Samurai Jack stories

1: Haku was sealed by Jack's father, but returns when Jack is a kid. Jack's father is taken by Haku, but his mother and himself escape with the only sword harmful to Haku. Jack's mother sends Jack to hone his combat skills with tribes all around the world. She keeps the sword until Jack returns as a man.

2: Haku sends Jack to the future to avoid losing the fight. Jack lands in an ultra modern city. He enters a bar full of thugs, and meets archeologist talking dogs who explain that Haku has enslaved many worlds. Jack accepts to free their people from Haku.

3: Haku sends a thousand robot beetles against the dogs. Jack organizes their defense (traps, tools), and defeats all the robots by himself while the dogs are watching.

4: In the jungle, small blue guys tell Jack that the big elephant-like creatures they are using are dangerous, and should be punished. A priest of the elephants explains to Jack that the elephants have actually been enslaved by the small blue guys. Jack breaks the orb used to enslave the elephants.

5: In a pine forest, Jack meets the human scientists who designed Haku's beetle robots. They are good guys, and want to escape to the past in a spaceship. They build a jet-pack and cosmonaut suit for Jack. In space, Jack protects them from Haku's wasp-like robots, but realizes that by doing so, he will miss the time travel.

6. Mysterious female warrior comes to help Jack. She needs a jewel to free her Dad, captured by Haku. Jack could use the jewel to go back in time. They collaborate, save each other, flirt. When they find the jewel, she breaks it and Jack realizes she was Haku.

7. Magic well giving one wish is protected by 3 archers. Jack realizes they are blind but perfectly accurate because they use the noise made by people when they walk in the snow. Jack wears a blindfold and sees the world like them, through noises. He beats them, but the well is cursed, so Jack destroys it.

8. Jack is mad because bounty hunters keep harassing him. Haku uses Jack's anger to create an evil clone of him. Jack beats the evil clone by doing yoga to calm himself down, thereby absorbing him.

9. Submarine city said to have a time machine. Inhabitants are slave of Haku, want to give Jack to Haku to gain freedom. Haku breaks his promise, so they regret giving Jack, and help him fight Haku. After Jack frees them, they explain the machine rumor was a lure.

10. Jack called by a voice to a mountain core. At the core, lava golem = warrior trapped in stone by Haku. Only way to free him: Jack kills him after a fair fight so he joins Valhalla.

11. Shaky, ridiculously long bridge. Jack meets with Scotsman in the middle after 2 days walking on it. Arrogant Scotsman demands that Jack backs up, because he has bounty on his head. Jack refuses, Scotsman trolls with bagpipe, they fight for 2 days. Bounty hunters show up for them both, so they fight together and become friends.

12. Capone-like gangsters from the 20s want to steal magic Water Jewel and gift it to Haku. Jack seizes the opportunity to meet with Haku and teams up with gangsters. Jewel protected by fire, wind, and earth guardians. Jack beats them by making them mix. When Jack meets Haku, gangsters knock him on the head before he can attack Haku.

13. Haku wants to improve his propaganda. Goes to school, tells kids classic tales like Red Riding Hood or 3 pigs, in which Jack is the bad guy. Kids deny them.

14. Jack teaches a jungle tribe to defend itself against evil gorillas. They teach him to "jump good" by attaching weights to him. When they remove the weights, he jumps above trees.

15. 3 tales. 1) Jack is lost. Giant double-headed magic worm says: "One of my head always says the truth, the other always lies. Solve enigma and we show you the path". Jack solves, but the worm eats him anyway. 2) Robot family, want to eat everything, but prefer metal (Jack's sword). When Jack rips one apart, they realize they are made of metal, and eat each other up. 3) Wish fairy protected by gargoyle. Jack frees her but his hand gets locked with hers. Gargoyle wakes up, Jack kills it, gargoyle laughs because only he knew the magic word to remove the manacles. Jack has no other choice but to say "I wish we were free".

16. Jack captured, gladiator for the Dome of Doom. Beats his opponents, asks for everyone to be free.

17. Scotsman's wife kidnapped. Jack and Scott rescue her, but are overwhelmed by the robots. Master of robots calls her fat, she goes berserk and kills everything.

18. Scientist makes 8 robots, trains them to kill Jack, powers them through Haku. Haku tells them to destroy scientist's city, so scientist gives Jack a power gauntlet to kill the robots. Jack kills 7/8, but then gauntlet runs out of power. Jack prays and gains power.

19. Jack visits his old city in ruins. Visions of the past. No action.

20. Jack is hopeless. 3 monks tell him to go to top of a very high mountain. Near the summit, Jack is about to abandon, but realizes he has to go on. He makes it to the top, and regains confidence in his quest.

21.Medieval village tormented by periodic stench. Jack realizes stench comes from dragon farts, goes inside dragon bowels, finds out baby dragon is spitting fire inside.

22. Haku asks 4 legendary hunters to capture Jack. They manage it, but Jack was their best hunt ever, so they grant him freedom instead.

23. Demon, minion of Haku, steals warrior souls and spawns them at will. Jack beats the souls, but the demon keeps spawning them. Only solution: Jack goes inside the demon and frees the souls.

24. Alice in Wonderland-like world. Jack takes a bath, gets his sword stolen by a white rabbit. Jack runs after white rabbit throughout the town, finds out it's only a girl with white-rabbit-looking backpack. She wanted to sell sword for money.

25. 300-like episode. Spartans fight against massive army. Jack shows them secret path to mastermind's citadel, they beat the boss, end of war.

26. Transformers-like robots/motorcycles break Jack's wooden sandals. He tries tennis shoes, heels, goth spiky black shoes, but he has problems with all of them when he tries to beat the robots. He has wooden sandals made in Asian shop, and beats them.

27. Jack stumbles into grumpy wizard in the street. Wizard turns him into a chicken. Jack gets captured, and his master enrolls him into underground coq fights against toxic critters and mini robots. One day, master and Jack walk in the street, master bumps into the wizard. Master turned into chicken, Jack back to human.

28. Graveyard, Haku-controlled zombies, and banshee. Banshee gets control of the sword, Haku appears, stabs Jack with it, but fails: the sword can only do good.

29. Techno music coming from the woods mesmerizes village kids. Jack discovers evil DJ plays Haku songs, defeats him, and frees kids.

30. A Western of robots. Big strong cowboy and his Cancan wife team up to capture Jack. They nearly succeed, but she ends up betraying her husband, and Jack beats both.

31. Haku awakens the 3 minions of Seth. To beat them, need to assemble together 3 pieces of scarab. While pursued by the minions, Jack finds the scarabs and summons Thot, who kills the minions.

32. Magic lake where people can't swim, only sink. Loch Ness monster transports Jack to the island. Series of monsters transport Jack until a time-travel portal. A buffed human guardian protects the portal, awaiting the Chosen One. The guardian wins because the Chosen One is not Jack right now, but Jack in the future.

33. Big, goofy, and peaceful creature follows Jack. When Jack finds time travel jewel, the creature eats it. Jack is furious, but creature still follows. 4 robots come and beat Jack. The creature goes berserk, transforms into something horrible, and kills the robots.

34. Haku disguised as hermit asks Jack for the 3 gems of Chronos, ie the power to travel in time. One temple for each gem. When Jack picks the first gem from its pedestal, water floods the room from a small orifice. Solution: use gem to plug the orifice. Second temple is wind-based. Third gem is inside a glass greenhouse that only opens at sunrise. Soon, the sun rays go through the glass and threaten to burn Jack. Solution: use gem to deflect sun rays and break the glass.

35. Spooky mansion. Jack gets flashes of the past: a dragon/wolf demon possessed ate the soul of the house's inhabitants. The demon eats Jack's soul too, but Jack beats him inside. Very few words are spoken.

36. Giant spiral tower has time travel portal on the top. Jack goes with 2 Shaolin monk friends. Thousands of stone warriors attack them on the way. When they find the portal, the monks are outnumbered and tell Jack to go, but he can't let them die. The portal disappears.

37. Jack wants to steal the jewel inside a pyramid filled with traps. Another thief, using spy tools, enters the pyramid at the same time. They go their own ways, pass similar traps in different ways. When they pick the jewel, robots appear, they are outnumbered, the thief leaves Jack behind, but regrets, goes back, and saves him. Outside, they argue so much over the jewel that they break it.

38. Haku hires ninja. Ninja lures Jack inside a hollow tower filled with wooden planks. Ninja hides in the shade of the planks, Jack hides in the light. All is black or white. As the sun sets, Jack loses ground. Solution: Jack blinds ninja with his sword and kill him by throwing his sword at him.

39. Mondobot, a 100 meter-tall robot, used to protect a city of robots. After it started to attack the city, the citizens tell Jack to find a legendary Power Ranger-like megabot hidden underwater. Jack goes inside, becomes the megabot. Mondobot fires guns at megabot, useless. They sword-fight until both swords break. Then fist fight, Jack wins.

40. Inn. Funky groovy Black guy says he is the real Jack. He duels Jack, they go outside, Jack asks to use bamboo swords, Jack wins. Haku robots show up, Jack kills them. They re-assemble behind Jack's back, the impostor sees it and warns Jack, who kills them again, and thanks the impostor.

41 and 42. Haku's origins. 3 original gods fought evil in space, but did not clean well. Tiny part falls on Earth, a big black pool of goo, passive but evil. Brave Asian emperor uses magic potion to clean the pool, but it only transforms into Haku. The gods send a horse to ride the emperor to a magic forge. At the forge, they make a sword able to kill Haku, and banish Haku in the ground.

43 and 44. Scotsman on a steamboat meets a waiter who looks like Jack, but denies he is Jack. To make him remember, he makes the lookalike fight bounty hunters, but he is weak and loses. Scotsman abandons, until singing sirens lure the ship, its crew, and Jack to their island. They hypnotize everyone. Scotsman on the ship is immune, says "his wife sings better", and plays the bagpipe to wake up everyone, including Jack.

45. Haku was sick, and unknowingly gave Jack his virus. Jack becomes angry and evil, and is neutralized by monks. While locked at the monastery, he fights Haku inside himself.

46. 5 bounty hunters, with their own idiosyncrasies, gather at a place rumored to have Jack. They team up and make a complex plan to ambush him. When Jack shows up, Jack is too fast/strong and ruins all parts of their plans.

47. Aliens land on Earth, need their ship fixed. Haku captures them while Jack was watching. Jack frees them.

48. Haku asks for a duel against Jack without his sword. Jack agrees only if 1) no shape shifting, 2) no minions, 3) no super power. Jack beats Haku, so Haku cheats and changes shape. Jack goes to pick up his sword, but a minion grabs it before him. Jack knew Haku would cheat, so he hid thousands of copies of his sword around. Haku loses his temper and leaves.

49. Summer: Jack hallucinates in the desert heat, fights shadows, gets tired. He concentrates on his qi and finds a real oasis. Fall: mad scientist makes potion to kill Jack, pours it into a well. Jack shows up, cautious, but only pretends to drink. Mad scientist does not understand, drinks, and dies. Winter: grim blacksmiths forge epic sword in a long process, and give it to their champion to beat Jack. First hit, Jack cuts the sword in two. Spring: a spirit lulls Jack to rest and sleep. He agrees, but keeps thinking of Haku. The spirit tries to force him to stay, Jack fights and beats it.

50. Robot with emotion chip, in love with his dog "Loulou, sweet thing". Haku kidnaps the dog, forces robot to attack Jack. He gets beaten by Jack, but asks him to take care of Loulou.

51. Jack as a child, sent to an African tribe to learn their martial arts. Makes friend with chief's child. One day, villagers imprisoned by evil men paid by Haku. Jack learns how their weird weapon works, and frees the villagers. Then the villagers beat the evil men.

52. Jack finds a baby without his mother. Baby whines, so Jack has to find milk, cure the kid, and fight off trolls who want to eat it. The baby's eyes see everything. When the mother comes, the baby has Jack's serious look on his face.

Game Architecture and Design - part 1: Design

Game Architecture and Design - part 1: Design, by Rollings and Morris, 2004

Ch1 - First concept

Originality can come from the gameplay, story, setting, characters, interface, or technology. It can also come from unexpected combinations. For example, a vampire living on a foggy island must fight against invading pirates. Present it through Indonesian shadow puppets, or Dia de los Muertos, or The Terror in France. It helps to think of movies, books, or music related to the theme.

Ch2 - Core design

Player goals can range from collecting something, gaining territory, racing, removing obstacles (finding keys to open doors), discovering (eg puzzles), or beating/killing other players. Provide means for these goals, and think about the feelings conveyed.

Emergence can be defined as complexity arising from simple rules. That is, rules interacting with rules or the environment. Populous preachers provide an interesting example of emergence. Preachers can convert warriors to their side unless those warriors are already in battle. Thus the first wave of enemy warriors will be converted by the preachers, but the second wave of warriors will fight with the converted warriors instead of being converted. These two simple rules force the player to regularly check her defenses.

Trivial choices are choices the players will always or never take. They should be avoided or left for the computer/AI to perform for the player. For example, when an ennemy unit is in sight, the player's units should shoot.

Ch3 - Gameplay

Synergies (also from slides by Claypool)

	of scale	of scope
Economy	The more of one unit, the cheaper/better/stronger. Ex: making more knights reduces their shadow cost per unit.	The more of a set, the better. Ex: trident + net, healer + tank + DPS.
Diseconomy	Benefits decrease with quantity.	Ex: mixed troops go as fast as their slowest member.

An interesting decision has an upside, a downside, and the payoff depends on circumstances (eg other players, environment, or self). For example, a Starcraft Terran player can choose to upgrade his Marine's attack range or attack rate. If the opponent plays Zergs, upgrading the attack rate is a very good choice. If the opponent plays Protoss, Marines are generally not the way to go (unless for surprise effect in a Marine-Vulture rush).

The shadow cost of a unit is any requirement the player had to pay before buying that unit. For example, knights require the cavalry technology ($100) and stables ($200). Knights can be purchased at the stables for $50. Thus making the first knight has a direct cost of $50 and a total shadow cost of $100 + $200 = $300. So overall, the knight costs $350. Making a second knight still costs $50, but reduces the shadow cost per knight to $300/2 = $150. Overall, making 2 knights costs $50 + $150 = $200 per knight. The tenth knight still costs $50, but decreases the shadow cost per knight to $30. At that point, the overall cost of a knight is $50 + $30 = $80.

Supporting investments are remotely related to the player's goal. For example, one needs to build farms to produce food to feed knights. Farms are a 2-degree supporting investment (farm - food - knights). Upgrading the damage of knights is a 1-degree supporting investment (upgrade - knights).

Costs (whether normal costs, supporting investments, or shadow costs) also depend on the environment. In Age of Empires, a unit costs 40 woods and takes 40 seconds to build. In the early game, things start slowly, so the expensive part is the 40 woods. Mid-game, events happen quickly, so the expensive part is 40 seconds. End-game, wood is depleted, so 40 woods is expensive again.

Strategic (ie long-term) choices will later impact tactical (short-term) choices.

Impermanence is an interesting choice: should I receive armor+100 for 30 seconds, or armor+5 forever?

Versatile choices are good for beginners. In an RTS, speed makes units more versatile.

Ch5 - Balance

Rewards = gameplay payoffs + graphics eye-candy.

Component balance = comparing unit A to unit B.

Attribute balance = comparing attack range to attack power (in a small map, attack range is not as important as attack power).

Ch6 - Look and feel

A list of storytelling techniques.

Obstacles: the player has to decipher/fight/think about the events to make the plot progress

Foreshadowing: prepare for the plot by giving a hint/preview. Ex: in an RTS, a couple clubmen attack my settlement. They were only scouts of a larger army ...

Personalization: saving the world is cliche and bad. Instead, the sexy princess asks ME to save her. Saving the world is a side-effect. The player identifies with his avatar during gameplay AND cutscenes. If the avatar has 2 hours to find a cure for himself, the player cares.

Resonance: The most subtle consists of repeated images that defy instant critical analysis. More direct: visual symbols that directly express the subtext.

Resistance: elements that delay the unfolding of the story. Helps suspend disbelief. The best way to involve the hero in a crazy story is by having him refuse at first. Ex: "please save the president" - "no, i'm retired" (this surprises the audience) - the bad guy kidnaps his daughter - "OK I'll do it"

Plot point: confound expectations or change the story's direction. 3 types: reversal (traitor!), discovery (a change from ignorance to knowledge, usually most effective when paired with reversals), and calamity (Gandalf dies at the beginning of the journey!). Ideally, each level begins and ends with a plot point, ideally during gameplay rather than during a cutscene. Early plot points deepen the story, later plot points clear u[ mysteries. Small plot points every 30 mins, big plot points every 3h.

Suspense: fear and expectation.

Dialogue: not needed if images can convey the idea better. Can give more colorful details.

Theme: Do not answer the questions you ask. Ex in Matrix: What is reality? How powerful is love?

Resolution: should be hard-won (satisfaction from effort), not obvious, satisfying (morally or aesthetically), consistent (with what happened so far), and achieve closure (solve problems of the story). Could use self-sacrifice at the end: when the avatar dies, the story naturally ends for the player.

Change: Change in the status quo causes the action. At the end, the hero must have changed in some ways (he learned or failed to learn something, grew up, ...).

Quests - Howard 2008

Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives by Jeff Howard, in 2008.

History of quest games

Year	Game	Innovations
1974	DnD	GM as referee, quests taken from Celtic, Norse, and Arthurian mythologies.
1976	Adventure	on computer, first RPG, network play
1983	King's Quest series	cut scenes, music, multiple endings, optional puzzles, and side-quests.
1985	Ultima IV series	virtues, colors, and classes are related
1986	Zelda series	quest status screen shows the player's progress, first action-adventure game.
1999	EQ	proliferating tasks rather than a single main quest
2004	WoW	lore quests, the never-ending war theme is a bleak scenario not particularly conductive to meaningful gameplay: failing a quest is not problematic.

Intro

Campbell's "Hero's Journey" consists of separation, initiation, and return. The individual builds himself, as found in medieval romances. In games, the initiation phase is lengthened and repeated, since it has most action.

A quest is an action that is meaningful to a player. It's also called a "mission" in games with a modern setting.

Ludologically, a quest has goals and consists of searching a functional meaning: a key opens a door, therefore the player should look for a door. A sword kills monsters, therefore the player is expecting to encounter enemies soon. Once meaning is found, the quest is over.

Narratologically, a quest has a story. The story and the lore motivate and immerse the player in the task.

But actually, meaningful quests come from striking a balance between too much action and too much narrative, while keeping in mind the big picture of the game's meaning. Except for XP and loot, why is that quest important to the player? What satisfaction does the player get by doing that quest? Here are some clues:

• Impact on the world: achievement, gaining power, learning about the lore, altering political or moral balance, or changing relationships with NPCs
• Back story: motivation to learn what happened before or what is going to happen after the quest is over.
• Lore: themes and ideas encoded within the world, such as religion, politics, landscape, objects, or challenges. "The world itself is the puzzle", and the player shows his opinions by playing the game.

Symbols should be tied to game mechanics. For example, in Ultima, completing a quest requires understanding the world's allegorical meanings: some colors are associated to a class and a quality (red = warrior = valor). Obtaining a part of a relic should open a door or provide a new power

In the end, the player may quest to make the plot progress, improve his avatar, or to try out fun gameplay. Ideally, a quest should combine the three, but it gets tricky in games where the player is allowed to pursue quests in the order he wants.

Spaces

Both macro and micro levels should guide the player towards the general direction to go to. Both should create a sense of progression and convey a meaning by their layout.

Micro level: balancing exploration and challenge. Tiered spaces such as towers or crypts are easy to navigate: traveling towards the highest or lowest level ensures challenges and rewards. Mazes with a sort of structure also work. There should also be disorientation elements such as traps, secret doors, or dead-ends, as well as obstacles standing between the player and his goal.

Macro level: quest hubs. Hubs are known and relatively safe places such as cities or campgrounds where the player is given quests and has to return to complete them. Hubs are surrounded by several quest locations. WoW has breadcrumb quests to encourage exploration, but no main quest; that makes the world seem disconnected and episodic. See the Morrowind map: the player starts on the periphery of the world, and travels clockwise from hub to hub until Ghostgate at the center of the map for the final encounter.

Dreams within games create initiatory spaces: the avatar can be changed into an animal, a ghost, or an older self, but remains controlled by the player, increasing the sense of immersion in the non-dream game world.

Characters

Cf Propp's dramatis personae at the beginning of theater scripts: characters are not defined by their traits, but by their actions: villain, donor, helper, or hero.

Dialog: keep it short, and let players have choices. yes/no selections are too simple: add a reason to add meaning. Example: NPC says "Take this money as a reward to save my kids". Player should not simply be given "OK", or "accept"/"refuse", but rather "I don't need money to save kids" (which shifts the player's alignment to lawful good) or "You don't have to give me the money - I'm going to kill you myself" (evil, and eventually summons the guards).

One quest per NPC is rare in modern RPGs.

Quest types

Name	Description
fetch	find an object and return it to an NPC
delivery	give an object to an NPC
dungeon crawl	go to certain points of a dungeon - and get loot on the way
escort/protect	usually an NPC, but could be a fellow player too
kill/combat	the most loaded with meaning: killing a peasant is very different from killing a demon. Opponents have to be obstacles to the plot

Objects

Most objects that the player collects are useless (sold to NPCs for money) or functional (healing potion, armor). But certain objects can motivate quests if they are:

• needed but missing,
• loaded with symbols,
• relatively powerful,
• fun to use (eg cast a random skill),
• with a distinct appearance (eg the Tatoos of Planescape Torment)

Sometimes, these objects only are MacGuffins: they are unimportant in themselves but motivate and unfold the plot.

The rod of seven parts: make a story from the whole and powerful artifact, break it apart, and spread the pieces around the world. The story follows naturally, and the players discover the meaning of the quest gradually. It also encourages exploration. Micro-level example: the 3-headed flail from the De'Arnise Hold in Baldur's Gate 2 requires the player to fully investigate the whole castle, and not just go directly to the boss.

There are varieties of ways the player can get an object: looted, forged, stolen, summoned by a sacrifice, or found in a chest at the bottom of a cave. But the way the player gets in possession of an object should give clues about using that object. Examples: a mace loot from a giant should require lots of strength. Frostmourne, given by the Lich King to trick Arthas the paladin, is obviously cursed.

Challenges

Tie the quest presentation to the world map and the log book. The logs of completed quests must give clues about the next quests or where to find them.

Conflicting goals make interesting choices. For example, in Ultima IV, the avatar gains compassion points by not killing 'good' characters, and gain valor points by never backing down from a fight. Interesting choice arises when the player is attacked by a 'good' character. [But what the player chooses (ie the player's opinion) differs from why he was given the choice in the first place (ie the meaning of the game).]

See also: hero's journey.

The Beautiful Road: A Writer’s Guide to Putting Gameplay First

Notes from a CGVW talk by Dave Kosak, a Blizzard quest designer, at UC Irvine on February 22nd 2012. Original talk called "The Beautiful Road: A Writer’s Guide to Putting Gameplay First" delivered at GDC Online 2011.
TLDR: When gameplay comes first, story-telling must make it beautiful, not suffocate it. There are different ways than text to convey story and characters.

The problem

Games can be story-driven (RPG or interactive fiction), gameplay-driven (Blizzard's "gameplay first"), technology-driven (early games on Kinect, or to show off a 3D engine like Crysis), or money-driven (Zynga). How can stories be included in gameplay-driven games?

Looking at other media, telling a story requires different amounts of time: books take 10 hours, movies 2 hours, sitcom episodes 20 min. Books are walls of text, movies have long scripts, and sitcon episodes have at most 3-page scripts.
In MMOs, it's hard to display walls of text: there's a limited amount of screen and UI real-estate, and players have a limited amount of attention. Players can pay attention to the story most in calm solo exploration, slightly less in group quests, even less in dungeon raids, and nearly not at all in intense PvP.

In Diablo, the core gameplay activity is kill -> loot -> sell -> repeat. Content designers should not obstruct the core activity, e.g. with cutscenes during game action. Instead, content designers should enhance the core gameplay activity. If gameplay is a road, content should be beautiful flowers on the side of the road.

Brevity is key. Example: the Red Dead Redemption mission called free the captured sheriff. When the player sees this line popping on the screen, and the minimap showing markers for sheriff, outlaws, and nearby weapons, she figures out herself what to do first: she could go save the sheriff, kill outlaws, or look for a powerful weapon. Moreover, the quest becomes an answer to the situation presented to the player: why has the sheriff been captured? Which kind of person is the sheriff?

Telling a story without a wall of text is possible through:

• dynamic level design
• dynamic environment aesthetics (changing to reflect quest progression/completion)
• events triggered when player arrives
• hints in NPC or enemy dialogues

Characters

Character geometry: balance between too few traits = cliche, and too many traits = too complicated + boring + harder to understand. Example: Sylvanas Windrunner is persistent, protective, and hard-hearted. When she becomes undead, all her traits are even more accentuated. Other example: Han Solo is cocky, scoundrel, and egocentric.

Interactions with other characters and the background of the character let us know, without the need for a wall of text, a character's traits. Ex: Han Solo leaves his friends when they need him, Luke meets him in a shady place, he owes money to Jabba.

Quirks are not traits: quirks are minor and only serve to further individualise a character. You can find a list of traits there.

• 1-dim characters: enemies or minor allies. Ex: Hungry ogre.
• 2-dim, with 1 expected and 1 unexpected = interesting: quest givers and companions. Ex: elf druid who is protective (expected) + violent (unexpected).
• 3-dim: franchise characters such as Arthas = cocky + practical + naive. Only and exactly those 3 traits make him pick Frostmourne. When he turns undead, naive becomes power-hungry.
• 4-dim: Freeman's character diamond. Often leads to contradictions between traits, also called masks, which can either be total pretense (clown pretends he's happy but is actually depressed), partially revealing, or representing a character's aspirations. Used in marketing personas and novels.

How to compel people to a character: Cf Writing screenplays that sell:

• sympathy
• jeopardy (we want Indiana Jones to survive)
• talent/good at what they're doing
• funny
• heroic/noble
• independent/do their own thing/own quirks
• artistic/admires beauty (ex: Sherlock Holmes plays the violin)

Cliches can be used as a shortcut to establish a character. When established, take the cliche, and throw it away: Her eyes were as blue as the sky can become Her eyes sparkled like saphires on black velvet (jewels give a refined connotation) or Her eyes were the same milky blue as my mother's eyes were before I killed her (surprise and suspense!).

Social status shows differences between high-class people (smooth movement, complete sentences, slow speech, direct eye contact) and lower-class people. Body language also works. Cf the movie 300. Changing status generates interesting dramatic situations. Ex: the boss has high status at work, but when he's back home, he's low status obeying his wife.

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch 12: Level Design

Level design = determine level's initial conditions, pacing (stressful or calm, genre-dependent) challenges, win/loss conditions, cut scene locations, aesthetics and mood (lighting, color palette, weather, special visual and audio effects, music, ambient audio), through tools.

Level design process

1. Determine level features: events, objects, NPC
2. Plan the gameplay: layout, challenge areas, win/lose conditions. Plan also the art: textures, styles, moods, ...
3. Prototype: requires that the game engine is at least partially working. Use mockups to place triggers and document what sets triggers off (= rigging).
4. Keep reviewing (with other people) and refining the level's size, pacing, objects, triggers, NPCs, and aesthetics.
5. Hand off the level to the art team with requirements and documentation.
6. Integrate visual and audio art assets, bug fix, and tune.

Guidelines

• tutorial = included in the first levels of the actual game (not as a side) = hands-on learning. Start explaining the most used features one by one. Disable unused features to avoid confusing the player. Explain UI elements and point at them visually (blinking or glowing). Let player go back and try the tutorial examples again. Allow the tutorial to be skipped.
• vary pacing within a level
• after player surmounts resource-consuming challenges, player should be given resources to come back
• avoid things that do not make sense/inconsistencies
• scope: do not get too big, adapt levels to team's capacity
• do not show all the challenges to in one level - introduce features gradually
• know your audience
• atypical levels should be optional: either they break suspension of disbelief or the challenges are foreign to the genre, and are therefore not exciting for players who like the genre. Atypical levels should be unlockable, hidden levels, or side missions, but not in the main progression.
• inform player of short-term goals
• be clear about risks, rewards, and consequences of decisions
• reward for skill, imagination, intelligence and dedication
• reward a lot, punish a little
• The AI is here to lose
• provide multiple difficulty settings
• action games: vary the pace/players must be able to rest
• strategy games: reward planning, give advantageous locations but let the player find them
• RPG: allow character growth and player self-expression
• sports: verisimilitude
• vehicle: reward skillful maneuvers
• construction and management sims: provide interesting variety of scenarios (= initial conditions and goals)
• adventure: challenges consistent with their location and the story
• artificial life: offer a lot of interactions between creature and environment
• puzzle: give time to think

Layout patterns

Pattern	Indications
open	player's movement has no constraints
linear	works well with linear stories
parallel	works well with foldback stories, shortcuts possible
ring	mostly only for racing games
network	maze, good for explorers, hard to tell a story because the path is quite free. If all major spaces are connected, then exploration is easy: it's good for FPS deathmatches.
hub and spoke/star	start at center, challenges and rewards in branches
combination	many kinds of games!

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch 7: Storytelling and narrative

Include stories in games because they

• give context,
• attract a wider audience than bare gameplay,
• keep players interested and offer variety in long games,
• can be marketing/advertising tools

A game needs a story if it has characters, it's not too abstract (unlike Creepsmash), or if the designer wants to convey emotions.

Concepts

A story is a credible, coherent, and dramatically meaningful series of events. Interactive story contains player-performed, NPC-initiated, and narrative events. Narrative is presentational, non-interactive. Its goal is to explain why things happen in the game world.

Players want to act, but narrative is passive. Always give the player a way to skip narrative materials.

Dramatic tension happens when a viewer realizes something important is happening and he wants to know what happens next. Dramatic tension is the essence of storytelling, thanks to cliffhangers and climax. It depends on the reader's identification with a character (ability to identify and sympathize). Dramatic events should not be repetitive or happen randomly.

Gameplay tension happens when a player wants to overcome a challenge. It is caused by uncertainty of success. Can happen randomly and be repetitive (Tetris).

Linear stories

Players can't change linear stories (but still interacts with them). Require less content. Storytelling engine does not have to store critical player decisions (because player does not decide anything, illusion of choice).Guarantee that the story makes sense and is consistent with previous events. Player has no dramatic freedom, but the story has a greater emotional power.

Non-linear stories

Branching

Branchpoint is determined by in-game (NPC) events or player events. Player events consist of effort to overcome a challenge (resulting in success or failure) or a decision about the story.
Consequence of a choice can be immediate or deferred, and punctual or cumulative (ie throughout the game). Player should know which actions have which kind of consequences, otherwise it can seem unfair.
The story engine stores a story tree and the player's current position in the tree. There can be different starts based on character skills/status or randomly. Consistency requires the same node to never be visited twice.
Advantages: player has dramatic freedom, can try to explore story tree when re-playing from start.
Drawbacks: need lot of content, expensive to implement, player has to re-start a lot to see a significantly different story branch,

Foldback

Compromise between linear and branching. Players think they have control over the story the first time they play through the game, but not when they replay. Some events have no turning back because they are critical (eg death of a sidekick/ally). The designers want those events to be inevitable to convey emotions.

Emergent narrative

Story comes from play in itself. The story engine is the mechanics engine. The Sims is kind of like that. Hard because mechanics are maths, and procedurally generating emotionally meaningful stories is hard with maths.

Endings

Generate emotions. Multiple endings if you want to reflect player's dramatic choices. Choices taken when overcoming challenges do not need multiple endings (they're not emotionally meaningful).

Granularity

How often the game presents narrative elements to the player. RTS have rare cut-scenes between 2 levels, their story has large granularity. Minuscule granularity means player actions are the actual story.

Mechanisms for advancing the plot

• Series of challenges or choices: the plot advances as player overcomes challenges. Usual in large-grained games.
• Journey: travel is a key component. Player can stay in an area at will, therefore she controls the pace.
• Drama: advances at its own pace (player is just watching)

Emotional limits of interactive stories

Stories have characters. When player identifies/sympathizes with one, he can feel emotions. When the player takes decisions for his avatar, the designer has to accept them. However, bad decisions may result in a meaningless ending. Therefore, the designer may want to allow a single meaningfully emotional ending. Readers hardly believe that the narrator will die in the middle of the story. In games, player's avatar is telling the story. If he dies, the story has to stop. Avatar friends can die, though. Be a game designer, not a film maker. Interactivity is crucial.

Episodes

• Unlimited series: each episode opens and closes a plot strand. Episodes have no order. Ex: Simpsons
• Serials: Plot strands start and end in any episode. Cliffhangers are used to keep viewer interested. There's no ending, and the plot focuses on a group of people rather than on a single person. Ex: soap operas
• Limited series: plot is season-long and episodes contain sub-plots. Ex: Harry Potter movies, Dexter, 24.
• Multi-part stories: each end of an episode should resolve a conflict. Ex: Star Wars and Terminator movies.

[Literature] Game Balance ch7 - Advancement, progression and pacing

My notes from course 7 of the Game Balance class of Summer 2010, by Ian Schreiber.

Progression is ...	in games that are ...
absolute	PvE/single player
relative to other players	PvP/multiplayer

Flow has two problems: different player audiences have different skills, and players learn throughout the game.
Balance = overall game difficulty, does not solve these problems. Balance only matches audience expectation.
Progression/Pacing = keeping the player in the flow zone. As player skill increases, so do challenges. Progression ensures the game ends in the time frame said by the box (1min for arcade, 40h for RPG, etc.). If the game is endless, then progression = end-game rewarding structure(s).

When transitioning from mid- to end- or elder game, the objectives change from progressing to something else. Game designer has to find something for the player to do. Ex: WoW guild raiding or making your house cute in Farmville/Sims. Problems: some players may like the progression game but not the elder game. The power gathered during progression game should be available and enjoyable during elder game.
Tips:

• As playtesters test the game, they become experts => the game gets tuned harder => make the game easier at the end, and/or keep some playtesters for the end.
• Let players adjust the difficulty themselves (more challenging but also more rewarding levels or adjusting the difficulty level at any time). In PVP, difficulty adjustment should be voluntary (handicap, resources at the beginning, ...).

PVE

Perceived difficulty = (game power challenge + game skill challenge) - (player power + player skill), with:

• Game power challenge = stats (doubling opponents HP makes the game harder)
• Game skill challenge = new enemies or better AI, direct challenge to the player's skill (you need to play better) and not a player's power (you need more hit points to win). A game designer can control power-related, but not skill-related components of difficulty.

Large luck component or shallow mechanics: a short increase in player skill as the player masters what little they can at the beginning. Then skill plateau (player is as good as she can ever be). A minute to learn, a minute to master. This is the design of educational games (where skill is not the priority).

Giving practice zones where new weapons or powers are acquired makes players learn/increase their skill faster. Skill gating = progressively harder challenges, guarantee that if players complete a challenge, then they are ready for the next. Skill gating != practice zones.

Psychology: “reward schedule” or “risk/reward cycle”: you don’t just want the players to progress, you want them to feel like they are being rewarded for playing well. Reward not too rarely and not too often. Many small rewards are more efficient than a single big reward. Regular rewards = bad. Reward for something players were looking for (otherwise the game seems too easy) and not for a random event (eg "inflict exactly 123 dmg"). 3 kinds of rewards related to progression: increasing player power, level transitions, and story progression.

Increasing player power

If the most fun toy in your game is only discovered 2/3rds of the way through, that’s a lot of time the player doesn’t get to have fun. How do you actually keep the player engaged when you've given away all the cool toys early in the game? One way is if your mechanics have a lot of depth, you can just present unique combinations of things to the player to keep them challenged and engaged. Warning: this is really hard to do in practice. You can also use other rewards more liberally after you shut off the new toys: more story, more stat increases, more frequent boss fights or level transitions. Also, toy upgrades.
Better shorten the game than have it too long and boring.

Level transitions

Each level takes a little bit longer than the last: fast progression at start engages player into the game, later levels can be longer because player wants to know the end of the plot.

Story progression

Story really IS a reward. There should be a match between story complication/climax curve and the difficulty curve. Ex: tutorial = exposition scene, miniboss = rising action, final boss = final climax. Final boss should not be as demanding on player skill as kill 10 rats.

Pattern: do not reveal the story only during level transition; instead, revealing additional background story immediately after a fight (even an easy one) makes players feel like they earned it. (But do not do that all the time otherwise it becomes predictble!)

PvP

Acquiring more power than opponents = primary reward. PvP has more options to play with than PVE because everything is relative, there's no defined level/stats to reach to be "strong".

negative feedback loops => more power when behind and less power when ahead => best player alternates => depends on opponents, no one is left behind (ex: Mario Kart with dynamic difficulty adjustment).
positive feedback loop => more power brings more power => best stays best => independent of the opponents, game ends faster, bad start is deadly (ex: League of Legends).

	positive sum	negative sum	zero sum
Definition	sum of all player resources increases over time	players lose power over time. Goal = lose power more slowly than opponents.	fixed amount of resources on the table
Example	Catan, Agricola	Chess	Poker
Positive feedback
Negative feedback			Solution: Each player spends time in the lead before one player's final blow ends the game.

When both players have realized who is going to win, the game should end quickly.

[Conf] Game design = learning design = game design

On June 19th, James Gee gave the opening keynote at FDG2010. You can find the abstract page xix. Here are some notes I took during the talk.

Games convey learning better than schools do.

A concentrated sample is a basic language sample for a 1-year-old kid learning language. But people do not speak simply enough, they do not send basic samples only. Nature's solution is: kids filter and simplify what they receive, they can only process simple sentences. Kids are built to be limited. What could be a boss battle in language? For games, the problem is: how to be sure players get only the bits of information they need to progress. Games are guided experience on concentrated sample for future learning. Each level is a preparation for the following level, each level is learning. A boss is here only to test if the player is prepared to learn more. A better player is a better learner.

Experts only know one thing, they overvalue it and undervalue their other knowledge. WoW is distributed experts who also understand other classes' expertise. With the Damage Meter add-on, DPS free-riders are spotted.

Learning is helped by the emotional impact found in games. Why would I save people in the game? Why would I play? The story is here to kick-in emotions and motivate players. Stories are the only way to do it.

There is always performance before competence. The problem is trainees need to trust their trainers, otherwise they fear to perform. In games, there is performance: it is players looking at other players or NPC. Bonus: the intelligence is distributed. The community helps learning. This works particularly well with modding.

A game is fair when players admit I can win if I get better.

For Baby Boomers, intelligence meant speed and efficiency. For today kids, it is adaptation.

[Literature] Tolkien: An Event Based Storytelling System

In this short paper from 2009, Satish et al. introduce Tolkien, an event-based storytelling system. This paper has an obvious link to interactive storytelling and fiction, but there could also be interesting applications to non-static or random content-generation in MMOG as well.

The authors define a story as a time-ordered coherent sequence of events. They consider a database filled with events and event-related data (video, audio, images, texts). Storytelling is simply retrieving appropriate events from the database in a particular order, and filter/adapt them to a particular audience. The filtering allows to show personal events such as birthdays to friends and relatives, music-related events to music-lovers or professional events such as conference talks to coworkers. Interactive storytelling approaches are inefficient in filtering large collections of events and most do not adapt to their audience.

[In the rest of the article, it is quite hard to understand in details what happens because the authors change their notations and names regularly. For instance, they use "objects" without having defined what they are. The "preference triple" definition has only two components. And so forth...

Each node of a directed acyclic graph represents an event. Events contain a spatio-temporal description and a semantics I_type. Edges are relations that connect events. Since relations are heterogeneous, they need different labels (found in the vocabulary L).

The storytelling process consists of two phases. First, the author specifies which events can be included in the story. Then the selected events are processed into a story tailored to the preferences of each member of the audience. (see figure below)

Story scripting

The scripting language the author can use to write the story script is actually a pseudo-SQL language. Example:

FIND $events FROM aParticularFile
FOR e IN $events
{
   FIND $museumsAtNY WHERE (activity = 'museum' 
                            AND datetime = '24 December 2008')
}
TELL $museumsAtNY

Compiling based on audience's preferences

Each member of the audience has its own preferences. For each member of the audience, these preferences are computed into a preference list, which is a a set of (pref_name, score). The score is a float between -1 (dislike) and 1 (like). For event e_i and person p_j, event interestingness is computed from the attributes of e_i and the preference list of p_j. It reflects how much an event should be incorporated into a specific viewer's story.

Story interestingness defines how interesting a story will be for a particular viewer. It is updated each time an event is added to the story. The addition of an event to the story aims at keeping story interestingness as high as possible. It can happen that the author's script requires to add an event reducing the story interestingness.

Architecture

Concretely, the viewer's preferences could be retrieved from a Google Calendar, Twitter or Facebook page (hence the WWW on the architecture diagram). The description of the rest of the architecture is given by the authors quite consicely:

The script contains a specification of the story as well as instructions on how to modify it depending of the audience. The script is first analyzed by a Script Processor to check for lexical errors. This provides the Compiler an error-free script with which it creates an operator tree. This operator tree would be stored in a cache. Once the preference list of the audience is known to the Run Time Processor, this tree is converted to a series of Index lookups and queries to the Eventbase. This database contains detailed event descriptions with the relevant media items. The results of these queries are then collected and sent to the Web-UI.
-- Arjun et al.

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch6: Character Development

Even though characters should have a clear role to the player, they must not be too stereotypical (if they are, they should have a little something that differentiates them from the standard stereotype). Characters should be credible. Even if they can be complex, they must stay consistent. Like in movies, a game's IP and marketing often rely on the main character. Games often use the main character's name for the game title to make consumers associate the IP with the character. Examples are Super Mario Bros, Duke Nukem or Sonic the Hedgehog. In short, characters should be appealing, believable, and the players should be able to identify with them. Incongruity and Disharmonious elements can be introduced for humor's sake.

Relationship between player and avatar

In RPGs where the player avatar is designed by the player, the avatar has no personality other than what the player chooses to create. In old textual adventure games (or Half Life), avatars (like Gordon Freeman) are nonspecific: the game designer does not need to specify or ask anything to the player about the avatar because the player never sees it. But computer graphics improved. It became awkward to write more and more complex stories about empty avatars.

Avatars became specific. Depending on how the player controls the avatar, he/she will not identify with it the same way. Some avatars such as Mario or Lara Croft remain puppets inside the hands of the player. Others such as April Ryan from The Longest Journey have their own will (she refuses to act too dangerously when the player asks her to). The avatar utterances can also be very important to the player. April Ryan speaks a lot (and sometimes gives clues to the player when she talks) while Gordon Freeman from Half-Life does not speak at all. The player can be directly inside the avatar (Half-Life) or just suggesting where it could move (The Longest Journey). Semispecific avatars are between nonspecific and specific avatars: the player does not know enough about them to form an opinion, but these avatars have a decent background (like Link in Zelda or Mario).

Men can identify with female avatars as long as the character is acting in a role that men are comfortable with such as exploration or adventure. However, women can be disgusted by hyper-sexualized female avatars. While men tend to simply use an avatar as a puppet, women care more about it and may appreciate to be able to customize it as they wish. The more details given by the designer about an avatar, the more independent it will be.

Personality

Three factors help show a character's personality: its appearance, behavior and language.

Visual appearances: art-driven character design

Art-driven character design consists of thinking about characters' appearance first. It is usually employed for quite shallow and straightforward characters that can also be used in other media like TV or comics. Characters can be humanoid (2 legs, 2 arms and a head), non-humanoid (vehicles, machines, animals or monsters) or hybrids , robots like C-3POr cyborgs). Cartoon appearances can provide 4 stereotypes to characters:

• cool (detached but focused, clever and often rebellious to authority) like Ratchet or Otcho
• tough (aggressive, strong, often hyper-sexualized) like Duke Nukem or Lara Croft,
• cute (large eyes and heads, round body, innocent look but sometimes handle weapons bigger than themselves), like Mario, Sonic or Pikachu
• goofy (funny, comedic), typically like Goofy from Disney

Representations of stereotypes may vary depending on the culture (cute in a manga is not the same as cute in Tintin or Marvels) and age (cute or scary is differently represented for 5-year-old girls or 30-year-old men). Although kids love cartoonish characters, they hate goody-two-shoes ones.

Clothes and weapons suggest a lot about a character: see Darth Vader's helmet or Indiana Jones' hat and whip. A rapier suggests elegance, while a meat cleaver suggests blood and violence. Jewelry and accessories such as crowns, bracelets or rings also help a lot to recognize a character's role. They can also act as containers of skills or powers that can be transfered between characters. Names (Bugs Bunny), nicknames (Snake), clothes color palette (blue, red and yellow for Superman versus plain black for Batman) or sidekicks (Tails for Sonic or Watson for Holmes) also help define the characters. Sidekicks can also sometimes help the player (the fairy Navy in Zelda) or provide an additional perspective of the hero to the player.

Concept art is done early in the design process and should not consists of too elaborated drawings. The concept arts are to be used by the marketing and programmer teams to get a rough idea of the game.

Behaviors: story-driven character design

Story-driven character design consists of thinking about the character's role, personality and behavior rather than its appearance. Artists come after the designer has decided how the avatar interacts with the game mechanics. Even though the interactions were not really complex, SSX Tricky gained a lot in including meaningful character rivalries in a snowboard game.

When characters appear for the first time to the player, there is a minimum of information about them to give to the player: where does the new character come from? Why does the avatar meet him/her? Also, character traits should be shown/seen/experienced rather than directly mentioned in the game handbook. Behaviors convey more depth about character's personalities than their appearances, providing the player has opportunities to observe these behaviors.

A character can be described by its attributes. Status attributes such as Health Points change frequently while characterization attributes such as age or gender (nearly) never change in the game. Emotional states and relationships like in the Sims are another very recent kind of attributes that describe characters' behaviors.

Dimensionality can give a more realistic perception of a character. The table nearby, deeply inspired by figures 6.9 to 6.12 of the book, illustrates the possible dimensions of characters found in the Lord of the Rings. Zero-dimensional characters have binary emotional states with no mixed feelings. They may have more than two emotional states, though. One-dimensional characters only have one emotion that can change during the game. Two-dimensional characters have multiple non-conflicting impulses, they face no ambiguity, while three-dimensional characters can have contradictory and conflicting emotions producing inconsistent behaviors. Three-dimensional characters can do things they do not really want to, reluctantly, or even sabotage their own efforts subconsciously.

Number of character dimensions	Lord of The Rings example	Figure
0 dim	Orcs
1 dim	Gimli and his attitude towards elves change over time
2 dim	Denethor never faces any moral dilemma... until the end
3 dim	Gollum towards the Ring

Characters, especially the hero, can grow while the player progresses through the game. They can grow physically, intellectually, morally or emotionally. RPGs often feature a rich and complex growth of the hero and other characters in the game. The stats of the character, its appearance, skills, language, interactions with other characters or even the plot can evolve to show various types of evolution (more power, more knowledge, etc.). Some character archetypes such as the mentor or the rival have proven they were instrumental in the success of a story, but they should be used wisely.

Language: audio design

Characters can also be recognized to their notorious sound (Darth Vader's breath) or phrases ("What's up doc?" from Bugs Bunny). Much of sound design involves psychological expectations: "glug glug glug" for a drowning person or metallic sound when metallic-looking objects are touched. Sounds must also fit the movements of the character.

Accent or vocabulary specific of a time-period, social class or country helps setting the context of the game. Bad grammar reveals bad schooling or Master Yoda. Speed of speech can indicate excitement, boredom, anxiety or suspicion. The tone of the speaker and vocal quirks such as slutter also convey a lot about the character.

Test your skills

• Think about a human two-dimensional character as a child, teenager and adult. Give several attributes giving clues about the age and maturity of the character at each stage.
• Imagine two characters whose strengths and weaknesses complement each other. Show how they seem unalike but nevertheless complement each other quite well. Show how they are weak when they are alone.

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch5: Creative Play

Self-defining play

Choosing an avatar is an act of self-definition because the players can identify to the avatar he/she controls. A player can choose an avatar from the beginning (in Monopoly or car video games for instance), customize his/her avatar (in old RPGs where the character acquires new skills or equipment, for instance) or build the avatar from scratch (in modern RPGs). The player can modify two types of attributes of his/her avatar: the functional and the cosmetic attributes.

The functional attributes affect the gameplay. Functional attributes can change during the game (eg XP) or be defined by the player at the beginning (like strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc. from Dungeons and Dragons). The player should be able to know how the choices made concerning his/her avatar's attributes will impact the game. Giving players a random number of points to assign to their attributes allows them to make interesting choices and create an avatar who reflects their own personality or fantasies without unbalancing the game. Include a default configuration for players who do not want to spend too much time in their avatar creation.

Cosmetic attributes such as eye or skin color are not part of the core mechanics but bring a lot of fun and do not need to be balanced. Cosmetic attribute must stay cosmetic attributes after updates of the game (example: bigger avatars are not stronger).

Creative Play

Creative Play happens when the player builds or designs things in games such as Sim City or Barbie Fashion Designer. Provide saving and sharing functionalities (cf Sporeopedia or Pokemon global trade station). Creative play can be constrained or freeform.

Constrained creative play provides a structure or tools for the player's creativity, and features can be unblocked as the game progresses. Constraints can be based on the game money (SimCity or RPGs), on the physics of the world (Bridge Construction Set), or some aesthetics standards. The aesthetics rules can either be established by the game designer beforehand, they can procedurally change over time or the public could also vote online for their favorite.

Freeform play sets no restriction at any time on the player's creativity. Constrained creative play-games sometimes offer a constraint-free sandbox mode. The construction of Spore creatures is an example of freeform play.

Other plays

The Movies or Stunt Island are games that feature storytelling-play. They let the players make their own movies and share them online. The player communities around the Sims also produced stories with commented screenshots of the game.

With mods, players can edit levels, items, characters and many other parts of the game. FPS hardcore players sometimes develop stronger bots (in the sense of FPS opponents, not cheating programs) than those given in the original game. However, UGC can sometimes be very ugly, inappropriate, or even amoral (porn, racism).

Test your skills

• Think of a game where the player can build something different than vehicles, buildings or cities. What is the reward given to the player? How could money be spent into the different pieces of this new construction? Could there be upgrades?
• Find a set of real-world existing aesthetics rules (in architecture, clothing, design, music, interior decoration or landscaping for instance). How could your game follow these rules to measure/appreciate the player's creations?
• How can you make clear to the player the consequences of his/her avatar customization decisions during the avatar creation?
• How can you create a sense of community between your players? How do you allow them to share their creations with others?

[Conf] Creative Writing in Video Games

Here are the notes I took at the last OC IGDA chapter. The title of this panel discussion was "Creative writing in video games". First, Steven-Elliot Altman from Acclaim introduced himself. Then the panel discussion started. In the panel were Chris Avellone, John Gonzalez, Anne Toole, Leonard Boyarsky, Dan Arey, Cameron Dayton and Steven-Elliot Altman. My comments stay in [brackets].

9 Dragons anecdotes by Altman

In 9 Dragons, the first authentic martial arts massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Altman created and animated The Hermit, a character in charge of many events in the game. Altman explained that The Hermit is like a rock star, but in real life I'm Steven! You have to reconnect to reality sometimes. Altman mentioned that 9 Dragons is F2P and that 6% of the players use the item mall (a RMT system - virtual items can be purchased for real money). Altman told the audience that The Hermit is the most powerful character in the game and can beat any others. [Interesting idea in a PvP game?] Altman decided to organize an event that would lead a player able to control a Dark Hermit, the ultimate killing Mob of The Land. Wielding a Sabre, he has all the power of The Hermit but will be bent on destruction. [On each of the 3 servers worldwide, the winner of a month-long rush-for-XP event in September won the Dark Hermit in January.] Following this rise of an extremely powerful player, other players feared to die and loose XP for nothing. So Acclaim decided to enable the Dark Hermit only between 4pm and 7pm (for instance) and increase the XP rate by 5 times during this period of the day. [Risky XP daily event.]

Random notes

[These notes are sometimes exact quotes from the panelists, sometimes a summary of what they actually said. I only kept the parts I found the most interesting.]

• You have to be creative on demand.
• Everyone, players or in the industry, share a common knowledge/common references about games.
• Nearly all the panelists read comics and novel books.
• But if you read the same thing and regurgitate the same thing all the time ... That's why you have so many Space Marines at the moment.
• Be able to sit and daydream, ignite ideas.
• You need to practice daydreaming.
• Geek culture is a shorthand in discussions.
• Game design and game writing were often put together in the discussion, people did not really make any difference between the two.
• In a game, everything tells a story. Music, textures, level design and even game mechanics are telling a story.
• Games are mimicking film conventions.
• Kratos fights against himself to save his wife and daughter in the last level of God of War. So this game is actually not totally for 9-year-old skater kids who only want to bash and slash. [But we had a discussion about that after the panel. In Ico as well, the player protects a weak person that the hero cherishes. But in Ico, it is all the time, this entire innovative game is "poetic"/"artful". I argued that in God of War, the wife and daughter scene where Kratos has to take them in his arms to heal them was only a pretext for "kids" to slash, because in the end, which game sold more copies? 3.21M for God of War and apparently between 650K (original sources are dead ...) or 900K]. Die Hard was also mentioned as a true love story [but it is yet another pretext for action to happen.]
• Writers have first to spend 10,000 hours before reaching a decent level and be recognized for their good work. [I hope this is a big exageration.]
• I use Excel cells for 3x5 cards. I write molecule stories in them and I can move them where I want. [this reminds me of post-its used in affinity diagrams in HCI.]
• [The panel consisted of 6 men and 1 woman but in college classes, I think there are usually more girls than boys in writing classes. So why are there more males than females writers in the game industry? I was told by a woman at this conference that the writing area has more girls in proportion than other areas of the game industry. But there are not many because group meetings look like fraternity meetings when you collaborate with a male development team. Hence, when you are a woman, you do not always grasp all the references, but you have to compensate with your own ideas.]
• Merchants NPC should not have too much story/background because the player wants to talk to them quickly. [generally true, but I think including merchants in stories, or unlocking them through the story could be interesting]
• If the player does not read the text, he/she looks at NPC faces
• ["Video games as art forms" is a cliché I can not hear anymore. SOME video games are TRULY art, and not presumably and vague "art forms".]
• Take a step back, think what a player expects at that moment
• If there is one NPC that is permanently (verbally or any other way) agressive to the player, the player should always have the last word. [wrong in Pokémon Red/Blue with the repeated Rival encounters: even though he always loses the fight, he says he was not really trained, that is the reason why the player has beaten him, and the player is just weak, and bye looser]
• [no game remembers the whole dialog tree to establish a psychological trend of the player and adapt the game possibilities to him/her. Crazy idea to use logging to anticipate people's behaviors ...]
• You do not want people to hate a NPC because he speaks too much [I find it depends on the situation. I found Jaheira in Baldur's Gate II spoke really a lot, especially during her romance with the player's avatar. At first, reading the dialog is bearable. But being interrupted in a crucial room of a dungeon, about a random discussion topic such as the divine origins of the player's avatar or the good old time with Elminster, is the best way to make the player hate the character AI. But this same situation in a tavern would be fine. The Team Rocket always speaks too much, and I find that gives them a small humorous role when they lose the fight.]
• You do not want the player to follow a weird track, you have to keep the control of the story [instead, why not having meta-stories that do not define the perimeter, but rather the types of possible interactions, stories being generated on top of the meta-story rules?]
• Watching a powerful NPC fighting at your side is much more impressive than any dialog
• Even evil choices should be satisfying for the players [Black and White!]
• The illusion of choice: do not let the player think "what does the developer want me to do now?"
• In 9 Dragons, some people did not want to join any clan. We did not expect that. So we started developing content for them, because after all, they pay for that!

Boss and Climax

In theatre, plays are composed of 1 to 5 act(s). An act can also be used for major sections of other entertainment, such as film, television, variety shows, music hall, and cabaret.. Similarly, traditional platform game levels can be compared to scenes and fighting a boss the end of an act. In Super Mario 64 for instance, when Mario gathers enough stars, he can meet Bowser. Interestingly, "playing" the comedy follows the same rythm and breaks as "playing" a game. To achieve climax at the end of an act in the game, the death of a boss may be eventually followed by a cinematic scene. Actually, the following cinematic scene also helps the game designer launch the player on a new part of the story or recall the final objective and how to achieve it: "You have collected a new artifact, congratulations! Remember that to reach the bad guy, you need 3 more. You can find one here [blinking red dot on the map]".

According to Clive Thomson in a wired.com article, a boss battle is the most mythopoeic part of gaming. Bosses stay in players' minds, and players often compare bosses, share their "favorite boss list" (as this gamespot thread shows) or exchange startegies. Players really like to talk about their game. As a consequence, players really like the boss system: a poll from The Escapist (N=129) shows that to the question "boss battles: yay or nay", 90% of the players answered yes and 10% no. I have previously detailed how boss monsters in a given level of Doom II or Dildo Tank become normal monsters in the following levels as the player has learned how to beat them. As an example of how much bosses can impact players, the Cyberdemon and Spiderdemon, the most impressive and powerful monsters that could be considered as bosses in Doom II, make noise when they move. From a game design perspective, the aim of the noise in Doom II might be to scare but also to warn the player. I think the noise contributes a lot to the "post-traumatic" state of mind the player is left after having played Doom II. As a player promoting the game to his friends writes, Before too long, you may realize that you're actually becoming quite paranoid, or even frightened because this game is very intense. At this point you should probably take a break, because I don't want to get sued if you have a heart attack.. Similarly in Plants versus Zombies the player receives a letter from the evil Dr. Zomboss. While all the letters previously received from the zombies were stained with misspellings, the perfectly-spelled one from Edgar Zomboss (see screenshot below) shines with a very formal register. The player undeniably wonders what is going to change as a zombie that can spell words correctly enters the game.

Shadow of the Colossus (SotC), a very poetic game from 2005 praised for his atmosphere and original design, contains only bosses. As it can be read in the wikipedia entry for SotC, the game is unusual within the action-adventure genre in that there are no towns or dungeons to explore, no characters with which to interact, and no enemies to defeat other than the colossi.. Beating each colossus requires its own strategy, but I will write about that later...
I strongly recommend the SotC OST.

I can hardly imagine a game with no boss. Games rely on a story, and the plot usually contains a conflict between the hero and his/her/its opponent(s). Just before the situation is brought back to normal (ie resolution), the player has to take part in a rising action to finally face the climax which consists of fighting the disruptive element(s). As the events happening to the hero are unusual, the player feels like he/she has to help the hero/heroine. This involvement can be seen at the back of kids' cereals box: the maze-games usually say "Help this guy find the exit" or "How is this girl going to find the solution?". For computer games, some NPC asking for the hero's help such as Toad in Super Mario 64 also make the player feel he/she is needed. Anyway, in the end, when the hero's task is done and everything comes back to normal (ie Falling action), the player can let the hero/heroine in his/her world and stop playing. But how can the plot of the game end if the player has no final disruptive cause to address? Killing the "bad guy that controls everything evil" seems an obvious solution, but multiple-endings games like Arcanum allow the player to choose his/her own solution. As a gamefaqs.com author writes, you can even skip the last boss fight, if your have maxed Intelligence and Persuasion. You can engage in a philosophical debate with the boss, and convince him that his plan is morally wrong. While the game provides the plot, the player should be the only one to decide how to solve it.

What is a boss?

(Geek) historical and cultural fact: the first game in which a boss appeared was dnd in 1974. In this dungeon-crawl RPG, a golden dragon was keeping the last treasure of a dungeon.

In single-player games, a boss is used to ensure a player has taken the time to level-up (raise their abilities through fighting anonymous easier foes) before progressing to a new section of the game. A boss is also a closure of Gameplay Progress according to Staffan Björk and Jussi Holopainen in Patterns in Game Design, p229.

A boss is usually bigger than the hero. As an example I found a kind of evolution in the difficulty of Doom II monsters:

• the Imp (brown) throws fire balls but can be killed in one shot (60 HP)
• the Hell Knight (light brown, horns) needs a bit more work (500 HP)
• the Baron of Hell is really resilient (1000 HP)
• and finally the Cyberdemon has an audible step when he moves (4000 HP)

In the early levels, the player may consider a Hell Knight as a difficult monster, maybe an end-of-level boss. But in the last levels, Hell Knights are very common. The player has become used to it and has possibly found a strategy to kill them (a particularly relevant one can be monster infighting). Only the Cyberdemon could be considered as a real big boss: it appears once or twice in the whole game (I remember having encountered it at least once with the ultra violence difficulty level). Anyway, the encounter with this boss (particularly in the 8th level) should teach the player that he/she should use monster infighting to be able to kill difficult monsters. The same principle is followed in Dildo Tank: the end-of-level boss is a common monster in the next levels, but the player knows which strategy to follow to beat them, and even sometimes many of them at a time. Bosses teach the player some play skills.

By the way, from an art design perspective, the monster sprites are set once and for all. As the player progresses in the game, there is no need to add new sprites: the previous end-of-level boss's sprite still fits "normal" monsters. This makes the art designer focus on fewer but higher quality monster appearances.

On another hand, a boss is an element of the scenario/storyline. In Wario Land III, killing a boss sometimes gives a music box, but ending a level gives a new power like swimming or brawling. In Mystic Quest, battlefields (see screenshot nearby) can help the player earn more experience before trying to enter a dungeon and kill the boss at the very bottom of the dungeon. This is rather a grinding/bashing solution which is not really pleasant as it does not really teach the player anything, but simply increases the level of the character.