Sentimental Gamer

Plugging away on writing Stage IV… I’ve got til Wednesday to finish it… god I hope I make it…

Back at Cornell after Spring Break… had a great time at home.

We visited my grandfather on my Dad’s side. Weirdly enough, he has esophageal cancer as well and has been getting treated for it for awhile now (I just haven’t made note of it on here… or did I?). Anyways, so we apparently now have a history of cancer in my family. He was doing well, at least seemed so in the short time we were there; but, from what I’m told, it’s not looking great…

So, it again got me thinking. I’m finally thinking again for the first time in a little while… why am I making Stage IV? It’s something that you can really miss if you don’t watch it. When you get to work on a programming job… you can just totally lose sight of why you’re doing it in the first place. I’m making Stage IV because I want to share my family’s experience. I want to give other people the chance to be in our situation, and… well, I want to make people think about things that you might not think about otherwise. I mean… I dunno. I’ve said it before, but in 2006, when my dad was fighting, I certainly wasn’t that close to it. I was at Cornell. But I really feel that it brought me closer to… something… than I ever was before and have ever been since. What that something is, I really couldn’t pin down. But it was some… certainty, some truth. *shrugs*. Conversely, maybe that’s just the normal reaction to things like that… to think that there’s really something more than just a man dying. Still, I’m making Stage IV in the hopes of recapturing that feeling, that notion of something more. But now, I want to look at it from 4 perspectives… my dad, my mom, myself, and Macy’s. I think we’re 4 different people, but I think that all 4 of us had at least some sense of the thing I’m talking about.

And I’m rambling, so I’m just gonna stop now.

Good to see this reminder again, over on LostGarden.com:

“One problem that is common to AI-driven systems is that most of the behaviors go on underneath the cover, away from the player’s eyes. It is very easy to fall into the trap of creating an intricate AI that ‘plays itself’ but is completely incomprehensible to the player.

Instead of asking how you might make the most realistic AI system, I prefer to steal a page from Nintendo’s playbook. Instead ask “What is the simplest system that drives forward the player experience?”

Peas climb. Peas fall. Peas get scored. All of these activities are very apparent to the user. Instead of complex internal logic, the design focuses on explicit external behaviors. Any internal logic such as the path finding system exists only to the minimum degree necessary to support the external behavior. We won’t build SkyNet using these sort of AI techniques, but we can make more enjoyable games.”

Well said! I believed it when the EA rep who came to Cornell said it, and I believe it now. I just hope that I can integrate that belief well into Stage IV!

GOOD GOD, I’VE GOT IT!

So, I’m sitting here thinking to myself… man, Stage IV is really lacking in… well, I don’t know. It wasn’t turning out in my mind how I would like it. I was reconsidering how I’m going to change it so that it was more innovative, more meaningful, more directed, and I realized that I was going to need to change up my structure for convos. In essence, I before had a hierarchy of a conversation: There was a conversation, which contained topics, which contained “dialog groups”, which basically were the possible player lines. Each player line had a number of possible NPC responses.

Now this might have worked well, but I realized that it in many ways limited the dynamic part of the convo… it was too much like a simple convo tree between two speakers. Binary, you know?

Then that cued me into a deeper issue… this was a REALLY self-centered game. Everything revolved around you, the college kid who’s dad is dying of cancer. Obviously, that kid is me, and I wanted to talk about my experience. But it was a little silly; even the XML file structure revolved around the kid saying something, the NPC responding, then control shifts back to the player.

So, weirdly enough, by thinking of how I want to fix up the technical design, I came upon my gameplay innovation. What I want to do is change the bottom level of the hierarchy. Instead of having groups, which contain player lines, which contain NPC responses, which then link to another group, why not have groups which contain lines, which then link to another group?!? I know it sounds the same, but essentially, this means that it’s not so player centered… I can have 3 or 4 or however many people I want in a convo since NPC lines can link off to other NPC lines, etc… pretty nifty.

But then, I realized, convo structure hierarchy is generic enough that, quite frankly, there isn’t actually a distinction between an NPC and the live player in the XML file, so why not do the same in game?!? The game could be played from any perspective (The boy, the girlfriend, the mother, the father,…), not just the boy. Suddenly, this is a game in which you experience the story from any perspective! You simply control what your chosen character says, and the NPCs respond in the algorithmic way that I’ve set up!

Ok, so yeah… wow… as though I’m the first guy to make a game that you play from multiple perspectives, right? Certainly, such an astonishingly simple idea has never been attempted in the history of the human race. But hey come on… I know that the central concept isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but I think that in Stage IV, it’ll really prove to be something that changes the game. In one way, it’s the exact same game no matter who you choose to play as, just with different people/machines driving each character. But, as I noted in an earlier post, I sort of want the dialog choices that are shown not so much to be “your character can say this or this or this, all of which branch a lot”. I want it to be like “here’s what’s floating in your mind…. what’re you going to say?” For example, say somebody says “You look awful today, monkey man!” In a wide-open adventure game, you see options like:

1.) “That may be true. I have been slacking on my hygiene lately”
2.) “Ack! You shall die for your impudence!”
3.) “I’m sorry, but that remark has hurt my feelings terrible. Boo hoo.”

But in Stage IV, it’d be more like:

1.) “That may be true. I have been slacking on my hygiene lately”
2.) “Ah Christ… I’m sorry… I just haven’t been around a bath in awhile”
3.) “Yeah, I guess… ” (ambiguous)

You’re more constrained in your choices, but I hope that feels more like you’re an actual character rather than some freak who can say whatever he/she feels like.

I want to do that because I want to guide the player’s choices, not give them a blank-slate character to do with as they please. That sort of game is fun, but it’s never been my favorite. I like games where I’m given a character with an attitude about things, a way of speaking ,etc. In other words, I like role-playing, not role-making.

Anyways, wow I better try to hammer out how this while DialogGroup business will work. I dunno if I made it clear in this post, but I think it’ll rescue the game in that it’s not all about “Ben Ben Ben”; instead, it’s a game that allows you to see the same situation from multiple ways. Hey, that’s what games are all about, right (see Peacemaker)?