ll just be wearing stretchy clothing and a brave smile when I do my vigilante-style killing.
Looking through the powers, I discount all blade-styled weapons. Too messy. There are a couple of fighting & fisticuffs based power sets that seem to fit his style, but they’re also a little bland. (And I am already playing a couple of other melee-based characters.) Then I see Telekinesis, which is based on Ego and Constitution. Ego? I can base my abilities on the strength of my own ego? Sold!
I go for a quick run-through of the character building options and am able to craft my avatar in just under a fortnight, which is a new record for me.
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| ME: Let’s see… does the nose look more heroic at 10% width or maybe a little closer to 14.5% width? MY WIFE: Are you still staring at that man? |
In keeping with his silver-age design, he’s got a chin that falls somewhere between “Jay Leno” and “bulldozer”. His suit is bright and colorful, and he’s ripped like Hercules even though his powers do not involve physical strength. In fact, I can’t think of a power more fattening than telekinesis. These days the only exercise I get is from walking to, and subsequently opening, the fridge. If I could move food with my mind and fly, then it would take me about two weeks to get to the point where I could cosplay as Castle Wulfenbach.
Thus begins the journey of Star on Chest. His Bio:
Star on Chest is becoming the premiere celebrity crimefighter of Millennium City and is the author of “An Awesome Being on Being Awesome, the Story of Star on Chest”. He appeared in People magazine’s “Top 50 best-looking superheroes of 2007”, and was a guest judge on ABC’s “Dancing with the Superheroes”. He’s the exclusive spokeshero for Altmier’s Brand Zesty Hot Sauce and for State Trust Auto Insurance.
For product endorsements, public appearances, or crime fighting, please contact Champion Media Worldwide and ask to speak with his agent.
A personal message from Star on Chest: “I’ll be appearing at the grand opening of the Northwood Center Mall this weekend. Stop on by to see your favorite star-based hero in person! Autographed photos just $20! Bring a friend!”
Champions Online doesn’t have catchphrases, but if it did his would be, “Don’t you KNOW who I AM?!?”
No, wait. It won’t let me use that bio because it’s too long. Apparently the biography system is powered by Twitter. I whittle it down, but then it complains that I have profanity. After much confusion I discover it was the phrase “hero in” that was setting it off, which it was evaluating as “heroin”. The content filter was worried I was promoting the use of dangerous narcotic drugs.
Dear Young People: Heroin can reduce you to a puking husk of a glassy-eyed junkie prostitute. Eventually you’ll find yourself haggling over the price of sex because you don’t have change for a five. Please do not try heroin unless your life is already worse than that. There. That should keep the kids safe.
Anyway, I revise the bio for brevity and remove the words “hero in” so as to avoid corrupting our impressionable youth with pro-heroin propaganda.
Eventually I summon all of my strength, all of my willpower, and boldly click the start button to begin the game.
Man, I should have gone with 10% width on the nose.
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| You know all those anthills you stomped on as a kid? Well, payback is a bitch. |
The city is in chaos. It’s being invaded by bug aliens known as Qualar or Quaa’lar or Qua’lor or some such piffle. Aliens run rampant through the streets and the police are fending off never-ending waves of bug man from behind hastily constructed barricades. Buildings have been smashed. Fires burn. The dead litter the sidewalks. The coffee shops are all closed.
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| Oh, now I’m going to have that 80’s song stuck in my head all day. Thank you so much, game. |
I begin my life as a hero in* the midst of this destruction. My first act is to climb out of a pile of rubble. I’m not the only one, though. Apparently this rubble has been spewing out heroes in an endless stream since launch day. This rubble is the king-hell clown car of the ages. There are actually people appearing on top of me before I can even step away from the pile. This leads to that awkward moment you get in MMO games, “Pardon me miss, but it seems we’re occupying the same physical space and you haven’t even bought me a drink yet.” I step out of the transporter malfunction and greet the nearby police officer.
Time to see what’s going on around this burgh.
* This phrase is not an endorsement for heroin.
Chainmail Bikini News
From The Archives:
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Borderlands Series
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
The Truth About Piracy
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Shamus Plays LOTRO
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
The Middle Ages
Would you have survived in the middle ages?