carry-on-my-wayward-butt:

walkingmyhellhound:

If I’ve learned anything from video games, it is that when you meet enemies, it means that you’re going in the right direction.

that’s really inspiring

Also, going the wrong way always leads to treasure.

(though this analogy breaks when you remember that video game dungeons only have one exit, I still like the exploring for treasure bit)

Summer 2012 in Games

The last section on my Summer 2012 to-do list was video games. Just for fun, I set aside five games I would have liked to finish. Just in case I fell into a time warp and found myself with infinite time and really needed some way to relax and keep myself entertained. Literally none of these got finished, and that’s okay. I don’t know what games I did actually play, unfortunately - it’s been too long.

• Final Fantasy VI Advance (GBA)

        I don’t think I played the game all year, still halfway through.

• Dark Souls (PS3)

        I set it aside when our PS3 died, and have yet to go back. I think I’m around Gapping Dragon…

• Nier (PS3)

        I’ve finished the first playthrough recently, and continue to be in deep romantic love with the soundtrack. It’s a beautiful gem of a game, albeit one with a lot of rough edges. Probably a few entirely rough, even unhewn sides if we’re being honest. I’ve forced myself to do all the sidequests, with only two left to finish (one of which is absolutely awful, and the other of which was couldn’t be completed after a certain point in my first game and has yet to appear in the second) so I’m extremely overpowered. Because of that, in a couple of hours I’ve nearly finished the first New Game+, which is really more like 60%-of-the-game+, and it’s done a few rather interesting things. I don’t want to spoil it, but you really do have to play it more than once.

• Xenoblade (Wii)

        About halfway through this one as well, and I think it’s probably the first true successor to what PS2 era jRPGs were trying to accomplish. Ni no Kuni (PS3) is another, but it’s newer so shh. Enjoyed the heck out of it, and I could generally be found grinning ear-to-ear as I ran around the world and completed stupid sidequests. The hour-at-a-time inventory management sessions were less joyous, but I suffered them gladly. Highly recommended.

• Last Story (Wii)

        A bit less far in this, but early impressions are good. I missed the days when jRPGs had stupid frog catching minigames (FF IX and Quina, ‘nuff said), or rewarded you for smacking your head on signs and slipping on oranges. The fact that you can hit your head on low-hanging signs makes me really happy. There are character animations for walking through tight spaces, and lots of other things. It’s very, very polished. However, in retrospect a lot of things in the first few hours were too simplistic to be fun… My brother and girlfriend have both finished it and enjoyed it, so I suppose I’ll go back to see if I can find what they saw in it.

Interactive fiction jam results

Summary: The theme we wound up with was Metaverse. Four hours wasn’t a whole lot of time for us to get familiar with Inform 7 and create something interesting. Managing scope is really important!

So, we ran a little bit late and started around 12:30, but most everyone was able to stay until 4:30 so it worked out. Unfortunately, announcing the theme at the start of the timer might not have been the best idea - I don’t know about everyone else, but I spent at least 30 minutes brainstorming. Still debating with myself whether picking the theme in advance and dedicating the four hours to implementation would have been better.

On the other hand, being a prolific writer, Crate was able to mostly finish what he had in mind. Not sure if it’s because he had a better idea of the scope of what you can write in 4 hours, or simply because he wrote so much faster than I did. Either way, good on him! For what it’s worth, Inform 7 source code is measured in words, and I had 800 vs his 1600. Still, I know I wouldn’t have my initial idea “completed” even if I had close to 2000 words. Vael and Maryanna are in a similar boat, I think. So much for putting our completed work online after four hours!

We all had fun, though, barring the occasional frustration with learning some of the more complex idioms of Inform 7. So we’ve agreed to get together once a week, for an hour or so, and continue working on our ideas. I don’t know how long we’ll keep it up, but it should be fun.

Lessons learned:

• The metaverse theme inspired me (and possibly the others) to work on a much grander scope than was actually reasonable. Most metaverses are developed over the course of multiple novel-length works. That usually takes longer than four hours.
• Creating an environment for your player to mess around with is difficult. There are a lot of tiny details to take care of when their actions have no constraints. What if they want to lick the torches you put on the walls? What if they try to run off with a giant stone statue? You have to decide early on how you want your game to deal with that kind of behaviour. Maybe for the theme of your game, it’s better to insert funny easter eggs everywhere. Or maybe you should have a terse “I don’t see any reason to do that” response to all unintended commands.
• Writing descriptions of all the areas and objects your player will see is time-consuming. I spent almost all of my time doing that, in fact, and ran out of time before I could introduce the player to their first NPC and have them learn their first spell. So what I ended up with, after four hours, was five areas and a handful of objects, all with nice descriptions in case the player decides to examine everything. Oh, and I had a sweet door connecting two areas. Also, I had some plural objects I’m pretty happy about ( eg: The pews are here. They are scenery.They are supporters. The description is “Some pews.” – I would like to be able to say “their description is”, however)
• Working with NPCs in Inform 7 wasn’t as immediately obvious as I had hoped it would be. Having conversation that doesn’t rely on “tell NPC hello” or other awkward constructions requires a bit of research. I’d like to find a way to have dialogue “come from” an NPC instead of the standard narrator. It seems more natural to write something like ‘NPC, say “Blah”’ in my code than 'say “NPC says blah”’. I assume it’s possible, but I didn’t have time to find out in the last 20 minutes. But perhaps I’m just being too object oriented, and there’s no real difference between the two.
• The documentation support in the Inform 7 IDE is pretty awesome. The manual for the entire language, and a pretty extensive Recipe Book, has built-in search from the IDE. The index is even better, though - among other things, it lists all the objects you’ve declared and allows you to navigate to their definition with a click, all the rules that have been defined, all the verbs the player can enter, all the phrases you can use in your code (with examples and links to the manual), the entire object hierarchy of your game… It took me a while to notice all of this stuff was there, but once I started exploring the index, I was able to find most anything I wanted from within the IDE.
• DSLs can be pretty cool! Everything about Inform 7 is focused on making interactive fiction, and it’s a superb tool for that task.

I put my code up on GitHub in case there’s any useful tricks in my source (warning: doesn’t compile right now). One thing I will point your attention to is the use of square brackets around the names of objects in prose - I learned that from a blog post by Aaron Reed, and I think it’s a great idea. Essentially, all you have to do is put square brackets around the names of nouns in your descriptions of locations. What this does is send the compiler looking for an object that can be referred to by the bracketed text, and if the compiler can’t resolve that name to an actual object, you get an error. If you wanted the object to exist, this is a good warning. If you don’t want such an object to exist, then you have to change the description so that it doesn’t imply there’s an object that the player can’t actually interact with.

As a bonus, if you find yourself using too many nouns, you have to get a bit more creative with your prose - I happen to love the noun-less version of the second description. I’m used to that sort of intense editing, though, and maybe you’re horrified by the idea of spending so much time thinking about every little sentence. That’s perfectly ok, because it is time-consuming. But in the long run, I’d much rather play a game full of awesome prose like that second version. Plus I wouldn’t wind up wasting time playing around with non-existent objects. Think of your players! Think of your satisfaction as you read your beautiful prose in the future! I’m often pleasantly surprised by the writing in my old blog posts, when I go digging through the archive, so obviously I think it’s worth putting in the effort.

Interactive fiction jam delayed; more resources

Rather than lose ¼ of my participants, I got everyone to agree on moving the date to Monday instead of today. Which works out well because it’s Labour Day, a useless holiday that has no festivities to keep people busy! Of course, the people participating who have spoken to me already know this, but who knows - there could be lurkers.

Anyway, I’ve been realizing the kind of effort that goes into making an awesome Inform 7 game like Violet. It would take more than four hours to produce something like that, especially as complete beginners. So I’m thinking that we’re going to have to tend more towards creating short stories with a bit of interactivity, for fear of having things spiral out of control.

At a bare minimum, I’m thinking of suggesting that everyone watch this video by Aaron Reed to get a basic introduction to Inform 7 and its integrated development environment (IDE). Then, go through this tutorial by Stephen Granade for a more hands-on introduction to the system - learning to create rooms, props, and rules. I’m hoping that’s a good enough baseline to produce something in a few hours without losing time on learning the basics.

Aside from all of that I’ve been busy looking into a variety of Inform 7 things. I get to be like that when presented with an extensible system. Rather than clog up my tumblr with a huge list of stuff, I’ve put everything I’ve found up on SimpleNote:

• General notes: https://simple-note.appspot.com/publish/pnNXVd
• Extensions I’ve found that seem like they might be useful: https://simple-note.appspot.com/publish/blW3Q2

It’s worth looking through to see if there’s anything that inspires you. Maybe you want to make a really conversation heavy game - if so, check out Eric Eve’s numerous conversation-related extensions (among other things). Maybe you want to make something modern involving computers and other real life objects - Emily Short has some extensions for that (again alongside a lot of other stuff). She also has an extension for incorporating mood variations in your non-player characters… And now I’m just repeating everything I wrote in SimpleNote. Go on through the general notes for some information on best practices and other junk, and then the extensions one for fiddly stuff you might like.

Finally: I’m working on making a list of themes to pick from. I’d be happy to take suggestions. My intent is for the theme to provide a mental challenge, since you can’t just write whatever you want. At the same time, it should be broad enough that different interpretations are possible. So here’s what I’ve got so far:

• Companionship (writing other people/creatures is hard, this may be a cruel option)
• Underwater (courtesy of Vael, though I’d rather we didn’t all write some Atlantis/BioShock story)
• Possession (interpret any way you please)
• Metaverse
• Duality (courtesy of Crate, but I dunno - contrasting two disparate parts or elements is a pretty abstract theme)
• Underworld (Crate)
• Recycling/renewal (Crate)
• Hostile negotiations/enemy of your enemy (Crate)

I know, it’s not a terribly impressive list. I thought of a few more but.. uh… I forgot to write them down. So, please do suggest more! Just don’t say Brave New World or Stranger In A Strange Land or anything like that. Come now, we’re better than that. To make life easier, I’m also going to suggest we avoid high fantasy sort of stuff because it’s incredibly difficult to do well.

So yeah, that’s where we’re at! I’m having a lot of fun with this.

**Link to a .rar of extensions I thought might be useful, up to date as of September 2nd 2012: http://uninotes.thebcn.net/i7x.rar

Installation instructions: * Extract all .i7x files into one folder (note the ATTACK extension in its own folder) * Open the Inform IDE * Click File * Click “Install extensions” * Ctrl+a to select all files * Click ok

Bonus: documentation for all extensions is available once they’re installed. Go to the Documentation pane, click on “Installed extensions” below the final chapter of the manual, and then click on the name of an extension.**

Meaning through Game Mechanics

[image courtesy of the Winter Voices site]

A few years ago, I came across a game on Steam called Winter Voices. It was an episodic RPG for PC by a small French developer, but they only released Episodes 0-4 (with 5 and 6 unreleased) before going bankrupt late last year. Because the company dissolved, the game has been removed from Steam and most honest digital distribution platforms. I don’t know what the game’s sales were like, but it didn’t get very much press and most people couldn’t recommend the game wholeheartedly. The rough state of the game at launch and bittersweet press response probably hurt the game a lot. But for the people who played it, Winter Voices provided a unique experience that truly deserved more exposure than it received.

        The game stars a young woman whose father has just died. She has returned to the small northern village where she grew up in order to attend his funeral, with the implication that she had gone off to make the most of her life elsewhere. Winter Voices begins when she arrives - correction: when you arrive - at the village a few hours before the funeral. [correction: I e-mailed this post to the game’s author, and the heroine did *not* leave the village - that was a miscommunication with the people who made the game’s intro video] You choose a variety of stats relating to your character’s personality, like humour and memory, and set off to talk to people and wander around the village.

        Whenever you run into nostalgic or otherwise emotional situations, you enter grid-based battle arenas where you struggle against shadows representing grief, painful memories, and other psychological trauma. However, there’s no “combat” as such - you can’t defeat grief by brute force. All you can do is try to withstand it. Most battles have goals like “get to the other side of the map” or “survive for 5 turns”. It’s a great metaphor, and Winter Voices may be the only game to imbue these common battle mechanics with actual meaning.

        It gets even more interesting when you see the game’s skill tree. Here’s an image of your initial skill choices, courtesy of Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

        The skill in the very center is Repulsion, which lets you push enemies a very short distance away. Generally, they can move much farther than you can push them, so it’s a fairly ineffectual defense - but initially it’s all your character is capable of mustering. As you gain experience from dealing with your emotions and talking to others, you can gain new skills that are connected to the ones you’ve already learned (in the above image, the highlighted circles are skills that player is able to pick). To quote the description from RPS:

You start at the centre, and each direction represents a different way of dealing with grief. See the yellow-looking skills towards the bottom right? They relate to regressing into your own imagination. The orange skills above those are all to do with being sociable, and the power of friends. An example of a skill that lies between both of those areas is Imaginary Friend, which summons an ally that will hold enemies back.

        The skill tree is another beautiful metaphor, and I think it makes for an awesomely individual experience for each player. Instinctively, you might think that everyone will experience the same “story” when playing Winter Voices - the one the game’s writers came up with, focused a woman dealing with the death of her father. However, the important story in Winter Voices - what I think of as its “narrative” - is the one enabled by the gameplay mechanics. Everything that you do in a game contributes to its narrative, and most designers and writers ignore this at their peril. Almost every game in the strategy/RPG genre relies on generic player statistics like strength, agility, etc. and skills that focus on faster or more exciting ways to kill things. This makes it very difficult for them to have a narrative that doesn’t involve faster and more exciting ways of killing stuff, because that’s the main form of conflict resolution. Then the writers are forced to craft a story with a lot of combat opportunities, stifling a huge swath of meaningful stories and narratives.

[image courtesy of the Winter Voices site]

        Rather than following the combat-focused trend, Winter Voices makes a metaphorical narrative out of your choice of which skills and stats to invest in. Every player builds their own, personal narrative about who the main character is and how she learns to cope with (and hopefully overcome) her emotional anguish. It’s possible to play Winter Voices without thinking about the story behind your gameplay choices - your narrative - but I expect that few players would. It’s just more fun to construct a story to make sense of the choices the game has provided for you, and that’s what makes Winter Voices so amazing. The sheer size of the game’s skill tree (you can only see a fraction of it above) also contributes to this phenomenon, because there are a lot of valid ways to play the game. Since they’re all equally efficient, the player will probably wind up making some personal choice in how they decide to play. Metaphorically speaking, each potential set of choices represents a different coping strategy.

        This sort of narrative complexity, which is generated by a mechanical system, fits poorly in other mediums. There are twelve mechanically (what they do for you) and narratively (what they say about your character) distinct skills you can choose when you gain your first skill point, and the number of possible paths only expands from there. That level of choice enables a wide variety of narratives, and it would be difficult to provide all of them in a single traditional novel or film. Moreover, the systems in Winter Voices provide an environment in which to make interesting choices. The skill tree in particular provides a handful of meaningful choices, each time you level up, about how your character deals with her emotional problems.

        On the other hand, it also provides constraints that make each choice more meaningful. If you could have every skill in the game at once, your choice of skills doesn’t really matter in the long run to the narrative. If you could have ten arbitrary skills from the entire set, the choice would have less narrative meaning - there would be less logical progression in the way that your character solves her problems. The end result is that your character builds on basic, foundational skills to learn more advanced and more effective abilities, which have a logical grounding in what she chose to learn in the past. The choices and constraints in Winter Voices enable a wide variety of possible narratives, and that’s what makes it so fascinating. To me, that’s the essence of video games.

        Having played Winter Voices when it was on Steam, I think it provides a valuable experience. If you spend an hour or two playing Winter Voices, you’ll experience a powerful argument for video games being art. The sort of argument you just can’t convey by letting people look at (but not touch!) games in a museum. It’s not a game for everyone, but you can get the game’s prologue for a few dollars, and I guarantee it’s worth at least that much money and a few hours of your time.

        There’s roughly three reasons why I wrote this post: one, the game is set to be re-released soon with a plethora of improvements from when Rock, Paper, Shotgun played the game. Two, I was disappointed by the Smithsonian exhibit linked above and I wanted to provide a compelling argument for why games are art. And finally, Extra Credits just released a compelling two-part series about game mechanics as metaphors.

        Regarding the first point: Some members of the original development team reformed under a new name, bought the IP back from the French government, and are currently running a beta test of a huuuuuuuuuuugely improved version of the game through Steam. If you’d like to try it out after reading this post, you can send them an e-mail at betatest@innerseas.com with the subject “Winter Voices EP5 - Beta Test”, with at least your Steam user name in it (maybe with some info about your computer’s hardware and such, too).

        It sounds like they’re looking for people to test the game from start to finish right now because of a big engine update a few days ago, so they’d probably be happy to have your help. Otherwise, they’re hoping to have the game back on Steam in a couple of weeks. So even if you don’t get into the beta test, please do give the game a shot - with the improvements they’ve listed in the Steam forums, I expect I’ll be able to recommend the game without any reservations now.

[Thanks to Vael Victus, M-. and Sarah for reviewing and helping me edit. Also, if your viewing experience sucked, you’re probably using the Tumblr dashboard - blame their elimination of a lot of basic HTML stuff.]