VectorStorm Blog

So I’ve just spent twelve hours at work on a holiday weekend, and I’m vaguely ill.  When better than now to post game design musings?  

The big problem with the “randomly generated murder mystery” idea I mentioned in an earlier post is that it’s too big and nebulous;  as a brief pitch it’s fine, but I need to actually start to work out a real design.

As such, I’m going to start with the most important things:  the target market, and the gameplay duration.   The murder mystery game will be a casual game aimed squarely at the casual gaming market (at its core, it’ll be a puzzle solving exercise, so I don’t want to try to target hardcore twitch-gamers), and a single standard game session should have a duration of between ten and twenty minutes (an “easy” mode may be much shorter).

With that in mind, we also need our core gameplay mechanic;  the thing that we’ll be doing the most during the game.  In this case, the core gameplay mechanic will be interviewing suspects as to what they did before and after the crime, and then comparing the information they give you compared against the information other suspects have given you, so you can figure out which suspects are telling the truth, and which are lying.

I’m imagining the interface for this as being a schematic view of the building, with a timeline that you can scrub forward and backward through, to see where the current suspect claims to have been and what they claim to have seen.  The player will have their own working area which acts as an overlay on top of this, where they can accumulate information about what others have told them, make notes for themselves, etc.

I’m currently leaning toward a Phoenix Wright-style “find conflicts between what different people remember, and present those disagreements to jog their memories” approach.  That seems like it’d provide a nice level of involvement for the player.

In fact, the player should probably be one of the guests himself, so he’ll have his own memories which he can use as a starting point for figuring out who’s telling the truth and who isn’t.  In terms of game mechanics, he could “interview himself” exactly like anyone else, but just know that he’s definitely not lying to himself, whereas any other character might be trustworthy or not at any given moment.  Having an objective “this much, at least, is True” point would probably make the game more accessible (much like how having more starting points in a game of Sudoku can make the puzzle much easier to solve)

Anyway, that’s enough for one evening.  This is just trying to get some broad brush strokes out about the direction the murder mystery game might be going;  I’ll start thinking about more gritty details tomorrow.

Just a very quick note that due to a recent spate of hot weather and an extremely busy work schedule, I’ve been feeling pretty run down for the last week, and so didn’t feel up to starting a “Game in a Week” this week, as I’d suggested earlier.

Luckily, things should be slowing down an awful lot over the coming weeks. I’ll either do the “Game in a Week”, or maybe I’ll try to do something faster; maybe the first step in a larger project. Not sure yet. I’ll think about it tomorrow, when I’m more awake.

For those watching the svn repo, Box2D 2.0.0 is now integrated with VectorStorm (with my own bugfix to work around a joint deletion issue;  hopefully an official fix for it will be coming soon!)

Projects I’ve been considering:

• Another Game in a Week
• A “Game in a Week”-style affair that’s compressed into just four days, to be done over the long Easter weekend.
• Implementing the “dinner party” game I discussed during the “Game in a Week” where I implemented Thunderstorm;  the little platformer which used the guests at a fancy soirée as the level geometry.
• I’ve also been thinking about procedurally generated games.  One possibility I’ve been thinking about more and more is a little game concept that I call “Every Shooter”, which generates a new shoot ‘em up every time you choose “Play Game”;  it randomly generates enemies, a player, and selects from amongst a large set of individual rules and control schemes to generate a unique shooter game each time you play.  This would be a much larger undertaking;  if I was to start on this, the first week would probably be taken just writing the basic random enemy generation systems..
• Also on the “procedurally generated games” point, I’ve been playing with the idea of algorithmically generated murder mysteries, which would be set inside randomly generated “worlds” (initially, isolated old mansions, and other “locked room” variants), in which the player would have to interview suspects and work out who was the murderer.  This also would be a much larger undertaking;  a week’s work on this might yield a good “isolated old mansion” generator.  Though I’ve never really done anything like this before, so it may turn out to be much quicker than I expect.

I just wanted to post an update on where things are at.

The current level of busyness at work will soon be easing off a bit; I’m hoping to have enough brainspace back to kick off another “Game in a Week” next week.

In other news.. Box2D version 2.0 has been released; I’ll be updating VectorStorm to that new version sometime very soon; I’ve already been playing with the new testbed examples that come with Box2D; lots of exciting new features in there! Can’t wait to adapt it all to the VectorStorm engine. Hopefully I should have that done sometime this weekend, just in time to not use it for anything meaningful in the Game in a Week, exactly like last time.

You’d think that this is self-evident, but many people (both inside and outside the industry) seem to be labouring under the confused impression that video games are in some way like movies. I’m writing this rambling little essay so that in the future I can point people to this page when they tell me that they have an idea for a game, and then proceed to tell me a cinematic story.

And also so that my friends can point and laugh at me, when I’m the one who makes that mistake.

I’ll confess in advance that this really has a lot more to do with professional games than independant ones, or the type of games that I tend to make here on the VectorStorm site. Sorry about that, but it’s my soapbox, so I can say what I like.

More beneath the fold.

Continue reading “Video games are not movies”

Very slow progress on VectorStorm lately. This is mostly because of being extremely busy at work, but also because I’ve been playing games rather than making them, the past week.

Stuff I’ve been playing this week: Sam and Max – The Raving Dead (excellent, for those following the Sam and Max series), Metroid Prime 3 (probably even better than the original Metroid Prime, for those who like exploration/puzzling action), Burnout: Paradise City (fantastic example of how to squeeze huge amounts of value out of a single set of level geometry), Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations (I have a real weakness for this series), Oendan 2 (this game is going to ruin my eyes. Must.. remember.. to.. blink!), Professor Layton and the Curious Village (Casual game with stunningly high production values. And the setting is straight out of a platform game that I’ve been wanting to make for a long time, so I’m mildly annoyed that they got there first, and more fully-realised than I could possibly manage on my own), Patapon (I like its graphic style, but I’m not yet convinced by the gameplay), and just in case I somehow manage to finish all of the above, I also have the new “Apollo Justice” game in my “to be played” queue. And N+ on the 360 has more levels than I’ll ever manage to make it through. Especially bits of episode 14. Mean ol’ Metanet (they do apologise for that one, at least).

More independent stuff I’ve been playing this week includes Warning Forever (boss-centered sh’mup where later bosses are evolved based upon how well you dealt with earlier bosses), Tripline (deceptively simple puzzle game; I’m currently working on solving the very last level), and I’m immensely pleased to have finally beaten Cursor*10 (single-player cooperative game; outside-the-box game design!) At work, I’ve had a window open for the past week, with The Tall Stump running in it (I can’t really play it for more than a few minutes at a time; I find the controls to be painfully fiddly, but I also can’t simply stop playing it!) And of course, I can’t ignore Samurai Movers, which is simple, joyous mayhem (assist a nice old lady who’s moving house, through careful use of your trebuchet).

I’m hoping to get around to doing some more coding sometime soon; perhaps this weekend. But for right now, work and work-recuperation are taking my time. Things should ease off a lot, late next week.