They’re coming along. I haven’t spent much time tweeking variables or optimizing yet. Lots of little shader tricks left to enhance the visual effect. The diffuse is still Oren-Nayer, but I haven’t added the new specular effects in yet.
So I’ve got a name for the Zero Crisis prequel -> Zero Horizon. I figure if EA isn’t going to make me a decent fantasy snowboarding game to play, I have to start doing it myself.
I’m also returning to some XNA goodness by dusting off the old Shader Series 3 to work on “Zero Lighting” — a look I can’t describe well until I can actually render it since I’m such a crummy artist.
I’m also resurrecting River’s End as my most complete action game at the moment that will easily support a networked multiplayer mode. I am going to use it as my research project for network LOD, dead reckoning, bicubic spline-based motion path interpolation, and view-biased misprediciton recovery techniques. In the last few weeks I’ve been looking at Kalman Filters as a way to reduce error in my dead reckoning systems. Sadly, I am simply too dumb to understand how to apply them properly. Therefore, I’ve purchased some college-level math books and I’m slowly making my way through them. I picked up “Linear Algebra Done Right” by Sheldon Axler. So far so good — not a determinant in sight.
Edit: I don’t know if this will work, but here’s a link to my facebook page showing Zero Crisis logo work:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/album.php?aid=2046318&id=1051001256
Where’s my update? To my throngs of readers: fear not. I’m working on a post just this minute! Or was, until real life distracted me.
Also, if you are spamming me in Russian, please know that this is a Cyrillic-free zone, as madated by the Geneva Convention Protocol II.
“Rick, we should start adding real posts to the Developer Blogs section on Trainwreck’s site.”
“… I’ve been doing that for two weeks.”
“…”
“…”
And so I admit that I haven’t been reading this site recently, as I was under the impression that it was a test-tube baby still awaiting implantation in Rick’s womb of content. Wow, that’s awful imagery; let’s move on.
I started playing video games on the Intellivision before I turned three. I was regularly defeating my father at NFL Football for said Intellivision before I turned five. In the years since, I’ve thought a lot about why I work in this industry, and why I associate myself with it so strongly, even before I worked at a game developer. I have many different charming rationalizations, but the early exposure has implanted a reptilian, “just because” directive into my cortex. Unfortunately, that’s really boring to talk about, so let’s discuss the rationalizations instead.
The most charming rationalization I have is that game development combines my two loves: performance and engineering. I’m driven to perform for people, and like everyone who has ever been successful on the stage, I crave applause. More generally, I crave appreciation. In fact, I think everyone craves appreciation, and that desire manifests itself in various ways. Engineering combines logical “solving” – what Rick would call “hard fun”, or at least Rick channeling Koster – and artistic creation from the aether. In one video game, I wrote the code that made it rain, and I was the first person to see it rain in this game. This powerful act of creation, and the fact that millions of others experienced that creation (albeit without associating it directly with me), is like a drug.
Like all drugs, the desire for more “hits” can lead you down some undesirable short-term paths. At this point in my career, I don’t want to work on crap, and I don’t want to work for no possible reward. I don’t want to just complete my assigned tasks as an employee; I want to play a meaningful role in the creation of the game. I don’t want to make any old game; I want to create something special – hopefully many somethings.
Unfortunately, I realized a long time ago that the only IP that I can create doesn’t pass my own “crap” filter. Fortunately, I found Rick, who has many compelling ideas and is even interested in doing all the boring businessy work. I just want to entertain people and make money at it, as money is a meaningful barometer of success at entertainment. More than that, I want to lead a group of people to collectively entertain others in ways I could never do by myself. The DaVinci to my Edison is definitely Jim Henson.
Rick once told me that there are four aspects to a career in the games industry: “creative”, “technical”, “business”, and “people”; you get to pick two. He had chosen “creative” and “business”, and my talents and interests obviously lie in “technical” and “people”. This should work out fairly well for us. On the other hand, I am mindful of the wisdom of Homer: “I lost creative control of the project. And I forgot to ask for any money.”
I’ve recently started playing Magic the Gathering again. More specifically, I’ve been playing it in its online incarnation. For those who are unfamiliar, Magic the Gathering Online is an online game of Magic the Gathering that mirrors the meat-world experience to a surreal level. If you are unfamiliar with the collectible card game Magic the Gathering, this may not be the right blog for you.
You purchase packs of virtual cards in the same way that you might walk into a game shop and purchase little, foil-wrapped pieces of paper. In a strange, metaphysical way, the value of the cards, like currency, are in the perception of value rather than the value of the raw materials. Unlike currency, there is no inherent promise that they can be exchanged for any other kind of good or service.
The notion that I place more value in my virtual property than in physical is just one sign of this age that leads me to believe there’s a better description of the epoch we currently occupy than the Information Age. I certainly have more virtual real-world liquid assets available to me at any given time than physical. This is an idea hundreds of years old, but there’s a new level of abstraction at work here: the virtual goods these days are backed by nothing save other people’s perception of their value. This is no land bank or gold-backed currency here; even stocks seem to rise and fall based on perception of market success rather than actual profits. These objects inherent worth are guaranteed by no more than the crystallographic orientation of a few thousand molecules orbiting madly in some server farm in a town you’ve never been to.
I’m surprisingly comfortable with the attachment of value to records in a database. Now, one could argue that as long as banks have been conducting a digital business, everyone has been doing this. The factor that makes this all possible is the notion of a fair playing field. I’d think after the recent scandals, scams, cartels, and conspiracies in the financial markets, my faith in the sea of gaming virtual value would be shaken. On the contrary, it just re-affirms that as long as game systems remain relatively closed and relatively uncomplicated, their inherent value is as or more trustworthy than my retirement plan. It puts things in perspective.
The conversion issue is significant, but I blind myself to the possibility that a game like Magic the Gathering Online is anything but a life-long investment. I have no illusions about “selling my deck” and making off with a real-world profit. I’ve invested in a lifetime of entertainment, which is, to my way of thinking, valuable improvement to my quality of life.
I think that many gamers have internalized this notion in one way or another. Online persistent systems, as long as they remain closed, should be less like real work. The second a player driven economy opens itself to the outside world of real currencies, the value is reduced. As long as the transaction is unidirectional, the player can maintain the illusion that it is “just a game”, which, to my mind, is actually very serious business.
Therefore, I can’t really fault companies for protecting their investments and cracking down on MMO “gold farmers” and the like. The damage inflicted by these people seems less about the impact on player economies, in game spam, and disruptive in-game “farming” behaviors. Instead I feel the real casualty is psychological – that by linking the real world value of currency to the virtual goods in the game, that every in-game transaction brings you crashing back into reality.
The reason games have aesthetics is to separate the game from the real thing. Actually trading stocks is not a game, and your brain doesn’t reward you because you can’t tell its fun. Trading fake stocks in a fantasy universe is training for the real world, and we are genetically conditioned to find pleasure in this training.
So let’s look at a problem with this theory: why do some people find work to be “fun”? My guess is that your brain tries to reward any useful thing that you do. With real-world success, comes real-world rewards, and you enjoy the kinds of responses you get. The thing is with games, there’s no real world reward with which to associate this pleasure. Game rewards come in four flavors: aesthetic sense pleasure (delight), fun (problem solving/brain training), social factors (recognition), and visceral responses (base emotion.)
If this sounds like a re-hashing of Ralph Kloster’s work, well, it is. I’m a subscriber. Even if he’s wrong, his theory leads to useful game design iteration techniques, which helps me make games for real. But the reason it’s here is to help me justify my position on the 4th wall in games with online property.
I’ll try to summarize my position: the problem with too many real-world rewards in an online game is that they diminish the value of the virtual rewards you get in-game. This seems counter to logic, where an in-game reward with real-world value should be, if anything, more valuable than a purely virtual reward. But by linking the virtual reward to the real, you’ve changed the goal of the activity from a training exercise to one of survival. In short, by giving real-world value to in-game rewards, you are stealing away the kind of fun unique to playing games.
Now, if you’ve been paying attention you should be asking, “what about gambling??!?!” What about gambling indeed. I’ll talk about that soon.
Trying to come up with something “new” is a necessarily reactive exercise. In a way, it’s just as derivative as mash-ups and clones, since the thought process is the same: “I think I can do better than that.” The key difference, for me anyways, is the opportunity cost of not doing something original when resources (and thus risk) are limited.
If there’s no preexisting expectation, what are your players going to compare it to?
You can condition your market to anything. I remember how ridiculous it used to sound to me when I first heard about people paying over $100 for a game with fake plastic guitars. That lasted right up to the point that I fired up Guitar Hero on the PS2 and started rocking out to Symphony of Destruction. There’s real delight there, because it was surprising, no matter how much I’d thought I’d known beforehand.
I worry sometimes, since many of my design docs stray into a familiar sand trap – I create something derivative of a game that was “almost, but not quite.” As if I, with my 2-man company and out-of-pocket investment capital, somehow will supplant some market leader in a genre because I have the benefit of having played the previous game. Preposterous. Execution is key to iteration, and in that, I am tragically unproven.
Anyhoo, let’s talk about what I’m doing right now.
Matt was kind enough to give me a long leash on the graphics engine, so I’m messing around with some post-process effects. Our camera doesn’t change much, so I’m playing with the idea of generating some screen-space volumetric effects. Notably, I want to make smoke that looks awesome when illuminated from below by point-lights. I’m making the assumption that our lights will generally be from below, but as I close in on a solution, it seems I won’t have to limit myself to scattering only. Some direct reflection might be possible. It’ll come down to GPU cycles. I am an ALU junkie.
I’m also working on UI layouts. My game has a lot of statistical data to present to the player, and I want to give them the tools they need to make quick, console-like decisions about things. This is important to me: I don’t want a dumbed-down experience; what I want is to give PC-or-board-game-level information, and present it in a UI that gives you aggregate statistics that are easy to balance.
For example, you have an FPS game where you get to chose two weapons from a large number of different firearms. You chose these weapons before you go into combat (sound like a popular game you’ve played?) This is an offline mode which gives the player a chance to rest from the frantic pace of the game proper and add a layer of resource management depth that increases the probability space of the gameplay without significantly complicated the core experience.
You, the player, can tell from the individual weapon stats that some are great at short range, some are better for long range. You decide on some long-range armament, but you know that will leave you vulnerable close in. So you’d like to augment that with some short range weaponry for your second choice. What if you could see a graph like the following at all times while selecting weapons?
So now you can at-a-glance your damage output at range based on your selected loadout.
Now this is the 10-foot-experience to me. At-a-glance information that is instantly useful. I want to give players the opportunity to tweak, twiddle, and min-max to their hearts content in the offline mode.
Now the question becomes – why doesn’t everyone do this? Seems like a good use of resources to me – it empowers the player to make better decisions based on a complex set of data. It’s also a great hint – by choosing certain data views you’re giving the player insight into what’s important to the designers. I don’t feel like that’s giving up the game. Remember, this is the offline mode, before the real game even begins.
I’d been waiting to generate some more content for the website – especially some logos or other expensive-looking things to show that we’re putting the force of dollars behind us. But that would be a lie; I am very poor ever since I bought my house. So for now you get a WordPress template and a promise that after I purchase a new AV receiver, a half-ton backyard smoker, a new gaming PC, and a new car, I’ll take what’s left and splurge on some custom embossing for our corporate logo billed at $200 an hour.
So what are we doing here?
Trainwreck is a side-project of mine that lets me exercise some creative and organizational skills outside of my day job. During the day I work in the game industry too – but in a tremendously uninteresting capacity. Rather than bore you with details, I’ll just say I work on game platform technology, and when that technology is working, you don’t even know it’s there.
I started Trainwreck as an entity to which I can attach and protect my IP. Like every asshole out there, I have game ideas – lots of game ideas. There’s a folder on my machine at home with something like 180 1-pager descriptions of games I’d like to make. I have probably 20 or so 10-page write ups and a handful of robust design docs. However, I’ve never released one of my own titles commercially. With Trainwreck I plan to rectify this shortcoming in my resume.
I don’t imagine I’ll sell a lot of product under the Trainwreck label, but I’m optimistic that our games will be different and entertaining enough to generate some buzz and delight some gamers. If I thought I could make a living at this, I’d quit my job in a heartbeat and develop my own intellectual properties full-time. But the games business, frankly, sucks. If there’s one truth that is drilled into my consciousness every day of my life, it is that without a franchise, game investments are some of the longest odds you can take. It’s like playing the lottery – the odds are low, the payouts potentially large, and the stakes are whatever you’re willing to spend.
I believe in ultra-transparency. We’ll be talking about everything we do here at Trainwreck, and we’ll be making up a bunch of stuff we didn’t actually do. We’ll talk about what we’re working on to a certain extent. If there are interesting IPs or concepts that we don’t want to reveal, we’ll keep it to ourselves until the time is right.
Our first project is a game called Arc Tactics. It’s set in a sci-fi/fantasy universe I’ve been daydreaming about since I was 10-years-old. My experiences over the years have refined my inclinations, and the Arc Universe has evolved from childish re-hashing of other material to something that is (hopefully) relatively new and exciting to people. While our first game only gives a tiny slice of the continuity we’ve developed, I hope for it to stand on its own merit of having genuinely new gameplay.
I’ll be blogging about lots of stuff – tech, game business, and production – but my real passion is for design. I’m interested in both the aesthetic and interactive parts of game, and I strongly believe in a stronger coupling between the two. It feels to me like people attach IP to a game or vice versa – I feel that they should be developed sympathetically to one another. This is an extreme challenge considering what games are relative to non-interactive media. I won’t go into detail on this yet. I’m not yet comfortable enough with my processes to start detailing them yet.
I’ll shoot for bi-weekly updates. Once I’m more comfortable with this format, I’ll have a regular update schedule. All the popular guys do it, and it’s what I prefer when I’m reading a blog.
Seriously, we’re getting ready for actual content delivery soon. When it happens, we will tell every major news media outlet in America. And by that, of course, I mean our parents and other people who don’t care.
Love,
Rick