Recently a friend of mine said I should write a book on proper game design from a storytelling perspective.
I'm frankly unsure about actually committing to an entire BOOK, in part because I honestly don't think I have enough fans/credit/market-space for it to really go out. Partly as well because my own ability as a storyteller, I feel anyway, needs refinement.
In any case, since there's been an expressed interest in what I have to say on the topic; and snippets of said advice have been well received, I thought I would do a few pieces on running/creating a sandbox game.
Defining the Sandbox.
The first question is in what sort of Sandbox we're talking about. When someone describes a Sandbox game, there's a few directions they could be taking that in.
A True Sandbox offers more or less unlimited freedom of action. There's a few solid rules in place, but they serve mainly to give you a point of reference and a solid environment to create your own fun. Minecraft is currently the best example of this sort of game, though there's a lot of games that let you build cities and theme-parks that qualify.
Honestly, I have no advice for you here. It's almost purely mechanical and my strong point is in narrative.
A Narrative Sandbox is what most people think of when they hear the term. These are games like Skyrim or GTA: Open worlds to explore and experience, but each thread in the tapestry is carefully woven and placed. In this type of Sandbox, you have considerably less freedom. You can pick what you wear and what you do, you have a choice of what paths you want to walk (often opening new ones and closing others as you progress), and people's perception of you will change based on what you've done and how you've done it.
This is pretty much going to be the primary focus of what I'm going to be talking about, this area here. It offers a overall high level of freedom to the player in general, and allows you to still script and write scenarios within certain boundaries.
Before I move on with the rest of what I have to say, I just wanted to talk about why the term 'scenario' is so important in this context. The biggest mistake people tend to make when writing for games is in writing 'plot'. They see the plot, and try to make a story out of it. When you write for a game, the 'plot' is the overall narrative framework the game exists in. You don't write a story, your write scenarios. Things the player(s) stumble across and get involved in. You don't solve the problems for them, you create a problem for them to solve.
Story is what happens when Players and Scenarios collide. Keep that in mind and your writing will improve instantly, guaranteed.
The last category, and one I will be spending little time on, is the Limited Sandbox. Which is more or less exactly what it sounds like. The opposite extreme of the 'True' sandbox. Whereas a True sandbox gives you total freedom (eg, Minecraft 'You are a dude.') and Narrative gives you a SENSE of freedom (eg, Skyrim 'You are a dude in a place where things are happening.'), Limited gives you a small area of complete freedom within a greater whole (eg, Harvest Moon 'You area dude in a place with a farm and things are happening. You can totally pick what crops to grow and who to mack on.').
There's a lot of games that could be considered partial/limited sandboxes, but frankly this is where the most overlap happens between a sandbox and other forms of world-building/exploring. The main reason I'll be spending not a lot of time with it is simply because it could be represented well by advice offered by the other categories.
This will be an interesting series to write....
2013-04-08
2013-03-17
Ideas Sketchbook 1
Friend of mine suggested doing this to add Blog content, just kinda throw out ideas I've had/are working on as side projects. I mean, a fair bit of them are underdeveloped, but if anybody expresses interest I could go on about them.
Some of them, like the one I'm gonna be talking about in a second, I'm already doing things with. A lot of them are briefly 'sketched' ideas that only have a couple of interesting concepts and/or I don't intend to really do anything with them if nobody expresses an interest. It would be great if anybody who read these and thought 'wow that's awesome' or 'wow, that' fucking terrible' would sound off, since it's hard to gauge fan reaction to ideas sometimes.
That said, I'm going to take a second to talk about Binary Warfare.
Thread 1
Thread 2
Thread 3
Binary Warfare is a tactics game I had an idea for about two years ago. Sadly, nothing really came of the project, but recently I've had a chance to talk with a few friends and am seriously considering a reboot.
I had some 'cool' ideas regarding multiple interconnected battlefields in a wargame setting after a friend of mine told me about a game called 'Dystopia'. Eventually I had some crazy plans, cooked up some examples and had a solid idea for how I wanted the final game to look.
Quick, easy to understand costs/builds/armies made it fun to work with, and it taught me a lot about game design, especially in terms of what goes into publishing rulebooks/minis and publicizing the game. Unfortunately, it had some major problems in the way:
1. I had no idea what I was doing.
2. Rules for territory creation/modding were something I literally couldn't wrap my head around. A problem when that's literally half the game.
3. Differing/Multiple objectives and game types were hard to implement.
4. Different factions meant having to design/print/ship six different types of people in hopes of illusive sales.
5. Absolutely no sculpting skills.
6. No way of creating minis that wouldn't leave me horribly in debt.
7. Balance requires playtesters I didn't have.
8. Math had passed fun and acceptable levels, and was approaching 'accountants only' territory.
9. No real publicity.
10. No real talent.
11. No artists. At all.
12. No money.
13. No time, because of work.
14. I was completely clueless as to any of the above factors before jumping into it.
So in short, the entire project was a house of cards.
If the cards were also soaked in gasoline, and played by a campfire.
In gale-force winds.
Actually taking a second to be honest with myself, it's shocking it didn't go cataclysmically wrong faster.
Now I've managed to solve most of those problems either directly or indirectly. The big one being that turn based strategy games are relatively easy to design/program helps a lot, as does the fact that I know people who I can ask for help/advice as the project continues.
Unfortunately, this is probably gonna have to wait until after I finish work on Armored, because I need the money/rep-boost from that before I can really move into video games.
Which suits me fine. I like having a huge project in the back to chip at when I'm bored and give me a vague semblance of a long term goal to work towards.
As a side note, I would seriously consider any sort of requests for elaboration and/or op-ed pieces for future updates. Just feel free to ask whatever in the comments section.
Some of them, like the one I'm gonna be talking about in a second, I'm already doing things with. A lot of them are briefly 'sketched' ideas that only have a couple of interesting concepts and/or I don't intend to really do anything with them if nobody expresses an interest. It would be great if anybody who read these and thought 'wow that's awesome' or 'wow, that' fucking terrible' would sound off, since it's hard to gauge fan reaction to ideas sometimes.
That said, I'm going to take a second to talk about Binary Warfare.
Thread 1
Thread 2
Thread 3
Binary Warfare is a tactics game I had an idea for about two years ago. Sadly, nothing really came of the project, but recently I've had a chance to talk with a few friends and am seriously considering a reboot.
I had some 'cool' ideas regarding multiple interconnected battlefields in a wargame setting after a friend of mine told me about a game called 'Dystopia'. Eventually I had some crazy plans, cooked up some examples and had a solid idea for how I wanted the final game to look.
Quick, easy to understand costs/builds/armies made it fun to work with, and it taught me a lot about game design, especially in terms of what goes into publishing rulebooks/minis and publicizing the game. Unfortunately, it had some major problems in the way:
1. I had no idea what I was doing.
2. Rules for territory creation/modding were something I literally couldn't wrap my head around. A problem when that's literally half the game.
3. Differing/Multiple objectives and game types were hard to implement.
4. Different factions meant having to design/print/ship six different types of people in hopes of illusive sales.
5. Absolutely no sculpting skills.
6. No way of creating minis that wouldn't leave me horribly in debt.
7. Balance requires playtesters I didn't have.
8. Math had passed fun and acceptable levels, and was approaching 'accountants only' territory.
9. No real publicity.
10. No real talent.
11. No artists. At all.
12. No money.
13. No time, because of work.
14. I was completely clueless as to any of the above factors before jumping into it.
So in short, the entire project was a house of cards.
If the cards were also soaked in gasoline, and played by a campfire.
In gale-force winds.
Actually taking a second to be honest with myself, it's shocking it didn't go cataclysmically wrong faster.
Now I've managed to solve most of those problems either directly or indirectly. The big one being that turn based strategy games are relatively easy to design/program helps a lot, as does the fact that I know people who I can ask for help/advice as the project continues.
Unfortunately, this is probably gonna have to wait until after I finish work on Armored, because I need the money/rep-boost from that before I can really move into video games.
Which suits me fine. I like having a huge project in the back to chip at when I'm bored and give me a vague semblance of a long term goal to work towards.
As a side note, I would seriously consider any sort of requests for elaboration and/or op-ed pieces for future updates. Just feel free to ask whatever in the comments section.
2013-03-11
Clearing out the closet.
I need to start writing passwords down or something. I left this blog in a fit of depression, and then forgot about it briefly during my recovery.
I literally STUMBLED across the fact that this thing existed about a week ago, and was shocked into remembering my naivety in starting the damned thing.
Then I had to walk the shame filled path of trying to recover the password.
I can't be the only one who does this: give a fake dipshit answer like 'your mother' to the question of 'where did you go to school' because you never forget passwords.
And honestly, I rarely forget passwords. I forget them on sites I don't go to for six months at a time or just to get into once to download something.
Somehow, some way, my arrogance in assuming I won't forget a password is inevitably rewarded by not only forgetting the password, but struggling for hours with my deliberately impossible to answer security questions.
Setting aside my rambling self flagellation, the past.... Year and a half? WOW. That's bad even by my standards....
In any case, the last year and a half have been really good for me from a creative standpoint. I've learned a lot about game design, had a lot of (hopefully) innovative ideas to play with, and met a few people I very much enjoy bouncing ideas off of.
But most of all, I learned a very important lesson from my most recent 'claim to fame' AC-Quest.
I'm not entirely sure I have any idea what I'm doing.
Let me explain: when I wanted to learn something, I would go and learn EXACTLY what I wanted to learn, and then moved on. Which isn't a bad way of doing things, I have a wide and balanced education that keeps me decently informed on most topics. I just lack a certain expertise when it comes to the finer points of things.
So I could say, help lay boards and pound nails, but I'm not really a carpenter.
What I didn't understand until I was already balls deep into working on Armored(The underlying game that powers AC-Quest) was that I desperately needed to learn carpentry.
Let's take this metaphor all the way to a full explanation.
I made AC-Quest as a bit of filler for fellow fans of an entirely unrelated quest. So I cleared a nice spot of ground and pitched a tent. When I realized I'd be staying a while, I set up a nice firepit, scouted the area for streams and such, and made myself comfortable.
At some point, a friend pointed out that I had a REALLY nice location for, say, a house. I agreed, so I took my limited knowledge and started building one. When supports started to fail, I put up another thing to reinforce it. When things started to lean I hammed it roughly back to where it should be and took preventative measures. Along the way, I learned a lot by virtue of the terror of having my house fall on me while I slept.
Eventually, it was comfortable and functional. I was happy.
Then it all burnt the FUCK down.
I won't rehash how painful it was for me to suffer catastrophic data loss over every aspect of my everything.
Now that I've had a chance to recover from the shock, I've actually come to see it as something of a blessing. I can take everything I learned to first time around and make the house BETTER from the ground up. Looking over my old notes (what little remain) everything was very slap-dash and fix on fail. It was frantic, exciting, and a lot of fun.
It was also objectively terrible game design as a philosophy.
Let me explain: Armored is my first real 'from the ground up' system. Most of the others were thought exercises that I built poorly just to see how certain factors actually affected game design. I have a lot of homebrew experience from modding other systems, but I also had an intimate knowledge of what was good/bad about the system I was modding for what I wanted.
So now I have an intense desire to do it right, because I feel like the world and story I crafted it for deserve better. Because my friends and fans deserve better. Because I've basically declared war on it, my shit luck, and everything between me and publishing a good game.
I said it before, but I'm going to finish this game or it finishes me.
I guess it would be obvious from the above post, but this blog is being reformed to share my ideas on game design(not shit like reviews or criticisms. I don't want my cynicism to ruin things for me here) with a HEAVY focus on Armored, but with occasional rambles about ideas ranging from homebrew to full-concepts to wouldn't it be cool? designs.
Also, new name. It's almost tradition at this point for me to have a new handle when I come back to this thing. I've been fucking it up for a solid four years now.
I literally STUMBLED across the fact that this thing existed about a week ago, and was shocked into remembering my naivety in starting the damned thing.
Then I had to walk the shame filled path of trying to recover the password.
I can't be the only one who does this: give a fake dipshit answer like 'your mother' to the question of 'where did you go to school' because you never forget passwords.
And honestly, I rarely forget passwords. I forget them on sites I don't go to for six months at a time or just to get into once to download something.
Somehow, some way, my arrogance in assuming I won't forget a password is inevitably rewarded by not only forgetting the password, but struggling for hours with my deliberately impossible to answer security questions.
Setting aside my rambling self flagellation, the past.... Year and a half? WOW. That's bad even by my standards....
In any case, the last year and a half have been really good for me from a creative standpoint. I've learned a lot about game design, had a lot of (hopefully) innovative ideas to play with, and met a few people I very much enjoy bouncing ideas off of.
But most of all, I learned a very important lesson from my most recent 'claim to fame' AC-Quest.
I'm not entirely sure I have any idea what I'm doing.
Let me explain: when I wanted to learn something, I would go and learn EXACTLY what I wanted to learn, and then moved on. Which isn't a bad way of doing things, I have a wide and balanced education that keeps me decently informed on most topics. I just lack a certain expertise when it comes to the finer points of things.
So I could say, help lay boards and pound nails, but I'm not really a carpenter.
What I didn't understand until I was already balls deep into working on Armored(The underlying game that powers AC-Quest) was that I desperately needed to learn carpentry.
Let's take this metaphor all the way to a full explanation.
I made AC-Quest as a bit of filler for fellow fans of an entirely unrelated quest. So I cleared a nice spot of ground and pitched a tent. When I realized I'd be staying a while, I set up a nice firepit, scouted the area for streams and such, and made myself comfortable.
At some point, a friend pointed out that I had a REALLY nice location for, say, a house. I agreed, so I took my limited knowledge and started building one. When supports started to fail, I put up another thing to reinforce it. When things started to lean I hammed it roughly back to where it should be and took preventative measures. Along the way, I learned a lot by virtue of the terror of having my house fall on me while I slept.
Eventually, it was comfortable and functional. I was happy.
Then it all burnt the FUCK down.
I won't rehash how painful it was for me to suffer catastrophic data loss over every aspect of my everything.
Now that I've had a chance to recover from the shock, I've actually come to see it as something of a blessing. I can take everything I learned to first time around and make the house BETTER from the ground up. Looking over my old notes (what little remain) everything was very slap-dash and fix on fail. It was frantic, exciting, and a lot of fun.
It was also objectively terrible game design as a philosophy.
Let me explain: Armored is my first real 'from the ground up' system. Most of the others were thought exercises that I built poorly just to see how certain factors actually affected game design. I have a lot of homebrew experience from modding other systems, but I also had an intimate knowledge of what was good/bad about the system I was modding for what I wanted.
So now I have an intense desire to do it right, because I feel like the world and story I crafted it for deserve better. Because my friends and fans deserve better. Because I've basically declared war on it, my shit luck, and everything between me and publishing a good game.
I said it before, but I'm going to finish this game or it finishes me.
I guess it would be obvious from the above post, but this blog is being reformed to share my ideas on game design(not shit like reviews or criticisms. I don't want my cynicism to ruin things for me here) with a HEAVY focus on Armored, but with occasional rambles about ideas ranging from homebrew to full-concepts to wouldn't it be cool? designs.
Also, new name. It's almost tradition at this point for me to have a new handle when I come back to this thing. I've been fucking it up for a solid four years now.
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