Not Yet

I didn’t get the level design position I applied for (although it seems I was one of the better applicants), as someone already on the development team who had industry experience applied as well. There’s always next time.

ナミちゃんお誕生日おめでとう！ / The April Post

もうすぐ誕生日カードを出すよ！おめでとう！

Somehow my endless parade of new hobbies has reduced my posting frequency to approximately once a month. April, here I am. I'll take this opportunity for a quick life update. In no particular order.

• My family vacation where my father and sister visited in March was a blast. We had a whirlwind week: San Francisco, Yosemite, Sequoia National Park, Santa Monica, Universal Studios Hollywood, San Diego Zoo. Dad and I even managed to sneak in a Nashville Predators game.
• Interested in the photos of my vacation? The promised shots from my time in Ireland[muchlessthanthree.com]? Well you’ll be happy to know that they are available on my deviantArt page[deviantart.com], along with a metric ton of other stuff.
• There’s a fantastic band out of San Francisco called LoveLikeFire[lovelikefire.com]. Give them a few listens and chances are you’ll fall in love with them, just as I have. They have a new album called Tear Ourselves Away that is dropping this summer, and the mp3 fairy tells me it’s well worth your money and time. Check out the awesome video for the first single, ‘William’.
  
• An enormous amount of my free time is still being dumped into my Team Fortress 2 map, which now has the working title of CTF-Standoff (official home[levelwon.blogspot.com]). It should be going beta in June, but I have recently drawn up some promotional images (below), because…
  
• I’ve just applied for another level design position. It’s at my current company, on a very prestigious project, so wish me luck! I had my first interview already, and I feel that it went fairly well.

Stay tuned next month for another exciting episode!

Metrics

Metrics, Metrics, Metrics. Go read xkcd.com!

I’ve been doing a bit of general level design study recently – theory and practice, both in traditional print media and via the internet. One of the things that’s mentioned again and again is the level designer’s responsibility for resource placement. For some reason, when someone mentions resource placement, my mind immediately jumps to the ‘Metroidvania‘ sub-genre. Generally, the character in these sorts of games start out with a basic set of abilities, and are free to explore the world. Eventually, the player begins to notice areas that are visible but that the character can’t currently reach – maybe they are higher than the character can jump, or are behind a barrier the character can’t destroy, etc. These obstacles are overcome by the acquisition of resources (usually some kind of equipment) that give the character new abilities that allow them to reach those previously inaccessible areas. These resources are carefully placed as rewards for overcoming a challenge such as defeating a boss, solving a puzzle, or traversing some particularly difficult terrain. One might say then that, from a level design perspective, the most important skills for these types of games are 1) resource placement, 2) resource acquisition challenges, and 3) visibly unreachable area placement. Number 2 is just your basic challenge-reward cycle that we see in so many other games, but this sub-genre focuses more heavily on numbers 1 & 3 than almost any other type of game does. In fact, some games (Knytt Stories comes to mind) almost dispense with number 2 completely, to the point where the only real challenge to finding the resources is exploring everywhere that you can currently access. This kind of edge case made my mind wander a bit, as doing level design for a great game of this kind strikes me as thrilling but extremely challenging.

Although there are a number of Metroidvania games out there and each has its fans, there’s a startling consensus among gamers as to which ones are really great and which ones are simply good (the downright poor ones are largely ignored). For me, it’s always seemed that the pacing was the largest component, almost as though the ratio of resource collection to visibly unreachable areas was one of the deciding factors. Too few unreachable areas between ability acquisition and the game becomes a standard linear game (a great genre in itself, but that’s another discussion), too many and it threatens to overwhelm the player’s ability to recall those areas later, after gaining the requisite skill to venture there.

This thought, in turn, made me wonder: Are there any metrics for this? I’d love to know what is the ‘right’ number of visibly unreachable areas to present to the player before giving them a new resource. Has anyone tabulated the average number of unreachable areas you see in Super Metroid between each resource acquisition? How about number of screens with these unreachable areas versus total number of screens the player currently has access to? I wonder if there are ‘correct’ ratios for these metrics that genre-defining games like Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night have managed to hit upon, and whether they arrived at them by accident, iteration (seems most likely), or by having access to similar metrics from other games?

The Dalaran Games (v. 2.0) / 俺な夢、バージョンアップ

Do me a favor: spare me some bandwidth and grab The Dalaran Games v2 from Filefront.

I know you’ve all been waiting with baited breath for The Dalaran Games, version 2.0. Well, the wait is over! Get it while it’s hot and let me know any feedback you might have. Here’s quick run down of the major changes:

2007.10.10 (version 2.0)

• Diamonds phase completely rehauled: maze is gone, new capture-the-flag gametype implemented.
• One minute trips to town put between phases 1&2 and 2&3 so players can buy items.
• Major hero revamps: selection narrowed to four units, abilities tweaked, new ’summon units’ abilities available.
• Eye of Sargeras now features a much more prominent roll in the story.
• Hearts phase arena changed significantly. Added meteor strikes and rune explosions to break up the gameplay.
• Players now always begin town phases in the area North of the arena (nearer to merchants). Path connecting the Northern and Southern parts of the map closed. Merchant in the Southern part of the map moved to the Northern part.
• Various small bug-fixes.

There are still a handful of known issues that I’ll be working out in the next version. In the meantime, grab the map and give it a play!

Still Here

Just working on an update to my Warcraft III map. I’ll have some updates as soon as I finish, I promise!

Playing to Win / 勝ちのためにやる

このページはDavid Sirlinさんのゲームデザインを関する本「Playing to Win」です。とても高論卓説の本です。全部英語なんですけれども。。。

I, like many other sites, think that it’s wonderful that David Sirlin has chosen to distribute his insightful book ‘Playing to Win’ for free in a digital format. I love that this book is 1) a serious take on games at a competitive level that approaches it’s topic from the viewpoint of a player rather than a designer and 2) doesn’t pull any punches. In particular it’s chapter on ‘Scrubs‘ is a must read.

The Dalaran Games (v. 1.0) / 俺な夢

俺が夢を追い掛けるだけです。気にしないで。

Well folks, here’s why I’ve been away from the blog for so damned long. For the past month or so, I’ve been working on polishing up a Warcraft III custom (trigger) map I started making over a year ago. Although it got put on a back burner for a bit during the hectic move to China, I’m happy to say that its finally to a point where I feel comfortable releasing it (but as a relentless perfectionist, I do not, of course, feel it’s ‘finished’). I have no doubt that it will require a few more revisions to improve the balance, but that’s why it’s time to let the community have it – it’s simply not possible for me to balance a four player multiplayer map by myself.

So go grab some friends and this map, and get to playing! Those who are interested in details, it’s a hero-arena styled map based around the concept of minigames. I feel the loading screen I posted last time makes a pretty decent teaser without giving away too many of the little strategies I hope will be evident after a few plays. If you watch the cinematics (which I hope aren’t too boring the first time around), then the game will probably take about fourty minutes. Without, it’s probably closer to a half hour. In the next few days I’m going to be spamming it to the big Warcraft III map/file sites in hopes of more feedback and balance suggestions. I’ll post links here to those at some point for those who are interested in such. Cheers and thanks in advance.

Edit:

Found a couple of bugs thanks to you friendly testers! I’m in the process of fixing and should have a new version to post before the end of August. :)

The first link is in!
Click here to get my map from Warcraft3Files.com! (a member of the FileFront network)

まあ、長い間で書けなかったごめんな。でも今回は大切な宣言や！（じゃないけど。。。）先の一ヶ月には俺の毎日はこのゲームのレベル。生憎
そのヨーゲは日本人が大体知らヘンと思うけど。。。

さあ、そのゲームが持ったら、俺のレベルをやってくださいね。

忘れないで見つめる事を
忘れないで感じる事を
今できるでしょう？

今しかないこの時間を
貴方しだいで
リルラ流れ行く