Been gone a while. Sorry about that – I’ve been working on this presentation for the TED Full-Spectrum Talk Contest:
The Language of Game Development, Spoken Here
Archives for category: Text-Based Games
The Agency: Razor One, Main Gameplay Screen
April, the year 2000. The COBOL-powered machines that still ran the world had just weathered the storm of the millennium’s crossing over. The first Xbox was more than a year away. And I was eighteen years old, hard at work learning how to write code for video games. Doesn’t that sound sterile to you? It does to me. “Coding games”. “Game programming”.”
Yuck.
It sounded just as bad to me back then, even though I knew it was my only chance to do what I’d always dreamed of – don the metaphorical articulated trumpet, cymbal hat, and bass-drum backpack belonging to the one-man band of game design and coding together, just as I knew my predecessors had done.
Sometime during the spring break of my freshman year at Digipen Institute of Technology – my Alma mater and my only claim to any academic prowess – I had a years-long romance with text-based game design and coding. Maybe it was because text output was the technical limitation I’d started with (Ed Fries, by the way, has a nice piece about the merits of designing for constraints), or perhaps it was a ZZT-laden nostalgic stumble (Tim Sweeney, too, has his own thoughts on design limitations) that left me collapsed, dead-drunk in ASCII alley.
One thing that keeps popping up as the development of the game continues is the notion of spatial granularity. It’s amazing what we take for granted in even a rudimentary 3D first-person shooter.
Quake, an early example of honest-to-God 3D gaming (and not the 2.5D skewing-and-billboard Wolfenstein clones) was among the first to begin the modern gamer’s training to recognize small deltas in position, rotation, and scale as markers that the action in their vicinity was about to change. It was an exercise of surprisingly complex pattern recognition.
The human brain is tuned to a fine nuance at 60 Hz, and the difference of a few degrees of any game entity can clue a wired brain off to a potential perceived future. You know the columns and stairways and arches of a place, and it is wired into the mind to accept a sudden breaking of any of those planes as the signal that something is about to go down.
It can happen in elements of a fraction of an inch: spotting a gun muzzle telegraphing around a corner, or a subtle color shift in the otherwise unbroken pattern of a wall – the difference of just a few pixels marks the transition from the static world to the dynamic world.
What’s our text-based equivalent?
You hear a sound to the south!
A notification of the above kind is chunky, not gritty; even though it can still maintain the appropriate “don’t open that door” aesthetic, the abstract notion of “south” leaves to the first-person-shooter mind an unsettling notion that for all the liberties taken with licensing, this is not a similar game to its spiritual parent at all.
The Inauspicious Beginning
It’s been something I’ve wanted to do since I started with Inform those many months ago – no, not finish Industry. I’ll get to that later (with all due respect to my waning credibility on the finisher’s market, there’s nothing quite like a lifetime of projects in various states of in-progressness-ness).
I’ve wanted to experiment with the abstraction of modern video game titles into text-based forms, preserving aesthetics and feel while developing new, text-friendly gameplay mechanics.
You heard me right. I’m making text-based versions of modern video games, because that’s the kind of self-flagellating logical exercise that passes for fun with me.
The first one is going to be Left 4 Dead – starting with the “No Mercy” episode.
It had really ought to come in a packet you can open when you’re old enough to read: “Welcome to life. You will experience this as a set of endless disagreements about perceptions orbiting an unobservable yet objective core set of thermodynamic rules.”
I’ve already had my fill of (and subsequent detox sessions from) radical relativism, far enough removed to be able to convince myself that there is a definitive is separate from our own perceptions (see Berkeley’s rock test), but I run almost immediately into an intractable problem when I get to work, and that is this: I don’t work in objectivity.
I’m paid, as a technical game designer, to create frameworks to support perceptions around an obfuscated set of assumptions. A game is more about trickery and flash than just about any other medium of creative expression; in fact, in handling the very real constraints of the hardware we test against, we gain a great deal of performance by removing unperceived elements (see Propaganda Village for a close physical metaphor).
