Author: harold

Go go go! will always be downsampled in my mind.

I miss playing this game. Sometimes a lot. It’s been one of the funniest game I have ever played with Bomberman and Mario Kart of course.

It’s not about killing. It’s all about situations. It’s all about player stories. Collaborative gameplay, in the best immersion setting you can have: First-Person-View.

When people say that these games are all conveying violence. Of course there are bullets, headshots, blood (I would have put less of this one in TF2) but looking at these games from that point of view is wrong because you can judge any game with moral and none are made with that in mind. Otherwise, what the hell means a plumber eating mushrooms and getting stronger with it while jumping like crazy? A subliminal go-get-some-drugs message that’s right. Or not.

At the last Indiecade there was a panel around FPV games, encouraging wacky concepts. The only concept I have for a FPV game is something like that:

AV-98 Ingram

I don’t want a human scale anymore, neither a little one. I want to be a GIANT. And not in a realistic slow painful way like MechWarrior, but in a way where I can move as fast as a human would, but in a robot of 12 meters for example.

So of course you would run in streets and manage to avoid cars, trucks and not to destroy everything in the city.

I would set a police procedural background (and other secret stuff) where you have to team with pals to arrest crazy robots like in the Patlabor serie. I loved how it describes the boredom of a little team of people sent to fix stuffs in the city. It’s really different from the simple plot of conflicts and wars you have in the Battletech world. Here, it would just be driving a robot, team up with friends and being careful to the city while wondering what the government or the army are up to.

You would be severely punished if not being careful, or rewarded if the mission was worth the damages (tough gameplay balance to set up!). You would be downgraded in the leaderboard if doing a mission would kill citizens and or making the city look like a battle field.

Of course it would be a MMO with destructable environments. Like in CS, I would emphasize action or combats on ressource scarcity, pushing people to work together. Want to capture this crazy robots? Make a plan because it’s not gonna happen by bunny jumping and railgunning the sucker.

The main problem of FPV games now is that you’re not responsible at all. They all have this “survive, whatever is happening” design. L4D makes it legitimate with zombies. TF2 makes it legitimate with a cartoon-ish style sending the message that “it’s all for fun don’t worry”.

I know, this PatlaborMMO is not very wacky, but I really have hard times to believe in really weird stuff with this immersive setup that is the FPV. Throwing kisses to others? Mmmh, no. A gun that create things? It works with 2D even in non- fast paced action game (Sprout Gun from Grim Fandango) but in FPV? Too weird..

Sometimes I really feel that we can’t go crazy producing games in some specific technical settings.

Still, we need to keep searching.

Suda51 was saying in a Gamasutra interview that his company was like a “video game band” with four members: script writing division, programming division, graphic art division and sound division”. All equal. Fab Four.

I’d like to dig that a little more.

Ok they’re only three. But you need confidence doing that don’t you?

If we look at the music history, we can see that the more people from a band know each other for a long time, the better it is for the formation to go further, to break through, to be successful whatever you put in on this last term.

What people knowing each other for a long time means? It means we’re talking about close friends or family. From the buddy in high school to the brother.

Rage Against the Machine child hood friend bassist of the vocalist. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger classmates in the early 50s. Freddie Mercury classmate with the first bassist and co-founder of Brian May’s band called Smile and renamed Queen.

Do you know a band that placed at least a single in the charts for five or more decades (50 years people!)? Besides The Rolling Stones, I know one. the band’s name is The Isley Brothers.

You get the idea.

It makes sense. I may be wrong but creating computer games and creating music are astonishly similar with this mix of absolute and total freedom when beginning to the extremely complex and subtual balance you need to achieve at the end of the production which if not obtained, can ruin everything. In graphic creation –from paint to movies- you have so much opportunities to mask hide or enhance. It’s all about illusion. Sound and games are more realistic in this creative sense.

To make it possible you have two choices: do it alone. Or do it with people you really can go with. It’s of course easier when it’s friends you know very well ie when you are all in a hard and stressful position and that you still don’t want to punch or stab them. I mean, for real :)

That’s why the indie game scene is full of little teams. That’s why AAA games get better when the core team is the same from an iteration to another. That’s why they fail when the team is not anymore (and with all the layoffs these last months, fear).

Look at the success of Zeno Clash, a game from a little team from Chile. I was really curious to see who they are because a large 3D world with a story, new gameplay and unique aesthetics is a FUCKING achievement for a team of four people. Four people, three brothers.

I’m not that surprised.

It scares me. I feel like I don’t have a band and never really did. As time passes by, it seems more and more out of touch.. I just tried to make me better at doing audio and games. I have a mental barrier for coding. But I should do it.

Then I would be like Prince.

Also if we want to mark our time with our medium, we need more friendship of xx years relying on the same visions or even family members into games in dev teams and less 3 months contracts, less ephemeral collaborations.

It is not happening at a big scale yet. The computer game creative-wise is kind of stagnating.

Maybe it’s unrelated.

The term audio-visual (AV) may refer to works with both a sound and a visual component.

It’s not too much about budgets or game developers not going for great audio and sound, they do from Indie to AAA.

It’s more about the fact that dev people usually separate these two components. Which are totally the same: they need to match perfectly and in the best case, they enhance each other. For that you need to make them work together, all the time, the sooner the better.

But in a lot of case the producer just doesn’t see it that way, graphic first, sound later.

The only thing in common that games have with movies is that they both have a sound and a visual component. In movies, it’s been a while that sound is made at the same time that the visuals or even before: the lightsaber sound –yeah I always use the same example because it just works- has been made with notes, the script of the movie and roughs of the ultimate Jedi weapon. Not after shooting, not during, not on post-production, BEFORE all of that. Pretty sure it gave George Lucas some visual ideas.

See what I mean?

These movies from the 70s indies directors –Scorsese, de Palma, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg- all share that: sound and visual are matching like crazy. Or not matching but playing together. I watched E.T. recently and the sound of men’s keys in the wood is brilliant, conveying this awful feeling of being locked or trapped. The high-pitched keys sound suggests oppression, jail. And there’s so much more interaction between audio and visual in this movie (and all the work of these directors).

Think about it. Emphasis on the sound part more than on the visual part of keys. Why? Because keys are not sexy and a close-up of them would be ridiculous. Pushy even.

That’s exactly what we do in games. We put too much effort on the visual to the point where it becomes ridiculous in a lot of ways: 3D graphic team sizes, outstanding visuals with generic audio (SF IV with sounds from sound banks everyone can buy), visual effects pornography (blur that shit, make the GPU sweat with useless particles just “because we can”) etc..

Everything is visual and if it’s the case, it doesn’t appeal the same way that if it’s audiovisual. More than trying to tell stories, it’s this delicate recipe of mixing two powerful components that we should go for in the game industry when we are looking at movies or tv.

Sound is easily forgettable –I didn’t remember the keys sound but watching it reminded me about it a lot- though. In the game industry we do think in months. A triple A game is making all its money in a matter of weeks. We globally don’t think our games as timeless creations.

Those who do that, success: Valve, Grim Fandango’s music and visual style, Everyday Shooter.. Damn, this game make me have tears sometimes. It’s a friggin’ shooter but the interaction and perfect match on the audiovisual part goes in places in my mind, in my heart that a little few games did go. It’s just overall a so much better experience, dare I say an unforgettable one.

We are building experiences. And we all have ears. Think about it when building the A/V content  around your gameplay.

Yes I want it. I want a way to go through games without having to fail miserably 50 times and giving up, thanks Rock Paper Shotgun to talk about it.

It’s a thing of the past now. Please.

Because to appreciate a game you need to play it. If a level is boring and you stop because it’s hard –or badly designed- so you miss an awesome experience next level, it’s really a loss for the player, for the game culture. I skipped countless boring chapters reading books, or skipping songs on a album. It’s easy. In games it’s never easy to do so.

Because hardcore gamers who actually do it over and over until the end would be proudly seen as people with balls and determination instead of being seen as dorky nolife gamers.

Because I hate the fact that if I passed three-third of the level, I have to restart over. Yeah I got it, merit and blabla but it’s a damn game people. Game developers were doing that in the 80s/90s because of hardware restrictions. Now, let me pause and save my game wherever I want. Whatever the game is. I demand freedom on my play sessions.

Because I’m a fucking adult and life is sufficiently hard. That doesn’t mean I want to play Peggle everyday. That means I don’t want your batshit crazy rules that make me fail all the time because the designer decided so. I don’t want something dull either.

Because I want to enjoy my games and if I pass this level, I don’t want to start it over everytime I launch my game.

Because I don’t have time for that. I have time to enjoy, I don’t have time to feel frustrated.

Because I would actually finish games, feel good and buy some more. What game developer doesn’t want that widely? A lot apparently.

I have to say it: I hate 3D third person view.

Hours of play like that… Mmmh, maybe not. 

That makes 90% of AAA titles sort of meh for me.

From a player point of view I hate it because having your character stabbed in the back while you can’t see shit just sucks so much. Alone in the Dark was the first to fully demonstrate that.

Of course a lot of progress has been done since then going from static cameras to dynamic ones but still, it’s always that Third Person View (TPV) that makes some situation totally unfair and not fun at all.

Also as Kotaku was writing a few days ago, it’s really boring to have the back of your character for hours. That’s what you are going to see the most. His/her ass/back. You couldn’t see why there was a lot of bikini-style female characters starting with Lara’s 70s indy-ish shorts? Well now you know.

Hours of work.. Hours of watching pr0n too I guess

Also, that’s why there is a lot of cinematics in these games, so you don’t have this “corridor” view all the time. Problem is, cinematics are no games.

Now from a developer point of view, 3D camera is a bitch. Almost nobody got it right, except Nintendo. 3D camera is an insane mind fuck to code, shape and make it perfect in every kind of situation, everywhere in the game, without creating bugs. Of course there’s no generic way to do it well, it depends entirely on what your game is about. You definitely can say that this is a massive problem.

One of the trick is to do it ala “japanese”: make the camera quite far away so that the player feels a bit of freedom, use as much special effects as you can so that the player forget the camera rigidness in a 3D world and then you have Devil May Cry/God of War/Bayonetta.

It’s really something I hate in single-player games, it’s just too noisy for me. When aesthetic is special I can have it a bit (Madworld, No More Heroes).

In MMOs it’s different. There’s no fast action pace everytime or you don’t have complex task to do like sneaking around a fortress in a realistic way, so it’s less a problem. You’re only watching stats while chatting in a text box anyway.

That’s why I like 2D and First Person View games. In 2D you always know what is going on around you and in FPV you are supposed to know/remember because you have the freedom to look wherever you want.

Computer games allow us to be free like crazy and TPV is way too much fake freedom and a nightmare to produce to be the default game representation.

Damn, it is!