I’m taking this opportunity to let you know that IndustryBroadcast.com has posted one of my blog posts, “Making Games that Speak for Themselves”, in audio format on their website.

IndustryBroadcast.com features various articles in audio format (which can be downloaded to your iPod, streamed on the site, etc.). So it’s quite useful if you can’t find the time to sit down and read through all those interesting articles you find on the net, or don’t want to go through the hassle of reading a bunch of unstapled printed pages on your subway ride. They cover various subjects such as game design, business, management, and more. Make sure you check it out, it’s quite worth it! I’ve added a link to the Blogroll on the right.

Thanks to Ryan Wiancko for making this possible and posting my article in this format on his site!

Currently, it appears that the game industry’s reaction to heightened competition has been to produce more games for a market that is segmenting, and bet more money on them as the stakes rise. But there are various hidden factors linked to a rise in competition. Since this increased competitiveness is the fruit of percieved profit opportunities by outsiders, a number of poor investments are made leading to low quality games on the shelves.

This leads to a faster drop in prices as they fail to sell at their initial price range, and this quickened price drop leads the customers to expect lower prices at all times. It soon becomes instinctive to them; sixty dollars is too expensive, period, I can wait a month to buy it at half the price, if not less, or buy it used

A streamlined and efficient corporate strategy will work well on calm seas as well as during storms, being able to pass over the short-term agitations of the market of which one has no control over. You can’t prevent a bunch of hacks from trying their hands at making money in the video game market, this is beyond you. The negative impact of their involvement in our industry should not dictate your fate.

Deciding to produce more games at a time when the competition has increased and the market has segmented further is no different than pretending that you can steer your ship with ease in a storm when you had enough trouble on calm seas.

If the return on investment has not increased but production capacity has, then the company becomes unstable and will be toppled as soon as it faces events beyond its control. The bigger they are the harder they fall, and competitive times are tumultuous times.

So what can be done? I see two actions to take in particular:

1- We must reduce overlap in our catalog so as to limit internal competition to make up for the increase in external competition. Each release, on its own, should be as successful as it possibly can be. Internal competition reduces those chances.

2- We need to increase return on investment. A good way to achieve this is to make games that will not become irrelevant six months after their releases. World of Warcraft has become part of gamers’ lives to an extent where they will cut elsewhere in their spendings in order to keep on playing. The same applies to some extent to titles like Guitar Hero, where players have created a personal link to what the game provides them with, something they don’t want to get rid of. This is what it means to make meaningful games.

Code written for World of Warcraft almost ten years ago is still bringing in revenue today. Part of keeping a game relevant also implies making a quality brand, and sustaining that quality. Some studios have been excellent at establishing each and every of their releases as quality brands. In the case of video games, we might be underestimating how important a studio’s name is for a relatively significant part of the market. The movies have their actors and directors, we have studios. A well established studio that has been consistent on delivering quality will definitly benefit in competitive times thanks to its reputation. It’s another factor behind the gamer’s purchase choice.

A game’s worth is also linked to its cost. If a gamer plays twenty eight hours of WoW a month for fifteen dollars, that’s around fifty cents an hour. Sixty dollars for twelve hours of play equals five dollars an hour. Instinctively, gamers know that without ever thinking about it. At a time when competition is so high, this instinct reinforces itself as they become more selective. It’s a natural process. What are they going to get out of the game, and at what price? As WoW has demonstrated, it’s cheap to play, and anyone who has experienced its gameplay mechanics understands how it establishes its worth in the player’s mind, although it’s subtle enough not to be directly insulting.

I doubt the guys over at Blizzard see their games as glorified slot machines, they believe in what they do and they commit themselves with dedication, but it also happens to fall perfectly in line with their publisher’s corporate strategy

The devs at Blizzard recognize how their games are successful from a gamer’s perspective as well as from a corporate one, and I doubt they have any shame about it. And yet, after all the profits they’re the very the source of, they probably rarely ever have to think about the corporate strategy itself, because in the end this is a unified and entirely natural and common sense-based approach. They simply focussed on making a game that stood out from the competition, that was fun, and that provided lasting value. Meanwhile, Activision continues, so far, to make sure that WoW remains the Activision MMORPG, giving the game the room it needs to be the continued success it is.

Imagine you were to look at a painting of a person. You know it’s not real, hence there are various errors that might subconsciously bother you, even though you wouldn’t have noticed them if those same apparent errors were edited into a photo. You might not be able to pinpoint what’s wrong with it, but instinctively your mind noticed something wasn’t right. Video game worlds are by their very nature artificial. There’s all sorts of factors that we would normally not be bothered by that will simply feel wrong when seen in a video game. A very clean hallway will look unfinished and a perfectly straight edge will look like it lacks detail.

So we can tell that already, the artistic direction has been influenced by the development of the tech we can now use, and that the video game medium makes it easier for the viewer to doubt what he sees. By why desaturated colors? There is one thing that our current consoles are terrible at; lighting. Our current lighting solutions are improving, but for the moment we have much difficulty simulating indirect lighting, especially in real-time. In the previous generation, graphical quality was not high enough for us to be bothered by the lack of indirect illumination in our saturated environments, but once again, as graphical quality rises, so does our expectations of how the world should be presented. Just as wonky animations will shatter immersion, so will poor lighting.

To hide this problem, we tend to instinctively desaturate everything. The mere presence of saturated colors unbalances the rest of the image. Since we often have some form of ambient occlusion in our environments, this visual effect makes the game look more visually convincing. The lack of indirect illumination, or more specifically the lack of radiosity, brings this level of believability off balance.

Here is an image that illustrates the problem:

The top image has ambient occlusion, but no radiosity. The bottom image has both

The top image doesn’t look bad, ambient occlusion (the dark edges around the areas where the different surfaces are close to one another) works well to add quality to the image. But the lack of radiosity doesn’t feel right. Imagine if this scene was actually a colorful sunlit living room in a penthouse. The lack of bouncing colors would really cheapen the quality of the image. Considering we could have a much higher quality if you went for a different theme where your tech would really work at its best, we might as well change the whole theme and make it an older, dusty living room with a CRT television, and cracked walls with paint that started peeling off here and there. The dirty look is to have a greater level of detail granularity in our textures, the peeled off paint is to get that extra bump that our normal maps allow us to have, we probably have some metal pipes here and there with their specular highlights, and the CRT television is to have a dynamic source of lighting to make it all even more apparent.

Here’s the same image as above, but in black and white:

Completely desaturated

Now that the radiosity can’t really be perceived, the visual quality doesn’t go off balance.

The game Mirror’s Edge used some nifty tech to simulate indirect lighting, which was really vital to the game’s visual quality. It simply could not have been set in a clean white city with brightly saturated surfaces if it wasn’t for this tech; it would have made the game look cheap, fake, and not immersive at all.

Mirror's Edge

Gears of War on the other hand had an artistic direction developed around the idea of using the new graphical developments to their full extent, so Epic went for dark environments with bumpy rocks and dirty metallic surfaces which would allow them to light the scenes up with multiple dynamic lights, allowing them to get the most out of their normal maps and specular highlights.

Gears of War

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves has an even more saturated palette than Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune because their lighting solution has vastly improved since and can be showcased rather well in colorful environments. They also use saturated colors to make certain objects stand out so as to guide the player throughout the level, it’s subtle but it works well. Uncharted 2 will probably be even more of a trend setter than Mirror’s Edge since it manages to pull off the gritty look while still using a unique color palette. It really allows the game to set itself apart from the competition.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

As our lighting solutions unify and become more dynamic-oriented, we can expect the next-generation  games to have a much wider variety of color palettes as real-time translucency and indirect illumination become easily achievable. Expect saturated colors to be the new brown.

Players often end up tellingl themselves “I just realized that I’m wasting my time playing these games!”, a sort of hamster’s wheel effect where they realize that their not actually getting anywhere. In other games, such as World of Warcraft, the players actually have the impression that they’ve accomplished something. The fact that the progress they’ve made is not erased when the game is turned off, that they can continued to expand on it week after week, and month after month, allows them to experience a never ending sense of accomplishment, one that feeds this need at a faster pace than other forms of gratification such as getting a promotion at their job, or passing an exam at school. The feedback is relatively immediate, and the game ends up being perceived as a source of worth.

Now I’m not interested in creating the ultimate slot-machine that would allow us to empty the wallets of anyone who would set their sights on it, but I am interested in figuring out how we can help ourselves as developers to provide the player with what he is seeking from our games.

I’ve thought of a simple trick that is probably applicable to a whole lot of games being developed. It’s the simple addition of witnesses to the player’s actions. I believe that by making the player feel like his actions are being witnessed, an increased sense of accomplishment will result. For example, if you’re making a fighting game, instead of having two characters fighting each other in the middle of nowhere, add a crowd watching the brawl. Street Fighter II had crowds in almost all of its stages and it was a big commercial success. Street Fighter III did not and the game’s reception was rather poor. Def Jam Fight for NY had fully interactive crowds and it was quite a success. Def Jam: Icon did not put emphasis on crowds, there were barely any, and it was a flop.

Street Fighter 2 has crowds in almost every stages.

Def Jam Fight for NY has interactive crowds, the game lives.

Def Jam Icon has in general no audience, it's visually life-less, no matter how dynamic the actual scenery is.

Alright, I can’t say those games were successes thanks to the presence of a crowd, but I think there’s a positive in having a crowd cheer while the player pummels his opponent.

In the same way, in open-world games like Grand Theft Auto or Assassin’s Creed, I think the interaction between the crowds and the player again gives him the impression that he isn’t playing by himself; everything he does is witnessed. It has an impact of sort, there’s a reaction. Of course if all possible reactions occur within a short time frame and then repeat continuously, the illusion of life disappears.

Assassin's Creed and its interactive crowds may have been efficient, but the game's repetitive nature was a reminder of the hamster's wheel effect.

In a game like World of Warcraft or other MMOs, the sense of worth, recognition, and accomplishment felt by so many players who must have spent hundreds of dollars each just in monthly fees since the game’s release, is directly tied to the fact the world is full of other living players who can see how awesome they are for having acquired an elite armor or mount only available to those who would have succeeded at killing some elite boss, having a lot of money, or spent a whole lot of time farming.

World of Warcraft and its look-at-me effect, with thousands of players per server

There’s really all sorts of ways to make the player feel a sense of accomplishment, such as visual progression notifiers (new armor or sword, new power of which you can see the impact of on your character, etc.), but I think the idea of adding witnesses, artificial or real, to the player’s actions might be one that is often overlooked. I believe that once again this is part of the reason why sci-fi is often a difficult sell; more often than not it is set in sterile, lifeless worlds. In general, the player secludes himself to play a game. If we put emphasis secluded form of play, we might be pushing the player toward a feeling of loneliness. Some players will enjoy such secluded and potentially immersive experiences, but I am certain that many would instinctively feel a certain sense of guilt.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the next big-hit first-person shooter to stand out among all others would turn out to be one where cities will be filled with massive amounts of lively civilians instead of being evacuated ones populated by a handful of abandoned cars.

http://www.allegory-of-the-game.com/

Same goes for the mouth, as I’m writing this my mouth as been moving, I swallowed some saliva, I rubbed my tongue against my palate cause I’ve had this cheese after taste in my mouth since I ate some earlier, I yawned, and I made some random expressions I’m not even aware of.

And take a clue from Naughty Dog’s Uncharted while you’re at it!

AI, physics, graphics, animations, sound, and so on, have evolved independently from one another, until they eventually created interdependences. We have to understand where each of them are heading to understand how they’ll be able to fit together in their future forms, otherwise we’ll simply end up with a bunch of deep interdependencies where it will be impossible to develop a component of the game without being limited by another one to the point where we’ll either have to scale back on our scope, or delay the game, for unpredictable results.

Until recently, we have been standing between two worlds; one where the game is still obviously just a game with all of its inconsistencies such as dumb AI, bad graphics, and weird physics, and one where the game is actually credible in what it represents as an experience, where we can believe what we see in the sense that all facets of the game are extremely well balanced, leading to heightened immersion. We can now almost cross fully into the later world if we want to, but there are some huge obstacles that won’t be overcome in the short term. If we don’t want to waste our efforts on what could become a failed experiment we have all the interest in the world to understand what those obstacles imply, and how we can get around them so that we can make the most out of the coming technological developments without hitting a major wall during production.

What I call the Triangle of Death, the emerging interdependence between physics, AI, and animations, is in my opinion the biggest challenge we will face in the near future, and one I think a lot of people are about to get involved in above their heads without realizing it.

A quick and simple example: You walk through a city under attack, and you find a dragon mount (a creature that can be used as a transportation method). The whole city is under attack by boulder-throwing catapults and the dragon is just sitting there as buildings around it are falling apart. Since you have a high graphical quality with life-like rendering quality, you would expect the mounts to act like it’s alive. So the programmers need to code AI for something that used to require none, so that the mounts can react even when the player is not riding them. Now if a giant boulder lands next to it, it should react. Well that implies contextual animations. Already it’s getting a bit complex, and the part of the city you’re in is quite narrow, so animations must take the tight environment into consideration. What happens if you shoot a flaming arrow next to the dragon’s head? Does it attack you? Does it know what the arrow implies? What if a player is riding the mount, and someone shoots an arrow in its tail? Does the player lose control as the mount charges you or as it runs away, or does it just play a “hurt” animation and sound effect while standing there?

Graphics are never a problem, we could have our sparse voxel octree and all that jazz. We could hook up thousands of PCs together and we’d have perfect graphical realism for all we know, but we still wouldn’t have believable characters. AI, animations and physics cannot be simulated together in a non-interdependent manner while allowing the immersion level to remain intact. We can’t even do “performance capture” for pre-rendered movies without scaring children away from movie theaters, let alone have the game’s AI do the job for us.

Physics are allowing us to create more dynamic environments, but this dynamism adds a layer of complexity to the AI’s perception, and the AI must then move within this dynamic environment in a credible manner. Even if your AI was as intelligent as a human, it would have to be backed by an equally efficient animation system. It’s just not gonna happen, especially not in highly dynamic environments. I won’t even get into the implications of being able to destroy a wall of stone but not being able to destroy a mere hay stack because the later is made out of flat planes rather than volumetric geometry.

The interdependence between physics, AI, and animations will not be overcome any time soon. That being said, all three have their places in our games, but it’s the link between each other that we have to remain entirely aware of. A good development team will be able to establish what their goals are to make a successful game, rationalize each of their decisions under that perspective, and effectively reach their goals by making sure that any challenges that do not contribute to their vision will be avoided thanks to a clever game design.

In the case of Shadow of the Colossus, the team spent a lot of time making high quality animations, and they made sure that the environments wouldn’t be excessively cluttered. This allowed the character, and especially the horse, to have enough room to move as well as they could without ending up in unnecessarily complex environments that would decrease the desired quality or create useless bottlenecks. Their highly ambitious goals of having an immersive game with a life-like protagonist and his horse were achieved by writing down their objectives, understanding the technical limitations they would face, and making their game’s design within those limitations so that they could reach those established objectives. To the player, this was entirely transparent, and it stands as a testimony to the efficiency of their approach.

Wander and his horse Agro

Epic’s Gears of War was another game that was designed around the idea of establishing a clear vision that would allow them to deliver a high quality game without ending up in major bottlenecks that would jeopardize the game’s quality. Even the art direction was built around the idea of instantiated geometry, normal maps, specular, glow, etc. But once again, to the player this was entirely transparent; to him it was simply an awesome game with a unique art direction.

Being ambitious should not be an excuse for having poor planning skills, being unable to anticipate challenges to their true extent, and failing at designing a game with established limitations. Write down your objectives, seek to anticipate problems and understand the different interdependencies as well as the ones that may emerge during the later development phase, rationalize your decisions in relation to your objectives, and deliver.

Good luck!

http://www.allegory-of-the-game.com

The Incredibles and Pokemon

If you show a short clip of Naruto to a random person on the street in his forties, they won’t understand what they are looking at. If you tell them it’s about ninjas, they’ll be even more confused because their idea of what a ninja should look like is quite different from what they’re being shown.

Naruto, and a regular ninja

All decisions we take in life are based on expectations; when we chose what to eat, what movie to watch or what kind of car to buy, the decision is based on expectations we have towards what will result from the choice.

If one has to chose between two movies, one completely unfamiliar to them in subject, the other about an historical event they’re familiar with, it’s likely that they’ll chose the one for which they can formulate certain expectations. There’s a reason why it’s always New York City that gets destroyed in the movies.

In the case of video game development, we tend to target people who are already gamers, but if there’s a possibility to target the same audience without limiting our product to them exclusively, chances are we’ll end up generating more sales since we’ll manage to attract the attention of a market we know of as well as one that may be hidden. I personally believe that this allowed a game like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed, which received mixed reviews, to sell over seven million copies.

The subject presented was one that practically anyone could understand. The knights and cities looked like what one would expect from the presented era and the depicted scene of assassination was perfectly readable and involved no magic or confusing gadgets. Anyone could tell that the game was probably about assassinating Templar Knights in medieval times, or something related to the crusades.

Viewers who saw a glimpse of the game were able to formulate expectations and hence gain interest in it if they were inclined to. This is already a much better start to reach for a wide consumer base than if the game was presented in a way that only gamers could decipher, such as a game where the knights have glowing magical wings and the cities float in the sky with two moons in the background.

Of course the high tech DNA-memory theme of the game was kept hidden for the most part, meant only to be seen after the game’s purchase and only anticipated by hard core gamers who had read about it, something that was otherwise completely transparent to the average viewer until they had the game in their console.

Assassin's Creed

It’s probably due to similar reasons that sci-fi movies tend to fail at the Box-Office. The genre itself is quite popular among a specific audience, but for the most part the lack of familiarity with the presented subjects or visuals tend to keep anyone else away from such movies. A movie like Black Hawk Down will attract a wide audience, but the same movie with the same theme and characters set in an alien world will pretty much only target sci-fi fans.

As a game developer, lack of familiarity with a game’s subject or its visuals is not an issue for me, but I could not see myself honestly telling my higher ups that we should make a game set in an entirely original world where everything has been created from scratch if we intend to sell the game to as many people as possible while keeping hard core gamers in mind.

As much as I’m bored with knights and dragons or modern warfare, if creating something completely unique implies reducing the game’s chances of becoming a commercial success I simply couldn’t see myself pretending that it’s a great idea. I’d make sure that any American or European could understand what they are looking at if we presented them a short wordless trailer of our game, if not just an image.

I’d want to make sure that they could explain themselves what our game is about without having us explaining it  to them. It’s not a question of being able to sell a game to anyone, but to allow anyone to formulate interest in our product if they are inclined to.

Recently, Nikkei Electronics Asia interviewed Sony Chairman, CEO Howard Stringer about what his post-recession vision for Sony was. I believe that his comments hold much truth, regardless of how much trouble he may have had to implement this vision at Sony.  I strongly recommend you to read the full interview, but here are some chosen quotes that I think relate to what I’ve described above:

“We can no longer say that we’re right and our customers are wrong. We can’t build only what we want to build. Right now is an excellent opportunity for consumer electronics companies to improve their understanding of consumers. Five years ago content companies were regarded as king in our industry, but that was wrong: the customer is king. [...] Consumers today are a lot different from how they were 20 years ago. They aren’t passive any more. [...] Understanding customers will also help us uncover hidden customers.“

If we look at the movie industry over the past decades, we can see that it has changed in the same way that the consumer electronics industry has. Gone With The Wind, Casablanca, or Ben-Hur, would be considered nearly unmarketable in the 21st century without the need for significant alterations.

I think this is in great part due to diversity of choice which has segmented the consumer base into an individual-driven market, meaning that in order to target a wide audience at a time when they have significant leverage as far as what they want to see, we have to be able to make movies, or in our case games, that speak to a wider audience to make up for the segmentation of the market brought by greater diversity of choice.

The more choice there is, the more the market becomes customer-driven, and the more we have to make products that speak to them rather than make what we personally want to make.

To go back to the example of subject familiarity, Forest Gump reached a wide audience in great part due to its reliance on a selection of familiar historical moments. It’s really what sold the tickets, what spoke to everyone, while in reality the movie on its own was well written and featured great performances from the actors. But the sense of familiarity allowed people to formulate expectations about something that would otherwise be difficult to understand the merits of.

Forest Gump meets JFK

Forest Gump and John Lennon

If you have to explain why your game is a good product to someone you want to sell it to, rather than make a game that speaks on its own, chances are you’re doing something wrong. Most people outside of hardcore gamers have a certain innate reluctance at spending money on video games.

Their reasoning is very similar to the one that leads them to watch movies like Finding Nemo or The Incredibles, regardless of their ages, over movies or TV series that are pretty much only enjoyed by kids such as Japanese anime. They see the later as alien to them, they don’t understand it, it doesn’t speak to them at all, and they can’t formulate expectations towards it as a result.

They’ll say that they watched the Pixar movies because the kids wanted to, but in the end they enjoyed it as well, they look forward to future such movies, and they hope that they’ll never have to watch a Pokemon movie again; a cartoon they actually despise, find ridiculous, if not harmful to their kids. Why? Because Pokemon is completely nonsensical to them, it’s noise, an annoyance, a waste of time that doesn’t speak to them at all.

If you want to uncover potential buyers you’re not even aware of, aiming at both the hardcore gamers and the casual ones or beyond, ask yourself if your game speaks about itself on its own, and if people can express a sense of familiarity with what you are presenting to them. Do they understand what they are looking at? Can they formulate an interest on their own? Or do you have to explain it to them to the point where that very act makes you feel like you’re trying to sell cat litter to a dog owner?

We can no longer simply make what we want to make.

Even with such constraints in place, there’s still a lot of room to produce excellent games, but that’s where talented creative directors, art directors, and game designers come in.

http://www.allegory-of-the-game.com/

Immersion is achieved by eliminating confusion, doubt, frustration, and also by keeping the experience’s credibility as intact as possible. A lot of game designers have been playing games since the days of the Atari and as a result they are more likely to not only have a wider threshold of tolerance than today’s average potential gamer, but just like a person who has been collecting comic books for decades they are less likely to be critical of content that is irrelevant in today’s market.

This scene happens at the beginning of "Tintin au Congo", published in 1931. Tintin gets imprisoned in a taxi with metal shutters, and after a brief moment of panic, he escapes two frames later by pulling a saw out of nowhere. Today, this would be considered a slap in the face of the reader. It's taking him for a fool, opening the door to criticism, and breaking the immersion. Why lock up the protagonist if he's going to escape two frames later in such a dubious way?

This doesn’t mean that all games should seek to be highly immersive, if at all. It’s all about context and premise. But for games with high caliber presentations, games set in relative reality, and targeting a wide market, I would say that immersion allows us to make the game easier to decipher for people who aren’t hard core gamers and effectively make it more enticing. It increases the chances that the people who see the game either in TV ads, trailers, and so on, will be able to understand its context and develop an interest for it. This is why pre-rendered cinematics are often such efficient marketing mediums; they speak to the consumer without being limited by any constraints linked to the gameplay such as camera, the presence of a HUD, etc.

A good example is Assassin’s Creed, of which the premise was presented in a way that made it extremely easy to decipher. But once you actually play the game, it presents you with an extremely abstract and invasive HUD, coupled with sound signals and some special effects all linked to the gameplay, making it initially highly confusing if not outright annoying. Add the learning curve to this and you’ve got a pretty good recipe for making the experience more frustrating than it should be. When the player is looking at the HUD for information, he’s not playing. It’s a clear breaking point between playing the game, and looking through a sort of digital guide or manual that gets constantly updated. For a flight sim this is fine, it’s part of the promised experience, but for a game about assassins that was presented like an action movie, it clearly isn’t.

How does a movie audience feel as they notice that the city-smashing monster they were supposed to be so afraid of has a zipper running down his back? No one thought they were looking at an actual monster, but suspension of disbelief allows people to put such conceptions aside. The use of convincing special effects allowed the 1998 Godzilla movie to be a hit, as silly as the subject was. Few would have sat through the movie while eating and drinking ten dollars worth of popcorn and soft drinks if it wasn’t at least presented in a relatively credible manner. The movie Cloverfield took a similar concept and used a realistic and immersive approach to keep him emotionally hooked. Immersion inherently softens criticism.

The gameplay should never feel like a mechanism, or a system. Yet we keep employing terms such as gameplay mechanics, or systemic gameplay. These are precisely the kind of concepts that break immersion, and that effectively clash with a credible premise.

In GTA, the gameplay mechanics or systemic gameplay are actually presented in a way that is tied to the game’s subject in a way that they become acceptable. A lot of the systemic gameplay is extremely boring, but gamers have either accepted them, enjoyed them, or simply skipped them. Either way, in GTA’s case it didn’t break the immersion, it remained believable, and this led to softened criticism. It’s no slap in the face like Tintin’s escape or rubber Godzilla.

Of course it doesn’t mean that HUDs should be eliminated, and that everything should be realistic, GTA was not. It’s simply a question of trying to keep the gamer involved, and for us to stay behind the movie screen. I would say that the worst one can do is break immersion in situations where the player might be challenged, where there is a chance of failure. In such situations, his sense of criticism increases significantly, and so does his sense of reasoning. For example, it is important to justify the presence of enemies.  If there is a believable explanation for respawning enemies, I guarantee you that it will already be less frustrating than if it simply wasn’t believable. It won’t necessarily be more fun for the player, but his critical sense will be softened.

It’s also important to make sure that goals and objectives are justified. If he is unable to open a locked door and instead has to walk all the way to a sparkling key in a trash bin at the end of a monster-infested street, instead of bashing the door open or simply getting in through the window, there’s a strong chance that the player will experience heightened levels of frustration if he gets hurt by the monsters than if it had been under a more justified context where risking his life would have made more sense. This way, the player won’t instinctively feel like the developers have setup the game against him, which would lead to frustration.

Also, justifying the gameplay within a context simply makes life easier for the player. It strongly helps casual gamers in understanding what is going on, what one has to do, why, etc., simply because it’s more logical. So on top of what we developers setup for the sake of the player, common sense steps in as an additional layer, which won’t happen if you have abstract or ridiculous gameplay mechanics. Immersion is directly linked to believability, and believability rests on reasoning. If I see an enemy in a guard tower, I understand the implication, his potential area of movement, his potential line of sight, and so on.  If he is standing instead on a big chimney, I’m not quite sure at all. Maybe he’s highly athletic? Maybe he came out of the chimney and can go back inside it? Maybe he can fly?

There are of course limitations when it comes to making highly immersive games, mostly due to the limited control devices used as well as for the need to provide the player with a forgiving sense of awareness through the use of a HUD, but justifying a game’s mechanics by focusing on keeping the player immersed will go a long way in providing the player with a respectable and emotional experience, shielding us developers from heightened levels of  criticism, while at the same time preventing the game from becoming so cryptic in its functions to the point where casual gamers will be frightened by the seemingly complex if not abstract mechanics.

There are different needs of emotional involvement based on what kind of game is produced but once expectations on his part have been established based on what we showed him, trough marketing or other means, we should make sure that the game will stick to the level of credibility he is now expecting from the game. In the end, it’s a question of “is it fun?”, and there are many roads to “fun”. Experienced developers will be able to find ways to make a game enjoyable without shattering the player’s sense of immersion.

http://www.allegory-of-the-game.com/

The 2d medium itself starts as a blank canvas, whereas in 3D a basic foundation must exist to some extent which must then be modified or built upon significantly to separate it completely from another 3D title which was created upon similar if not identical foundations.

It’s easier on a technical basis to create a unique visual style for a 2D game than for a 3D one. By default most 3D rendering engines will give you the same shading and lighting; only by adding code will you be able to end up with your own particular shaders, lighting algorithms, cameras, etc. In 2D, you have no graphical base to start from other than a limitless color palette, so it’s more likely to lead to a variety of visual styles since none are derived from a common foundation; everything is created from scratch.

A 3D character is likely to use an existing bone system to be animated, and while a proprietary and independent systems could be created it is a less enticing alternative due to the technical challenges and lengthening of development time. Yet in 2D, the proportions of a character is irrelevant as no system is widely used across the game industry to facilitate 2D character animation. Physical properties and their interactions are also completely irrelevant in a 2D system where such properties simply don’t exist by default; there is no significant challenge in having a sphere transform into a pyramid in the 2D medium, while it can be quite a monumental task in a 3D real-time engine as an underlying system of geometry dictates how objects can be displayed or transformed which has to be significantly customized to achieve anything that it was not specifically designed for. In the case of 2D visuals, it is in general just a question of drawing each frames.

These are but a few examples, yet I hope that this will help you see the challenges that developers face when it comes to creating a unique visual identity for their 3D titles, especially when the subject or genre is decided by another party. As the production pipeline becomes more flexible, developers of 3D games will have more time to dedicate themselves to unique visual representations, but it will never be as flexible as the 2D medium.

http://www.allegory-of-the-game.com/