Tag: games

Game design at Castalia

Over the years, I’ve noticed that most of the readers here are not terribly interested in the nuts and bolts of game design. Which is fine, it’s a fairly esoteric topic that tends to require both extensive reading and extensive game-playing, which considerably limits the potential appeal of such discussions. However, those few who are interested in it tend to be very interested indeed.

So, I’m going to be doing the occasional post over at the Castalia House blog on some of my thoughts on a very particular game design for a tactical wargame on which I am working as part of the First Sword Kickstarter, about which you can read more in the Game Dev letter. And you can also read about my initial thoughts on doing something new with the design, which I think could potentially be as significant for tactical wargaming in the long term as the ASL morale model has proven to be.

If you subscribe to the Game Dev newsletter, you’re aware that Alpenwolf has a new partner and I’m going to be writing the new rules for a certain SF infantry combat game. Without getting into any details concerning that, I want to discuss two of the primary principles I plan on utilizing as the basis for the core gameplay. I was recently editing a book by Martin van Creveld that we’ll be publishing in another week or so, A History of Strategy, and one thing that occurred to me while I was working on it and reading his Technology and War, was how the great stress that Clausewitz placed on friction, and in particular, on information in war, was seldom modeled at the tactical level in wargaming. Clausewitz wrote:

 A great part of the information in war is contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the greatest part is somewhat doubtful. This requires that an officer possess a certain power of discrimination, which only knowledge of men and things and good judgment can give. The law of probability must be his guide. This is difficult even in the pre-war plans, which are made in the study and outside the actual sphere of war. It is enormously more difficult when, in the turmoil of war, one report follows hard upon another. It is fortunate if these reports, in contradicting each other, produce a sort of balance and thus demand further examination. It is much worse for the inexperienced when chance does not render him this service, but one report supports another, confirms it, magnifies it, continually paints with new colors, until urgent necessity forces from him a decision which will soon be disclosed as folly, all these reports having been lies, exaggerations, and errors.

Read more about my concept of a Tactical Uncertainty Principle over there, if it happens to strike you as interesting.

A taste of things to come

John Wright is pleased with Jeremiah’s artwork for the first volume in his Unwithering Realm series, Somewhither, which will be coming out in April. And if you’re interested in supporting an esoteric, but worthwhile project, Castalia House blogger Ken Burnside and Ad Astra game developer needs just $2k more in order to fund his AVID Assistant via Kickstarter.

Speaking of Castalia, we’ll have a new offer going out to the New Release Subscribers next week, but for various reasons I’m not going to bother going into, we will be releasing not just one, but TWO new books the week after that. I’d like to find 10 volunteers to review both of them, so if you’ve got the interest and the intellectual chops to handle either Equality: The Impossible Quest or The Art of War: The History of Military Strategy, both by Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, email me with EQUALITY or WAR in the subject. UPDATE: have all 10 for both books, thank you.

The former is conceived as the third in a conceptual trilogy with Plato’s work on Justice and J.S. Mill’s work on Liberty, whereas the latter features a foreword by none other than Dr. Jerry Pournelle himself, who describes van Creveld’s work as “a necessary supplement to Clausewitz.” It’s a short, but as you can probably imagine from that description, brilliant history, and anyone who has appreciated Mr. Lind’s work is going to find it fascinating and educational. Thanks to Chris Kallini, who did both of the van Creveld covers.

We are fighting back

Reggie at Reaxxion explains how SJWs are putting women out of work.

 PAX banned booth babes from their events and they are just one of many events including E3 to start banning booth babes. This is an excerpt of what PAX had to say on their booth babe policy:

PAX has a strict ‘no booth babe’ policy with the purpose of creating an environment where everyone can feel comfortable and welcome, and the focus is on games, not hired booth staff.

Booth babes are defined as staff of ANY gender used by exhibitors to promote their products at PAX by using overtly sexual or suggestive methods. Partial nudity, the aggressive display of cleavage and the navel, and shorts/skirts higher than 4” above the knee are not allowed. If for any reason an exhibit and/or its contents are deemed objectionable to PAX management, the exhibitor will be asked to alter the attire of its staff.

Cosplayed characters that are playable in-game are an exception to this rule (within reason), and exhibitors must obtain permission from show management prior to the show.

As Reggie points out, cosplayers shouldn’t be breathing a sigh of relief, because it’s obvious they are next. Hot women make not-hot women uncomfortable, therefore they must be banned.  As Game Dev newsletter subscribers already know, Alpenwolf has bravely responded to this attack on women by adding a female character to First Sword and making her the face of the game.

About more in the near future. “Morwyn Shadowsong” is already scheduled to be featured in a photoshoot for a popular men’s site and will also be appearing in miniature, cartoon, and 3D formats. She will also be the protagonist of a novella, The Gladiator’s Song, which will be published later this year by Castalia House.

Interview with a legend

Johnny Wilson, the former editor-in-chief of Computer Gaming World, is one of my all-time favorite people in the game industry and one of the individuals I most respect on the planet. He’s written one very good book with Rusel DeMaria on the history of the industry, and I’m hoping to get another one out of him for Castalia House.

Like a lot of the old school game industry people, Johnny is more than a one-trick pony; in addition to being a professor at DePaul University, he’s also a theologian and a pastor. The whole Gamasutra interview from 2012 is fascinating, but in light of #GamerGate, I found these two answers to be particularly prescient.

Was there any moment that made you realize game journalism had finally reached the main stream?

Considering the shoddy state of mainstream journalism today (even some once-great newspapers are pure sell-outs), I guess we reached that bottom rung level a long time ago. I know that when I was editor, I had definite ideals of serving the reader, avoiding conflict-of-interest, and getting behind the corporate facades and into the real stories. The truth is that I don’t know of any modern publications—analog or digital—that have those ideals.

Do you think game reviews with percentages and stars somehow cheapened game journalism?

No, I think the desire to get the “first” coverage cheapened game journalism. In the pen and paper world, we used to talk about “shrink-wrap” reviews. I know that some of the early pioneers in the hobby game magazines would talk about popping the shrink-wrap, looking at the components, reading the rules, and writing the review without even pushing pieces around. My feeling was that European publications, because they had a more competitive environment (and efficient distribution system), rushed reviews to press. That doesn’t really serve the reader at all.

My argument with, for example, PC Gamer’s percentage system wasn’t that they used percentages, it was that an astute reader would notice that the magazine (at least, during the Gary Witta era) always had some sacrificial lamb of a product that they rated in low percentage ratings. But, if you looked at those games, a lot of them were never released in the U.S. and certainly weren’t advertisers in that publication. At CGW, we didn’t have enough editorial space to deal with games that weren’t going to be released in the U.S. So, we wouldn’t even have touched those games. On the other hand, there were times that lousy games we might have been tempted to ignore were actually advertised in our publication. If they were advertised, I felt an obligation to review them. And I had more than one advertiser yell at me that I shouldn’t treat them that way after what they had spent. I shrugged my shoulders on one occasion and said, “Ironically, I probably wouldn’t even have assigned the review if you weren’t trying to get my readers’ attention.”

But, did our star ratings cheapen our review work? No. If anything, the stars sharpened our efforts. The reviewers suggested a number of stars and the editor covering that genre was expected to defend that star rating in the general editorial [OK, “Star Chamber”] meeting where we debated the ratings. The meeting often required a half-day or more of heated discussions before we approved those reviews to go to press. We didn’t discuss the reviews among ourselves as much before the star ratings were implemented. To be honest, I resisted the star ratings for as long as possible. I wanted the readers to READ the reviews. But, the bottom line is that I just kept getting hammered by readers that we NEVER gave bad reviews when I thought it was clear that we gave bad reviews. I eventually realized that our readership was becoming younger and more casual and, as a result, we had to spell out what we really thought.

The world wide web was the death of game journalism. There simply isn’t any reliable metric to determine which site is really reliable and which journalists are legitimately trying to do their work and which are merely “fan boys” getting their dopamine fix by slamming people and using “tabloid” style headlines. It always makes me nervous when I read reviews on the web because I don’t feel like I can trust anyone to have played the game all the way through.

Go read the reviews from the older CGW issues sometime. The difference between the level of expertise and the depth of knowledge possessed by the writers then versus the writers of today is astonishing. The dirty little secret of the SJWs in game journalism today is that they don’t actually know very much about games, which is why they always lean towards using their nominal game reviews and articles as a platform for non-gaming issues.

I wrote for both Electronic Entertainment and Computer Gaming World, and writing for the latter was always rigorous. Chris Lombardi not only sent my first review back to me for re-writing, but rejected an article on games as the realization of the Wagnerian concept of Total Art that later appeared in a BenBella SmartPop book. The most notable thing CGW had that most modern game sites lack was integrity.

Reaxxion interview

Reaxxion posted the translation of a recent interview with me by Werta Best of old-games.ru. Among other things it features the original CD sleeve cover of Rebel Moon that hasn’t been seen by anyone in decades.

Who was the first member in your team who proposed the
revolutionary idea to use the beautiful color lighting in the developed
RM game engine? Attention please, it was before Unreal release! Did your
team perform an overview of the graphics capabilities for other first
person shooters published before RM?

That was my partner Andrew’s idea. We knew Marc Rein and the guys at
Unreal very well, in fact, our audio guy and housemate is now their
audio director. Because we came from a high-resolution graphics
background, we always looked to push the envelope in one way or another.
Expanding the color depth was something we wanted to do as soon as the
hardware could handle it. The problem was that you were still limited to
256-color palettes in the textures due to memory limitations.

What’s in your opinion was the reason for poor commercial success of Rebel Moon Rising – is it because of previous game has low popularity (Rebel Moon, 1995) or due to low resolution of sprites used in both games?

One word. QUAKE. Rebel Moon Rising got pretty good reviews and was well-regarded by other designers, but once people had a taste of 3D, they didn’t want to go back to 2.5D. It’s not like that surprised us. After all, I was the one who originally trademarked “3D Blaster” years before and I’d spent a lot of time out in the Bay Area as a Transdimensional Evangelist trying to convince Creative, Hercules, and Diamond, among others, to adopt 3D acceleration long before Jensen Huang got Nvidea going. We knew 3D was going to be big for the shooter market, but we didn’t have time to write a 3D engine on Intel’s schedule. And more importantly, we discovered that the graphics bus was too slow to let the MMX properly support 3D at the higher resolutions we originally intended to support.

The original MMX was actually four times faster than it was able to deliver, but the limitation was the bus, not the chip’s performance. We were the ones who discovered the problem; Intel was absolutely horrified when we proved it to them by blitting a 2-bit black rectangle. Commercial success was always an afterthought, as our Intel relationship guided most of our decisions and generated most of our revenue.

We were very pleased with effects for varying of gravity on some level’s maps – it was one of the most original gameplay ideas in both Rebel Moon games. Has anyone used same method for walkthrough of levels in other games published in 90-s? Who was the author of idea in your team?

I don’t know. I asked Andrew and he doesn’t recall either. Our culture at Fenris Wolf was always one of pushing things further. We created the first escort mission in a shooter, we were the first to support MMX, the first to implement speech recognition in a multiplayer game (you could switch weapons and send predetermined messages using your voice), and we also introduced a number of smaller innovations like in-level variable gravity. Given that the game was set in space, the idea of blowing up a gravity generator and then having it affect the gameplay would have seemed pretty obvious to all of us at the time.

The net game levels walkthrough in RMR is more interesting than single player maps. It seems that RMR game originally was planned as a coop game only and single player levels are just the secondary product from net levels. Is it right?

No, it’s precisely backward. The problem with single player was that Intel’s testers simply weren’t gamers. We created the first two levels, which are borderline retarded and come complete with arrows on the floor pointing GO THIS WAY, rather late in the process because the testers couldn’t manage to complete levels that any competent gamer could play through in minutes. So we had to dumb everything down. We didn’t even do the multiplayer stuff until the retail release with GT, but because Intel wasn’t involved with those, we could design them for proper gamers. That’s probably why they are more interesting.

In our opinion, for Rebel Moon Rising game very effective way was used to a sharp change of the game environment – teleportation to another planet (in alien world). And it was made one year before popular Half-Life! (teleport to Xen…). This significant jump was originally planned in the RMR game scenario as well as concept art?

In light of the fact that we were using an expanded color depth for the first time, my decision to set the storyline in space, on the Moon, was a very, very bad one. I thought it would be visually impressive to have these rich jeweled tones of the lasers and lights contrasted against the grays of the environment, but the effect was just too subtle. And our artists, while smart and talented, were all very young and hired straight out of art school with no computer or 3D experience. We should have done something more wild and garish like Unreal.

The decision to shift the focus to the alien environments allowed us to bring in more color and interesting visuals than was permitted by an environment mostly filled with black space and Moon rocks. The jump was definitely planned in the design document and it was always part of the story, but we did end up putting more of the levels in the alien environments than originally planned due to the desire to incorporate more interesting graphical elements.

I’m always pleased to see that the old games aren’t forgotten, including my own. Werta and his team of programmers are amazing; they not only ported Rebel Moon Rising to the modern versions of Windows, but even ported the original Rebel Moon to it. And they managed to get the nine demo levels of the unfinished Rebel Moon Revolution working so you can see some of the still-advanced twin AI systems at work.

It’s good to see Reaxxion continuing to grow and providing more SJW-free game-related content.

Texture bleg

Is there anyone who specializes in texturing very high poly count STL files who might be interested in tackling our pair of orcs? If this is solidly within your bag of tricks, please contact me. At this point, we’re looking for volunteers.

If you want to see Orc Gladiator #2 soon, sign up for Castalia House’s Game Development newsletter. We’ll be sending out the first one within the next two weeks, we’re just trying to nail something down before we can announce it to the subscribers.

Another response to Anita Sarkeesian

Sam Roberts of Reaxxion carefully considers Anita Sarkeesian’s list of recommendations to “make games less shitty for women”. This was #3 on his list of eloquent, well-reasoned, and above all, illustrative responses:

Have female characters of various body types

My response: No.

The temptation is always to say that Ms. Sarkeesian misrepresents the
gaming industry, that there are actually plenty of female-friendly
games, or that characters like the ones above are “strong women”, whom
feminists should love.  This is the wrong answer.  By making this
argument, you’re implicitly agreeing with Sarkeesian and her like that
games need to be feminist-friendly; you’re just disagreeing on how
feminist-friendly they are right now.  And once you’ve agreed with her
there, you’ve given her the power to dictate what is and isn’t allowed.
 After all, who’s going to know better about what games are
SJW-friendly—you, or a women’s studies major?

The only response is this: If you don’t like games with big-boobed girls, don’t play them.

There is nothing to discuss. I speak only for myself, but my opinion happens to be shared by nearly ever game designer and game developer in the industry, regardless of whether they are Left, Right, or somewhere in the middle. We make the games we want to make. We play the games we want to play. If Anita Sarkeesian, or anyone else, wants to see different games made, then she is welcome to make her own. We’re not going to do it.

Frankly, these ladies all look a bit beefy to me. Where are all the slender, snake-hipped girls with cheekbones you can shave with and BMIs of 17? Surely this is the rankest misogyny by bearded, round-bellied patriarchs!

An SJW guide to making games

Anita Sarkeesian is not, by her own admission, a gamer. Nor is she a game developer, let alone a game designer. Kotaku quoted her as follows:

Sarkeesian mentioned her time in grad school, which I believe was the same time she was saying in that clip that she wasn’t a fan of games. “If you asked me at the time, I would probably have said I wasn’t a gamer,” she said. Under her breath she added: “I don’t even know if I want to say that now, but whatever.”

She’s not a gamer. She knows nothing about games. She is a classic SJW entryist, invading a culture to which she does not belong in order to change it according to her principles. Her list of “improvements”:

“Eight things developers can do to make games less shitty for women.”

  1. Avoid the Smurfette principle (don’t have just one female character in an ensemble cast, let alone one whose personality is more or less “girl” or “woman.”)
  2. “Lingerie is not armor” (Dress female characters as something other than sex objects.)
  3. Have female characters of various body types
  4. Don’t over-emphasize female characters’ rear ends, not any more than you would the average male character’s
  5. Include more female characters of color.
  6. Animate female characters to move the way normal women, soldiers or athletes would move.
  7. Record female character voiceover so that pain sounds painful, not orgasmic.
  8. Include female enemies, but don’t sexualize those enemies.

My response, as a professional game developer, is simple and straightforward. Go to Hell. I don’t tell Anita Sarkeesian how to publicly media-whore herself for a living and she has no business telling me or any other game designer how to make the games we wish to make. Only one point would even theoretically improve any game in even a minor way, and it could be applied equally well to TV and movies, namely, point 6. What is the point of motion capturing a giraffe if you’re trying to portray a cheetah?

If she thinks my game, or any other game, is “shitty for women”, that’s her right. And it’s my right, and the right of every other single game designer and developer in the industry to tell her that I don’t give the smallest quantum of a damn what she thinks. It is also our right to continue ignoring her recommendations as we go about making the games we want to make rather than the games she would prefer made.

I am, however, willing to implement one of her suggestions. We will implement her point #7 in First Sword if Anita Sarkeesian volunteers to submit to a physical but non-sexual beating and have the painful sounds she makes in the course of that beating recorded. Solely in the interests of verisimilitude and making games less shitty for women, of course. That’s not a threat, it is merely an offer. She can, of course, refuse, and thereby inform the world that her commitment to her cause is rather less than total. Then we will continue doing exactly what we were doing before she started trying to tell us what to do.

However, her points do serve to demonstrate the utter futility, the utter idiocy, of giving in to her demands. First the complaint was that there weren’t any women. Now the complaint is that there aren’t enough women, they aren’t dressed right, they’re the wrong color, they don’t walk in the approved fashion, they make the wrong noises, and so on. It never ends.

Any game developer who is dumb enough to think the demands are going to stop there simply hasn’t been paying attention to anything that has happened in the last 50 years. Just say no to SJWs. Just say no to non-gamers trying to tell game industry professionals how to do their jobs.

Game Development newsletter

If you think you might be interested in supporting the First Sword kickstarter, or want to otherwise support what we’re doing on the game front, please sign up for Castalia House’s Game Development newsletter. All you need to do is enter your email address, no name or anything else is required. I think I can assure you that it will be, in the long run, even more significant than Castalia House. If Castalia was the first step, this is the second.

This is entirely separate from the New Release newsletter, so even if you subscribe to that for the books, you’ll need to sign up separately for the Game Development one. As with New Releases, you can expect we’ll be occasionally giving away free stuff to subscribers, although what that might be, I can’t possibly say. And obviously, there will be no spamming or selling of information.

Among the other benefits subscribers get is the chance to have first crack at all pre-Alpha, Alpha, and Beta testing. And just to show you the sort of thing we’ll be showing subscribers, here is a glimpse of a Warhammer Fantasy Battle-style tabletop we’re assembling. We’re still in the process of getting the miniatures into 3D; right now the High Elven Spearguard and the Elven Archers are complete and we’re working on Goblin Archers and Elven Cavalry. Eventually, this battlefield will feature nine regiments; the regiment featured below is the same one that can be seen on the right side of the stockade in the image above. The terrain will not normally be flat green, that is merely a toggle to show the extent of the playable “table”.

You will probably notice that these screenshots have absolutely nothing to do with gladiators. That’s because what we are designing is a 3D miniatures playing system. First Sword is only one of literally scores of games that we intend to be playable in our system. Anyhow, if it’s potentially of interest, sign up for the newsletter.