Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 257
June 26, 2015
Cuphead, Fleish & Cherry, and the influence and impact of classic animation
Why creators need to be careful when resurrecting the images of classic animation.
How do you bring the magic of Spelunky to 3D architecture?
Mark Johns is chasing a ghost. This is what he tells me. It's not quite the truth. The spectral quality of this "ghost" isn't immateriality; interfacing with it isn't a problem, Johns has done that thousands of times. The hard bit, and the bit he's after, is understanding it.
The ghost is actually Spelunky: a procedurally generated action-platformer that Johns declares "might be the greatest videogame ever made." But Johns reaches for metaphor, as he's the kind of guy to give into the lure of theatrics if given the chance. He lives in the moment. Snatch him a boiler suit and goggles and he'd probably be happy to act out a Peter Venkman fantasy, ghostbusting down a busy street, making sound effects with his mouth. "What's all this about?" a passer-by would ask. Everyone, even Johns, has forgot.
"no one as of yet has quite managed to capture the magic of the game."
But he's serious when I talk to him. And what are we actually talking about? "The allure of procedural generation is that a game world can be different every time you load it up. The promise is infinite variety within the possibility scope of the architecture the designer creates," he says. Oh yeah, we're talking about Spelunky and the brilliance of its procedural generation.
Johns explains to me that what he finds compelling about Spelunky is that it still surprises him. He's been playing it since 2008 and there's still more for it to reveal to him every time he goes back. The trick is in how Spelunky's 2D levels are generated. Each level is divided into 16 squares, each of which are filled randomly with an architectural variant from a pool of about 50. Once done, its systems then make another pass over each square in the level to add further randomization before adding traps, enemies, and items. Coder and artist Darius Kazemi has explained all this in much further detail before.
For Johns, the key to using procedural generation in a videogame level is hitting the balance between linearity and a random mess. Spelunky is the epitome of that for Johns. This is why he's chasing it. And he's not the only one. According to Johns, also chasing this ghost is Edmund McMillen with The Binding of Isaac, as well as Jan Willem of Vlambeer with Nuclear Throne, and pretty much anyone who incorporates roguelike elements into their game these days. "Despite Spelunky's influence on other developers, no one as of yet has quite managed to capture the magic of the game. If you talk to JW about Nuclear Throne, for example, he'll still say that he's trying to figure out how to instill in it the feeling of surprise and possibility that you get in Spelunky," Johns tells me.
randomness isn't interesting by itself.
The common mistake that Johns sees people making is using randomization techniques to lazily add more content to their game. He posits that randomness isn't interesting by itself. This, he says, is the wrong way to do it. Ideally, when bringing in procedural generation, you need a "firm foundation of game design principles, flow, and ideally an awareness of narrative structure, the systems you build will reflect it," according to Johns. It's the difference between having a hyperactive toddler splash smears and shapes across a piece of paper with a paintbrush, and having an artist like Pollock do it.
For many players, these differences might be too subtle to pick out and analyze, as they lack the expert eye necessary. But the argument goes that most would feel it upon playing. That is ultimately what Johns is chasing—that immediate connection with a virtual space, and an appeal that lasts throughout multiple replays. He doesn't want players to learn a linear path, nor does he want them to be overwhelmed with pure chaos, he's all about "giving players a chance instead to learn the laws that govern the universe they're presented with, responding in real-time to novel situations based on the heuristics they construct from their past attempts." He wants players to co-write their adventure with him, which he reasons is what led to Minecraft's popularity, as players "created the story of their experience in that world themselves, as they discovered its laws and very literally formed their environments themselves."
All of what Johns tells me is knowledge that he's putting into the creation of Gibson Hyperdrive. Oh, wait a sec, we're back to the theatrical side of Johns again. I've got to present it as GIBSON HYPERDRIVE. All-caps. A game that Johns claims "rises from the ashes of a fallen neofuture and arrives, crashing through your doorstep into hyperbole." He bloody loves it. What is GIBSON HYPERDRIVE? I wish I could tell you. At first, Johns described it to me as a "mystery FPS." But it has since become clear that it's an improved version of an older collaborative project ("arcade-style motorcycle parkour") of his called Terror Bikes. The idea is that you're riding a vehicle through a strange dimension, desperately hurtling across procedurally generated spirals and crooked peaks as you try not to crash or fall off the track. There is shooting, somewhere.
GIBSON HYPERDRIVE isn't the first shooter to use procedural generation. Johns is all too aware of this. In fact, his motivation for working on one is due to the frustration he has with those that are currently on offer. Their topography is too often comprised of straight corridors and box rooms and therefore lack that smack on the lips that Spelunky has. According to Johns, the way many designers of procedural shooters offset this bland architecture is by putting the focus on randomized weapons and items. "So while the levels feel samey, your options in how to tackle them are constantly changing," he says. "I'd like to bring the focus more to the levels themselves, and worry about item variety later."
half-eroded castles sitting on mountains
The idea is to create level structures that invite exploration and offer challenge after many playthroughs. As this is is what Spelunky does, Johns has studied and mirrored the techniques in hopes of applying them to a first-person format. "I first made a really quick prototype with just a few random level chunks made of 3D primitives," Johns said. "I shuffled around and connected them to each other in random ways, and it was instantly compelling." But it's not enough to take only from Spelunky as that's a 2D platformer and GIBSON HYPERDRIVE is a 3D shooter. So Johns looks to other shooters for inspiration, but many modern ones focus too much on creating a real sense of space, ones that procedural generation doesn't lend itself too. For GIBSON HYPERDRIVE, the shapes of levels need to be more abstract. Finding the answer took him all the way back to the near-beginning of the first-person shooter: the original Doom.
Look at a classic Doom map from an overhead view and you can see how all the different chunks slot together. Notably, these levels are non-symmetrical, comprised of irregular shapes with strange angles, and blend a range of smaller and larger spaces. This was all authored, of course, most of it by John Romero. And it was in watching a recorded playthrough of the original Doom levels that Romero did with IGN that Johns found his inspiration. "The first thing I try and think about is 'what would be a cool look?'" Romero says in the video. "So this area here is interesting, just because it gives you possibilities: I could go left, I could go right, what's that flashing light? What's through here? Oh, an elevator?" What Romero proves here is that at this early point in the history of first-person shooter and 3D level design what mattered the most was presenting a wide variety of interesting tactical setups and exploration opportunities for the player. The narrative that so often dominates modern shooters through cutscenes and scripted events was, instead, found in navigating these hostile environments in Doom. The lore that did exist was restricted to a couple of words in a level's title, such as "Toxin Refinery" and "Command Control." This gave a lot of room for abstraction.
Johns incorporated these 20-year-old design lessons, which were abandoned long ago in favor of realism, into GIBSON HYPERDRIVE. He kept twisting pillars, hanging them on the edge of sky islands, adding etches and nooks, half-eroded castles sitting on mountains, stacks of arches. The results speak for themselves. These are the chunks with which his systems will piece together entire levels as is the case in Spelunky. It's all very sensible, designed, and planned out. It is the serious side of Johns that spoke to me. But what it's setting up is for that moment-to-moment expression that Johns so easily slips into. He wants his players to embrace that, too, as they fly at hyper speed through his carnival of architecture, living in two-second increments of absolute hyperbole.
You can follow the development of GIBSON HYPERDRIVE on the TIGSource forums. It will be coming to PC and Xbox One.
The aesthetics of a videogame conference
At E3, you can tell a publisher’s power by the carpeting in their booth. Seriously.
June 25, 2015
Artware finds a new home
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TRIP (PC, Mac)
BY AXEL SHOKK
Originally released in 2012 without any fanfare, first-person "artware" game TRIP got a second chance recently with its arrival on Steam—a chance that its creator and avant-garde artist Axel Shokk jumped on. This re-release, as it were, has encouraged Shokk to treat TRIP as less of a videogame and more of a "3D art platform" that he plans to regularly update with new virtual art installations. These will arrive as singular worlds accessible from the game's menu that all offer an abstract experience in color, animation, and music. Each of these worlds will demand nothing of you but to wander according to your own curiosity. You're asked only to find wild sights inside this software and to enjoy piecing together the dancing creatures and their vivid environments as you would a cubist painting.
Perfect for: Children, avant-garde artists, curious netizens.
Playtime: As long as you can trip.
Long live Doom
Worship at the altar of shooting hellspawn.
Get your summer reading on lock with the new videogame Storybundle
This is a very good deal.
This story about gay marriage in a videogame shouldn't be big news, but it is
This is going to be a short article because there aren’t two sides to tell.
In Nintendo’s upcoming Fire Emblem Fates, it will be possible for your avatar to bond with an NPC of the same gender during a war and eventually get married. Polygon reports that relationships between men will require the purchase of the Conquest edition and relationships between women will require the purchase of the Birthright edition. Alternately, those who purchase either one of these editions will be able to download a third story line that allows for same-sex marriage for either gender. These relationships are optional, but the choice is there. Choice, in games and civil rights, is a good thing.
Choice is a good thing.
This shouldn’t really be news. Ideally it would just be one more detail lost in an endless stream of pre-release tedium. That is obviously not the case. On the one hand, polls show that a majority of Americans support gay marriage and have done so for years. Yet gay marriage is not yet universally accessible—the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which centers on states’ rights to refuse to issue marriage licences to gay couples or recognize their marriages, is expected next week. (Reminder: Follow SCOTUSblog!) There is also the not insignificant matter of whether businesses such as bakeries that make wedding cakes can refuse service to gay couples. The lived reality for many gay citizens lags well behind the majority’s professed support.
The situation in videogames is not entirely dissimilar. While support for more inclusive videogames exists, developers and studios have often made it impossible to engage in same-sex relationships. As such, each instance of inclusion feels like a victory. It shouldn’t be a big deal that someone from Nintendo told Polygon “We believe that our gameplay experiences should reflect the diversity of the communities in which we operate,” but it is. It shouldn’t be a big story every time something like this happens, but for the foreseeable future it will be.
Fights for rights and inclusivity are in large part fights to transform that which ought be banal into that which is actually banal. For now, however, that which ought be banal is news: Fire Emblem Fates allows same-sex marriages and that’s great.
Homesick is a story exploration game about people, nature, and night terrors
Homesick isn’t afraid to court environmentalist politics.
GTA Online���s heists prove that there���s no honor among thieves
GTA’s worlds have always been full of assholes. Online, it’s even worse.
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