Happy Holidays

I know the blog is new and all, but I just wanted to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Eid Mubarak, Happy Kwanzaa, Joyous Festivus, and hopes for a happy and wonderful New Year.

Breakdown Lane: RPG

As I seem to have hit something of a logistical roadblock with my explorations in GameMaker for the moment, I thought now would be a good time to start a new series within the blog.  You've seen other series posts such as "Down To Business" and "Rant," but this is going to be about the deconstruction of game types as a prelude to design.

When "RTFM" Fails

Been starting to get into a routine (always a good idea when starting new ventures) where I switch off between days where I make a blog post and days where I go through a tutorial.  The last week or so, I've been going through the tutorials in GameMaker, getting an idea of how useful it will be for my own efforts.  So far, the tutorial projects haven't been bad, but I've been running into a problem.

Down To Business: Getting Started

As much as I love discussing and thinking about game design, world building, and all the fun stuff like that, there is a part of me that knows that if you're going to be making games as your chosen profession, you are going to have to familiarize yourself with and resign yourself towards doing the part of the job that you find boring.  The dreaded "business end" of things.

Design Theory: The Preparation Of Ideas

From my first post, people may have gotten the impression that I'm perhaps slightly aggrieved with programmers.  And I'm really not.  I am slightly aggrieved with programmers who don't use their intellect to think about anything beyond coding.  Case in point: a new friend recently met up with a guy who ostensibly works in the games industry and has taught game design courses at the college level.  When she asked about what was necessary to get into the games industry, his immediate response was, "you really need to be a programmer."

Being completely fair, you can technically create a game without anything other than a programmer.  It may not be the most visually striking, or have any visuals at all.  It may not have the most stirring soundtrack, or the best sound effects, or even eloquent voice overs.  As a program, it will undoubtedly function.  However, the question is whether it qualifies as a game or not.

Sid Meier once described a game as "a series of interesting choices."  For myself, I've expanded on that description thusly: "a series of interesting choices within a specific set of circumstances."  It's not merely the choices themselves that are interesting, so much as the choices available to the player at any given time.  A player's choices are constrained by the circumstances surrounding the player at that moment.  Think back to one of the golden oldies of gaming, King's Quest.  You could type commands and get the character to perform certain actions which would get you past puzzles and through character interactions.  In theory, the player could type this command:

KILL THE KING

The problem is that while the command might make sense to you and I, the circumstances surrounding the character at the time would make such a thing impossible.  The character might not be currently armed.  The character might be half a world away from the king.  Or, even more likely, the developers never envisioned the player might turn regicide and didn't provide any sort of path like that for the game.  Part of the circumstances that your interesting choices take place in are the assumptions that the designer was operating under in the first place.

If somebody were to ask me, "how do I make a game?", my response would be, "Define a set of circumstances."  Let's break down some popular games into their particular circumstances.
  

• Tetris - stack blocks falling down a shaft in a way that the shaft gets filled all the way across but not up to the top
• Street Fighter - compete against different fighters of varying styles to become a champion
• Civilization - develop your nation from the Stone Age to the Space Age through scientific progress, military might, or diplomatic skill
• Skyrim - explore a large area and undertake quests to save the world

Things like scoring, lore, fighting styles, all of that are fine details.  They are not circumstances in and of themselves, but one of those interesting choices you have to make.  Do you go with Ryu or Chun-Li?  Do you improve your Bow skill or your Sword skill?  Do you research Steam Power or Economics?  Do you rotate the L-shaped block one way or the other?  You have to be able to boil your idea down to the essentials.  No characters, no background story, nothing beyond the bare bones necessary to describe the circumstances your players will be experiencing.  Once you've got that down, then you've taken the first step towards building a game. 

Rant: The More Things Change . . .

I hadn't expected to make another post to the blog quite this early.  Nor had I expected to be touching back on my "Raving Rant" roots from The Armchair Empire quite so soon.  Unfortunately, it happened in a way that I really could not let pass.

For the last six months or so, I've been casually following news about an upcoming title from Ubisoft titled For Honor.  In what appears to borrow heavily from the Dynasty Warriors series, players take control of Vikings, samurai, and knights to see who the ultimate badass is in a strange and mysterious land beyond time and space.  Being a fan of Dynasty Warriors, and being a history buff, I was mildly interested in this title and wanted to see how it would turn out.  That interest died today when I came across an article from Kyle Orland over at Ars Technica describing a forum response from an Ubisoft community manager indicating that the game would require a persistent Internet connection when playing as a single player.

A Note On The Title

Being a literature geek, and an inveterate lover of myths and folk lore, there's a certain significance to me as far as the title of this particular blog.

The name refers to an old Irish story about a master builder named Gobhan (probably butchering the spelling).  The story goes that one day, he was commissioned to build a magnificent tower for Balor, the King of the Fomors, a race of giants.  Gobhan was given a year to construct the tower and he went straight to work, making tremendous progress in record time.  However, Balor came down with a serious case of project envy.  After Gobhan left the land of the Fomors, he would only go on to build even more incredible and breathtaking structures, and that was something Balor just could not abide.  He wanted this to be Gobhan's eternal masterpiece, and the only way to make that happen was to make sure it was the last project he ever worked on.

As the tower neared completion, Balor ordered the scaffolds removed to trap Gobhan at the top, intending to starve the builder to death.  Gobhan, however, had no desire to simply lay down and die for his treacherous patron.  It was readily apparent to Gobhan that if he was able to build a tower stone by stone, he could also very easily demolish it the same way.  When word reached Balor that Gobhan was knocking stones out of the tower one by one, the Fomori king ordered the scaffolds returned.  Gobhan struck a new bargain (probably with sufficient penalties for attempted murder) that ensured the completion of the tower and his safe passage out of the land of the Fomors, and as feared by Balor, he went on to create newer and more amazing structures.

I've always liked that story, and it seemed appropriate for somebody working on building his own tower, so to speak.

Once Upon A Time...

There was a dream of a game studio.  Before the indie game scene really took off, before Epic made the Unreal Engine open to everybody, before Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter, there was a college kid who read an article in PC Gamer and thought, "This could be interesting."

The dream never really went away.  It's been almost 20 years since that dream first took shape, but it's stayed with me this whole time, always that one thing that has tantalized and called to me, whispering, "You can do this."