Strongman Games

It’s time for a second bout of game design discussion, this time focusing on the design (and finally, visuals!) of Heidegger.

It’s not a big project, but it is many things: a road test for our technology and the first prototype of a way more ambitious project, but first and foremost it’s a game about herding. The basic form of the system is that enemies respond to the avatar’s movement in a predictable fashion. That’s the premise, the game at its vaguest conceptual level. It only turns into a game once the system grows more granular, more specific.

The player can influence the movement of the herd, but to what end? Mastery of the herd’s behaviour must lead to something, must be exploitable. Let’s add bombs. Lead a swarm of enemies towards a bomb then blow it up to wipe them all out and earn points. That adds direction to the system: Enemies are herded so they can be blown up. Since they spawn from all angles, they form a mutable element of the game space, something predictable yet plastic that forces manoeuvring and constantly threatens to end the player’s efforts.

Since the player can be cornered, he (I’ll be nice and use “she” in my next piece) needs to be capable of more than just movement to avoid the frustration of unavoidable defeat whenever surrounded or cornered. The avatar is given a weapon, but not one powerful enough to discourage herding and turn the game into a pure shooter, and the player is not awarded any points for shooting enemies. Instead, to avoid negative reinforcement, the player is awarded with an increased score multiplier. Shooting enemies rather than herding them towards bombs take away direct reward and substitute it with future, potential and compound reward – like putting money in the bank (or so banks would have you believe).

The system is taking ludic form. We have encouraged certain types of behaviour, and allowed certain others but at the cost of immediate reward to avoid de-emphasizing the core of the system. It is now a game, but there is still plenty of room for elaboration and granularity, for exploring, focusing and deepening the herding system.

Enemies could exhibit different responses to incoming weapon fire, move at different speeds and in different patterns – each of the existing mechanics give rise to more. Some enemies could dodge attacks; others could split in two and flank the avatar. There could be several avatars with different weaponry and movement, each demanding different responses to enemy behaviour. The multiplier is still underdeveloped, more of a band aid on the thematic contradiction of shooting enemies than a real mechanic. Could it be tied back into the herding, strengthening the concept rather than uncomfortably correcting one of its flaws? Of course, a path-finding algorithm could be employed to ensure escape routes from any situation, but that could cheapen the player’s effort and skill.

Skilful herding could also add to the multiplier, making it part of the essential risk/reward loop and adding further substance to it. Playing with the herd, escaping it at the last second – letting it encroach and then barely scraping by with pixels to spare, could increase the multiplier even more than shooting. By herding well rather than thinning the flock when it grows unruly, the player is rewarded for acting according to the thematic premise of the game.

That’s the aim of granularity, to strengthen and focus the system rather than simply expanding it. Variation is built into the system, not around it. This is what I see as systemic aesthetic, epitomizing the potential of a concept rather than widening it, and there are even more nooks and crannies that can be filled with meaning.

At the moment, the bomb is almost arbitrary, arguably the crux of the system but also external to the effort of herding. Say bombs spawn at set times, indicated by a countdown, to give the player a certainty about how much he has to exert himself before reaping the reward, allowing strategy on top of the tactics. Then, when the bomb has spawned, a second countdown starts – slightly longer than the first one.

Suddenly the player is tempted to exert himself further since another bomb will appear after another known period of time. Can the player cope with the enemies that are certain to spawn in that duration, or is it foolish overreaching? It’s tempting to continue since the reward will be greater and while navigating the swarms of enemies is risky, that translates into even greater opportunity for building multiplier. The complexity is self-reinforcing and as the system folds in on itself, stronger emotions are elicited – a stronger aesthetic emerges.

The second bomb appears, yet another timer starts ticking down. The neon numbers pulsate as the background slowly changes colour; this is the final one. All the mechanics encourage herding and building skills related to it; all are contained within the initial conceptual space. The herd grows enormous, little safe space remains; dodging, scraping and directing the swarm takes all the player’s cunning and skill … before the third bomb finally spawns.

No more countdowns, just more and more enemies spawning at breakneck speed. Steer them towards the bombs; try to get the bombs close to each other so they will all detonate in a destructive daisy-chain, aaaaaaaaand BOOM, the bombs go off and the herd evaporates as fireworks cover the screen, the points are multiplied by a gazillion and the granularity coalesces into a moment of breath-taking reward: Beauty.

This is the second part of a discussion of game design and aesthetics. The first part can be found here.

I keep wondering what it is that I love about games. When I was a kid, it was about the wonder of playing my own cartoon, that strange sense of wonder at mastering the game but not fully comprehending the limits of the world. Even mercilessly linear games like Mega Man and Super Mario Bros. didn’t just feel like, but were worlds rife with potential, that could yield anything if I just explored them. I didn’t know the medium, so I assumed the illusion was infinite and that there were even more secrets beyond the ones I’d uncovered.

As I grew older and got more accustomed to games, I started dreaming about the possible rather than actual content, looking for dragons in the Alik’r desert (it was empty) and attempting to unravel the complex web of characters and factions in the Wasteland (it didn’t exist). I tried not to notice the limitations of these barely simulated worlds, but eventually they all succumbed to pattern recognition and mental modelling.

Robbed of this safety, of these mechanical wombs only limited by my capacity for wonder, I did the only sensible thing: I developed a robust, romantic love affair with the medium’s potential. I could never see enough progress, because enough of it would allow games to truly turn into the mirages I had believed so dearly in my childhood and adolescence. This hope successfully fuelled my years of games writing, but as I played and wrote about dozens, hundreds of games and tried to understand what and why they were, I was slowly sapped of this thirst for change.

I understood that it must be hard to make games, since they all stuck to the same principles and limitations, even making similar mistakes. I eventually decided that this was precisely because so many games insisted on chasing the dragon of structured narrative, attempting to tell the hero stories familiar from other mediums without addressing the incoherence of the overarching fiction in relation to the possibility space of the simulation.

So I rejected stories as well, seeking refuge in the mechanical clarity of tightly defined shoot’em-ups that played only to the medium’s strengths, eschewing storytelling but fully defining and exploiting their mechanics. I felt that they offered pure play without any illusions, and that this was a very valuable aesthetic. I imagined that all other games would benefit from the same narrowness, failing to realize that my intimate and habitual understanding of the relationship between mechanism and illusion was rare – maybe even undesirable to many players.

Now I’m a game developer, and my concern with ideals has turned into a search for aesthetics. Not visual aesthetics, since I’m not an artist (although I make graphics), or the aesthetics of well-formed systems architecture, since I’m not a programmer (although I produce code). As a designer, my concern is the user experience – those drab two words that refer to the fantastic shaping of perception, consciousness and skill that result from player immersion in games. But what gives rise to the user experience? What aesthetic provokes this complex response?

At their hearts, most games are systems. I struggle to call them simulations, since that implies recreation rather than synthesis – instead, I see them as collections of mechanisms that act in concert to give the appearance of fluidity, of life, although they’re really machines whose gears just turn so quickly you can barely sense their shape.

A game, then – as Frank Lantz recently said, beating me to the punch – is the aesthetic of an interactive system. Calling them games suddenly feels slightly silly, as that implies challenge and competition where none is necessary, but to avoid nomenclatural meltdown I’ll keep calling them that. But that line explains nothing by itself – what constitutes the aesthetic? What lifts games from being just intricate mechanisms to being truly beautiful?

I want to say coherence, but Jonatan Söderström has demonstrated time and time again that incoherence and systemic fragility – more noise than signal – can be a very valid and interesting aesthetic. No, I find myself agreeing with Randy Smith that systemic granularity, the extent to which mechanics map the possibilities laid out by the conceptual form of the system, is the aesthetic. At least they are to me, as a designer. Players, artists, coders, writers and businessmen may obviously feel differently.

To illustrate, I’ll talk about the design of our next game, Heidegger. The next entry can be found here.

It’s easy and tempting to believe that concepts and ideas just spring fully formed from the creator’s forehead, that great stuff emerges fully formed from certain people who just have the knack. I don’t really think so, and while I hesitate to call the stuff we do awe-inspiring (I’ll save that sort of hyperbole for when we actually set the world on fire), I think a lot of people would still assume that anything we make just sort of came into being.

Take Heidegger: It’s an offshoot of a much larger project, and started out as a literal prototype with the same setting and mechanics as the project it’s meant to lead to. The as-of-yet unnamed social shoot’em-up we’re working on is set in the methane oceans of Titan, and as such it was tempting to apply the same concept to Heidegger, leading to a weird, minimalist sea creature look:

The idea was that the eyes would always point towards the player, not for any particular purpose, but as a neat little touch to bring the otherwise unremarkable shapes a little more personality. We ditched that idea pretty early on, however, simply because it would take a lot of work to make it look great and since we didn’t want to debut any of the visual concepts from the core project just yet, it would just remain half-assed and maybe even detract from the impact of the final product.

Instead, we opted to hop on a trend we’ve been watching with childish glee for a while: the sudden love for 80s, lo-fi graphics. To add our own spin to it, we wanted to pump it up to 11 and make it completely over-the-top, mixing the blocky look with current trends in video design. We wanted the chunkiest, most pixelicious graphics ever, and then make ‘em hyperkinetic:

Unfortunately, I’m a bit too young to really remember those super blocky visuals and what made them come alive. I also had my doubts about whether the aesthetic would really translate when our game style was more modern and required lots of scaling and rotation, which would flatly contradict the 8-bit aesthetic anyway.

With that in mind, I decided to experiment with more late-nineties graphics design applied in a chunky fashion:

This approach ran into the same problems as the über-pixelly look. The simple shapes needed to stay perfectly crisp to remain pleasing to the eye, which we couldn’t really expect to accomplish without using massively slow vector rendering. Besides, we needed a lot of different colours to distinguish symbols in the game space. Without a very limited and clean palette, the game space turned from striking and elegant into a soup of neon colours that was pretty hard to read.

Perhaps foolishly, I wanted to stay true to the retro concept, and opted for 16-bit nostalgia, as that’s what I really remember and know well. It would also mix well with our tech, as the scaling and rotation would be reminiscent of Super Nintendo and Mega Drive/Genesis-style rendering:

I’m quite fond of this style of pixel art, so putting this stuff together felt almost like a holiday compared to trying to put myself into the memories and nostalgia of someone five to ten years older than me and figuring out how to make that particular retro look tick beautifully. So I stuck to the 16-bit look and eventually ended up with these three avatars:

Now, this didn’t really mesh with our actual concept anymore, and would require a lot of animation and more detailed backdrops to avoid looking too cheap. It would mean a lot of work, and since the aim of the project is to test our rapid prototyping pipeline and gameplay coding environment, investing lots into graphics didn’t really make sense.

As we decided to abandon the 16-bit look, our tech finally came together to the point where we could road-test graphics properly. As it turned out, it was perfectly suitable for a quite different approach to shooter aesthetics, more in tune with the psychedelic approach from Ka-Bloom and that would stand out quite a bit more. It’s a sort of retro-acid affair based on sacred geometry that we’ll be proud and excited to reveal after some ever-so-slight nipping and tucking. Stay tuned in, turned on and dropped out.

We’ve got a bit of a crush on Geometry Wars here at Strongman Towers. The elegant neon take on the Robotron template sort of embodies everything we love about transcendent gameplay experiences.

So, of course, we had to roll our own. Heidegger builds on the herding gameplay of oh-so-many twin-stick shooters, with one key difference: herding is not just a survival technique; it’s the core of the scoring and agency loop.

If you’ve played Geometry Wars 2, you’ve undoubtedly spent quite a lot of time on Pacifism, the deceptively simple game mode where there’s no shooting, just laid-back outwitting of basic enemies coupled with a bit of explosive slalom.

Well, we want to put the guns back in and reward the player even more for methodical herding and situational awareness. You can build your score multiplier by shooting regular enemies, but you can also do it by different mean.

Living dangerously and scraping enemies, getting huge swarms of angry enemies to follow you and ultimately blowing them up with conveniently supplied bomb enemies that wipe out entire swarms of foes, yielding pretty fireworks, massive scores and power-ups.

We also wanted to toy around with more play styles, and so we’re intending to feature several avatars with different bullet patterns, movement speed and crowd control techniques.

In the end, Heidegger will assemble itself a snug little pupa of user feedback, data and ambition, before emerging a fully-fledged and completely unique social shmup that we can’t wait to tell you more about.

Welcome, weary wanderer, to this wellspring of wonder. As the perceptive visitor will have noticed by now, Strongman Games is a London-based maker of Flash game craziness and bringer of good things. We specialize in weird and wonderful web and social games, hoping to eventually provide an alternative to the drudgery and routine of that characterize (and arguably mar) the current crop of social games.

In addition, we’re working on some rather exciting technology that we will make available as it matures past the “that’ll do for now” stage, for the benefit of hobbyist and dedicated game developers alike. Providing a slightly more n00b-friendly entry point to Flash game development, we hope to stimulate even more creativity and participation in the rather exciting indie wave that’s billowing across the games industry.

Give our first game, Ka-Bloom, a whirl and stay tuned for a deluge of game development whimsy, as we chronicle the highs and lows of indie game development in today’s favourable social and economic climate.

We’ll also start the drip feed of bullshots, lofty promises and concept art for our next game, Heidegger – and if you’re all very, very nice we’ll also make sure to share some of our lovingly crafted design documentation for inspiration and criticism.