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Archives For November 30, 1999

Balancing Solo vs Group Play

October 21, 2015 — Leave a comment

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Rust. It’s a great sandbox PvP game but it has some frustrating balancing that makes solo play a chore at times and currently disproportionately favours group play. It got me thinking about the problems with balancing solo play versus group play. So I’m going to to try to expand on my thoughts about the issue through the example of Rust.

To begin with let’s state some premises, these may not be valid for your own vision but I think they are common to most persistent games with PvP:

  • Group play will in general always be superior to playing by yourself.
  • Playing by yourself should be viable without a huge time commitment.
  • Live player interaction is preferred.

In general games tend to balance activities through resource acquisition and the cost in resources of achieving something. Grinding to get materials to build a base and grinding to get materials to raid a base are staples of Rust. Ultimately it’s about optimising the time taken to achieve the desired goal. The problem is that these activities scale really well as you add more people so groups are by far the dominant strategy and quickly significantly out power individuals. Our goal as game designers based on the premises above is to keep the gap between groups and solo players reasonable such that whilst solo players may never challenge giant groups they can enjoy the broader metagame.

One great way of achieving this is balance on an orthogonal axis, skill. Rather than making the game hard by forcing you to spend a lot of time gathering, crafting and building a root to the objective is also available through skill. Rust actually has this in various parts. For example the bow in the game is resource cheap, takes a reasonable amount of skill to wield effectively and can take down kitted out players. It’s suboptimal in comparison to the high resource cost guns in the game but its a viable way to get one that relies on skill rather than time. Outside of systems design there is some great social engineering metagaming that people use to effectively give themselves a leg up.

Whereas the bow is a great example of balancing skill versus time raiding other peoples bases in Rust takes the opposite tack. As it takes a lot of resources and time to construct a base raising has been similarly balanced that destroying a base also takes a lot of time and resources. It’s also much safer with no negative consequences to raid a base whilst the occupants are offline. This isn’t inherently wrong but it does put solo players at a huge disadvantage as group advantages essentially mean they can raid solo players at will with very little chance of there being any repercussion. Part of the issue here is that the only way to successfully raid a base is through destruction. It’s a straight up case of “how much do you want to pay to get the stuff in here?”. Players can optimise this somewhat by intelligently working their way to the bases loot but ultimately there is only a small skill component to raiding in comparison to the massive amount of time sunk in resources. The solution? Well we don’t necessarily want to make bases easier to destroy but adding a skill component seems feasible.

On Code Locks and Key Locks

Currently there are two tiers of doors in Rust. A regular key lock that lets you craft keys from it which take up inventory space and can be given or looted to gain access to a door. A code lock that has a four digit pin that you can share with friends to give them access to the door. It’s worth noting that both can be brute forced with key locks having less combinations but being more laborious to actually try each at present. The former also costs less than the latter. In my time in Rust I’ve used one key lock when I was green but since then nothing but code locks as the advantages of the latter are huge.

The easiest solution I’ve thought of is to remove Code Locks. As noted above keys are physically present items that give you access where as codes are remembered and as such intangible. This puts us squarely in the territory of skill, you must fight to protect your keys or bury them in a stash (a small container that can be buried and only reappears if someone looks at it for a small amount of time) both are vulnerable to interception. This provides a skill based, non-destructive and player interaction based mechanism for solo players and groups to get access to a base. Clearly groups still have an advantage but as with the bow example solo players can also successfully use it against groups. There are a bunch of QoL improvements that would need to be made to make this a good implementation but it demonstrates the idea.

Further solutions could include audible tone differences on code locks that can be overheard, some form of systems based skill test to bypass a code lock (which could be extended to other items), much more expensive code locks and completely different systems targeting other parts of raiding.

TL;DR

When looking at balancing game systems with one another in games that support both solo and group play don’t just consider resource cost adjustments as you’ll be lopsidedly punishing solo players and eventually smaller groups. Instead look at skill based systems that whilst still giving groups an advantage also mean that solo players can still take part without the game becoming onerous.

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Art in Prototypes

July 14, 2014 — Leave a comment

There is a persistent myth circulating in the videogames development community that you don’t want good art in a prototype. To me this is like saying you don’t want spaces, punctuation and paragraphs in a draft piece of writing. It’s simply not true and removing good art from a prototype hurts a games readability as much as removing punctuation does with good writing. What a prototype actually needs is the minimum amount of art for the game to be visual and aurally readable, and aesthetically pleasing. If your prototype doesn’t have these qualities you are actively making it harder for anyone playing or watching your game to understand and appreciate the design underneath.

Your Art does not have to be Complex!

This persistent myth seems to spring from AAA development where content has become increasingly complex and laborious to create so “no art” is a hyperbolic description of how much simpler things need to be. Prototyping is supposed to be a quick process of getting a minimal version of the core game to a decent quality. In this situation simplicity is king. If we look towards Indie games there are plenty of art styles that are extremely simple yet easy to understand and aesthetically pleasing. Thomas Was Alone is a clear example of a very straightforward art style which is supremely readable but still aesthetically pleasing.

thomas_was_alone_1

Thomas Was Alone

 

Obviously Thomas Was Alone is a reasonably simple platformer but this is the final production quality art and it’s simpler than most prototypes! There is a lot you can learn from looking at games with minimalist art styles that translates into more complex styles, for example the way in which the characters are highlighted against the background to improve readability. This walk-through of an update to the Summoner’s Rift map in League of Legends demonstrates this really well.

More complex games are going to require more complex art to retain readability. One way to ensure readability is to make sure silhouettes are distinct. Low-poly, flat-shaded models create silhouettes as well as high-poly models with huge detail in their texture maps. Levels can be “grey-boxed” and minimally dressed to keep visual hints in place. In many ways we’re trying to boil down the art to the essentials required to explain and sell the game.

It also might be the case that you need nearer production quality assets (to give a good indication of final visual design) for example if you want to show the prototype off to investors or the general public. In this case it’s often worthwhile keeping simple assets for as long as possible so you can target the time-consuming art work to the parts of the game that will provide the most benefit.

Re-use Existing Assets

Re-use existing assets to get you going. For example Left 4 Dead was initially prototyped with the Counterstrike models and skins. I’m not certain exactly what they did but simple animations for attacks and zombie walk cycles are the sort of thing I would think about adding immediately. When I was prototyping new avatar gameplay for EVE Online we reused all sorts of assets from EVE and even some that had been created specifically for cinematic trailers. Similarly some of the assets used in the EVR prototype came from EVE.

There are also lots of digital asset stores that will sell ready made assets for games. Jump on them.

It’s important when buying or re-using assets to make sure that you’re keeping the visuals as coherent and readable as possible. Otherwise the assets are probably detracting rather than adding to the prototype.

Juice It

Art isn’t just assets, it’s the whole gamut of feedback and your prototype should feel as good to play as you hope the final version will. Simple programmatic techniques can breathe life into static assets. A bit of scaling and tweening can turn a sprite into a character.

But Keep Focus

Art in games needs to be complementary to the gameplay. The focus of a prototype is experimenting with and proving out the gameplay of what will hopefully become a full game. Art can make a game with mediocre mechanics into a good game but at this stage we want the art to play a support role in enabling the player to be able to understand and appreciate the game.

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A Simple Agile Game Design/Development Process

July 2, 2014 — 3 Comments

Usually when Agile is introduced to people it’s done so with Scrum which is seemingly filled with arcane terms and voodoo ritual. Very often the context behind those rituals and terms is lost and the general advice is to, “do it by the book,” until you understand, before you adapt it. There are a couple of problems with this. Firstly that the context Scrum was developed for might not fit the context you are making games in so rather than enabling you to move faster and make better games you are standing in a corner with your wizard hat on. Secondly Scrum as an introduction obscures some of the elegance behind the Agile Principles, concerned as it is with day-to-day process in service to that elegance.

So let’s cut back to the elegance. In yesterdays post I made a simple re-drafting of the Agile Manifesto to make sense of it for games design/development. Today I’m going to take those re-drafted principles and show how they fit into a simple Agile process.

First a diagram:

simple agile

That’s it. That’s the beating heart of Agile. So simple you can describe it in one sentence. Come up with an idea, make it and try it out to see what it’s like, then use your learning to refactor your idea and processes. So simple it gets repeatedly invented in an intuitive fashion. So simple I can retire this blog forever! Done!

Well not quite, we’ve only managed to deal with a few of the Agile Principles in this loop the rest involve what happens during each stage. Currently we’re hitting:

  • Deliver a playable game frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
  • A playable game is the primary measure of progress.
  • At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Ideate

We want to keep our ideas lightweight. Over-complicating our ideas too early means wasting a bunch of time both coming up with them and also implementing them. We’ll be refining our ideas over the course of many iterations so starting with a ‘perfect design’ is not going to help particularly as we have not yet managed to evaluate how perfect the design really is! The watch phrase some canny individual coined was “Just Barely Good Enough”.

Ideally we’re keeping these principles in mind:

  • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  • Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.

Create

Creation is in many ways the ‘easy bit’ where we turn the idea into something playable. The main point to be aware of is that almost every task is going to require some Just-In-Time design. Having whiteboards (or a pad if you’re by yourself) handy is incredibly useful to quickly solve design problems. If you’re creating a videogame then this is also the time to make sure you’re refactoring the code your are working on to keep it simple, elegant and easy to work with. There are lots of ways to make this less painful but that’s outside of the scope of this post.

The principles to keep in mind are the same:

  • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  • Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.

Evaluate

Evaluation means putting real people in front of your game and have them play it. Ideally you want the audience you intend to release the game to playing it as early as possible (or a close facsimile). At the very least you want some people that aren’t you playing the game to give criticism and feedback. Other developers can be good as they can excuse some of the rough edges of a product in development as well as being able to understand the ruleset and provide critique of the design. If you’re in a company then you’re probably going to have a list of stakeholders responsible for your project who should be playing every iteration and providing feedback. Other excellent although more time consuming methods include using Usability testing methods. For example doing some User Testing, a technique where you watch a players game session and take notes on friction points in the experience.

Schemes like alpha and beta testing, attending games shows, plus funding methods like Early Access also provide a host of willing playtesters. A caveat here is that the quality of the game experience does matter when showing something externally to large groups of people in a manner where there are quality expectations. First impressions count, word of mouth is important and it can be hard to dig a games name out of the toilet if every comment on articles about your game references how rubbish an early version was.

The end result should be a collated list of feedback and some action points to take into the next Ideation phase.

The principles being hit here are:

  • Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of a quality game experience.
  • Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

The remainder of the principles deal with things like team composition, team management and day-to-day practices that are effective rather than process. They should be kept in mind at all times.

So why is Scrum so complicated?

Well it turns out as you start to use the above process a whole bunch of questions will routinely come up that need to be answered. Some can be answered by reading the Agile principles but others need a bit of cogitating on the best way to handle them.

For example how long should it take to move through the whole loop? According to the Agile Principles:

Deliver a playable game frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. Frequently providing a playable game means frequent feedback from stakeholders, playtesters and colleagues. It is the engine of iteration.

So we want to move through the loop pretty quickly, what if our idea is complicated? Well we’re going to have to cut the idea up into chunks we can implement and we’re going to need to work out roughly what order to do them in. But that means we won’t have the “full game” playable for some time? Well we should build a prototype first so we can get early feedback on our complete game design or we won’t worry too much and let the final design fall out in the wash as we receive feedback. Scrum basically provides a ready made solution to a lot of common problems that come up when trying to implement this elegant feedback loop.

Whether you pick an off-the-shelf solution or grow your own from simple beginnings the important thing to remember is that the entire process fails if you don’t keep up the virtuous feedback loop for both the game being made and the processes you use to make it.

In Agile, Game Design, Game Development, Prototyping , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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