C2E2 is the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, a large convention in our city that up until this year was mostly geared to comics fans.  Lunar Giant spent all of last weekend showing off Delve Deeper and teasing the forthcoming Delve Deeper board game.

This was our first big convention, but we’ve done smaller (much smaller) ones in the past.  Still, the amount of goodwill and new fans we generated was simply astounding.  Here are some of the people I want to thank, first, and then a short post-mortem:

• Larry Settembrini, of Reed Expo, for being absolutely great in handling our booth area and being the man with the plan.  Without Larry, Chicago games would’ve never made it to C2E2 this year.
• Garrett Fuller, from MMORPG.com, for helping organizing the three panels that I helped bring to C2E2.  As with Larry, a lot of this wouldn’t have been possible without Garrett.
• My brother, Dan Margalus, for being the biggest help ever at our booth.
• Craig Stern, of Sinister Design (check him out!), for bringing us into the Indie Minibooth, as well as joining the Chicago games area and showing off his stuff.  Oh, that’s right, we were part of the very first Indie Minibooth (Megabooth affiliated).  Thanks, Craig!
• The Men Who Wear Many Hats, for being such great booth space neighbors.  Ryan, Mike, and their girlfriends Jamie and Cynthia, were absolutely great to be next to.  I even stole a few ideas from Ryan for our booth, and talking with Mike (though it happens too infrequently) is always a pleasure.  Real smart guy.
• Chris Cobb from Ragtag Studio for being an awesome dude as usual, as well as for speaking on our panel along with Rob Lach (probably one of the most thoughtful developers I’ve met) and Ryan from The Hats.
• All of the rest of the folks who showed in the games space, including Experimental Gamer (makers of Boot Hill Heroes, a game I’m super excited about.), Trinket Studios, 2Bit [Entertainment], Iron Galaxy, and our great friends from Indianapolis Puca Studios and Rapture Games.
• Our (somewhat legendary) panelists on the Future of Games panel, Chelsea Blasko, Denny Thorley, Eugene Jarvis, Dave Wolinsky, and Andrew Hayward.
• I’d also specifically like to thank my friends Kevin Casper, Eric Shofe, and Jared Steffes for stepping up and helping out with the area in general.
• Finally, thanks to all the local games press who came out to support us. Scott Nichols, Andy Groen, Andrew Hayward, Carter Dotson, Myke Prohaska, Cody Shults, and all of you other guys who I met.

Post-Mortem

What Went Right

It was really great to see people play our game in person, so just being at C2E2 was really energizing.  On top of that, we got all of the basics right: we got a boatload of email signups, and sold a bunch of copies of Delve Deeper.  Our booth was professional, always had people playing the game, and in general generated a nice amount of interest.  We also had one dedicated computer set up for showing a video of the game, which was a great way to draw folks in to play.

Once our handouts did come in (more about that later), people got a kick out of them and I’m noticing an uptick in direct traffic to our websites which I can only assume is due to the cards pointing to the site.  Other costs included a few refurbed laptops, some cheapo monitors, and cables and such.  I’m really proud with how much stuff we got just by bargain hunting, and I’d suggest to anyone who needs equipment for a con to start looking months in advance to get the best deals.

Finally, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to be kind, courteous, and helpful to every single person who comes to your booth. I had several folks come by, not really interested in the game, but knowing that I also do a lot of organizing in the community around Chicago.  After talking with them and helping them, several of them turned out to be incredibly influential people in other sectors of the Chicago tech industry who I’m going to be meeting with hopefully over the next month!

Went Could’ve Gone Better

Never order anything from Office Depot again.  Our stuff came in late, and so we didn’t have any really great handouts for folks until the second day of the convention.  I’d also elevate the monitor displaying a video of our game next time to eye level, to help draw folks in more.

More staff. Having only 2 people watching a booth is hell, and while it was great experience, I’d recommend at least 4 folks if you really want to keep the energy and enthusiasm at your booth space up.  To add to that, get carpeting! Yikes, get carpeting for your booth, folks.  Standing on cement for 12 hours a day is not great for your joints, and it also kind of looks tacky.

Finally, I would’ve liked other things to hand out like buttons, stickers, etc.  While our materials were nice, they weren’t the (as Ryan from The Hats put his buttons) honey that draws the people in.

—–

Overall, the first C2E2 to really have a games presence was pretty nice.  I would’ve liked the con-goers to have been more primed for video games, but being the first year, I also understand you have to start somewhere.  This was a great opportunity for the Chicago games community to get together and show off our work as a collective body, and got me really excited for the conference that I’ll be helping throw later this summer.

Most importantly, it’s got all of us here at Lunar Giant ready to roll on some projects we’ve only casually been talking about until now.

More soon! And check out some of the press we’re getting from C2E2!

Lunar Giant will be at Booth 812a at C2E2, showing off our new Delve Deeper board game, as well as Delve Deeper.  The booth space (organized by a group I run called IGDA Chicago) will also be showing games like Divekick, Organ Trail, Ray’s the Dead, Color Sheep, Telepath Tactics, Boot Hill Heroes, Gunblitz, and Planet’s Core!

Come check us out.

So, welcome to any new fans!  Glad to have you here.  Hope you’re enjoying our game, and keep reading our developer diaries.  Great things to come!

My writing schedule has been all messed up for a bit now, I’ve been scrambling to get a real mountain of work done before it topples over and crushes me, so I’ve had to stay away from the keys a lot more than I’d like to. That said, despite the fact this is not my usual writing day, I felt like making a short response to an article I saw elsewhere, over at GameSpot, dealing with the issue of strong female characterization in games. The article itself is interesting enough, its called “Fear of Warrior Women,” but I think the title and the ethos behind it miss part of the context. I got much more out of the linked-to article on Gamasutra by Untold Entertainment’s Ryan Creighton that dealt with troubles he’s having trying to make a game without (as he fears) coming off as anti-feminine, sexist, or racist. Basically he says that his world ended up full of white guys, with a white guy as the hero (a guy at least, I’m guessing on color) becuase its a safer path that means he’s not going to have any of his women or non-white characters raise alarm bells for their depictions.

Well crap, man! That’s an alarm bell right there!

The beginning of his article is a strong one, as has Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango) and Theodor Waern (The Journey Down) talking about their experiences working with whitebread development teams creating a game full of cultural accents that are not their own, like Grim Fandango’s Day of the Dead theme and The Journey Down’s mix of African and West Indies. Basically, they wrote the best they could, they asked the voice staff to play with the script, and made a best faith effort to present the world in a reasonable fashion.

I think the difference between this approach and Ryan’s approach was that Ryan was coming at his game as a lilly-white game that he was trying to cram some other voices and faces into, whereas Tim and Waern were making games with a specific cultural flavor from the get go. I don’t think that’s really his fault, I presume the story he’s telling is the kind of story that has been told many times before, and usually with a young male in the lead. That’s an honest mistake to make. It’s also the kind of mistake that leads to us having a lot of young males in the leads of stories, because that’s what most stories were about, except the ones about finding true love, settling down, and making babies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but there’s more than a little cultural inertia behind the assumptions we make in a Hero On Adventure story. Which of the many “We” is being spoken of, however, can be a hard thing to define.

The “we” people usually use is “we other white male game developers,” which is a big issue. When people get their anger out of the way, the real problem they have with non-white non-male characters in many games is that they aren’t written like a “person” but a stereotype. I think it’s less malign than that, but sadder. I think that white males are often written as a blank slate to which there are some things applied, such as “Lost his Family,” and “Chip on his Shoulder,” but a woman or a black guy or a black woman is going to automatically come in with a few other things on their blank slate. Even if that character is so generic that they only deliver a few stereotypical lines of dialogue before disappearing that black dude is much more likely to talk like Shaft or Mister T than an crazy old Prospector or something.

If you’ve read these kinds of articles before I can skip all the stuff about reinforcing assigned sociological roles as women as sex objects or black men as thugs being just as bad when you do it in a “positive” manner by saying “Oh, but they’re also a hero!” Multiclassing your characters into Stripper/Hero and Thug/Hero does not give the first part a pass. The fact that first part was there at all isn’t a sign that you’re a racist bad person, just that you need to really get a blank slate to work with. In many ways its not your fault, you’re handed that slate as part of being in this society. Black men are handed that slate too, and women. Reinventing a culture is not just about changing the views of white men, but changing everyone’s views about what it is that they need to be. And, honestly, the fact is that most white men don’t know their slate has a bunch of stuff on it too that they didn’t even notice.

People will often say “Oh yeah, having a woman be sexy is sexist, but all male heroes are ripped superman or pretty boys, amirite!?” AND THAT IS PART OF THE PROBLEM TOO. Your slate game with a few things on it saying that unless you’re exercising power either physically (strength) or sexually (pretty) you’ve got to have money, or your life is pretty much a crapfest to be pitied. Do you believe that? I doubt you do. But that’s because you understand that this is a stupid idea and you ignore it and probably get frustrated when someone else tries to reinforce that, especially by saying that someone like you can’t be the hero because they’re not super wealthy, or a Hollywood action hero/model, or a giant steaming hulk of roid flesh. This is the same way a woman might ignore the and be frustrated when she sees her value (in this case, consider Hero Potential to be a good thing) assessed in light of how desirable she is, how thin she is, and how she doesn’t see people “like her” in games.

It can be hard to see what your slate comes with. When people say “just write your characters like a human being, not like a fill-in-the-blank AND a human being,” they’re trying to give the best advice they can, but the problem is that we all have lenses we are TOLD to view other people through. You can take the lenses off, but it is difficult to unhinge all that accumulated cultural knowledge of what to expect from people, especially when so much of it is reinforced by other people’s behaviors too–because unless you take the lens off your OWN life, you’ll probably display a few of those stereotypical behaviors too. This is how people model their behavior. I tried to emulate John Wayne growing up, just a tiny bit, not much, but just enough at times because he was a masculine persona I could see and approved of. If I was growing up now without that kind of a more placid strength, I don’t know, I may not have been able to stick that idea on my slate. I might be a different person. We’re who we are in part because, when we were young, we had to operate with a very limited Character Building toolkit.

So backing up a bit, I think Ryan should have just written himself into a corner. If he wants to tell a story, just tell the story, and it’ll probably flow out of the same cultural gestalt that we have been working from for a long time. Nothing wrong with that, but without a lot of other “stories” to choose from its not surprising when they look similar. That’s what getting other voices in there does, people get a chance to tell stories, and you get a chance to want to make a game out of them. In truth the skin color or gender shouldn’t matter, except that it does, because people need to be able to see more people that are almost “Like Them” to model behaviors on and see all the different ways they can be. That’s one of the annoyances I have with the angry female warrior woman thing. Yeah, sure, she’s beating guys up, but it also shows her as a deranged crazy person. The angry warrior man is usually not the ideal male either. Maybe the ladies need a Jane Wayne?

But if Ryan wanted to tell a story with more women or people with non-white faces, but doesn’t know how to write them, just don’t write them like someone you don’t know how to write. Do you know how to write like a white male? Do you? How do you know? Because you ARE one? That doesn’t mean a thing. Do you write like a Earnest Hemmingway? He was a white guy. How about J.R.R. Tolkein? He was a white guy too. Or do you write like yourself from your own place in time and gender and skin according to what was on your slate?

Hm.

You will never be the characters you’re writing for. They will never be you either. The best we can do is not be afraid, and to write the characters we want to write, and be unapologetic about the failings that we have. If you’re worried about looking racist, don’t be paralyzed by fear, write the character as a character first and as their other stuff later. This isn’t a unique process, its about understanding who they are, and that should let you breathe a sigh of relief. The process for making a black guy is the same as a white guy. If you think that their skin color has an impact to the story, I’d ask why. If that character has faced discrimination in the past, okay, maybe. But that’s a character point, not a ‘given’ in the story, so ask how that effects him. Also do this to the other guys, don’t treat the hero as the ‘default’ when you make them, even if they’re as whitebread as can be. If they’re big and strong, are they big and strong because they believe (as other men in their world may) that strength is a masculine ideal? Would they treat women and other men as lesser, even in a kindly but patronizing way, because they see themselves as ‘better’? If they’re big and strong because they work in a quarry, but the ideal of men is as refined, lean gentlemen, would be embarassed and try to avoid showing his physique for fear of looking like an animal in the eyes of society?

As odd as that sounds, that actually was a thing. I was watching an episode of Poirot, a fun detective series my Fiancee and I both enjoy watching, and there was an episode where this foppish British lady commented that this one woman’s new male companion was a “gorilla,” and joked that it must have been an “animal attraction.” It was mocked more than once, and though the guy was a barely bigger than his fellow Bits in the episode, compared to me he looked like a skinny little dude. It was interesting to think about how the cultural ideal for a man of that age was very different, and when you take your own culture into your game as a ‘given,’ such as large, strong men appearing more ‘masculine’ to the world, you’re already doing yourself a disservice. I’m not saying you need to invent an inverted world where all preconceptions are challenged. I’m just saying, you’re making a lot of assumptions there. White male characters are subject to society’s expectations just like everyone else is, and if you ignore that then you’re making them the default, blank slate from which to work with, which is patently untrue.

Write them as a generic, genderless, sexless, skinless character until you have an idea what you want them to do. If they need to be rescued, don’t automatically make them female. Giant monsters the size of a dumptruck could beat an Arnold senseless as easily as an Amanda. Maybe your Muscleman McArmorpants got stuck in a hole and can’t get out. Maybe he can’t swim. Maybe he fell off a cliff and needs you to get him a rope. If you want to challenge skin and gender and sex roles because that makes you feel good, do it and enjoy it and spend the little extra time to make sure you’re not “defaulting” your characters. If you feel like you HAVE to, then don’t. Since the real goal of all this hand-wringing is to bring us to a state where you can be whatever you are without someone treating you differently for it, why not just do that? Just write your characters. Just write them and don’t worry about anything other than what their motivations are, and then give them some shapes, colors, and orientations later. You can do plenty of good just by avoiding the same tired gender/skin/sex roles without having to turn the world topsy turvy every time.

Ryan really felt like he was making his huntress into something that was different and positive for women, which is why I think it was so odd that a lot of the things he does are just shuffling around the way in which she is only a reflection on the men, rather than the building of her own unique character. His words are: “I patted myself on the back for asking our character designer to give her a small chest, and for marring her face with a big red scar to “de-beautify” her… Here was a woman who was holding her own in the apocalypse, living off the land and sustaining herself, defending her hand-built log cabin with a blunderbuss and a snarl. She isn’t in the game to be a love interest for the main character; she knows more about the game world and its creatures than anyone else, and she joins the quest to satisfy her revenge sub-plot. She makes it through the game without anyone kissing her. She does get rescued at one point, but the Spellirium is self-referential, and the characters cheekily mention how disappointing the moment is.”

I think the biggest mistake he made was thinking, first, that it really matters what her body looks like. There’s a reaction against overt sexualization in women, but my previously mentioned fiancee would be in a right fit if I was to say that busty ladies can’t fight monsters too. Small chest and a scar may make her less of a sex doll, but it doesn’t make her un-pretty, and it doesn’t really matter. It may be annoying when everyone in a fictional world is beautiful, but that really wasn’t the point here. Instead of patting yourself on the back for caring the way she looks, one should focus on how she acts.

Characters and costume are different things, and should be treated like different things. If your character is well developed then it shouldn’t really matter what they’re wearing, you can still tell their story. You don’t need to de-beautify her as if beauty were a weakness, but you also shouldn’t treat great beauty as the default and a scar as a band-aid over that. My second biggest annoyance was saying that she built and defends her own log cabin, as if I should be surprised because she’s a woman who does this, and that she does so with a snarl and lots of land-lore, again as if I should be surprised. Maybe I’m not meant to be surprised, but I think that if I saw a Woodsman character who lives in a log cabin that nobody would need to say that he built it HIMSELF and HE defends it! I’d be like “Well yeah, of course, he’s the woodsman… is there a reason why he couldn’t?”

Throwing an angry snarl onto the woman’s face, the same face you already threw a scar onto, makes it stand out. It almost makes me wonder if she’s mad because the monster managed to outwit her or because it scarred her face. She hides it afterall, behind a lock of her hair. Hiding the scar seems to imply shame, which seems to make me wonder if she feels the revenge is for the scarring of the face, which again establishes that she acknowledges herself as an object whose value is equated to beauty. Is she ashamed that the monster gave her that scar? From what was said it sounds like the monster was a real doozy. I know men show off her scar. Maybe she should show it off and be renowned in the community as that badass gal with the really awesome scar. Maybe she should be happy because she has the best scar in the area and everyone likes to hear the story? EH.

I don’t know more about her revenge plot, but unless that’s why she’s scowling, it’s just TOO MUCH BAND-AID. She ends up looking like a dark damsel to be helped on her revenge plot by a man because she lacks the “power” to do it herself… (see how I can turn it into sexism again? The “power” she lacks is man wang. Man wang slays the monster that scarred her and made her miserable! The monster is her confused sexuality! Man wang will make her happy because that’s what all women neeeeeeed! GAME SO SEXIST) …and less of a person. But, anyway, this stuff is complex. I’m not faulting Ryan much. I just thought it was interesting how people work themselves into knots when the real solution to all of these problems starts and ends with the characterization.

Spacelab Signing Out

Oh, and the angry woman conspiracy group would probably give Ryan a pass if he let her get a date at the end. You can do that without making them a lusted-after sex object for the main character all game. You’re not objectifying someone if you, ya’ know, give them a chance to get hitched. Shakespearean happy endings where everyone gets married at the end and all that.

Neil Wickman likes strong female characters too!

He has been working for Lunar Giant studios since its inception as one of the lead designers and the Creative Director. Listen to him @LunarNeil on Twitter.

I know I had said I’d probably do a big info-drop today and show the document I’ve been working on, but with Valentine’s Day having absolutely creamed my time last night, I didn’t have enough time to get stuff cleaned up and ready to be published. Part of what caught my eye and distracted me from my appointed task was the hilariously bad launch day of the Aliens: Colonial Marines game. Why did this catch my eye? I read several articles, some by people going so far as to say that it is impossible (or nearly so) to create a game based on the Aliens franchise that doesn’t suck. I take issue to that, but I’m a sucker for an obvious fix, especially when its the whole fun aspect that someone misses.

Colonial Marines is going to need a really long postmortem, and I haven’t even played the game so I’m not going to criticize one element or another from a personal perspective. What is clear is that the game suffers from a few big problems:

First, its buggy and unfinished. This much is clear from a lot of problems with the AI, the animation, and so forth. This isn’t really a criticism about the developer, its just a problem when a project changes hands so many times and endures such a lengthy development. It would have been really nice if the game hadn’t been buggy, but it was. Let’s move on.

Second, it set expectations way too high by putting out a demo that over-delivered on the final product. I’ve talked about demos recently, and I like the idea of the ‘vertical slice’ demo that shows different events all crammed together in order to give players a tantalizing glance that leaves them wanting more. Someone must have put a lot of work into that demo though, because they made a demo that seems to have been dramatically stronger than the actual game. How did that happen? Did assets get cut to make them work on consoles? I know that happens quite a bit, and it is probably the biggest, most inexcusable travesty I can think of, but for it to go from well thought out to poorly thought out seems to indicate that there was a substantial bit of work on that demo on an intellectual level that never made it into the game.

Third, it fails in the most fundamental level, Tone and Intention, and that’s what I wanted to touch on today and then expand tomorrow.

Nothing about this will be surprising. When you make an Aliens game and market it as the sequel to an incredibly beloved Action/Horror/Suspense movie, players assume that what they’re getting is an experience similar to what the movies created. Right? Okay. So how is it that so little of the game focuses on the Marines struggling against this alien menace? The game went to great lengths to brand itself as a sequel to the Aliens movie and to use settings, storylines, and even characters from the Alien franchise as a foundation for the game. This sets it apart from an Aliens versus Predators game that is very willing to get a bit goofy with the situations to make it work.

Now, normally I’d say being forced to play nice with a setting hamstrings good development, but Aliens is really the perfect setting for making a great game. It plays to all the strengths of an interactive medium, far more than the original Alien did, and a lot more than most of the Survival Horror or just plan Horror games out there. Conventional wisdom is that making a movie adaptation results in a watered down experience, often with an uninteresting game that gets battered up and fried in the style of the original as a blatant fan-service cash grab. You do see that a lot, but it isn’t the fault of the IP that is is taken and used poorly, but the fault of the people creating the game.

Just like how I defend narrative from bad games, I will defend the idea of making a movie adaptation game by saying that movies and games have very different benchmarks for a successful experience, but most games based on moves tend towards the action, adventure, or horror genres. These are genres filled with situations that excite the viewer and make them want to enact those experiences on their own, which makes them marketable as a game. I’m surprised there was no game tie-in for 300 that I can think of, or for the Avengers, at least not yet, or maybe only on a handheld or something similar. I didn’t hear about it so it can’t possibly exist. Things like this mean that that a game based on that franchise generally has two main draws.

First, the appeal of the action. If you’re playing a game based on Aliens, you want to endure the same kinds of harrowing situations that they did in the movies. You don’t want to gun down legions of aliens because they didn’t do that in the movie and it would be counter-tonal in a very obvious way. Similarly, if you’re playing an Indiana Jones game, you’re not looking to spend a lot of time hiding from monsters or monitoring a sanity gauge. You may not expect to gun down hordes of Nazis in an Indiana Jones game, but Indie usually kills around 20 or so people in his movies, and that’s a decent bodycount for an Adventure Game don’t you think? It would also be against the tone to show Indie cowering from monsters–he’s a man of action in a lighthearted film that has only occasional dark turns. When people make games based off of movies and they fail to appeal to the same sensibilities as the movie, its no wonder it comes out poorly.

The second main draw from a franchise are the franchise accouterments, like the characters and settings and iconic gizmos. It would be hard to make a game out of a movie with no great stuff to show off, which is why I think a lot of the very ‘samey’ modern combat games end up having to go nuts with the plot-lines. There’s nothing else to show. But if you have a strong enough character or a cool enough device you can really go with that. The Batman Arkham games may not be amazingly complex in a lot of ways, but they nail some of setting elements that people really like, which does a great job of putting you into that world. It also doesn’t feel the need to duplicate the same Batman as any other source that I can point out, and that lets them make a tie-in or licensed game without it being just a “Dark Knight Rises” game or whatever.

If they end up wanting to make a good Star Trek game, they may not want to set it either in the Shatner-Kirk or the Young-Kirk worlds, but take an Arkham approach and just put their toe into both worlds and create their own. Using the iconic characters, taking a good deal of the stylizing from both depictions, and being able to use iconic settings and gizmos like The Enterprise would make for a very interesting proposition. Now, how do you make that kind of a game?

You would want to stop and ask, hey, what’s cool about this, and go from there. We can talk a bit more about that tomorrow, let’s get back to Aliens. In Alien and Aliens, that appeal is terror, suspense, the horror of the unknown, and a little bit of girl power. How do you mess this formula up?

1) You take out the terror by making the enemies stupid and easy to kill. In the first movie the crew had no real weapons and almost nothing to defend themselves with against an unknown monster that is killing them off one by one. In the second movie they had lots of people, they knew what they were fighting, and they had a ton of firepower. The protagonists still ended up getting overwhelmed and outmatched up until the very end. Both of these situations depend on giving the humans an advantage (in the first, numbers and size, in the second, planning and technology) and then yanking it out from under them. If your game is just going to spoon-feed the player a series of corridor shooting sections against a fairly standard foe you’re draining the terror out of it.

2) Removing the surprise factor and repeating the waves of aliens too often. Suspense is a big part of generating fear, and games have a hard time with it. How do you generate proper suspense in a game that doesn’t let you pull the kinds of point of view tricks that a movie does, or mess with the audience? First, the player knows the situation, they know there are going to be aliens. But what they don’t need to know is when and where you’re going to start dropping them. The use of monster closets and enemy waves is detrimental to the design because it treats the aliens as an environmental menace rather than an opposition force. The terror that the aliens cause by exploding out of ducts or sneaking into dark corners or running around the walls and ceilings is lost on the players if all you do is spit them out and launch them at the player. If you can find ways of showing the player signs that they are being tracked without making it a pre-scripted event, go for it. That’s actually not as hard as you think.

3) Horrors of the unknown are pointless unless we have something yet unknown. Sure, one of the ways to do that is to throw in some new critter designs, but of all the pillars of the movies, I’d say this is the least important. I love watching Alien and Aliens now even though I know everything there is to know about them. I don’t always want to see a new design, I love the iconic original and I have no problems keeping with that one. What the designers could do to create an unknown horror though is to make it difficult for the player to know where they’re going and what they’re doing. Many people have said Amnesia in Space. What about Far Cry in Space? Sure, an open-world Aliens game might sound entirely cliche, but if you mix the game up enough that there’s no obvious way through, you’re taking away a lot of their ability to plan, predict, and prepare for the enemy attacks. You have to make it unpredictable in a broad strokes way, and then you’ll get a lot more Horror bang for your buck from every little thing you add in.

4) Girl power nowhere to be seen! I’m not saying you need to make another Ripley, but there’s nothing wrong with trying to add just a drop of a feminine protagonist appeal when games are mired in a debate about their sexist depictions of women and the game you’re making is based on one of the big name-brands to feature strong female protagonists. Hell, the second move was even heavily invested with female themes. Want to know a good one that even a non-gamer picks up on really fast? Newt in Aliens is an instant, powerful reason for Ripley to risk everything. Threatening children? Absolutely no good. How about if the character in Aliens wasn’t just some space marine woman, but maybe a colonist who has a family? Maybe part of what you’re trying to do is get out of whatever the hellish environment you in without losing your three kids? Can you imagine trying to keep three kids from getting eaten by the Xenos? I swear, people are going to pull some seriously crazy stuff to do that, especially if you make damned sure those kids are never an escort-quest style burden. If one is young enough to carry in your offhand and another is old enough to fire a weapon, I think you have the makings of a pretty intense Last Stand moment right there.

Yes, it might be controversial, but I also think it’d be powerful. Better to court a bit of controversy and make something that actually tells a story, but this would need to be very well written to make it both not-annyoing and not-forced. Plus, it is an Aliens game, and these themes have existed in the franchise for many installments.

The last thing I want to get to before jumping onboard a bigger-picture element tomorrow is an idea I’ve seen a ton. It’s not surprising that people, having seen just how badly the game is handling the source material, come back instantly and say “Why not just make Amnesia in Space, with Xenos instead of the monsters?”

This is honestly not a terrible idea, and I think it highlights one of the weaknesses of approaching an Aliens game like a shooter. I heard one commentator say that the Aliens franchise is unable to produce good games because the Xenomorphs are, as a rule, not well suited to a campaign. They say the aliens would be too powerful, that the sense of terror entirely lost because the player has no sense of the unknown, and that the effectiveness of seeing a squad of soldiers torn apart would fall apart because the player would be immersed in this situation rather than horrified at seeing it happen going on around them, powerless.

That’s kinda bullshit. Tomorrow, I’ll explain a bit more why I think so.

Spacelab Signing Out

Late entry here, coming in at close to dinnertime. Hope you all are having a great weekend, and stop by tomorrow!

Neil Wickman now really wants to make a Star Trek game.

He has been working for Lunar Giant studios since its inception as one of the lead designers and the Creative Director. Listen to him @LunarNeil on Twitter.

“Hey guys, what do we think happens when a roaring inferno hits a Keg of 120 proof alcohol?”

Yesterday I sent out that rather ominious Skype text. If you’re a designer sitting there, hoping not to have a terribly overcomplicated game, and then someone asks for information on simulating Beverage Explosion, I think a little concern is warranted.

So right now, I’m putting together a document to act as a primer for everyone on the team to get ‘caught up’ on the design and get on the same page. This happens, the design will get away from some people unless you make sure to have daily meetings. One advantage to this is it lets you go nuts with the creativity, but unless you’re always keeping yourself tied to the ground, you’re going to get way too far out.

Designing in isolation always brings that out of people. The best thing you can do is arm yourself against it with this advice: When designing a project, imagine your creativity, time, and money as a jug of water that you cannot add more to. The broader your game is, the more features it has, the shallower it will be when you pour your jug of water into it. Narrower games are much deeper for the same amount of money, time and effort.

I don’t say this to expouse a minimalist concept of game design, but right now even big names like Chris Taylor are struggling to make enough money to put together their projects. Being able to do a good game on much less funding is going to be an essential task in the future, not because a big studio has to (they will continue to create bloated tech demos) but because a small studio with an artistic idea will have to. If you’re someone with a clever idea you want to get made, surprise! You’re a small studio artist now. The big studios will not want to make your game. They are locked in a death struggle with the other big studios and there’s no room for something clever.

So, that tidbit aside, where am I going with this? Basically, I find it really useful to try and keep myself to these restraints. When you have a good idea you should never say “Well, this would be awesome, we’ll need to add another two weeks of work, but it’ll be awesome.” You should always try to find some way to do the important aspect of that idea with the stuff you have.

For example, the explosive Dwarf Rum listed above, would be a bad idea to include on its own. But if we put this into the context of the whole game, we can see that we need a way for an enemy to tear down buildings. Since its idiotic that people with swords would smash a building down with them, I can justify not making the animations for that, which makes me happy. It also lets me justify saying that siege units are different from normal units, in that they carry the tool to break buildings. What is that tool? Well, what do we already have in-game? We have wooden structures, wooden supports, and a few big enemies that use fire. How about fire?

Fire can make sense, right? Big enemies come in with fire, set stuff ablaze, wooden supports go up, buildings burn down, that kind of thing. So now if we consider an Rum Barrel to be a structure of some sort they can react to fire. Viola! That was a fun idea, and now it seems entirely reasonable. The ‘deconstruction’ action for the barrel will just include a fireball and fuel more flames.

“Well, there you go,” was my co-worker’s response, worried that I was getting too complicated. But if we keep this from being complexity, and instead make it nothing but the natural outgrowth of sensible, reasonable systems already necessary for the game, that’s much easier to justify, and should not take more than a tiny bit of time to do. You can’t avoid having a method for buildings to fall apart, but you can easily say “No using barrels of Rum as explosives.”

Of course not, I have barrels of gunpowder for that.

Oh wait, that wasn’t in the memo? Damn.

I plan on showing off the document I’m working on later, once I’ve gotten it all done and my co-workers have signed off on it, but for the moment I’ll just go with a few snippets. Its fun to try and break your favorite games down into their core components. For us, those are:

1: Tunneling
2: Resource Extraction
3: Construction
4: De-Construction
5: Combat

I think that these five “Big Mechanisms” encompass nearly all of the gameplay. Stuff like Heroes leveling up would be classed under combat, and stuff like wood and rum lighting on fire are in De-Construction. Figuring out the smallest numbers of pillars you need to hold up your roof helps you focus on just the elements that cannot be cut. Its really, really easy to make something more complex, afterall. You could make an entire game out JUST tunneling, with no monsters or anything. It might be a puzzle game, but you could do it. So what is your roof? Try writing a statement like this:

The Core Strategic Principle of Delve Deeper 2 is Controlling the Map for the Extraction of Resources by Laborers.

Our game is a strategy game, so I identified the strategic element as the core concern of the game. If you’re making a shooter, then I would assume that your focus is on shooting. If you’re making one of those RPG/Shooter hybrids you gotta figure out what is the most important thing on your plate. Everything should support your main focus. If your game is a narrative game, everything should support the narrative. If your game is a platforming game, everything should support the platforming.

This is a goofy thing I don’t see people grasping a lot, even though its really simple. For example, Combat is an element in The Deepening, and it was also in the original. However, the original included combat as a fun thing and a consequence of mining, but it didn’t precisely support the tile-placement and map expansion mechanic.

The Deepening addressed this fact and looked at what combat needed to be for the strategic mode. First, if the strategic goal is controlling the map and extracting resources, then combat should impact map control directly. We accomplished this by going with that Swashbuckling feel, where warriors will take or give up territory as they fight. They don’t just stand and battle, they’ll go up staircases or jump across tables and stay mobile. So in this case, the Superior Combat Asset (for whichever reason) steals territory from the Inferior Combat Asset as a result of their scuffle. This allows powerful combatants to expand their player’s territory, defend territory they already have, and perform a projection of power from their safer territory into contested territory

Instead of being an afterthought, combat directly translates into territory gain. I see this only very rarely, though in Company of Heroes it came through strongly, and that game really hit all the right notes on designing a strategic RTS.

Construction and De-Construction also play directly into it, but more on that at a later date. Suffice to say, when you’re building things in your tunnels, you’re obviously contributing to a form of game where territory control is important.

Resource extraction is a big one too. I felt that one of the best ways we can actually unify the idea of territory with resource extraction is to change minerals from being a background object to a foreground object. Why do we have gold in the back when it could be in the walls?

Quick show of hands, who has seen The Fellowship of the Rings or The Hobbit? In both we get shots of Dwarf Mines being massive holes down into the earth where millions of tons of rock have been cleared away in a search for riches. Remember the idea of digging too greedily and too deep? Remember what happened to Moria when they did? Well, that’s because when you dig gold out of the wall, you’ve also dug away the wall!

So when you’re mining, you’re mining out the walls in the area full of gold. If you imagine a very simple One on One map with a pile of gold in the center you can see how this will force players into conflict with each other. Instead of having to dangle relics in pre-made tunnels down below, we’ll be able to use the map’s normal design to push players into gradual contact with each other. Best of all, it will actually force people to dig too greedily and too deep, searching for more money to spend or score with.

Also nice is that the same movement scheme can be re-used multiple times, making it much easier for players to understand how to control the game. If you want to move a hero from one place to another, you could use a waypoint system. Click one place to have them path to that place on their own, or give multiple waypoints to give them a more specific route. This also lets you queue up movements and actions, which is great. Once done, that same system can be re-used for tunnel digging, as you can click on an origin point and then a few more waypoints, assign Miners to the task, and let them work it out. That’s really nice for tunnel construction. Mining can even be done the same way, though I would suggest that mining be done on a “per miner” basis, to slow down how quickly resources are harvested. They can even mine in a similar way to how they dig, making players understand at a glance that mining and tunneling are both systems that knock chunks out of the walls and are done by miners.

So that’s several systems all united in working towards the major goal, improved and made more fun while also cutting them down and ditching less fun elements, and one easy to understand movement mechanic being used three times for three different applications and replacing the previously existing complex one. Not bad at all.

Hopefully that’ll keep people from freaking out a little.

Spacelab Signing Out

Thanks for reading this development update. It was a bit of a rambling one, but I think you’d be happy to hear that the design is coming together enough that I can make a document that overviews the entire game. In a bit I’ll probably be able to show it off, maybe for this or a later Friday/Saturday double feature. Now I’ve got to go grab some food! Designing is hungry work.

Neil Wickman makes lemonaide when given explosive lemons, and justifies them as a deconstruction mechanic..

He has been working for Lunar Giant studios since its inception as one of the lead designers and the Creative Director. Listen to him @LunarNeil on Twitter.

Big Picture Monday is hitting a snag. I’m having a hard time picking up a lot of industry buzz about topics aside from “This new thing is cool” or “This is what we’re planning on doing,” the recent D.I.C.E. talks have given people so many topics to focus on that its hard to get a real good handle on what the buzz is. For those who don’t know what D.I.C.E. is, you’re better off looking to an actual new aggregate and checking out some of the talks, I think you’ll find it a lot of fun. What really struck me on some of this was the business aspect of game design getting a lot more information on what works and what doesn’t. That’s not surprising, especially in the wake of THQ imploding earlier this year.

First off, some data came out that shows that the most game copies are sold by companies that release just a trailer, not a demo. That made some people sit up, but it made total sense to me. It also made me really sad to have people talking about it. I remember playing the WORMS 1 demo over and over again with my brothers. We really only needed that one stage, and basically every stage after that was less fun, so whoops. I also remember seeing or playing, I can’t even remember, the Diablo III demo and it really killed a lot of my interest in the game. It felt so flat and derivative, and yeah, it was like literally the first 15 minutes of gameplay so of course its easy, dull, and simple. But if that’s your demo, that’s terrible!

Trailers are, for us, a very well understood medium. It’s a short video thing with some text, some music, and the implicit (or explicit) inclusion of a “go get this thing” usually with both the price and the time, and the place, you can get it. We get trailers for food (advertisements work this way) we get trailers for movies, we get trailers for cars, we get trailers for gizmos, wonkers and bars! I can make a Seuss rhyme if I feel like it, don’t look at me that way. Demos are, however, like a bite of that food rather than the teaser trailer. While it MAY stoke my interest, I might also be able to content myself with just a bite, especially if the rest of it costs 60 bucks. Microtransact away when your game is 5, 10 or hell, even 30 bucks, but once I’ve paid for a full game please give me a full game. My two extra bucks better be buying the most awesome SOMETHING…

Now, let me tell you, I am entirely unqualified to make the following claims except that I make games and play games and have a functioning human brain, but I think that the demo is not AS BAD as it seems. Lemme grab the quote from over on the Penny Arcade report so I can link you to it. By the way, Ben Kuchera is a fun guy to follow on Twitter.

“Wait, you mean we spent all this money making a demo and getting it out there and it cut our sales in half?” Schell asked. “Yes, that’s exactly what happened to you because when you put the demo out, people had seen the trailer and they’re ‘like that’s cool,’ and they made a plan. They had to try that game. And then they played the demo. ‘Alright, I tried the game, that was okay, alright I’m done.’ But the games with no demo, you have to buy it if you want to try it. These plans make a big difference.”

He’s talking about the idea of planning in games. He also talks about planning in the form of MMO Armor Lusting, where you see some fancy bling and instead of just thinking “That’s some bling” you start going “Holy crap where do I have to go to get that” and because you have a plan in your head, you’re already moving along towards an end goal. His point is that by exploting player planning processes you not only make a better business model but you also give players a more enjoyable experience. To bash on D3 once again, the micro-transaction real money auction house puts a hole in the adventuring tension because your plan for “I must have that thing” ends up being “I guess I have to pay someone 5 bucks for it.” That’s crappy and people really don’t like that.

They’d like it more if it was in-game gold, but my guess what they really want is the experience of wrenching the sword from the still-warm hand of a defeated enemy. Exclusivity is a motivating principle for people, because having something hard to get confers status, and that status is greatly diminished in message when its just “I have money,” especially in a world of pre-teens using parental credit cards or McDonalds fry-cook money to buy Ragehammers of the Magma God. No slight to the pre-teens out there, power-purchasing is always a deal with the devil. The devil in this case is the Bottom Line, and that’s a very dangerous thing to mess around with, since most “Deals with the Devil” don’t actually include boards of directors, shareholders, and legions of suited demons from “CORPORATE” coming to say “You need to add this, you need to change that, and you need it this year by Christmas.”

Most games go over-budget and over-time because most things in life are over-budget and over-time unless they over-estimate before they start. Hint to indies, overestimate. If you look at the overestimated number and say “I can’t spend that long on this, there’s no way it’ll take that long,” you should just quit now. It’ll take that long, buddy. It’ll take that long and then you’ll realize you need to add network multiplayer and you can’t.

Back to my original point: nobody can really turn up their nose to someone who killed the Magma God to steal the Ragehammer, but I think people have a reasonable complaint when your method of defeating Lord Magmoose was throwing three dollars at him. Think about how ridiculous that sounds!

So when you break that planning routine in a different way, by offering a demo, people will reach the end and be all like “Well, that was good,” because that was their expectation. Ask yourself this, what’s harder: feeling satisfied with just one bite of a good burger, or feeling satisfied after having one complete mini-burger. Or stopping mid-way through a big book versus reading to the end of a short story in a collection of short stories. When the experience you’re given has boundaries, you’re way more likely to finish and go “Ahh, okay. Well, that was alright… not great. I’m done.”

I think superior demo design could help, and I would be curious to see how a well-made demo experience would do compared to a crappy demo. D3 had a really crappy demo, as it gave me a segment of the least interesting portion of gameplay, no doubt. Trailers give you pieces of all the best stuff, splicing dialogue together in dramatic way, being a bit deceptive at times, and it seems like the big over-the-top scene moments are shot just to put them in the trailer. Why don’t people do that with a demo? Because its hard? Trailers would fail too if they were just the first 10 minutes of gameplay footage. How dull would it be to see someone fiddle through the graphical options for a bit, reading all the quest text, etc.

Make a demo the way you would make a trailer, and maybe it won’t cut your eventual sales in half. Instead of giving a complete experience, or even an honest one, throw it all at the wall. If your trailer would feature giant monsters, exploding walls, hordes of zombies, and epic spells, then make the demo include all of those. Shove me along in it on a breakneck pace, don’t let me get too situated in the world. Don’t make the world accessible at all, really. Let it just wash over me as I play a little bit, feeling that epic power that I wanted to have, and then cut it off mid-bite. Don’t let me finish an entire experience. Don’t even tease a boss and then end it there, or let me beat that first boss and say “YOU MUST UPGRADE TO PLAY ON,” even if that’s a little more effective. Just bring it to a massive crescendo, and SLAM the gate on me. That’ll leave me with this feeling of “But, but, two more seconds!”

That’s the goal of a demo!

Spacelab Signing Out

Anyway, just my feeling. I get a bit frustrated when fun, good-hearted features like demos get canned and games increasingly look for ways to drain every dollar out of you despite uniformly costing a premium price at the outset. Delve Deeper 2 is absolutely going to include microtransactions as well, but for fun and optional stuff, not the way we’ve been seeing Dead Space and Diablo do it. It isn’t that they’re asking me to pay a dollar, but that they’re ruining the experience for that dollar, and there’s no way for me to opt out of the bad designs that encourage it. I can promise we’re not going to do that with our games. Everyone knows that game design is a business, and there’s nothing wrong with that, it costs money to make a game because people need money to survive. I need money to pay my rent and by groceries. But as an indie, it feels unclean to me. I can afford to be more risk-taking or eschew common wisdom because I only need a niche market appeal. Once you get as big as THQ or Blizzard, you need everyone’s money, all of it. That leads to very different design choices, I guess.

It also sucks a lot of the purpose out of it. Making it all about the money isn’t evil because money is evil, its evil because it consigns you to the shackles of financial wisdom and market pressures. Again, there’s nothing WRONG with that, but its a very different environment, and is not always a fun one to work in. This is the curse of businesses though. If you just keep getting bigger and bigger you eventually get so big you have to make so much money that you cannot afford NOT to adhere to a very narrow path. You also end up killing off or merging with smaller, more creative enterprises, hopefully not entirely draining them of interesting thoughts the way it often seems like.

Here’s something I would like, though. I’d like everyone to save, like, a quarter a day. Or a dime, or something. Save it for a really exciting game. Play a demo, get a good feel for it, don’t let the game distract you by that feeling of “Well, I played the demo, I’m done.” Save up some quarters and get a really fun game that just has a clever twist on something, or isn’t part of a big genre, or represents something harder to box up. Journey is not a game a big studio could make well, it was worth the quarters people spent on it. Minecraft was too, though now its been cloned to hell and back. Making big companies sit up and go “Why are these little goofball games making money?” is less about the game developers there being woken up (though a lot of them need to be too) but it makes the corporate guys wake up. We’re knocking on the gates of hell there, not the poor schlubs stuck working for a company that refuses to innovate. But give it a thought. We all buy more games than we play, let’s just make one of those games a high-concept piece. And if you’ve already been that guy or gal for a while now, kudos fellow person, you’re helping a ton and it isn’t going unnoticed.

Neil Wickman feels like he’s walking into Mordor when he talks like this.

He has been working for Lunar Giant studios since its inception as one of the lead designers and the Creative Director. Listen to him @LunarNeil on Twitter.

Okay, note to self, before writing a massively long post and accidentally closing it… save. Let’s try this again, but a bit more condensed.

The idea that territory is something traditionally ignored was the premise of my previous entry, and like any under-utilized bit of creative paydirt you gotta figure out why nobody was messing with it before. I’d say that the reason is just convention, and that most people are concerned with slugging it out near bases rather than near, well, some random piece of nothing. Real wars are often fought over territory that has strategic value but almost nothing visibly defining for it, its just a place on a map that is important in relation to something else. This is also a function of reality’s distinct lack of “bases” or resource harvesting on the battlefield.

So, why aren’t we usually invested in the area between Our First Base and Our Expansion Base? Because there’s literally nothing there that has any value to us, except a path from A to B. Making that valuable to the player means it has to be part of some investment or something they can exploit. The simplest way, before we get into our teaser from last time, would be to make something have to go from Base A to Base B. It could be as simple as a truck convoy that often goes from A to B, dropping off supplies of some sort. You need to protect the supply caravan, so naturally the space around your caravan route is important to you, since you want to protect it. That’s not a bad idea.

Now, I had mentioned pipes last time, so here we go. Pipes could do something of the same thing, and you can run a pipe from A to B without the need to actually have a supply train constantly going along that route. Pipes are also handy because they assume a relatively constant flow of something, like water or steam. Interrupting this flow will mess up whatever was on the other end, which leads to all kinds of fun. Wiring is essentially a pipe for electrons, but we’re keeping that out of The Deepening, so lets use steam and water as our power cables.

Another fun thing about pipes is that it assumes there’s something on the other end shoving stuff into the pipe, like a water pump or a steam boiler. So a steam machine assumes, essentially, three parts. One, a boiler to create the steam. Two, a pipe to channel the steam. Three, a machine part that runs when steam is shot through it. Most steam devices just combined 1 and 3 into a single operating mechanism, but lets have reality sit aside for a moment and just focus on what we have here.

This lets us have a stationary asset on two ends, one in a safe place, The Base, one in a dangerous place, The Machine, and then the power cable that runs to it, the steam pipe. This gives the player two discrete regions of importance, the base and the machine, to be defended… and it also gives them the need to defend the territory between those regions so that the machine can keep running. Stopping the machine can now be accomplished at anywhere between A and B by smashing a pipe, which is a really interesting idea, I think. You’ve created a situation that allows for all kinds of interesting sabotage!

What if that steam pipe was powering an elevator? If I snuck a unit unit into your territory to sabotage some of your steam pipes, and your elevator went dead, would the units down there be stuck or would the elevator be able to run slowly on no power? Maybe I did this to cut your units off from an attack on your main base. Strategy!

What if the pipes were running some kind of device that cannot be turned off safely. I’m not sure what that would be, but just go with it. So now you’ve cut the power, and Device X is running out of control, and after a few turns it’ll explode or burst into flames, setting off other devices and causing the Alchemist’s Shop to catch fire and that’ll lead to a good portion of your base going up in flames.

What if we also have water pipes? So we have steam pipes and water pipes, and sometimes water pipes connect to steam boilers to create steam that goes out in steam pipes. Cutting the water might make the steam boiler overheat and burst into flames. Let’s pretend our Dwarfs are using Uranium instead of Coal to power their steampunk water boilers because, you know, Dwarfs. Having your water cut could be a big deal!

What if, mind you, we decide to include some more puzzley elements. I like the idea of a strategy puzzle thing going on. We could try and do something like having a Compressor object which you can hook a water pipe. Depending what you build next to the Water Compressor you can either make a Water Cannon to blast enemies, or a Hydraulic Elevator for moving your Dwarfs and minerals around, or a Water Drill to mine out gold, or whatever. In this case, smashing the water pipe would either disable your defenses, or mess up your pathing or slow down your mineral extraction.

This would make territory valuable enough to protect, and if we allow you to build bases or improve tunnels, now you’ve made an investment. Bricking up a tunnel to keep monsters from digging through the walls would be great, and if a Paved Tunnel also lets you move faster or fit more Dwarfs onto the hex then that’s another great improvement. Building some infrastructure, if its fast and easy to manage, would allow you to see your territory as a massive asset, not as a frustration to be avoided. An Elevator is better than a Nydus canal because it lets you improve the territory, not remove it.

I would like, over the next few days, to try and think up a small number of functional machine parts… like four to five… which can be used in interesting ways to create a puzzle in your tunnels. I don’t want it to be too complex or too time consuming, but if we can make the idea of Tunnel Improvement more than just Base Construction, and more about adding things and picking territory for improvement and enforcing a feeling of TERRITORY BEING VALUABLE… then that’ll be great.

Spacelab Signing Out

Everything should reinforce the main idea that territory is the key asset in the game. I don’t want people to feel like their tunnels are just there for the sake of being there, I’d like them to think about expanding their territory and exploiting it in a very different way. We’re not reinventing the wheel here, I really think there’s a way to make tunnel improvement easier by thinking about it in terms of puzzle pieces being slapped together.

This is going to evolve over the next few days, to be sure, but that’s where I am right now. I want to have a big map full of of interesting things to capture, exploit, and fight… and some cool things they’ve designed themselves. If you’ve got any ideas, leave a reply!

Neil Wickman reminds you that a Dwarf mine is not just a series of tubes.

He has been working for Lunar Giant studios since its inception as one of the lead designers and the Creative Director. Listen to him @LunarNeil on Twitter.

Strategy is what I’m talking about today. I’m pretty much done with designing the combat model for DD2, and I can bring up all the gory details at a later entry, and off I am onto the other stuff that ties the game together.

Strategy is such a wide net though, and its hard to get into talking about it because of just how broad the subject is. Strategy games usually fit into a few niches that we just assume are what they are, like how people call Diablo an “action RPG” despite the fact the only tenuous connection to an actual roleplaying game is the use of stats to represent player avatar power progression. I think that’s almost as weak as saying it is a an “action novel” because they both use printed text.

Strategy has a similar problem. Most games have strategic thinking in them, in the strictest sense of the word. You need to plan out what you want to do, try to do it, and then adapt as situations change. Platformers have the least emphasis on strategy I suppose, as do some other games that are more “skill” based than “plan” based, but add a puzzle or two into there and that’s as strategic as any RTS, I would say. I’m not going to try and define all the elements of what strategy is or does, I’m just ruminating on strategy game subjects a little bit as I bring up the beginning of what Delve Deeper 2’s strategy is all about.

I do get a bit annoyed at the emphasis on twitch reactions in most strategic games. Since as far back as I can recall, I want to play the King on a battlefield, with one of those maps that show the territory and little wooden soldiers to represent forces, and then draw big arrows or shove them around with those tiny pushbrooms. It is a very abstract feeling, sure, and very similar to a board game. But I like the sense of power and command I get from saying “Army 1, go over there. Army 2, take that hill.” In those situations my command is my input, and then I’m tasked to think about how best to adapt to my enemy’s movements.

This is not the feeling I get from a game like Starcraft, where I’ve heard people talk at length about the great virtues of needing to control every single little idiot on the battlefield personally. I’ve even heard people claiming low squad sizes were better. An intentional limitation designed to be less than you need? That’s a virtue? Sounds like an oversight. Squads, when Dawn of War and Company of Heroes had them, were such a boon for me and to this day I see a yawning divide between different strategy games bridged only by their desire to force me to bother with all kinds of micro-management nonsense. So what can I do to fix that in my own game?

Well, some people like micro, but those people are strange to me. I regret to inform them that The Deepening is more focused on keeping your attention where the fun stuff is, like moving your heroes, or setting up your base, or building your tunnels. I also want to remember that base building is an important element of DD2, but if you just end up building it the same way each time, there’s really no point. We’ve got to make it so base-building is a strategic choice.

See, that’s the thing about strategy, it really boils down to the way you react. The saying goes that “no plan ever survives contact with the enemy,” but that doesn’t mean you don’t make plans. It means that you need to have a backup, and be flexible. Many games use the repetition of the same process as a core element of the game, but unless I’m really changing something up, those first 5-10 minutes before I have an infrastructure running are mostly wasted time. The emergence of “no rush” rules might be seen as crap designed to keep the slower, crappier players from having to learn good build orders, but I think it comes from an idea that people want to see the big, glorious battles and don’t really enjoy winning or losing from an SCV rush or knowing they can never come back from a mere second or two of wasted time leading to an inevitable loss.

That’s fun for some people, but it isn’t strategy anymore, it’s a quick-draw duel. If you’re both doing it the same way, and just trying to be faster or better at it, then you’ve drained the strategy out of it.

When people build bases in DD2, I want there to be a strategy involved. Not just a plan, but a counter-plan. I want the bases and the infrastructure to be as important as troop movements, if I can. Not in the passive way of “Oh, he did this, now he has more money” or even the somewhat strategic “Oh, he built less troops, but now he has a nuke to shoot at me” way. Too often we allow a separation between the troops and tactical gameplay and the strategic gameplay.

The main strategy of the game is to secure space on the hex grid. Secure it as in take it and keep it from the enemy. That’s how you make money, sure. But its also how you give yourself more tactical options when an enemy squad arrives. The new combat model was designed to put an incredible importance on positioning and tunnel control. If you just fight like you did in DD1, you’ll lose terribly to someone who fights using the tunnels to surround, bypass, or flank his enemies. You need to fight more like ants than men. To quote Star Trek, players need to display three dimensional thinking, and not just move directly at their foes.

Now, combine that with the importance of digging tunnels and capturing space, and then of securing those spaces with infrastructural improvements and you’re making a small step. But in most games you build a base, maybe put some walls and turrets around it, and that’s as far as you can go. You never really do anything like laying down roads or rails so you can wheel heavy artillery towards your enemy. Sometimes you may set up a quick travel node, but that’s much less interesting because the focus there is bypassing terrain rather than controlling it. People tend to treat territory as a nuisance, and only show the slightest interest in areas on the map where there are resources or some other node to control. Even then, the focus is only on those materials. Nothing about the terrain, other than if it does or does not grant money to make more troops or build more factories, does the player have an interest in, or any reason to.

I don’t want to make bases like beehives clustered in nodes around the map. I understand that, quite logically, players will want to isolate delicate structures far away where they are safe. But by finding ways to force players to make use of the entire terrainscape, we are going to see people battling not just for parts of a map, but the whole map. You’ll pick your battles, but you might spend an enormous amount of money and blood warring over an area of the map without a single resource node on it. I think that would be perfect. Realistic in a sense, but also strategic in a way I cannot think of many games being. How am I going to make Mud Hex 0412 interesting enough to fight over when there are so many, and without stuffing it full of money or other assets you want to harvest and bring back to the base?

Let’s talk again tomorrow.

Spacelab Signing Out

To sum all this up, I think most games like to lay out “funnels” for units to bypass, treat fliers as special in that they bypass funnels but have no other special features to them, and make the game strictly about the economics of mineral harvesting with a cursory bit of interest paid to actual army usage. There are exceptions–Supreme Commander treated airplanes somewhat like actual airplanes, or how Company of Heroes makes resource node control more distributed than centralized… but it all seems to be mostly the same. I’m going to fix this entire problem with one of the simplest concepts in gaming: Pipes.

Neil Wickman is in the market for a good Plumber.

He has been working for Lunar Giant studios since its inception as one of the lead designers and the Creative Director. Listen to him @LunarNeil on Twitter.

The combat model has been haunting me repeatedly, but in weaker and weaker ferocity. Now the question isn’t “How do I do this?” but “What do I have to finish?”

Maddeningly, the biggest problems were the most bland conventions, things like armor or combat resolution or shield usage. I didn’t want The Deepening to just be a re-hash of the same mechanics we’ve seen a million times, and not because I’ve got the grandest of ambitions. I just wanted the game to be better than the stuff people came up with back in the day of massive floppies and monitors that only had the color green. They did a good job for what they had, but I think its about time we stop treating shields as +2 AC or hitpoint levels as binary states.

So what I did was think up one of the most terribly complex systems ever, read up on real-world fighting, and dive into the kinds of stuff people actually went through in that fighting. Then I decided what parts of it looked the best for our game, and started trying to trash-compact it into as small of a system as possible. One of the design goals I set for myself was getting the Swashbuckling feel into action, so that means I need to have a lot of attacks being traded, a back-and-forth push of combatants, and a system for the parrying of blows.

If you want a good example of swashbuckling, try to watch The Adventures of Robin Hood, or for something with a bit more comedy, the duel in The Court Jester. Swashbuckling isn’t about good or realistic swordplay, but a very emotional give and take. That’s my feeling anyway. It always seemed focused on allowing for a lot of good quips, quick movement, and for the upper hand to be given and taken back and forth. Any good Swashbuckler fight tends to have a moment where someone does something dirty or gives their opponent a chance to yield, sometimes both. Blowing off a chance to surrender and pulling a dagger or something, that’s a good leadup to you getting offed.

So why would this be good for Delve Deeper 2, of all things? Very few times in any swashbuckler fight do you not know who is winning and why, it just has a great way of giving the necessary feedback to the audience as to what is going on. In a massive furball between teams, being able to tell what is happening will be important, and I need that to happen BEFORE your entire team ends up as corpses. Swashbuckling aesthetics may not make the most sense for guys wielding polearms and shields, but the ethos will still work just fine, and I’d rather that characters retreat before taking damage, and take some damage before getting killed. Layering on some wounds before the character just falls over dead will go a long way towards changing the tempo of the fight. It also means that combats will be slow enough (in terms of time until irreversible losses) that you’ll be able to get your bearings, pull back, and form a plan. That’s important for a strategy game. Fighting in a series of tunnels is probably a hellish affair, and we’ll be taking some of the edge off of that, but making it both tense AND fun and often funny isn’t so bad if you just think it through.

Built into this is armor. Armor will mitigate a lot of the damage you take, which is important when fighting things like Trolls or Dragons. Of course, not everyone wants to trade mobility for defense, so you’ll set up your team the way it makes the most sense to you. Armor gives you heavy resistance against slashing weapons, mobility tends to win out against slow thudding ones. It isn’t an equal fight though, the guy in armor is nearly always going to beat the guy not in armor, assuming otherwise equally skilled opponents, like another Dwarf. But if you’re choosing to rush into combat against a guy who has traded mobility for the ability to win in melee combat, you’re crazy. What about using traps? Why not use some teamwork? Etc. Armor will make you really nasty in melee, since you can not only take a lot of punishment but choose to be more aggressive, giving you a further advantage. Combine that with the swashbuckling mechanics and I think its shaping up interestingly.

What about shields? Well, shields and weapons in general need to be able to parry, since parrying is such a major part of the aesthetic. It was also a huge part of the quasi-renaissance era that The Deepening takes place in. You don’t just take a hit with a shield, you jam it into the sword before it comes down, knocking it to the side, and attack the foe. In swashbuckler fencing duels, nearly all the fighting is done sword on sword, but with a shield it works kinda the same… except that you can defend and strike at the same time. Someone with a shield has an advantage over someone without one, but carrying a shield means you can’t carry a two-handed weapon capable of clonking in the head of someone in armor. Again, armor gives you a big advantage, but there’s ways around it. It also means that shields aren’t just for heavy armor guys, they’re a good way for anyone to survive better in melee combat. But not everyone is going to want a shield, and that’s just fine, there will be a variety of off-hand items for people to use.

When two enemies come into contact, we’ll probably resolve combat as a series of opposed attacks, with Dude A having priority for the first attack (due to higher agility, surprise attack, longer weapon, etc) and Dude B having priority for the second attack. Assuming that they have light weapons there could be a series of follow up strikes on both sides. If you add shields to the mix, people will be able to parry and attack with higher frequency, leading to a very dynamic back-and-forth. This all plays out in a second or two, keeping combat from being too sluggish.

If it goes well, the way it should look is this:

Bejord “Axebreath” Uyrard is a Bear-Kin Berserker, a Dwarf Warrior who channels the spirits of the bear and actually fights alongside a big Tunnel Bear.

Scrabblegrab is a Goblin ratmancer and has a team of ruffians at his side.

Simultaneous resolution begins, and while running around, Bejord, alongside Ursus his bear compansion, and Scrabblegrab’s swarm run into each other, and that will not do. Combat is declared between these two groups, with two goblins next to Bejord, another a hex away, and Scrabblegrab three hexes away from the combat. During their respective turns, Bejord chooses the Aggressive Posture for the coming combat turn and Scrabblegrab (who isn’t locked into combat since he’s not adjacent) chooses to fire his Cone of Rats spell. Additionally, he sends his minions off in an Aggressive attack as well, moving the last one up into combat.

The Combat round begins, Cone of Rats starts to ‘wind up,’ but in the second before it activates, Bejord and the goblins begin exchanging attacks. Right now its two against three. There’s a Combat Morale meter over the shared hex space, showing who is winning the emotional tug of war between the goblins and the bear/dwarf tag team. Though it starts off even, it quickly goes in Bejord’s favor. The goblins get in an initial hit or two, but Bejord parries with his shield and attacks, smashing a goblin into pulp. The bear savages another.

Berserkers do not suffer negative morale, as they are berserk, and thats kinda what happens. Normally a unit would lose some morale from taking abuse like this, but because the victory was so complete and because his class makes him impossible to panic, not even the swirling horizontal tornado of dead rats cast by Scrabblegrab is enough to weaken his resolve. The three goblins try to retreat, having ended the combat encounter with zero morale… but this plays into Bejord’s advantages. Bejord advances after them due to his Aggressive stance, and due to their aggressive stance they take a penalty for retreating, and it quickly becomes a rout. The bear and dwarf advance one hex after the fleeing enemy, taking the hex they were just on and killing two of the goblins in the process. The last goblin manages to complete its panic behavior and runs to the nearest leader. The ruffian and its leader, seeing how futile this fight is, start their next turn by running as fast as they can. The day is Bejord’s.

Had this been between two equally skilled fighters, the one who had flubbed a parry would have taken some damage and possibly tried to back up. If they had been nimble enough, they may even have dodged the successful counterattack, which works similar to a retreat. They’d have ended up one square backwards, safely out of reach, but unable to attack again. The opponent, unless they were in defensive posture, would likely have advanced to continue the swashbuckling duel. Two opponents with shields and swords might trade several blows without doing serious damage to each other, but the weaker of the two will nearly always yield ground for safety’s sake.

You might be able to guess that such a system, in a complex web of badly lit, unexplored tunnels filled with monsters, machinery, and traps of all design… that can be a kinda exciting thing. At least, that’s the plan. One skilled warrior may be able to force back a small squad of opponents himself. A team of powerful warriors may be able to smash their way, in a relatively believable fashion, through a horde of lesser foes.

Now I’ve just got to draw and animate all of it, hoo boy.

Spacelab Signing Out

What do you think of the ideas posted? Obviously, these fights take no account of flanking and advanced maneuvering. This was also a situation where none of the hexes were stressed above capacity. If you have a small tunnel you won’t be able to pile Dwarfs up on it forever, so even a well designed army might get bogged down by a chokepoint. Bonus points if you named your chokepoint defender Leonidwarf. You’re going to want to design your tunnels in such a way that an opponent who comes knocking on your front door will have to worry about getting attacked from behind. All that awesome armor won’t save you for long from a pair of heroes smashing on you from both sides. Even Bejord would probably start losing morale if you managed to kill off his fuzzy bear buddy in a pincer maneuver.

Neil Wickman wants to tell you about the musketmen.

He has been working for Lunar Giant studios since its inception as one of the lead designers and the Creative Director. Listen to him @LunarNeil on Twitter.