Postmortem: The Game Design of Surreal's The Suffering

What Went Right

1. Initial Concept. As I have discussed, the initial concept of our game changed relatively little over the course of development. Something about "an action horror game set in a prison" was uniquely compelling to our publisher, the press, and gamers alike. Despite containing highly stylized supernatural creatures, the game's very real-world setting was essential to making the game relevant and hooking people. The game's prison setting proved particularly intriguing to gamers and was a rich space for us to explore that had been under-utilized previously.

	Evolution of the Slayer.

Shortly after development started, I wrote a fairly detailed back-story for both the game world (Carnate Island) and Torque, and these elements also changed relatively little over the course of development. Though we did not plan on communicating all of this back-story to the player directly, it gave the game tremendous consistency as we built it. As we were given more time to iterate on the project, the back-story documents gave us a strong foundation on which to expand the game without seeming forced.

2. Focus. Having established our high-level design goals from the start, we were then extremely frugal about adding features. We knew that in order to properly implement the features the game did need, we would have to omit mechanics that were non-essential. For example, beyond his weapons, health, and flashlight batteries, Torque cannot carry any inventory items, including keys. To some, it was odd that we were making a prison game that didn't include using keys to unlock cells and gates. But in the end we realized that including keys didn't really add much if anything to the core gameplay experience and would have been wasted development time.

At the same time, we worked hard to keep the features that enhanced our core gameplay. Our fully playable first person mode evolved out of a more traditional "look around" mode. Over the course of development numerous problems arose and cutting it was suggested numerous times. This feature, however, was a major enhancement to our core gameplay experience, since shooting from the first person perspective is extremely intuitive to players. Indeed, from our gameplay testing we knew this was a very popular feature. Thus we knew that whatever extra time was required to make a fully functional first person mode would be well worth it.

Though we may have been too conservative in a few cases (for example, the game's shooter mechanics would be better off had we included the ability for Torque to crouch), overall our strict policy paid off nicely and allowed us to refine our core features while staying on schedule.

3. Changing the Control Scheme. Though I said earlier that we stayed remarkably close to our original concept, there is something that changed significantly from our earliest one-liner: the game stopped being similar to Devil May Cry (DMC). Indeed, from the very beginning I wasn't much of a fan of the gameplay in DMC and preferred shooters that, at that time, were traditionally more popular on the PC. Indeed, Half-Life was also mentioned in our concept for exactly that reason. Truth be told, DMC was mentioned in the pitch because a number of the publishers we were talking with about The Suffering had expressed interest in appealing to the fans of DMC.

As a result, from the start our game and level design work had much more in common with Half-Life than with DMC, except for our controls. When designing control schemes, I feel that you want to give the user something they are familiar with from other games. In general I find relying on other games for inspiration to be problematic, but in the case of controls I think it is crucial. What we had originally implemented was a target-lock system inspired by Syphon Filter, the most popular third-person shooter on the PlayStation, and DMC, at the time the most popular third-person shooter on the PlayStation 2. With our controls for a console-style shooter but our gameplay from a PC-style shooter, about a year into development we realized we had a dangerous disconnect in our design that made our game tedious instead of fun.

However, by this point Max Payne, Halo, Medal of Honor: Frontline, and SOCOM had all been released on the consoles and sold in excess of a million copies each. All were shooting based games in the PC tradition: they eschewed target-lock in favor of double-stick control schemes that simulated the mouse/keyboard experience from the PC. This system had the advantage of forcing players to actually aim at their target while having the disadvantage of being challenging for novice players to pick up. But looking at the sales for these titles, we concluded the installed base of players who were familiar with these controls was now large enough that we could take the risk of turning off a few newbies.

The change was a huge success for the game: it fixed the disconnect in our gameplay and added depth that had been completely missing. There was now very little similarity to DMC to be found. Looking at the forums today, I find that some players still have trouble adjusting to the two-stick system, and I believe we have lost some potential players for this reason. However, our significantly deeper game experience has brought in so many players that I know we made the right decision.

	Two 2D level maps created by the design team prior to level construction. The one on the left was created using Smart Draw, while the one on the bottom was made using Photoshop.

4. Storytelling Techniques. The Suffering had a deep story to convey, but we didn't want storytelling to get in the way of our core game experience. With immersion being one of our design goals, we didn't want to rely on too many cut-scenes. We had a rule of thumb that cut-scenes were to be used exclusively for pivotal story points or for intensely scary scenes. Furthermore, we wanted to keep Torque's actions fairly neutral during these scenes to avoid negating the player's feeling that they were fully in control of Torque at all times. Thus we needed to use different storytelling techniques.

A lot of story was communicated during gameplay through the various NPCs who function as Torque's guides through the world of Carnate Island. Though the player could kill any human character at any time (thus missing out on the story points they had to convey) being in a horror space allowed us to use supernatural characters who Torque was unable to kill. The player could also hear dialog over radios, PA systems, and telephones, all real-time during gameplay. The player was also able to collect various notes throughout the game in addition to unlocking pages in an archive, both of which revealed more of the back-story to players who were interested. Finally, we used a slow-motion blur effect to convey events from Torque's past and the history of the island. Inspired by some of the imagery from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, this technique was our most innovative and also proved to be fairly frightening.

All of these techniques combined to allow us to tell a story with a minimum of play interruption. Players who wanted to experience the story were able to, while those who would rather stick to playing the game could ignore it. Even with these techniques, the story is kept mysterious enough that players will still be left with numerous unanswered questions. My hope is that players will fill in the blanks with their own imagination, following the tradition of great horror films such as The Birds, The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, and The Ring. In horror, the player's imagination is far more disturbing than anything a writer could possibly come up with.

5. Iteration and Gameplay Testing. From a design standpoint, one of the most fortunate events of The Suffering's development was getting time to iterate on the game. Midway was quite happy with the game's progress and had seen a strong reaction to it from the press and public alike. Thus they gave us a generous time extension, not because we were behind schedule but because they wanted to make the game as strong as possible. Thus, with our levels all fully built and functional many months before shipping, we were able to do a number of passes on the game. We did a pass on horror elements to make the game more frightening, including adding our real-time environmental flashes that are so key to the final experience. We also did a story pass, not to change the story but to expand on how it was presented to the player. We performed an AI pass to make the creatures much more dynamic and varied in their behaviors. Finally we did a puzzle pass to fix the most egregious problems with the puzzles. The impact of these passes cannot be underestimated. For example, the game's design did not originally plan for the real-time scenes involving Torque's wife and children to be in the game, since we did not have time to build them from an art standpoint. Anyone who has played The Suffering knows how crucial those scenes are to the game experience.

To help us figure out what needed fixing, at numerous points in development we put the game in front of a group of gamers and watched them play and then listened to their feedback. This gameplay testing is distinct from focus testing since these sessions were for development feedback alone, not for marketing use at all. We did this as early as seven months into development, and we were able to fix a lot of major problems early on, including our disjointed control scheme. If anything, the game could have benefited from more gameplay testing, but what we did have time for impacted the game tremendously.

Referensi : http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20040609/rouse_02.shtml

Halo 2 for PC

You can't say you don't like Halo. Even if you claim to dislike it, I know that somewhere deep down in your soul there's a little gravelly voice cheering its sticky plasma grenades, fun little vehicles and relatively unique take on combat.

You've had some good times with Master Chief, whether sitting on the floor in front of an Xbox with a mate or perhaps even with Gearbox's PC version of times past. I know that a fire has been lit somewhere deep in your heart - so take hold of my hand, look deep into my eyes and join me in exhaling a smidgen of that green metallic love.

Something you can say, though, is that there was no need to keep the PC community waiting three long years for a conversion. A conversion too that now appears dull and ageing, and what's more can only be run on a Vista platform bereft of anything else worth playing apart from Geometry Wars. That is, at least until the advent of DX10 and the whine of a million gamers opening their wallets and pouring coins into the cavernous maw of Bill Gates.

But whatever you think about Vista, and whether you consider MS a risen messiah or a ruthless hijacker of fun, I think that while we're still holding hands (and we are still holding hands), we can all agree that releasing the ancient Halo 2 as a flagship title for both Vista and Games for Windows LIVE is a f***ing stupid idea.

BE MY HALO
The bare bones of Halo 2 are great - its shooty, hidey gameplay, amusing physics and some genuinely excellent set-pieces (notably jumping onboard the giant spider mech in an otherwise barren attack on Earth) still get the adrenalin pumping. But due to the 'OMG - online multiplayer on Xbox! This is the future!' effect of its original launch, people tend to forget its multitude of sins.

The dull, obtuse and nonsensical storyline (the low point of which is a Flood hive mind ripped straight from Little Shop Of Horrors), the sudden ending, the cop-out that was the Earth invasion, the crap bits where you play as an alien Arbiter, the endless retread of gameplay already done to death in the original... All getting in the way of action you can't help but feel affection for despite it all.

STILL A PISSER
Multiplayer is what sealed the deal with the living-room format, and all the old arenas and downloadable content resurface here - ready, willing and able for you to strap yourself into MS's bulky LIVE system and an undeniably giggle-packed game, despite a marked variation in quality as you pass between the 23 maps.

The two new maps on offer (Uplift and District) are pretty intense - but, I'm sorry,
if there are redeeming features in that one with the giant turbine that every bugger plays, then I've yet to find them. As for the persistent lack of co-op play on PC, well, that's just as unforgivable as it was last time around. Oh, and the menu systems pissed me off too - MS still seem convinced that everyone will be playing with one of their pads, and to get my mouse inverted (yes, I know), I had to traverse seven screens, which may not sound like much, but felt like I was ascending Kilimanjaro.

As for the graphics, well, I can't deny they're far crisper and cleaner than the Xbox version (you can increase the resolution and everything), but that doesn't stop them looking dated. I've always really liked the character models of the Halo menagerie, but even so, everything seems flat and lifeless compared to the efforts of every other shooter on the market.

Crikey. What a kicking. Despite all this, though, what Halo boils down to - the same 30 seconds of decent action, repeated ad infinitum - is, while sometimes too repetitive, still great fun. Interiors are drab and lifeless, exteriors are often starkly beautiful; you shoot, you jump, you hide, you win, you lose, you die, you laugh, you live once more.

The Halo template is not broken - but shell out cash for this and your spirits sure will be. You'll have fun, it'll make you smile, I won't deny it. But three years on, the Halo 2 Vista experience is as forgettable as it is tardy and somewhat depressing.

Referensi http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=164526

Who Says Video Games Have to be Fun? The Rise of Serious Games [2]

Pushing Forward

Swain hopes The Redistricting Game, which launched at the recent Games for Change Festival in New York, is one of the success stories that helps push the genre forward.

Such a notion may seem a bit pie in the sky, especially considering The Redistricting Game’s content. According to a press release that preceded the game’s launch, “the game exposes how redistricting works, how it is abused and how it adversely affects democracy. It provides hands-on understanding of the real redistricting process, including drawing district maps and interacting with party bosses, congresspeople, citizen groups and courts. Players directly experience how crafty manipulations of lines can yield skewed victories for either party—effectively allowing politicians to choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians.”

Why did Swain make a game about gerrymandering, and why would anyone want to play it? Telling someone how redistricting works and what it means can be cumbersome and hard to grasp, Swain replies. “However, if she could gain an understanding of redistricting by experiencing it via a fact-based interactive system, then she may come to her own conclusions about its ramifications.

“Our goal with The Redistricting Game is to provide an objective look at the phenomenon and let people come to their own conclusions,” he adds. “We don’t side with one political party and we don’t push an agenda. We just want the game to demystify redistricting in a credible way and we want people to have a good time while playing it.”

Another game that hopes to demystify complex issues, impact society and promote change is PeaceMaker, released by Pittsburgh-based ImpactGames in 2006. Started by Eric Brown and Asi Burak while they were students at Carnegie Mellon University, PeaceMaker allows users to play the part of an Israeli prime minister or a Palestinian president and make diplomatic, security and economic decisions for their virtual country of choice.

Although Brown and Burak hoped their game would make an impression on the general public, they also hoped it would influence their peers in the mainstream game development community. “We really wanted to drive the industry,” says Brown, the founder and former co-manager of Issue Design Build in Seattle. “We wanted to make something that compares to the role documentaries play in the movie industry.”

“The demographic of gamers historically is 12- to 18-year-old boys,” he adds, “which has grown as that generation got older. In our minds, there is a group within that community that is interested in something with a bit more meaning, a little more depth. We wanted to show them you can produce a game that is just as engaging as anything out there, but also has a positive message and influence.”

Brown says he and Burak chose to make a video game about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because “games are really good at putting people in the shoes of someone else—something you can’t always do with something like a news article. Games can empower people to interact with an environment, and they can contextualize events in time.”

Seggerman agrees. “Games can help people put themselves in perspectives otherwise unavailable to them. They can let people exhibit behaviors or try roles they’ve never tried before.”

Likewise, she says, “games are fantastic at allowing players to explore complex, interrelated issues and fiddle with those issues to see how they affect each other.” Global conflicts and even environmental issues are especially worthwhile topics for serious games, Seggerman adds, “because you can’t really look at one aspect of global warming, for instance, without looking at a myriad of other aspects.”

Alternative Topics

Headline-grabbing subjects like global warming or third-world poverty (as seen in the popular Ayiti: The Cost of Life) aren’t the only ones tackled in serious games. Some of the genre’s most captivating offerings take on topics that are a bit further from the limelight.

Take Persuasive Games’ Disaffected!, which puts players “in the role of employees forced to service customers under the particular incompetences common to a Kinko’s store.” Bogost says he made the game because “Kinko’s is a place I both frequent and abhor and I felt that a satire of it had the opportunity to speak to a whole range of people.”

“Getting crappy service at Kinko’s is a mundane, everyday experience that all of us have had,” he adds. “Why does it happen? We don’t answer that question in the game, but we offer players the chance to step behind the counter and imagine what forces might be driving these dissatisfied workers. Is it simple incompetence? Sedition? Labor issues?”

Similar questions are addressed in another of Persuasive Games’ offerings: Airport Insecurity. “It’s another everyday experience that I hoped players could start to ask questions about,” Bogost says. “I’m really much more interested in the mundane than the serious. It’s just that our work often breaks a lot of unspoken rules about what can be represented in a video game.”

The same can be said for the products of the Italian video game collective La Molleindustria, headed up by Paolo Pedercini. One of studio’s best-known releases is The McDonald’s Video Game, which puts players behind the counter (and into the back office) of the world’s most famous (and infamous) fast-food chain. The lesser-known Tamatipico, on the other hand, focuses on the often-ignored world of flexworkers, while another La Molleindustria offering, Queer Power: Welcome to Queerland, turns a curious eye toward “queer theory.”

“I see a lot of cartoons and movies that deal with gender issues, but video games too often spread homophobic messages,” Pedercini says of the thought process behind Queer Power, which inverts the fighting game archetypes created by arcade-style beat ‘em ups like Capcom’s seminal Street Fighter II.

“Game conventions are strongly biased by cultural and ideological values,” the developer says. Overturning those clichés “is a way to play with players’ expectations and push them to reflect on the stereotypes in commercial games.”

Offering gamers “alternative points of view” is a goal Pedercini and his crew set for each of La Molleindustria’s releases. “We believe that if we want to have an impact on society we must influence mainstream pop culture,” Pedercini says. “The progressive forces always ignore the importance of pop culture in the opinion-making process.” Conservatives, he adds, have the practice down pat. “Just look at TV shows like Dallas.”

Who Needs Fun?

Play a few rounds of Queer Power and you’ll quickly realize that “having fun” isn’t the point. Nor is it the point of any of Pedercini’s games, it seems. "Fun is never our main
goal-or, at least, not the common concept of fun," he says.

Other developers of serious games share Pedercini’s opinion that video games don’t have to be fun to be worthwhile. “I’m all for escapism,” Frasca says, “but I think that games that deal with serious topics can be more engaging to certain people.”

“For 30 years now we’ve focused on making games produce fun,” adds Bogost. “Isn’t it about time we started working toward other kinds of emotional responses?”

Bogost believes that will happen eventually. “I know that comparisons to the film industry have grown tired and overused,” he says, “but indulge me in this one: When you watch the Academy Awards this year, how many films in the running for awards are about big explosions and other forms of immediate gratification, and how many are about the more complex subtleties of human experience?

“Someday, hopefully someday soon, we'll look back at video games and laugh at how unsophisticated we are today,” Bogost adds. “It's like going to the cineplex and every screen is showing a Michael Bay flick.”

Seggerman offers up a similar comparison to the movie industry when forecasting the future of the serious games movement. “It took a while for film to start taking a look at serious issues,” she says. “We didn’t see documentaries come to the fore until the late 60s or early 70s. So it’s going to be a little while before serious games hit their stride and gain mainstream attention.

“It will get there,” Seggerman adds. “It has to—it’s such a natural fit.”

Referensi http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1465/who_says_video_games_have_to_be_.php

Who Says Video Games Have to be Fun? The Rise of Serious Games [1]

Think back to when you first contemplated getting into the video games industry. The ‘aha’ moment probably occurred while playing a particular game.

That certainly was the case for Suzanne Seggerman, co-founder and president of Games for Change, the social change/social issues branch of the Washington, D.C.-based Serious Games Initiative. While working as a documentary film producer for PBS, a co-worker slipped Seggerman a diskette containing Jim Gasperini’s government simulation game, Hidden Agenda. “I had played a little Asteroids while in college,” the New Yorker remembers, “but I definitely wasn’t a gamer.”

That all changed after she spent a weekend with her computerized present. “It was a transformative experience for me,” Seggerman says. “I sat up in the attic while a party was going on below—and I’m never one to miss a good party—and must have played the game for 10 hours straight.”

“I learned more about politics by playing Hidden Agenda than by reading 10 newspapers,” she adds.

Seggerman continued making films for a few years, but that ‘aha’ moment was never far from her thoughts. “I made a mental note that it had been something important and powerful and that I’d get back to that place at some point in my career,” she says.

That moment came in 2004 when Seggerman, who in the meantime had earned a master’s degree from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, co-founded Games for Change with Global Kids’ Barry Joseph and NetAid’s Ben Stokes (now with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation).

“We act as the primary community of practice for the people making activist games, documentary games, persuasive games, political games, serious games, social-issue games—whatever you want to call them,” Seggerman explains.

Games for Change fills a void Seggerman discovered when she attended her first Game Developers Conference in 1996. “I went there to find people working on what I called ‘meaningful’ games,” she says. “Much to my surprise, I couldn’t find anyone.”

“That made me realize what an aberration Hidden Agenda was at that point,” Seggerman adds. “I’m amazed it made it into my hands when it did, because I don’t think any other game would have impacted me the way that one did.”

Serious Attention

Serious games are no longer an aberration, of course. Countless examples created by the likes of Ian Bogost, Gonzalo Frasca, Paolo Pedercini, Chris Swain and more have caught the attention of the press and the public in the years since Seggerman’s first trip to GDC. They’ve also caught the attention of the mainstream game development community, though not often in a positive way.

“There’s a lot of hatred toward serious games right now,” Seggerman says, adding that the lack of love could be due to any number of reasons. “It could be because of the name or it could be because they think—and rightfully so—that many educational games have been terrible,” she adds. “Bad educational software has done us a lot of harm.”

Another knock against so-called serious games is that they simply don’t stack up to more mainstream offerings.

“Most people are less generous with their words; they’d say that most activist/political/serious games just plain suck” says Bogost, Ph.D., founding partner of Atlanta-based Persuasive Games, LLC, makers of Presidential Pong, Disaffected! and Airport Insecurity. “And that might be true, in part. The level of craft in serious games often leaves much to be desired.”

Powerful Robot Games' September 12th

Of course, mainstream titles generally garner bigger budgets than their “serious” brethren. "I think the main problem is that it is very expensive to make any kind of game," offers Frasca, co-founder of Powerful Robot Games, a Uruguay-based studio that has crafted such titles as September 12th and the Howard Dean for Iowa Game. “Political games generally do not have a financial return, and that makes it particularly hard to produce them with the same quality as commercial work.”

Swain, an assistant professor in the USC School of Cinematic Arts’ Interactive Media Division and a co-director of the school’s Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab, also cites miniscule budgets and less access to experienced talent as reasons for the discrepancy between mainstream and serious games.

That said, Swain—who designed The Redistricting Game and acted as a faculty advisor for the PlayStation3 game, fl0w—suggests “the field of political/activist games is very young. We need some success stories to prove our value because right now political games mostly grab headlines and have little real impact.”

Referensi http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1465/who_says_video_games_have_to_be_.php