Visual design: The Astrophysicist sits in a wheelchair which she controls with a joystick. She has a large anti-matter generator strapped to the back of her chair, and a fancy laptop control system on her lap. Her body is almost entirely encased in a protective metal shell, though her head is clearly displayed. A shock of red hair floats delicately behind her as she moves. Alternate skin designs include a Hextech version, Double Rainbow Arke, as well as Zamboni Arke – as you can imagine.

Abilities:

Passive: Celestial spheres.
Arke gains a percentage bonus to movement speed corresponding to her her maximum total mana.

Q ability:
Particle Decelerator.
Jane Doe sends out a set of energy orbs along a straight line. The number of orbs increases as she puts points into this ability, beginning at 3 and reaching 8 at level 5. Each orb hovers in the air momentarily, slowing anyone in their path. After a second the orbs collapse into the orb furthest from Jane Doe causing magic damage to anyone in their path. The range of this ability increases with each level.

W ability:
Jump jets.
Jump Jets are a targeted flash spell, much like Corki’s W. However this spell takes a moment to channel, the jump jets need to heat up, during this channeling time smoke emerges in a small radius around Jane Doe. Any enemy champion who passes into this smoke has their attack speed lowered temporarily. Jump Jets cannot be interrupted except by taunts, stuns and silences. If this ability is interrupted Arke continues to give off smoke for a second or two more.

E ability:
Dark Matter.
Dark matter causes an inter-dimensional rift to occur wherever the summoner’s cursor is currently positioned, within a limited range. Each time an enemy champion is hit with Dark Matter they take damage but also lose a percentage of armor, this armor debuff can stack up to a total of 8 times – but only on one target at a time, hitting a second target removes the debuff from the first.

R ability:
Planetary Alignment.
After a brief channel Jane Doe creates a damage reducing shield for 6 seconds on every member of her team. This shield cannot be destroyed and reduces all damage by a flat percentage. This ability has a relatively high cool down, and reduces all damage by 18/25/33% depending on it’s level.

People expect iOS gaming experiences to be shorter than those on console/PC. They want to get their fun in 15 minutes or less, often because people play iOS games while in transit, or while waiting for something else. It helps to try and divide your gameplay up into 10-12 minute chunks to ensure the players have a complete experience each time they play, and also to encourage them to come back and play the next level / section.

The iPad has made screen resolution problems less of an issue – for iPad gamers. As iOS game designers we now have the challenge of making something compelling on the small iPhone screen that holds up on the larger screen. Basically we have to design firefights around the iPhone screen, and let the better graphics/effects carry those firefights onto the bigger screen. Designing for iPhone means that enemies must be large enough on screen for us to recognize them. As long as these enemies are recognizable we know they can be targeted easily using the ironsights zoomed-in aiming mode. We found on Modern Combat 3 that enemies couldn’t be more than 25-30 units away before they got too small to notice/target.

The first person control scheme developed here at Gameloft is one of the best on iOS. We have a modular system that allows the user to adjust the positioning and scale of each of the buttons. This lets players pick the layout that best suits them, but it also means we cannot assume which part of the screen is going to be covered up by their thumbs/fingers. Because of this we must prioritize action in the center of the screen, and avoid having action/information occur in the bottom corners of either side of the screen. The way the game controls also means that having action occur on opposite sides of the character is nearly impossible, 180 degree turns are not easy to perform and can take several finger swipes.

Consider the field of view, FOV is the extent of the observable world seen by the camera at any given moment. Average human FOV is close to 180 degrees left to right, though much of that is peripheral vision. (vertical FOV is closer to about 100 degrees). In games the camera usually has a FOV between 90 and 110-120, horizontally. I would estimate that the average left to right finger swipe moves the camera less than 90 degrees, making a 180 turn a matter of at least 3 swipes. This has to be taken into account, especially considering that going into ironsights mode further reduces the ‘rotating speed’ of the player.
All of these limitations affect what the user can see on screen at any one time. I call the playable space that these limitations leave behind the field of play, or FOP.

By understanding the field of play we can better decide how to set up encounters: enemy placement, spawn order etc…

With these limitations considered, I think a great place to begin looking at firefight design is not in fps games, but instead in rail shooters. Before I do this let me stress that I am not arguing that iOS fps need to be reduced to rail shooters. I think there is lots of room for player control, it makes the combat experience more dynamic, and it adds more strategic and exploratory gameplay for the user. But to try and create a fun playing experience let’s take a quick look at rail-shooter designs and see what we can learn from them.

Rail shooters often allow the player a (at least temporary) safe spot to take cover. Think of the ducking mechanic in Time Crisis. The rail-shooter moves the player from set piece to set piece, but in almost every instance there is a piece of cover the user can duck behind.

The enemies in rail-shooters always present themselves before they start attacking. Either by popping up from behind cover, or running in from the side of the screen, the user has a moment to first identify where the most imminent threat is, then to quickly map out the order he will target those threats.

Rail-shooters also play with resource management, giving the users limited ammo, or at least limited ammo for more powerful weapons, as well as offering occasional health packs and the like.

In Modern Combat 3 we learned that ducking is not the optimal way to offer the user a safe spot. The simplest way is to place high covers, where the user is covered while in standing position, and having the player strafe in and out of that cover by dragging their virtual joystick from left to right. This is easier in practice than having the user try and use the duck and pop gameplay of a gears of war.

Because of the limitations of the FOP we cannot have too many instances where the user has to swing their view to extremes in either direction. So when we present enemies we need to make sure they either pop-up within this FOP or run into this FOP from either side, and don’t start attacking the player until they have a chance to notice them.
We can certainly spawn enemies to the extremes of where the player is facing, but we need to limit the number of times we put the player in a position where they have to rotate the camera close to 180 degrees because “something” is shooting at them.
We can also play with resource management, though we do this equally to heighten gameplay by increasing the value of each bullet, while also recognizing that we will be selling ammo packs and upgrades via micro-transactions. Because of this economy we have to ensure that there is no level where the player will be unable to finish without micro-transactions, but we also want to make these purchases feel necessary. A fine balance s needed, one worthy of discussion on it’s own.

To be continued…

First up, Dallol, the Ethiopian sulfur volcano.

via

Some unconfirmed rumours about the Ludic Order of the Golden Pawn (Golden Pawn for short).

Soon after it’s founding the Golden Pawn was infiltrated by an FBI splinter group intent on promoting the game Monopoly before any others.

The Golden Pawn apparently can roll dice so that they land on their edges – and stay there.

The Golden Pawn once played a 48 hour marathon of tic tac toe, it ended in a tie?

The Golden Pawn play Scotland Yard with 5 bandits and 1 cop.

The Golden Pawn build a chessboard the size of 15 aircraft carriers stacked end to end somewhere in the mesa desert from which to play checkers vs. the Alpha Centauri.

etc…

update: Meeting 1 of the Ludic Order took place last weekend and I won RISK! Also: Risk is a TERRIBLE BOARD GAME!!!! I wasn’t playing seriously at all, and managed to win based on luck. A 4 hour game should not be won purely by luck.

This is where I run into my first hiccup. I am a game designer, a gamer, a person well versed in how games work and in the evolution of game design. Does this grant me a privileged position in my relationship with an individual game system? Probably. I recall the first film course I took in university, and how I have never watched movies in the same way since taking that course. But I am digressing and certainly could make a decent post of this in the future so allow me to get back to improv theater.

As I was saying, if improv players do not cultivate this relationship between themselves, they will not be able to play properly. If we as video game players do not respect this relationship between ourselves and the system, then we will have an inferior playing experience.

I took an improv class with a guy who wasn’t all that good. He’s a professional actor, he did look like a soap opera star, but he was a real dead-end when it came to improvisation. I’m no expert either, but it was clear that when I was in scenes with this guy I was going to have to deal with his limitations. Once me and some other players embraced his limitations we were set, and a few really funny bits came out of it. For example this actor fellow could not resist making dumb double-entendres at the ladies in our group, he did this anytime he had the chance… *groan* However, knowing his limitations made us able to have fun in scenes with him. A great example was when one of the ladies suggested he was a malfunctioning gigolo robot, all of a sudden his wooden pick-up lines were perfect character choices! He hadn’t changed, but the way we ‘used’ him did.

To enjoy a game we have to embrace it’s limitations. This is a tricky thing though, where do the acceptable limitations of a system end and the breaking points of a poorly designed system begin? Look forward to the next piece in this series where I intend to look at some games where the limitations have improved the game, and other games where the limitations cascade into experiences that ruin the fun of playing.

Trademark’d!

In improv the number one rule is to listen. You accept what others offer in order to advance the scene, and you try and contribute to that scene based on what has been offered previously.

Video games trick us into thinking they are listening. They wait, with the grace of Eliza, and only when the right combination of inputs is achieved will the game offer up some advancement, a branching path with less than a handful of options.

I grew up dueling with text parsers.

The first principle of improv is summed up as “Yes, and”. “Yes” I will accept what you have offered up, “and” I will add the following context or content or call-back or whatever – in service of that initial offering. For a comedy nerd with little improv training this is hard to accept at first. ‘When do I get to use a silly accent, or present an absurd non-sequitor?’. The answer is always ‘only when it serves the scene’. Wouldn’t you know it, mugging and gags go a long way to ruin an improv scene. Pre-canned reactions, one-liners, pratfalls. They have their place, but more often than not they can derail a scene.

Video games are constantly committing this faux-pas. We’ll look more into this soon in part 2.

Not much time to sit back and enjoy it however. On to the next!