Train Jam
I was lucky enough to snag a Train Jam ticket this year! Got to meet a ton of lovely people, hang out and talk shop, and of course play some of the amazing games they made.
Here's my entry, Haunted Heist, a 3D browser game. Rob a haunted mansion!
Roscoe
I got hired to make a secret game embedded in a website footer. Check it out. :)
Right, on to the real stuff!
Design overhaul
The past couple months, I've been overhauling gameplay, going in some wild directions. The following is a synopsis of my "design" process (emphasis on the scare quotes).
Goals
The game has two main aspects. At any given time, you will be either a) parkour-exploring cool environments, or b) facing off against another player online.
Target emotions for parkour-land: freedom, delight, curiosity, relaxation. Basically the same goals Lemma had, or should have had. I'm not too worried about this mode; I've done it before.
Target emotions for multiplayer-land: tension, fear, triumph. This is new territory, and will constitute the focus of the rest of this post. I want to replicate and improve the experience of playing a one-on-one, sniper-only, one-shot-kill round of Call of Duty. Maybe the players only take 5 shots the whole game, but they're constantly trying to predict each other's moves and out-maneuver the opponent.
Detour into MOBA-land
In an attempt to improve on the CoD sniper idea, I tried to identify the things that make it interesting. I thought maybe the long-term player interaction differentiated it from your typical free-for-all CoD frenzy. The longer you're alive, the more interesting your interaction with the enemy becomes. As soon as you die, everything is reset and lost. I wanted to facilitate more methods of player interaction that didn't involve death.
I don't know much about MOBAs, but I think they have a lot of non-player-death interaction. Players are generally alive for a long time; dying is a big deal. And plenty of successful players go through a whole game without killing another player.
So I tried to identify compelling MOBA elements that could be transplanted into my game without too much fuss. I added auto-spawning minions, turrets, and big, granular health bars.
Only minions could attack turrets. Players could kill minions with a headshot, but only once the minion's health dropped beneath a threshold, which opened their helmet. This forced players to stay behind their minions and try to last-hit enemies.
Players could still kill each other with one or two hits, but it became a risky proposition to venture into enemy territory. I decided to visualize view ranges around enemy units to make it clear exactly where an enemy would start attacking. A bit like fog of war.
I hoped that all of this would give players more ways to interact with each other, albeit indirectly, killing minions rather than each other.
Progression
Again, I don't know much about MOBAs; I just can't get into them. But they clearly work for people. I wanted to extract the fun from them. I played a few (admittedly short) games of LoL, and more importantly, collected some feedback from MOBA players. I discovered there is no single feature that defines a MOBA, but one feature seemed at once pivotal and easy to transplant: player progression. In a MOBA, everyone starts each game on a (hopefully) level playing field, and becomes more powerful as the game progresses.
Mainly, they progress by leveling up their abilities. I decided to steal this, along with the idea of a team score.
Here I also experimented with colors, trying to brighten everything and make it more appealing, like a MOBA.
Killing enemy minions and players gave credits, which could be spent on abilities. Kill the enemy player five times to win. Easy. Ship it!
Problems
At this point, everything has at least 50-100 HP. I kept player attacks pretty powerful, but minions take around 30 seconds to wear each other's health down. In true MOBA fashion, they just stand still attacking until somebody dies. This works fine in a top-down RTS-like setting, but not in a "visceral" first-person game.
In general, my detour into MOBA-land was missing some of my target emotions, namely tension and fear. Giving players five lives, turning everything into bullet sponges, and brightening the graphics all worked to lower the tension. I could see that with some polish, the MOBA elements would accomplish the goal of long-term player interaction, but at the expense of everything else.
Backpedaling
I'm now back to the original prototype: you get one life. I think this is more impactful than an arbitrary score number at the top of screen.
I'm also back (way back) to darker colors. The vibrant, beautiful colors I love still have a place in parkour mode, but here the colors need to be dark and maybe even discomforting.
I also switched the reticle from a diamond to an inverted triangle, for several reasons. First, triangles are aggressive, especially inverted triangles. I noticed just that small change evokes a much more hostile feeling than the relatively peaceful diamond shape. Second, triangles and non-square angles are a theme I want to explore in this game, since my last game was all squares. I keep finding squares I've added instinctively and converting them to triangles.
Salvaged ideas
My goal now is to facilitate long-term player interaction without sacrificing tension. I'm keeping the "fog of war" idea, and even making it more central. Map control is one element I noticed was critical to MOBAs. I'm now experimenting with having players place proximity sensors around the map which "capture" areas. Maybe a bit like Splatoon.
Abilities and player progression are also staying, although I'm simplifying them so that only one ability can be equipped at a time.
Wrapping up
All this has not been very productive in terms of features making it into the final product, but I see it as a necessary step of my patent-pending "design by trial-and-error" process. The key is to have a set of design goals which you can use to judge potential ideas. Some of these crazy MOBA ideas work toward my goals, and so remain, while others get cut. Previously, my design goals have been, "make something I like".
I went to a great GDC talk about the narrative design of Dragon Age Inquisition's DLC. The writers picked movie references for their story; one was Captain America Winter Soldier; the other escapes me at the moment. But these two movies gave the whole team familiar references from which they could make decisions on every little detail of the game.
That's what I'm trying to do. I don't have any movie references for the story yet, but I'm looking. Unfortunately my movie literacy is pretty abysmal. :)