Personal Updates

Lots of updates I'm sure everyone is dying to see!


Firstly, I got First Place in the Overwatch Level Design Contest! I submitted OWC_Traverse, set in City 17. The rebels have to fight their way through the city to reach an Combine forward base and destroy it. The goal of the contest was to create a new map for the mod, which pits up to seven player controlled rebels player from the first person perspective against the "Overwatch", a human player controlling all of the Combine troops facing the rebels from an RTS-lite overview. Sort of Sven Co-op meets Half-Life Wars. It provided some interesting challenges, like providing the Overwatch player with a clear overview of the map, keeping the rebels from wandering into the Combine spawns, and a lot of entity scripting work for the objectives. It will be included in a future release, so I'm looking forward to that! I'm supposed to receive some notes and feedback from the playtesters, which is also great. Congrats to the other winners!

In other level design news, I'm working on a level for the Rooftopville competition over at PlanetPhillip. It's blocked out and I'm starting to add in enemies and encounters before I start texturing and detailing. I think A Brief Detour suffered in that the combat encounters were too tight and left no room for maneuvering. The enemies were right in your face, and there were no alternate paths to take or ways to flank the enemy. The courtyard in particular, where the Combine rappelled in, had no full cover and nowhere to hide or regroup, just eight Combine rushing in, giving the player no choice but to stand and fight it out.

I knew there was something wrong with the combat, but it took someone else playing through and telling me in different words for me to realize what was it was. But now I have a much better understanding of how combat spaces work. I know I was thinking about alternate paths and varied cover the whole time, but somehow that didn't make it into my map. It was way too cramped, and almost all the encounters dropped you into a space with little to no options. The player needs room to maneuver and possible cover between them and the enemies, including actual alternate paths. Thinking back to the encounters with enemy grunts in the first Half-Life, some of the most interesting encounter spaces were large warehouses, with multiple elevations and dozens of potential paths through stacks of crates, allowing for flanking and giving the player breathers from combat. Hopefully I can incorporate those ideas into my Rooftopville map.

On the job front, I'm still sending out resumes and soliciting feedback on my portfolio, since there seemed to be a burst of level designer positions posted in the past few months. I'm certainly getting some practice writing cover letters! No responses yet, but I'll keep at it.

I also have a new portfolio up at http://samcombs.carbonmade.com. Check it out and tell me what you think! I'll be adding OWC_Traverse up there shortly.

Left 4 Dead 2 Survival Map - Office Space

Woo! I finally got this map put together. It's a Survival map set in and around an office building. Go check it out here.

Minecraft!

(image shamelessley stolen from Quinns' post on RPS)

I've been distracted by the excellent Minecraft. I'd seen a few posts on it, but what finally pushed me into buying it was Quinns' Mine the Gap series on Rock Paper Shotgun. I've only just started, but I'm having an amazing time building shacks, bridges, and beacon towers, carving stairways into cliffsides, and delving into huge pitch black caves. It's extremely satisfying to stand atop a tower you've built out of blocks you've dug out with you own block, pixelated hands and look out on an infinite randomly generated land, ripe for exploring.

There's a healthy dose of Dwarf Fortress style 'losing is fun!' - enemies blowing you up or arrowing you to death, falling off my most recent construction project, even drowning - I broke a hole in the ice and jumped in. What I didn't take into account was how quickly my hole in the ice would freeze back over, so I was left pounding futilely against the underside of the ice until my air ran out. I lost everything I had collected, but I was laughing. Each death is a lesson on the rules of the world, and an opportunity to laugh at yourself.

It helps that the penalty for death isn't too harsh. You lose everything in your pockets and get returned your original spawn, but everything you've constructed or stored stays as it was. The tiered material system makes it easy to get started or restart after you die. Almost all the blocks can be dug out with your hands, albeit at an extremely slow pace for anything besides dirt and sand. But once you're collected enough materials to build some tools, collection speed improves dramatically. The starting material progression for tools is wood-stone-iron. So you chop down a tree with your hands, then build a wood pick axe to gather stone that you can use to make a stone pick axe, which can be used to gather ore plus coal and more stone to smelt the ore into iron which can be used to make iron tools. This avoids the catch 22 of needing a tool to gather the materials to make the tool that you need to gather the materials, etc. that some other games with building fall into.

And this tech tree of sorts can be climbed quickly, but death is quick and common, so you'll have to repeat the hunt for materials over and over again. But instead of becoming a grind, this is one of the core bits of fun in the game. Wood and stone are very common, but the game forces you to explore to find the rarer ores, taking advantage of the infinite world. And there's always another striking clifface to scale or picturesque waterfall spilling down into a cave to marvel at, with constant rewards. Another reward are the short refrains of music that seem to play at random times. They're beautiful little pieces, they drew my girlfriend into the room to see what I was playing. They reward the player just for still being alive, a sort of a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. And there's enemies and combat and construction on top of all of that. In short it's an amazing game, and all by one guy. I'm more than happy with my purchase.

In other news, I'm attending the IGDA Austin Microtalks this evening, where ten speakers speak for ten minutes on a variety of topics. It should be interesting, hopefully I can meet some industry people there.

Left 4 Dead 2 Survival Level Progress #2

Still chipping away at the Survival level. I solved a problem with the flow in the nav mesh - it kept giving me flow errors, but nothing was popping up when I ran 'nav_trouble_report" from the console. I had an area marked PLAYER_START, all areas were marked FINALE and BATTLEFIELD. I finally tracked the problem to the "goal" nav area it was using by combing through the log of the nav_analyze. In survival maps without a checkpoint, the area closest to the center of all the nav areas is used as the goal, and it turns out that the goal area it chose was on the (player inaccessible) roof. So I added on a new nav area to shift the center back onto a flat surface, and that fixed the problem. It seems like there would be an easier way to do it, but this one worked for me. Besides that, textured a few areas and moved some props around. I'll keep at it!

Left 4 Dead 2 Survival Level Progress

Still working on my Left 4 Dead 2 Survival level. It's an office building turned CEDA evacuation center, now abandoned and overrun. I've roughed out most the geometry, placed a few props and textured a bit. It's still missing something. I should have planned a little more before I jumped in to the editor. I had some thumbnail sketches of how I wanted it laid out, but it morphed as soon as I started laying out brushes. It feels a little claustrophobic, so I think I'll expand it, make the second story accessible, perhaps. It just needs some more polishing. Testing is a little cumbersome, since the nav mesh has to be rebuilt every time the geometry changes, so it's harder to jump in and test after making major changes to the map. There has to be a way to automatically fill in the gaps or update the nav mesh without deleting and adding by hand. I'll take another look through the documentation and browse some forums.

Indie Game Magazine Interstellar Marines Preview

I'm in print! A preview I wrote of Interstellar Marines appears in the Sept-Oct 2010 edition of Indie Game Magazine this month (page 5). You should check out both! I've written some demo reviews before, but this is the first full fledged article I have in there.

Just Left 4 Saboteur

It's been a while. I'm playing a lot of Left 4 Dead 2 with some college friends, which inspired me to try my hand at a Survival level. I have not worked with the navigation meshes before, my experience is limited to waypoint graphs. But I like the mesh approach, it takes the busy work out of pathfinding since they're automatically generated as opposed to the manual placement of nodes. The AI director also reduces work, randomly generating mobs and specials on the fly. I love it, it lets the level designer focus on creating combat arenas and not worry about the exact placement of enemies. At any rate, seeing how enemy spawning and pathfinding works is helping me get better at the game, or at least a better grasp of why things happen the way they do.

I'm trying to brainstorm up some settings for a Survival level that haven't been done before. Trailer park and office building atrium have been bouncing around, not terribly original, but interesting places to fight zombies. I'm analyzing the existing Survival levels, seeing how my friends and I choose spots to make our stand and that what keeps us playing again and again on certain levels.

Besides Left 4 Dead 2, I've just come down from an open world game kick, playing hours and hours of Just Cause 2 and The Saboteur. Both have cartoonish plots with unique ways of getting around the world, with a grappling hook and climbing buildings, respectively. I feel like I'm playing a cheesy comic book character in both, which isn't a bad thing. Neither storylines take themselves seriously, but that fits especially well with the ridiculous never ending explosions and car/helicopter/boat crashes mixed in with gunplay that is Just Cause 2. The grappling hook/infinite parachute combo is insane, it beats boring old walking and running around.

My problem (not really a problem) is I have a hard time getting to a set destination in the game world, I end up distracted every time. There are so many "Ooh, shiny!" bits to distract me. And they are literally shiny - the pickups have a pulsing glow that catches your eye, besides the proximity indicator helpfully telling me goodies are near. More than six different types of collectibles, every little hamlet or outpost has a progress counter and is filled with goodies to steal and things that blow up real good. I've had a hell of a time with it, and I'm less than a quarter of the way through the game thanks the mentioned distractions. As Tom Francis so succinctly put it, it's 'the screw-around game' - a huge toy box filled with stuff to blow up and mess with. And I am more than ok with that.

The Saboteur is a little different. There are a few nice touches like being able to move the camera around during cutscenes and the colorizing of districts as you liberate them. I love darting up any building, leaping from rooftop to rooftop. There's something very satisfying about getting the drop on a Nazi soldier, then sprinting across the rooftops to duck into an attic until the coast is clear. It helps quite a bit that Sean seems to be made of Kevlar, letting me take stupid fun risks like brawling hand-to-hand with squads of Nazis armed with machine guns.

The storyline missions don't take advantage of the running across the rooftops excitment very often. Most are copied to the letter from previous sandbox games - tail person X, chauffeur NPCs around, ditch your tail, etc. They have none of the zaniness of Just Cause 2 missions, but it's hard to get crazier than grappling onto ICBMs while in flight, then blowing them up and parachuting off. When the missions deviate from previous formulas, and use the roof climbing freedom, they can be a lot of fun. Stealing a bottle of booze back from a German officer was a lot of fun, mainly because the game gave you an open ended goal and then got out of the way. They give me enough tools - sneaking, disguises, climbing, melee attacks, explosives - that when the game lets me, I can take my own approach.

The plot is pretty stale, and the characters are dry and forgettable. The crazy accents in Just Cause 2 are at least new stereotypes as opposed to the French and German ones in The Saboteur. But the real character is the setting, and I find it fascinating. It's worth buying the game just to experience occupied Paris. It makes me wish there was more interaction with the everyday people. Random events like watching an innocent civilain being arrested and loaded into a truck, then hijacking said truck and freeing the prisoner are extremely rewarding, and I wish there were more events like that to mix it up.

As it stands, the routine of hunting down guard towers to blow up became repetitive after a few hours. The only reliable way of blowing them up seems to be the same stick of dynamite to the base technique, and a little variety to the destruction would be an improvement. Maybe guy wires to destroy, or just more heavily guarded targets? There's not much challenge to blowing them up. Taking out targets in Just Cause 2 or Red Faction: Guerrilla is much more challenging, you usually have to shoot and scoot, not so much in The Saboteur. I think this might be where some of the complaints of dumb AI might come from, because it is too easy to get away with blowing everything up. There has to be some challenge to be interesting. But despite all my complains, I don't understand how little mention this game got. It made me sad that Pandemic is gone now - there's a solid core of a game there that could do with some tweaking, and it isn't the buggy mess that was Mercenaries 2. Some reviewers have mentioned that Assassin's Creed did the parts I liked - the climbing buildings and jumping about - better, so maybe that's why people seemed nonplussed.

Unfortunately, technical difficulties are getting in the way of my enjoyment of The Saboteur. SecureROM is acting up, it only reads my disk when it feels like it, telling me to insert the original disk that is already in the drive. It's been doing the same with Borderlands, and it's frustrating.

There will be more updates on my Left 4 Dead 2 level soon, so stay tuned!

Mirror's Edge

I finally got around to playing some of Mirror's Edge, after buying it during the Steam Holiday Sale this past winter.

The environments really are stunning, and it is refreshing to see so many bright primary colors. Sprinting, jumping and swinging from perch to perch is thrilling and visceral when it flows, and a terrible chore when it doesn't. The runner vision that highlights the best path helps keep you moving along, but there are a few places where I got lost or frustrated, namely jumping around the sides of a huge hole in the ground, a gigantic storm drain. Very visually impressive, but I ended up jumping to my death more than a dozen times in a row in a part where I had to run to catch a timed door.

Mainly I missed wall runs when jumping from platforms to platform along the edge of this hole and plummeted to my death. So after a half dozen or so tries, I switched to normal jumps and made it just fine, but I still wanted to wall run across the gaps. Wall running seemed so much cooler, it just seemed like the natural move. Why would I make a normal jump when I can run on the freaking walls? But I have a hard time getting the key combination right for some reason. Maybe it was the curved walls of the storm drain that was making it harder to register the wall jumps? Or I'm not hitting the buttons in the correct combination?

The huge circular storm drain was also a pain because I wasn't sure which way to head. The checkpoint pointed me in the wrong direction, facing a platform that I had just jumped on but forgot about. So I ended up dying another dozen times before I figured out my mistake. Solution: Maybe make the platforms more unique with different colors or lighting patterns? Maybe have some of the platforms collapse or retract or get blown off after I've used them?

Another spot where I had trouble was in the first level after the tutorial, where I had to make a long jump from one building to another and catch a pipe on the other side. Again, this took me more than a dozen tries. I kept missing the pipe, or hitting the wrong button, I'm still not sure what I did to finally catch it. I'm not sure if I need to activate pipes when I hit them, or if I wasn't crouching at the right time, or if I just wasn't jumping at the right time? There were too many factors to pin down what I was doing wrong. This could perhaps be fixed by having context clues, like having the pipe flash red when it's the right time to press a button to grab it? Or have me grab a pipe earlier in the level in a safe spot where I don't have to worry about making a huge jump, then have me make a long jump without a pipe, then combine the two once I have become confident doing both together.

That's my main complaint, that the controls can be frustrating. I can visualize what I want to do, but it's hard to get Faith to do it. Maybe just a more clear tutorial on wall running? Force me to practice it a couple times in a row where I can try it again and again without penalty? Maybe it's easier to pull off wall running with a controller, I am playing with a keyboard and mouse on my PC. Or maybe I'm just not that great at the game, one of the producers of Mirror's Edge in this postmortem on Crispy Gamer mentions that if he could go back and add something to the game, he would add a variable difficulty system that made it easier to make jumps, gave the player a little more room for error. Maybe that's what I need, but I still feel there were a few spots where I feel like I should not have gotten lost.

I don't want it to sound like I'm bashing the game, it's just that the fun bits fly by, and when I get lost or have to make a jump over and over again, it gets burned into my mind. That does not make the good bits any worse: any game where I can slide down an office building, jump off and drop kick goons as I land is a winner in my book. Having bullets flying by and glass shattering all around me as I outrun an entire squad of cops and a helicopter is an awesome experience, all without firing a shot.

One idea I was thinking of as I played was having free reign of the world, Mirror's Edge as a sandbox game, finding and delivering hidden packages scattered throughout the world, crossing from one end of the city to the other on the rooftops. Probably a nightmare to design such a huge space without the player getting lost, since I already had trouble with that in the linear game, but I think it could be done, and it's a fun daydream, finding my own fastest way through the world, the time trials writ large.

SXSW Interactive Day 3

Day Three! I presented Robot Revolution for the 2010 SXSW ScreenBurn AAA Game Design Competition today! I competed with some awesome guys, Fredric King & Ryan Doyle with Tall Bike Joust, and Patrick Cunningham, who had Grimore and Shadow Wars.

King and Doyle presented first, followed by Patrick, then me, then Patrick again.

King and Doyle had implemented the first of the planned stages for their game, an iPhone game about bike jousting, which looks pretty intense. I think it's awesome that they were able to actually implement their game, that gave them some serious points with the judges. The iPhone game wasn't the AAA part of their plan, they're also going to make a browser game and a console version, with more than just the bike jousting. There were some technical difficulties, the sound wasn't working for the laptop set up for us, but they improvised and gave their own voiceover.

Patrick Cunningham had two game ideas and presented twice, which definitely worked out for him. Grimore was an open world fantasy RPG, with a complex sounding magic system, and Shadows Wars was a cyberpunk MMO. A unique idea from Shadow Wars was doing mini-games or puzzles before a mission to give you an advantage, like more info about the level. I thought that was pretty cool. His wife did all the drawings for his slides, which were also awesome. His slides were pretty densely packed with text, but the illustrations helped, and he seems like a great guy.

After the presentations, we were lined up at the front of the room and asked to give our elevator pitch, then the audience applauded for each contestant. The judges (Adam Martin, Chris Charla, Jesse Redniss, and Lori Durham, with Kain Shin moderating) then publicly decided among themselves which game was going to win it. Robot Revolution wasn't a favorite of any of the judges, so I think it was ruled out pretty quickly. Shadows Wars won it, with the judges saying it seemed to have the most commercial appeal, being the most likely to be picked up by a studio and made. Tall Bike Joust got a mention for also being marketable since there was already an audience for tall bike jousting. The judges seemed to have a little difficulty choosing, and there wasn't a clear cut criteria or rubric. Having an even number of judges also seems like an odd choice, since there was almost a tie.

I wish I had gotten more feedback on what wasn't as great about my idea. It lost, so there has to be something wrong with it, and more feedback would have been nice. But I got a sweet trophy for being a finalist and got to meet some cool people, so it's all good.

If anyone would like to take a look, I've uploaded my presentation here. Make sure you check out the speaker notes (click the little face with a plus sign), they explain a lot. Any feedback is welcome, either on the blog or at sam.combs@gmail.com.

The other finalists were great, and congratulations to Patrick for his win!

P.S. - I also saw the Casual game design contest, with Escape From Planet Zero by Lance Meyers taking home the prize. I might write up a bit more about it later!

SXSW Interactive, Day 1

So I had my first day at SXSW. I came by Thursday and got my pass early, and I'm glad I did - the line today was huge. I got a chance to see three panels and have a quick look at the ScreenBurn Arcade.

The first was "Take Over the World With XNA Indie Games", with Chris Williams presenting. Pretty small crowd, but I think people were still registering and getting their bearings at 2 PM. He did a very general overview of XNA, nothing new if you've checked it out before. But I hadn't heard of the Windows 7 phone though, that apparently has multi-touch and will support XNA, which might be an interesting combination. Learning about the peer approval process for Community Games was also new to me. Still, I was expecting more of a look at up-and-coming games, sales figures, that sort of thing. Still, it would probably be a good intro for someone that had never heard of it.

Next was "Drawing Board: Innovation Lessons from Cartooning", with Tom Fishburne. This wasn't one of the ScreenBurn panels, but I'm glad I sat in on it. The basic lessons I drew from it:

1. You can't expect creativity to just come to you, you have to exercise your creative muscles and constantly be on the lookout for new ideas, you can't really force creativity.
2. If your work is polarizing, that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you don't get any sort of response, or only neutral comments, you're probably doing something people have seen before, nothing innovative.
3. Even niche subjects can have a broad appeal if you're doing a good enough job. Blogs can help to give context to inside jokes.

He also mentioned Russell Davies' blog post "How to be Interesting", which seems to boil down to the idea that people will find you interesting if you're interested in them, so have diverse interests and pay closer attention to the world around you, and be able to get people to talk about themselves. He suggesting regularly taking pictures, making blog posts, reading about subjects you haven't heard of, and just generally paying more attention. Makes sense to me.

The last panel was pretty interesting - "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility - The Future of Video Games". I wish this one could have been longer, it lost some time due to a false alarm evacuation of the room fifteen minutes in. Jesse Schell's "Design Outside the Box" presentation at DICE was brought up, and the general opinion of the panel members was that the use of achievement systems to foster good behavior was a good thing, if a little creepy if taken to extremes.

I wish this had been discussed more, it seems like such an interesting concept. They suggested that as long as individuals can control and mix and match the achievement systems they want to use, modifying them to fit their own ends, that achievement driven structures could be used for good, and I think I agree. I wonder if artificial achievements are all that appealing to people that aren't gamers or people with addictive personalities.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow's round of panels, hopefully I'll have a chance to get a better look at the ScreenBurn Arcade. In the meantime, I'm really looking forward to presenting my entry for the ScreenBurn Game Design Contest at 3:30PM on Sunday. A little nervous, but still excited.

A Brief Detour

More news!

So that level I was working on? I finished it!





It's titled "A Brief Detour", and that says it all. It's a single player map for Half-Life 2: Episode 2, where you're separated from your squad, and have to venture through a Combine controlled apartment complex to meet back up with them.

Someone from the Interloper.net forums was kind enough to post a video playthrough - it's a little out of date compared to the most recent version, but it gives a pretty good overview:



You can download it at PlanetPhillip or Snark Pit. It's a featured level on SnarkPit right now, which I'm proud of. The reviews say it's really solid, "a nice little map", but short. I just wanted to make sure I could make a singleplayer level that was solid and polished, and I think I accomplished that. It took a few weeks of work, with lots of playtesting and tweaking. I learned a lot, and hopefully I can top it with my next project!

In other news, I'm still pumped about presenting Robot Revolution at the SXSW ScreenBurn game design contest on March 14th, I'll need to do a few more dry runs of the presentation in the next few weeks.

Busy Week

It's been a crazy week. First, I found out I'm a semi-finalist for the SXSW ScreenBurn Game Design Competition, which I'm really excited about. I'm hashing out a presentation for that I have to get sent in by Monday. I'm also working on a short single player level for Half-Life 2. I've got the whole thing blocked out and scripted, now I have to go back and add in textures , lighting, and a lot of tweaking. I hope to have that released for feedback soon. Look for it on SnarkPit and Interlopers in a few weeks. There's also school that started back up this week, work, and the internship, so that's soaked up all the rest of my free time. I certainly feel productive!

Woo! Solium Infernum!

Hurray! Solium Infernum is being released today! It's by Cryptic Comet, that also made the excellent Armageddom Empires. I got a chance to beta test this, and even got my name in the credits, very cool. Thanks to Vic Davis for giving me a chance to try it out and test it.
Solium Infernum is a turn-based strategy game set in Hell, and I've had a blast with it. The focus is more on diplomatic maneuvering and cloak and dagger moves than direct combat, and that's a plus for me. You're limited to only a few actions total per turn, which helps give every decision more weight. Do I want to move that unit to protect that place of power? Or buy that artifact I've had my eye on in the Bazaar? Or should I commit one of my precious moves to demanding tribute, so I can have enough souls to bid on that Praetor to give my legion that extra bit of power? It can be very tense in a good way, juggling three different objectives and jockeying for position.
I certainly recommend you at least try it. It can be a little inaccessible at first, but just give the manual a good read and keep it open the first few times you play, and you'll get the hang of it.

Saint's Row 2

I just got Saint's Row 2 for PC this week, since it's currently on sale at Direct2Drive for $5. And it's a blast, if more than a little unoptimized.

The story's nothing that will win awards, the 'taking back the streets' theme is a little tired. The humor's a little crude, but it's good enough to earn a cheap laugh or two. But it's damn fun to mess around in.

The best way to describe it is as a huge cartoon sandbox. You can pick trash, rocks and people up and use them as weapons. Clothing and cars are customizable to a surprising degree, down to the pattern on your tie or whether your shirt is tucked in or not. You're rewarded for everything - driving on the wrong side of the road, kicking people while they're down, flinging yourself from your car in a crash - everything. The rewards make just driving around the city satisfying, since you're never without something to do. No matter where you turn, there's a diversion, as the game calls them. And I've had more fun with these than I have with the actual missions.

The FUZZ diversion, where you impersonate a police officer for a COPS-like show, is exactly how the Vigilante missions in every GTA should have been. You're given random crimes to deal with as brutally as possible in order to get higher ratings for the show. The crimes range from riots to streaking to carjacking. The best part is the police join in on your side, and assist as you violate the civil liberties of criminals everywhere. The police attacking you in the GTA Vigilante missions always ruined the fun for me, even if that's a tad more 'realistic'. The variety of crimes, police siding with you, and generally higher level of mayhem make it a lot more entertaining.

The only problem I have with the FUZZ diversion is that the time limits are a little harsh, and I'm rather have more time to mess around, but you can restart with little to no hassle.

The performance issue is the only thing holding the game back for me - the stuttering while driving is terrible, although part of that might be my computer specs, a lot of it seems to be poor optimization for the PC.

Far Cry 2 Map: Dogon Arroyo

Yes, another Far Cry 2 multiplayer map. I just really got into a groove these past few weeks, I really like this editor. It's amazing to be able to make believable outdoor environments so easily, the terrain tools and collection system make it a breeze.



This one is set in a canyon lined with the ruins of a Dogon village, the focal point being a natural bridge that links the paths running along the tops of the canyon walls.
Players have three paths to choose from: through the canyon and under the rock bridge, or along either side of the canyon walls.
Through the canyon is the fastest, most direct route to the other base, but there is very little cover and enemies on the canyon walls can rain down withering fire from the heights and safely toss grenades from out of sight. But, unless someone comes to the very edge of the canyon wall and looks down, you'll most likely stay out of sight. Also, the canyon floor is covered with grass, and can easily become a death trap if both ends of the canyon catch fire if a Molotov or two is tossed down.
Atop the canyon walls, there's cover from the Dogon ruins along one side, and just bare rock along the other, although this bare side is slightly sunken, and it's easier to stay out of sight from the other side of the canyon wall. It's a fairly simple map, very straightforward, with lots of action in one central arena.


As far as my thought process goes, I was originally thinking of the tunnel from de_dust in Counter-Strike - a sunken area with commanding points above it on either side. The raised balcony directly across from the entrance on the CT side makes it into a sniper fest, but hopefully having a way to cross over the tunnel in my map will balance this out. I just wanted to see if I could take that one element and make a map out of it, and I think it turned out well.

To download, search for "Dogon Arroyo" in the in-game map browser. As usual, I would really appreciate any feedback.

Far Cry 2 Map: A Bridge Between

Another map for Far Cry 2! This one I designed as a Capture the Diamond map from the start, and I tried to include an interesting central feature: the elevated wooden bridge that runs across the middle of the map, as seen in the screenshot above. This bridge helps to split the map between the two factions, and offers a risky but quick path across the map, and unsafe sniping spots, besides being a unique feature that hopefully people will remember, and a good central landmark. This map is a little tighter and more focused than Last Stop, my last attempt at a Far Cry 2 map, which I think had too much space between the spawns and objectives, so you should be able to get to the action faster in A Bridge Between.



One thing I noticed is there are sniping spots very near the spawns where the other team's diamond location is visible (on top of the oil tanks, and on top of the UFLL diamond building), which I think is alright. These sniping spots are very open with little cover, so they'd be hard to camp from, and there are plenty of alternate routes to and from the diamond, but not so many that you won't run into someone from the other team. The sniping spots make the player very visible, so you trade a good view for exposing yourself to fire from all over the map.
I playtested it a lot by myself, but I don't know anyone else with the game to playtest it with, so if you have any feedback, as usual I'd love to hear it. I'm confident that this is a better attempt than my last.


To download, search for "A Bridge Between" in the in-game map browser.

Far Cry 2 Map: Last Stop

Besides playing Mercenaries 2, I've finished a Far Cry 2 multiplayer level: Last Stop. It supports all the game modes (Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Diamond and Uprising), and is set in a valley hemmed by cliffs, with a railroad spur line running into it, terminating in an abandoned train station at the end of the valley, with a junkyard on the other side. It was designed with Capture the Diamond mode in mind.
As an aside, I really felt like working on maps with objectives for a change, as opposed to just straight deathmatch. Hence why the HL2:DM level I talked about in an earlier post didn't really get anywhere. As amazing a game Half-Life 2 is, the combat isn't all that compelling for me, with the gravity gun being the only unique feature, and that's more of a novelty than a core component of the combat. I just in the mood for making objective based maps, which Far Cry 2 has. Plus the combat feels solid, really tactile, like I'm actually sliding around in the dirt, tossing grenades and firing guns, it really succeeds in that respect.


Back to the map, I think I provided the right mix of cover and open space, with multiple paths to the objective and plenty of room to flank. I tried to keep the concept of "multiple paths" in mind, and I think I succeeded on a micro scale: from almost every piece of cover, there is more than one piece of cover that you can reach. You can brave the main road, out in the open with machine gun emplacements covering it from either end, or stick to the sides under the cliffs, using the long grass and trees for concealment. I was really feeling the train yard part of the map, and started by just laying out track and the station, and starting from there. The cliffs were added around the rail, kind of haphazardly, but I like the way it looks. I tried to leave openings so it seemed connected to a greater world, and wasn't just an arena. The warehouse end opposite the train station wasn't as inspired, but I think it works. I tried to keep everything spaced equally, positioning the spawns, diamonds and vehicles about the same distance apart for each side.


I haven't seen very many custom CTD maps with a lot of open terrain, and I'd love to try it out, but it's hard to find people to play with, and it's hard to get a map to stand out enough to get downloads, with clones of levels from other games taking the spotlight. But, I think I'm going to try another map, now that I'm settled into the editor, which is an absolute pleasure to work with. I only wish more level editors were more polished and straightforward to use. I really wish they would have released a single player editor as well, since Far Cry 2 cries out to be modded.

Search for "Last Stop" in the in-game custom map browser. I'd love it if someone wanted to host the map, so I could get some more feedback. Enjoy!

Mercenaries 2: A Love/Hate Relationship

I've started playing Mercenaries 2 again, and I'm not entirely sure why. I've already beat it, but I started up a new campaign last week and I'm already halfway through. It's a terribly buggy unpolished game.

Examples of the bugs and general annoyances (Many, many examples):

• The soldiers yell out wrong phrases - whenever I hijack a helicopter, the male pilot I've just thrown to their death yells "I've killed the merc!" in a female voice with a heavy Jamaican accent.

• The random quips the AI soldiers make are usually wrong, repeated way too often, and very grating. If you make the mistake of picking up some UP mercs in your vehicle, you get to listen to them complain about the heat with the same two lines, every thirty seconds. I stopped the car, got out, and beat them to death in the street about the second time this happened.

• There's not much point in taking allies along anyway. They usually die in the first few seconds of an engagement. If you're lucky, they'll toss a grenade at your feet as they fall. If they're manning a gun that shoots explosive rounds, they have an unfortunate tendency to fire at point blank range, blowing up the vehicle they're riding in.
  

• There's almost no point in using guns when you can run up to someone and bash them in the face, instantly killing them. It's quicker than getting in a firefight and way, way overpowered.
  

• The AI is questionable at times - soldiers that spawn on rooftops love to jump off to their deaths. Enemy drivers will gladly step out of their vehicle and let you take it if you so much as point a gun at them. Your allies will continue to fire on a vehicle as you're hijacking it, sometimes destroying it just as you finish another painful hijacking quick time event.

• The quick time events are a huge pain. Especially on the PC, since instead of flashing the exact key you need to press, like "E" or "Shift", they flash an icon that represents the action the key is bound to. That extra second it takes to tell if that waving fist is the melee attack or use is one second too long. Some of the harder sequences for attack helicopters and heavy tanks take multiple tries for me, running through it until I have the sequence memorized long enough to forget it before the next hijacking attempt.
  

• Speaking of quick time events, if you fail one while trying to hijack a helicopter, afterward the pilot has a tendency to be sitting six feet to the right of his helicopter, floating in midair.

• There are some serious pop up issues - buildings and walls will pop up a few seconds after you've driven into them, trapping you inside. I failed at least one mission because of the pop up - the Pirates have you hauling rum in the back of a truck that can fall out as you drive. Only the rum spawned before the truck, so I instantly failed the mission since the cargo was crushed under the wheels before I could even get there.

• Machine guns, road blocks and obstacles can sometimes spawn six feet above the road. Enemies occasionally spawn inside rocks and buildings - especially frustrating if they're calling for reinforcements and it's impossible to kill them.

• Damage is inconsistent. Signs and small rocks will take a quarter of your vehicle's health if you bump into them, but you can slam through guardrails and telephone poles no problem. You take ten points of damage if you fall walking down stairs, but you can fall from a helicopter and live.

I'm sure there are more, but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Most of these can be seen within a few minutes of play, should have been spotted in QA testing, and could be fixed with a simple patch. I would tell Pandemic about the bugs I've found, but there's no contact info anywhere on their official site - only a link to EA Support, which told me they don't answer questions unless they're about "technical" issues. The PC patch that has been released fixes only a handful of hardware compatibility issues and a few graphics tweaks, but all the above bugs still remain. Another patch was promised sometime last year, to no avail.
The reason I still care is that besides all these issues, there's still a fun game there. Blowing stuff up is fun, and when the game sticks to that, it can be a blast. But all these little quibbles add up, and they break the immersion factor and cause some serious frustration at times. The gameplay itself isn't perfect: there are way too many timed races and trials that flat out aren't fun, and the world isn't lively enough to just wander around in like you can in GTA 4 - there's not the sense of being in a living, breathing place, partially due to the stupid pedestrian dialogue and behavior and the dozens of bugs. There needs to be more battles taking place in the world, more action when you're not in a mission so there are more opportunities for the player to make their own fun. For me, that's the point of having a sandbox game, being able to decide what you want to do in the world without having it be in a structured mission format.
There were so many possibilities, but I'm afraid Pandemic either ran short on money and/or time to polish and test the game. I also hope they will open up to the community a little more. I understands that means having to filter through a bunch of pointless mail, but I'm sure there are jewels of feedback, especially when there are this many bugs.

If anyone knows a way to get in contact with someone at Pandemic or is at Pandemic, I'd love to hear from you. I'd be happy to provide more evidence of these bugs if there was any chance of getting another major patch for the PC version.

Game Design Challenge Brainstorming: The Crisis of Credit

Over at Game Career Guide, the biweekly Game Design Challenge is design a game that explains the global credit crisis in a fun way. I've been brainstorming this for a couple hours, and I can't think of a good way to approach it.

First off, there are so many variables involved, it seems difficult to pin the cause of the crisis down. The video they linked breaks it down, but even then there appear to be many causes: the low interest rates made T-bills unappealing and borrowing cheap, which caused lots of speculation and use of leverage. Then the demand for securitized mortgages caused investors to call for more mortgage backed securities, which caused mortgage brokers to offer mortgages to high-risk borrowers, who for the most part defaulted after being led into getting into mortgages they couldn't repay or lying about their income and getting a loan anyway. These defaults led to lots of houses being on the market, and this along with the housing bubble bust caused house values to plummet, which made the mortgage based securities basically worthless.

There's much more to it, but even this simplified version seems hard to turn into a game. I'm still thinking of it from a simulation perspective, and I'm not sure that would work, since it is such a complicated issue. It just seems if you're trying to teach about it, there should be some sort of lesson. And since it's a game, there should be some sort of meaningful choice, some decisions to be made by the player. And who should the player be? An investment banker? A person trying to buy a house? A mortgage broker? Each one of these in turn? Or maybe an omniscient view, where they can see where everything when wrong? What could the player have control over that would be interesting, what interesting decisions could they make from these viewpoints?

I was originally thinking of having the player follow the path of the mortgage, starting as the person buying a house, shopping for a mortgage, seeing their choices, then becoming a mortgage broker trying to sell the mortgages, so on and so forth until they zoomed out and saw the whole picture. But the decisions at each point are basically automatic - do I buy a mortgage based security or not - or really boring - who wants to have to shop for a mortgage in a game? And then what would each of the steps teach you?

Maybe the key is to break the crisis down to the root cause. This cause seems to be a lack of transparency - homeowners didn't know they wouldn't be able to pay back the mortgages, and investors didn't know this either. None of people involved seemed to see the crisis coming, or didn't care as long as they were getting money. So how lack of transparency be a game mechanic? Hiding information in a game is usually frowned upon - it's frustrating because the player doesn't know what's going on. Can that rule be broken for the sake of teaching? And was data really hidden from the actors involved, or did they willingly deceive themselves into thinking it would all be ok? And if that's the case, can a game replicate that same feeling - where you tell yourself everything will be ok, even though it's going to end in disaster?

I'll have to sleep on it. I know there's a solution, I'm just having a hard time brainstorming it. But the process so far has shown me that educational games can be hard - to be able to teach complex subjects through doing, not showing or telling. I can visulize the issue, I could tell someone else about it now, but I'm not sure how to make it into a game. Maybe some research into other educational games is in order.

Twitter

I finally started a Twitter account(@samuelcom), at the urging of Brenda Brathwaite (@bbrathwaite). Well, she didn't tell me personally, but her blog post did, and I was contemplating it for a while. Don't expect a blow by blow account of my every action, though. You should get one too. Bandwagon, woo!