Trainwreck Interactive

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.

Rick Developer Blog Game Design, Project Status, User Interface