Well, it
has been close to two years since the last "Bad
Game Designer, No Twinkie!" column, so I think it's time for
another one. I keep a collection of computer game misfeatures, design
errors, and personal annoyances as I play, and it's now long enough to
publish. Some of these are level-design errors or even programming weaknesses,
but they're all things that a game designer has at least some influence
on.
Adolescent
Armageddon
"Conquer
the world!" "The fate of humanity is at stake!" "Save
the galaxy!" scream the boxes on the shelves down at the game software
store. "No!" I'm tempted to scream back. "I don't want
to! The galaxy can go stuff itself!"
Too many computer games are fulfillments of adolescent power-fantasies,
and a meaningless apocalyptic scenario is a classic symptom. It's been
quite a while since I was an adolescent, and I just don't believe them
any more. Maybe that means I'm a boring old adult, no longer capable of
grandiose visions… but let's face it, the people who run around yelling
about conquering the world are nut cases. I think it's more accurate to
say that I just don't care. I don't want to rule the world. I'm not terribly
interested in saving the galaxy. It's too big and impersonal a task, and
it's not credible that a single individual can do it anyway. Don't ask
me to. I don't feel like it.
"But wait," I hear you cry in irritation. "Aren't you one
of those Tolkien nuts? And isn't The Lord of the Rings about as
apocalyptic as you can get?" Well, yes, I am, and yes, it is. But
what sets The Lord of the Rings apart from most of its pale imitators
is that it's not actually about how wonderful it is to save the world.
It's about what passes away irretrievably even when you succeed. It's
a book about the tragedy of saving the world, the price to be paid for
doing it.
I think the success of The Sims demonstrates pretty clearly that
it's not necessary to rule the world, and a lot of people don't even want
to. They're busy just trying to keep the dishes washed and the newspapers
picked up. Millions of them are perfectly happy doing it, and Maxis is
making a fortune out of fulfilling that particular, if peculiar, fantasy.
We don't need for games to be about adolescent armageddon. We only need
for them to be about people that we care for, and in fact that allows
us to make a much wider variety of games than "Save the world!"
does.
Having to stand in (or select) exactly the right spot.
There's not a lot that needs to be said about this. If the designer has
made a selectable region of the screen extremely small on purpose, it's
just a trial-and-error time-waster, a boring puzzle. If the designer has
done it by accident, it's a misfeature that should have been caught during
testing. There's one problem with testers: they're such experienced gamers
- and after a few hundred hours playing a game, so experienced with that
particular game - that they may not catch design errors which would annoy
the pants off mass-market, non-core players. As we make more and more
games for the non-core market, we need testers who can think like a non-core
gamer.
Bad pathfinding.
Pathfinding is the process of figuring out how to get a ground-based unit
from here to there, avoiding obstacles on the way. Pathfinding can go
wrong in a lot of ways, but the most frustrating is when a unit gets stuck
behind something and can't figure out how to get around it. The original
Age of Empires was notorious for its bad pathfinding until they
released a patch for it. You'd tell a group of people to go somewhere,
and they'd get stuck and wander haplessly around until you either gave
them new orders or removed some trivial obstruction that a two-year-old
could figure out how to get past. In addition to being frustrating, it
destroys the player's suspension of disbelief and respect for the game.
Pathfinding is not a simple problem by any means - I used to program silicon
layout and circuit routing tools for a living, so I know something about
it. Game pathfinding is easier in some respects because soldiers don't
create a short circuit if they cross another soldier's path on the battlefield.
However, unlike routing chip traces, it can't be left to run overnight,
either. When the player tells a soldier to go somewhere, that soldier
needs to leave immediately, without visibly stopping to think about how
he's going to get there.
Here are a few design rules of thumb about pathfinding:
It's not about what the troops can see, it's about what the player
can see. Typically, the player is looking at an aerial perspective
of a region, and can clearly see the path she wants her troops to take.
Even if those troops don't "know" the terrain, and can't "see"
the best route from the ground, they should use the player's degree of
knowledge, not their own, to plan a route. Otherwise the player will be
asking, "Why are you going that way?"
Foot soldiers should not be obstructed by their own side's equipment.
In the real world, if a group of foot soldiers are trying to get past
a row of friendly tanks, they can do it, even if the tanks are lined up
axle to axle. They'll climb over, crawl under, or whatever. It may slow
them down, but it won't stop them. That's one of the best features of
the common infantryman - he may not have much armor or firepower, but
he's more versatile than any other unit. Don't take that away from him
by needlessly obstructing his pathfinding.
Groups of units should filter among obstacles similar in size to themselves,
but should stay together when travelling around large obstacles. As
a general rule, groups should stick together and follow roughly the same
path, but not to the extent of all walking around the right-hand side
of a tree. And how many times have you selected a group of soldiers, told
them to go somewhere, and found that two out of the twenty of them are
wandering off on some other weird route of their own? What's happening
is that the two are treating the other 18 as an obstacle rather than a
group that they're expected to remain part of. They've got a little too
much independent thinking in their AI. You have to balance their freedom
to improvise individual paths for themselves (filtering among trees or
boulders) with their obligation to stick together (taking the same way
around a hill or building).
Make it easy for the player to enter waypoints as part of her movement
orders. This is your "escape clause" if your pathfinding
has bugs. By entering waypoints, players can work around pathfinding problems.
Obviously it's preferable to get it right the first time, but solving
the problem with waypoints at least lets the player go on playing instead
of giving up in frustration. And waypoints are generally useful anyway
Whole books are written about pathfinding, so I'll leave it there. Much
of it is a question of testing and tuning. But do try to do it well; bad
pathfinding will cause a player to dismiss your game as "stupid"
more quickly than just about anything else.
Low-poly trees (and other models, too).
Don't do it. It's ugly and tacky. Get your pixel artists to do nice sprites
instead, and stick 'em on a single rectangle, if you don't have enough
polys to go around. Yes, they will pixellate as you get closer to them
unless you MIP-map them, but so will the textures in your walls; we're
used to that. Remember how the creatures in Doom only had one sprite when
they were lying dead on the floor? And when you went around to the other
side of them they still were facing the same way, following you like the
eyes in one of those creepy paintings? And remember how that was OK, and
we didn't really mind? The same is true for trees - even more so, in fact.
Unless it's significant to the gameplay somehow, it doesn't really matter
if a tree's orientation is always the same way with respect to the player
no matter where he is. It's still better to have a nice-looking tree sprite
than some weird blocky green umbrella thing.
Too few
audio clips for a given situation.
I hate hearing the same damned audio clip over and over whenever a particular
situation recurs in a game. It doesn't matter if it's just a confirming
beep - in that case, it should always be the same sound, so it sends the
same cue to the player - but if it's a person speaking, it gets annoying
very fast. I was the audio/video producer for Madden NFL Football for
many years, so I've been guilty of this one myself on occasion. We had
a limited amount of recording time with Mr. Madden each year, so we couldn't
record everything we wanted. The audio script for Madden NFL Football
was typically about 75 pages long, and I would have written twice that
much if I could.
If you're going to have voice clips associated with particular situations
("I'm hit!" and so on), then record a lot of them. My own rule
of thumb is that there should never be fewer than five audio clips for
any situation, even the rarest; and for common events there should be
at least two dozen or so. You don't always have to record completely different
sentences; sometimes the same sentence delivered with a slightly different
emphasis will do. In the game, have the software keep a list of them and
choose one at random to play when the situation calls for it, then mark
it off the list. The next time the situation arises, choose at random
from the remaining ones, and so on. When you've run through them all,
reset the list except for the most recently played clip. That way the
players will never hear the same clip twice in a row.
Birds that
carry swords.
Argh! Our party is under attack by evil doom-chickens from the foul fowlyard
of Kafoozalum! We're in danger of being pecked to death a la Tippi Hedren.
We hack. We slash. We cast spells of Oven Roasting+3. Some of us get hurt
in a vague, numerical sort of way that doesn't actually seem to involve
blood or pain. Eventually we kill the last of the chickens (no evil creature
is ever smart enough to run away, even when it's hopelessly outnumbered;
an admirable sense of duty for a bird). Searching the bodies we find that,
as with all evil creatures, even blind cave-dwelling slimeworms, they're
carrying money and human weapons and armor around with them. How fortuitous!
Evil doom-chicken #3 (second from the left, but otherwise indistinguishable
from doom-chickens #1, 2, and 4) had a Great Big Nasty Sword of Serious
Hurtfulness+5. Funny, I didn't notice that sword anywhere on its feathery
person while it was still alive. If it was so heavily armed, why didn't
it use it in the fight? Come to think of it, where was it keeping all
this gold, too? In its gizzard? Eeeeew!
You get the idea.
Conclusion
Well, that’s my catalog of complaints for another year or so. If
you’ve been responsible for any of these mistakes, bad game designer!
No Twinkie for you! And if you’ve got a few personal peeves and game
design gaffes of your own, by all means send
me some E-mail and tell me about them. It’s time to start
making a new list.
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