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!

Brainstorming for a HL2:DM Level

I've started brainstorming for another HL2:DM level, and this excellent article, "Basics of effective FPS encounter design" from Fullbright has helped me frame criticism of my first published level design attempt, dm_light_industrial. Unfortunately, apparently somewhere in the Snarkpit update, the comments were lost, but one that I still remember was that there were too many dead ends - basically that the level didn't flow, and it was a little generic, which I have to agree with. I didn't really understand the too many dead ends comments, but I think I do after reading Steve's post. It's geared more towards single player map design, but it still helped.
His article gives three basic guidelines:

1. Varied, clustered cover
2. Circular navigability
3. Observability

Summed up, hallways make for uninteresting combat areas and there needs to be more than the binary choice of moving forward or back, with alternate paths that encourage both players to take risks, and the players need to be able to see these choices, and start in a position where they can survey the layout and make their decisions.
Unfortunately, I think dm_light_industrial failed in all three concepts to some degree or another. The map is basically hallways, broken up with rooms at the end, with a few hubs. There are quite a few areas that dead end, and I see now these areas are deathtraps, with no way out and no choices besides fighting your way out, which can be frustrating.
Also, there is no central focus to the level, the one "arena" area is too small and too hard to navigate, with very little cover. It needs to be much bigger, with more hiding spots and cover, and pathways all around the outside of the focal point. I think my next attempt needs to include at least one of these arena areas, a lot more cover, no tight hallways, and a compelling theme. I also need to playtest with other players a lot more, I only got a chance to play it with one person, and just that helped quite a bit.
I'll have to brainstorm a bit more, but I will probably have a rough outline sketched up in the near future. If anyone plays the map and has any more tips, I'd be grateful.

PS: Steve Gaynor's "make cool shit and show it off" entry is also worth a read.

Game Design Interview Continued

This would have been nice to have for my interview - Game Job Interview Questions And How to Answer Them. Questions 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 and 12 came up in mine in some form or another. I think my responses were alright for the most part, but I know I flubbed the "Do you have any questions?" part. I asked what the day to day responsibilities would be for an intern, and I don't think that was specific enough. The article has a list of what look like pretty good questions at the end.

I don't think I was enthusiastic enough in my interview, since the interviewer told me as much in the follow-up email I sent. I think a lot of that was being nervous, which I really shouldn't have been, but I think to improve my confidence, I need to have more completed work. Right now I have three multiplayer maps made. I need some single player content, and just more content in general. I also need to polish up my portfolio website, and more it to it's own domain, but I'll worry about that once I have more content to show off.

I have a plan worked out for this summer to treat building levels and games as a job, scheduling out a time every day to work on something, and that doesn't mean blogging or gaming or surfing the web, it mean mapping or designing quests or writing design documents. This summer is going to be my last block of free time before I start job hunting, so I need to get some work done. My plan right now is to try another HL2 : Deathmatch map first, since I know there's a community for it and I know Hammer and the Source engine pretty well, then something for Fallout 3, to demonstrate my quest design, writing and single player design skills. That should be good for a start, and if I have more time, probably a single player map for Half-Life 2 or a map for Men of War. I'll have more to update on that when I'm done with finals and back home for the summer.

Fallout 3 Thoughts

I've started up Fallout 3 again with a new game, abandoning my first after I actually stumbled upon Vault 112 before I was supposed to. I never bothered to trek to GNR or any of downtown Washington, since I took the Blood Ties quest in Megaton my first playthrough, and that took me out into the wastes instead.

I felt a little cheated skipping over such a big part of the story, I was just exploring and tripped on it, which I think made it a bit more rewarding experience. I was just looking for ammo and stimpacks in an abandoned gas station, and it was a complete surprise to find a fully functional vault in the basement. It felt like I had done all of the work, there wasn't a quest arrow pointing me right to it, even though I did miss out on the storyline missions that led up that far.

But having now played the part I skipped, I don't think I missed out on that much. The city feels artificial and claustrophobic compared to the wasteland. The convenient rubble piles that block the city streets pop up way too often, dividing the city up into pockets of gameplay, with the Metro interlinking it all. I understand why the blocks are there, to keep the "fun per square inch" up and avoid players getting easily lost and bored in featureless ruins, and it does keep the game well paced. But it breaks the immersion every time I run into them, kind of like the wire fences in Stalker. I don't know that there's anything that could be done to fix that, it's part of the locked door syndrome that every game seems to have to some degree.

But the way the city areas are implemented in Fallout 3, it makes it hard to navigate without the ever-present quest arrows showing you the way. It removes some of the incentive to explore when there's something telling you exactly where you need to go, there aren't many incentives to wander off the set path if you're on a quest. This could be fixed - there aren't enough visible landmarks, which is kind of funny to say about Washington, D.C. But there's no way to just look around and know where you are or where your destination is. The Washington Monument could be a direct analog to the Citadel in Half-Life 2, a constant reminder of where the player is and where they need to go. A minor thing, but I think it could have helped a lot with immersion, being able to place yourself without opening the Pip-Boy 3000 and puzzling through the map.

On more of a theme/style note, Fallout 3 aims for a cartoonish, pulp comic, retro future feel when it's at its best - over the top bloody slowmo deaths in VATS that somehow never get old, cars exploding in mini-mushroom clouds, giant fire breathing ants - where it falls down is when it tries to be serious or make the player really care about the characters. I can't think of a single person in the game I can identify with. Not the inhabitants of Vault 101 and the barely believable Tunnel Snakes, not my in-game father with his phoned in lines, even the captives of the mutants are hard to relate to - I freed one only to have her run directly into another mutant camp and have her head blown off.

I think there are a variety of reasons I'm apathetic about the characters in Fallout 3. The mediocre to downright terrible voice acting - the combat taunts are unintentionally hilarious at first, then just grinding on the ears. Then there are the dialog options I'm given, which are really shallow. There's either "I love you and I'd love to help!" or "Fuck you!" without a whole lot of middle ground options or alternatives.

It's been a while since I've played the original Fallout, but I remember the characters being a lot more engaging, with deeper motivations, and more choice as to how quests turned out. It could jut be fuzzy memory, but I felt like I had more power and responsibility in the original Fallout. There was an entire vault at stake, that their lives depended on me, and I was told that from the start, with a deadline every time I opened my PipBoy, a handwritten note tracking the days of water left in Vault 13.

There's no such driving force in Fallout 3. My father is gone, I have to go find him because someone I've seen twice before with no authority says so, because I'm going to be killed by a character I saw for ten seconds earlier in the game. There's a negative goal: survive, but no overarching goal besides following my father. I'm following in someone else's footsteps, just like the title of one of the quests: but it's hard to feel like you're very important when your father has been to all of these places before. You're almost a supporting character. Even when you find your father and escort him back, he can't die, he can only faint. He could have basically done this himself.

The story of Fallout 3 doesn't put the player in a position to feel powerful, with the father's accomplishments looming over you. Maybe I'm reading too much into that, but I think it's part of it. There's nothing wrong with not making the player all powerful, and it gets boring being the only force changing the landscape in a open world RPG, but you're given very little power in the current game. You do errands for any Joe Blow that asks, the key characters are unkillable (unlike you), and almost all of the quests amount to glorified package delivery.

I don't want anyone to get the impression that I don't like the game - I've put more than 20 hours into two separate (partial) playthroughs, and I've enjoyed the exploration part, but none of the quests have been that rewarding. I've had to make my own fun, but the game allows for that. It's a sandbox to play in, and it's a big sandbox - I haven't even seen a quarter of the locations. I'll probably come back to Fallout 3, once I've seen the ending and the rest of the main quest myself.

I'm also considering starting a small mod, adding in a new dungeon. I need a portfolio piece, and Fallout 3 has a powerful, easy to use toolkit, so hopefully I'll have something to show soon.

Elven Legacy Demo

I played the Elven Legacy demo yesterday, and it seems pretty solid, good turn based fun. The only feature that stood out as bad was the terrible tutorial. You're going to have me watch a video instead of walk me through it in the actual interface? Really? Besides having the cliched fantasy voice yell at me while I'm watching it, the voiceover kept clipping, the next sentence running over the end of the last one. The pacing was too slow - a veteran of the genre would be bored to tears and a brand new gamer would be confused and unsure, since all they have to go off of is a blurry video, then they're dropped into the interface. Why couldn't they just highlight buttons and walk me through it with tool tips? The interface is fairly simple, so there wouldn't be a whole lot lost if they just dropped it all together. Maybe have a little pop-up explaining camera controls at the first.
The ability to zoom in and see individual units was nice visual candy, but it doesn't do anything gameplay wise. What I liked was how archers could defend any friendly unit they're near, firing back at the enemy if the adjacent unit was attacked. Fairly simple, but it added a nice element of strategy. The semi-random upgrade options were also nice. Every time a unit levels up, three upgrade options are given at random, which adds a little variety as opposed to a pure tech-tree approach. What might be an even better improvement is getting benefits based on what the unit had done - if they've been fighting in the woods, they get a bonus to woodland combat, or bonuses against spearmen if they've been fighting an army's worth of them.
That's something I though was a little off in Civilization 4, how you could assign points to any specialty you wanted. That gives the player more control, so there might be a very good reason they went that way. I sort of feel like prototyping something up to test if bonuses based on actual unit experiences would be fun.

Game Design Internship Interview

I had my first game design job (phone) interview Thursday, and it was pretty in-depth, around 45 minutes of questions. I made the small mistake of taking the call in a public place since it was scheduled as soon as I got off work. Ten minutes into the call a loud group moved into the room and I tried to get to a quiet spot, and succeeded in losing my cell phone signal and dropping the call. He called right back, but it was still embarrassing. So lesson learned. The interview was with one of the lead designers for the project I would be working on if hired.

A few of the questions asked and my answers - these are paraphrased, I took notes right after the call:

1. What is the process you go through when making a level?
   


I first sketch out a rough layout of what I have in mind, then block out the level in the editor I'm using, with just the basic untextured geometry. Then I play through the level, making sure I can move through the level smoothly, without getting caught in any of the spaces. Once the geometry is functional, I then add in the NPCs and some basic scripted events, and play through the level again, this time taking note of what enemy placements work or not, modifying the geometry or enemy placement as needed. Then I go back and start to add textures and polish, adding in 3D assets as they're completed, making sure every thing's going together well. (I don't think I included enough about the teamwork involved in making a level and how to ask for the assets you'll require, since most of the work I've done has been fairly independent.)



2. What level are you most proud of, and why?
   


I mentioned a level I made for a dodgeball modification for Half-Life 2 with a lot of raised areas and platforms floating in space, with large pillars in-between and supporting them for cover.



3. What level made by someone else on your team to you most admire, and why?
   


This was a map with conveyor belts, suspended over molten metal. This one took a lot of skill to maneuver in, and took the dodgeball arena concept somewhere I hadn't though of. Also, this was one of the first levels made for the mod that used cover, as opposed to the first where we emulated normal dodgeball, where every level looked like and was as bare as a high school gym. (The dodgeball mod wasn't really that good, I wish I had a better example here.)



4. If you were in charge of designing ten levels for a game, what elements would you suggest the level designers use to make the levels unique and fun?
   


I used the dodgeball mod as an example, and though that good use of cover, meaning the cover could be maneuvered around and countered by another player, and placement of balls that required the player to take a risk of some sort to pick up the balls, like leaving cover.



5. On your last project, what were the basic elements that made up a good level?
   


Basically the same as #4, it was sort of an extension of his question. (I think he asked this because I wasn't making a whole lot of sense in #4.)


What's your favorite game of the last year? What were the best and worst parts of it? What would you do to improve the sequel for this game?



I chose GTA 4, and explained how I liked the buddy mission mechanic, and how it took you from mission to mission smoothly, made the game flow better so you always had something to do, and added a lot to the story, revealing just a bit more about each character and the player's character in return for doing what basically amounted to chores. I then said I also disliked the buddy mechanic, since it didn't allow the player to explore on their own without being interrupted by basically required missions, unlike the previous games in the series, where it was easier for the player to make their own informal missions, if they were so inclined. I'm not sure what I would improve about the sequel. (I messed up here, I needed to have a game to talk about where I knew of a way to improve it. Far Cry 2 would have been a better choice, since I have a few ideas to improve it that I should make a post about sometime. I'm pretty sure contradicting myself didn't help.)



What are you plans in the industry?



My plans in the industry are to become a game designer, and hopefully a lead designer in a few years.



What would you personally bring to the game industry? What area do you want to work on?



I talked about how I wanted to improve storytelling, and he asked me what I though made storytelling in games different from other mediums. I said interactivity, the fact that the player makes up their own story to some extent, being able to make moment to moment decisions in gameplay, that each person playing the game will make their own unique experience, and I name-dropped Chris Crawford. I got on kind of a roll, then talked about the really important part of game design was making the player feel like they've made the right decision, even when they really didn't make a decision at all, the game made it for them, but they feel they had a choice, or at least that the choice they were forced to make was the best one, and the area of story in game design was where I wanted to work.



Would you feel comfortable implementing other people's ideas?



Absolutely, I think it'd be a worthy learning experience, by successfully implementing other people's idea I can see which of those work and what doesn't, and use them in my own work.

I think I did alright, but there's some serious room for improvement. I think a lot of what I need to know could be learned from an internship, or at least an example single player level completed for any game that I could talk about, that would have fixed a lot of the problems. So I need to have better examples, use Far Cry 2 next time, and write up a post on what I want to do to organize my thoughts. 

If anyone made it this far, do you have any suggestions? Anywhere I messed up that I didn't mention? Any tips for future interviews?

Boiling Point

Just got and played a little Boiling Point, since someone on the SA Forums recommended it as in some ways similar to Deus Ex. I'm not sure how true that comparison was. It's much more freeform, since you can jump in and do whatever you want, even ignore the main mission. The voice acting is just as terrible, if not worse, and the graphics are barely better. The environments seem awfully sterile - there's really no little details to make it seem like a real world - no clutter, no one doing anything more than walking around or fighting. That and all of the NPC respawn in the exact same place, no matter how many times you kill them. They could have mixed it up a little, have them randomly spawn, give them "jobs", that sort of thing. They tried, some of the details are compelling - the villager walking from town to town that you can give a ride, for example. But, you always see the same guy a mile down the road, carrying the exact same sack. It needs some more variety. Since they've added more depth to the game, more actions you can perform, the game can't get away with the cardboard characters in other sandbox games. Hell, San Andreas did a better job of giving the characters depth. Pedestrians in SA would look at store fronts, carry on conversations with other people, and could jump out of the way if you tried to run them down. The same can't be said here. They did a good job of giving the player more options on how they want to play, and more depth to his actions, but lended little of this depth to the NPCs. Some of it might be the translation, but the conversations are tedious. The conversations take too long to get anywhere, and don't really tell a whole lot about the world. I've been playing for a few game days, and I'm not sure I even know what city I'm in. Apparently there's something going on with drugs.

Then, after all that, there's absolutely no polish to the game. I was just given a mission by a man outside the bar, so I drive out, and I find out it's for the bandit factions, which hates my guts. So I fight my way in, hoping to meet my contact, and I end up following the mission marker to a corpse. Great. So I try and drive off, and I get shot through the windshield and die. Alright, all good. I then proceed to respawn in the middle of the bay, just above my car. I can see my arm resting on the door - apparently I'm having an out of body experience as well. I'm also trapped in the roof of the car, so I can do nothing except wait for the player to drown. Hmm. Another little deal is that children can't be killed, or even knocked down. That's fine, I don't need to kill them - but they have a tendency to stand in the middle of the road, and hitting them with your car is like slamming into a brick wall. Just the little things.

Some other details - the weapon wear system is terrible. The percentage of wear determines the percentage of shots that misfire. So if you pick up a fully automatic rifle that a bandit was just hosing you down with non-stop, it's usually about 50% worn. That seems to mean that every other shot jams the weapon, and I'm forced to click again to clear it. This might be alright if the AI also had to deal with this, or if it didn't waste all of my ammo, but it does. I'm the only one with a crippled weapon. I'm alright with the jamming or misfires, but no weapon would jam like that, in bad condition or otherwise.

There are also little details they could have added. Stuff like changing where you respawn or are healed depending on your faction standing - say you're on good terms with the army and poor ones with the civilians, you wake up in an army hospital and get to keep your weapons. I say this because I must have executed the doctor six times, and he still brought me back every time. I mean, there are limits to the Hippocratic Oath...

Besides all that, it's still sort of fun. Driving up on rebels fighting it out with army soldiers is pretty sweet - at least, until the soldiers are ran down by passing civilian cars that don't bother to stop, and that the AI refuses to avoid. Pretty broken. If they'd spend some more time on polish, it could have been really great. Hell, it probably could have been patched better and fixed most of it, outside the uncompelling dialogue. Make the AI seem a little brighter, make the inventory system more intuitive , and do some serious bug hunting and optimization, and this could be a really fun game.

Deus Ex Ideas

Well, there hasn't been a whole lot of progress in the game design front. I've been reading a lot more industry blogs and researching positions, spruced up my resume and sent it off to a few Austin companies, so we'll see what comes of that. I did a bit of research on Deus Ex, comparing the game levels to real world locations, thanks to Flickr. Kind of a weird feeling to see places like Castle Clinton and Battery Park as real places. That and how different they look, and how hilariously blocky the Deus Ex levels are in comparison. I read a Warren Spector post-mortem on Deus Ex, and how at first they tried for exact physical replicas of real world locations - well, I'll let this block quote explain:

Our original plan to build large, outdoor areas -- whole sections of New York, Area 51, lovingly recreated in excruciating detail gleaned from maps and satellite photos and, most notably, my dream of allowing players to explore the entire White House -- just proved to be unfeasible. There was no way any then-current renderer was going to allow us to do all that. The design had to change. (Postmortem: Ion Storm's Deus Ex)

He brings up later the fact that most real world locations aren't really all of that compelling game spaces, or at least are hard to guide the player in. Which is probably true, to some extent, unless you give players the tools to utilize those spaces in a fun way. I've always thought out gun battles when I'm bored someplace, Wal-Mart or the like. And there are interesting possibilities - soldiers rappelling down through the skylights, vans crashing through the front doors, jumping from shelf to shelf as RPGs and tracer rounds whiz past. But, besides the technical problems, how would you implement a space like this in a game? Or, more specifically, how would you let interesting situations like that transpire in the game, without resorting to scripted events? That seemed to be part of what Deus Ex was going for in the first place, with some of the earliest concepts - to be able to jump into a real world location and do whatever you wanted to complete a goal. Player freedom is what I think I'm going for here - how to give the player freedom to complete goals as they want to, while keeping it fun. And basically, you can't let the player do whatever they want to do, which I'll get to in a second. I've been replaying GTA: San Andreas, mainly since I don't have a 360 or PS3 to play GTA IV, but it's been interesting nonetheless. Mainly seeing how much the game does restrict the player once it comes down to missions, and when the player isn't restricted in the mission, how frustrating it can be. It really is surprising, how linear the missions really are. Of course, when you're not in a mission, you can do whatever the hell you want, and it can be really fun, mainly since if the player is so inclined, they can make up their own story for what they're doing in the game. At least, that's what I do. But the missions - they allow for very little freedom. You usually have very little choice of car or weapons - they're usually handed to the player, or strategically placed so they can't be missed. It's still technically the player's choice to pick them up and use them, sometimes, but it usually means failure if they don't. For example, the player is given the mission of getting back a van full of drugs. The player drives out to the van, and is shown a cutscene where the drug thieves have split up on bikes. The player is then placed on a bike and told to chase after them. The player can choose which of them he wants to chase after, but it makes little difference. Ok, I'm just starting to ramble. Basically, most of the mission designs give the player little to no choice on how to complete the goals. A later goal has the player destroy poker chip machines a rival gang is using to make counterfeit chips. The player is told to "avoid being seen" - and then is only given the option of going through the front door, only to be instantly spotted. Even if the player does avoid being spotted on the way in, the scripted entrance removes any advantage the player earned. Maybe by making it possible for the player to sneak in a back door, or get a van rigged with explosives and drive it in, or hire thugs to help him out, or drive a motorcycle inside, or stealthy sabotage the chip operation, by stealing a uniform and rigging the machines - any of these things. Those all seem to offer the player more choices, and wouldn't keep the player from just jumping in and start shooting. How hard would these things to be to add, and would they still be fun? How much extra work would be involved? If each of those options had to be scripted individually for this mission, it probably wouldn't be worth it. But, if those options were made an integral part of the game world, and open as part of any mission, that would be interesting, and allow for the player to create their own missions and entertain themselves more easily. The one thing I've realized is that most games give you only one tool for interacting with the world around you - weapons. You can kill people, or spare them, and that amount to pretty much the only choice. And most of the time, sparing them mean letting yourself die. When that's the only choices you have for interaction that isn't heavily prescripted, it's actually pretty limited. Are social interactions just not that exciting, or are they really that hard to model? Would it be impossible for the player to create the story depending on their decisions? Could that be compelling? Or would it be asking too much of the player?

Example game: The player enters the world as a blank slate. The player knows nothing of their charater's past, why they're here, or what they're doing. But they have the freedom to do anything they want as events unfold around them. Lets say the player starts out at a prison, having just been released, with only the clothes on their back and a few hundred dollars. They step outside, with a fellow ex-con. They player can then start up a conversation with them, if they wish. They start talking, and the ex-con starts asking the player questions about what they were in prison for, etc. These questions then shape the player. Sort of similar to the systems at the start of Morrowind or Oblivion, where the players asked questions and then given stats, except now it would actually shape the story of the game. If, for example, the player says they were wrongfully accused, perhaps the game focuses on the players' attempts at redemption or revenge, depending on the rest of the player's actions. That and the other characters shape themselves around the player like a choose your own adventure book. If they say they stole a car, maybe the other con is an ex car thief too, and offers to go into business together. If the player's trying to start a new clean life for themselves, maybe the new friend has a business lead. Simplistic examples, but it could make for an interesting game. It would present interesting production problems - having so many possibilities would make for a lot of work, making most of the characters the player meets lead interesting lives that can be changed or will change the player's experience, taking more of a pen and paper RPG approach to it. If the players start to wander away from the main storyline in a campaign, the GM can usually pull another NPC into service to continue the storyline with slight modifications. Maybe make the player's fate unavoidable, while still giving the illusion of freedom. I guess the problem with that is any playthrough after the first attempt would reveal the trick, since basically the same storyline would be followed in our pen and paper RPG example. Basically, giving the player that much control over the storyline would lead to numerous complications, but it's something to think about.

I need to start working on some more portfolio pieces, and focus these posts down more. This is more of a rambling brain dump than anything else. I should try my hand at a small single player episode for HL2. Still thinking about that underground V2 base idea. That and I've been getting some ideas from STALKER. We'll see, hopefully I get something constructive done, at least some sketching out of ideas and maybe some reading while I'm gone on the family trip.

Episodic

So I want to try and make an episodic single player modification for Half-Life 2, in the same vein as the excellent Minerva, but I don't want to be derivative. Everyone's tired of the same Eastern European textures and theming from the original game by now, but I'm kind of limited by those assets. It's a hell of a job making new assets at the same level of quality of the originals, especially with just one person and a limited amount of time. I don't think it's completely tapped out, especially if you mix it up with a few custom elements, but it's hard to get a setting that hasn't been done in the original game or one of the episodes. Most of the traditional areas have already been covered: sewers, city streets, apartments, prisons, countryside, but there's still room for some more. What I have been thinking about is this: the underground V2 assembly plants. Still fit with the European theme, with some interesting possibilities that haven't been covered before. Could be awesome with the right custom props - some rusting V-2 rockets in various states of assembly, new Combine assembly lines, prison labor, some direct echoes of Nazi Germany. Could be interesting, if a little limited if you stick with purely the original place - not a whole lot of exciting pictures, the modern day place looks like an empty, mostly flooded concrete box. RtCW comes to mind, with the sweet airbase mission and the rocket bases, with just enough basis in reality to be believable, at least in a comic book way. Need to get some more reference material, work out some prototype levels.