Weapon rationale and placement - Taken from the design doc

Weapons Rationalisation



After initially taking a look at all of the weapons available to use in Unreal Tournament 2004, we have decided to only use a certain few. Our rationale for this is twofold.

First of all, we want our weapons in the game to be as straightforward as possible to use. If a player has to spend a large portion of their game time figuring out how to use a weapon, then to a large extent it is a wasted test. For this reason, we have opted to not include weapons such as the Bio Rifle and the Ion Painter, neither of which is straightforward to use properly.

Secondly, because the scale of our level is going to be fairly small in terms of an Unreal map, as we are only going to be testing in a 1v1 environment, we do not need to excessively clutter the level with weapons and ammo pick ups.

Taking this into account, ultimately we have decided on having four different weapons in our level, as well as the basic rifle which the player starts every game with. They are:

Minigun
The minigun is a fast firing weapon which has good all round use. It has a secondary fire mode which makes it better at range but slower firing. Its primary fire deals 7-8 damage per bullet, and the secondary fire deals 14 damage per bullet.

Flak Cannon
The flak cannon is a sort of futuristic shotgun. It fires several small pellets which make it extremely lethal at close range but woefully inaccurate at anything further away. Additionally, its secondary fire mode causes splash damage, meaning the player does not have to be 100% accurate to cause damage. Its primary fire deals 117 damage, and the secondary fire deals between 76 and 164 damage, depending on how close to the target the shot lands.


Shock Rifle
The shock rifle is a good range weapon with a fairly good rate of fire. The reason we chose this over the sniper rifle is that it doesn’t rely on a player’s skill with the scope to score hits. Like the flak cannon, it has a secondary fire function which deals splash damage to a target. The primary fire deals 45 damage per bullet.

Rocket Launcher
The rocket launcher deals a great deal of damage to a target as well as exploding on impact, dealing additional splash damage. Obviously a large amount of damage is dealt for a hit. Also it has a great secondary fire, which fires three rockets at once towards a target. The primary fire deals 80-88 damage.







Weapon placement rationale


Rocket Launcher
The rocket launcher sits in the middle of the map, visible to both players. You will notice there is only one on the map, which is because we want the rocket launcher to really dominate the battlefield when it is in play. To stop it being too powerful, it will be on a slow respawn timer and have limited ammo.

Flak Cannon
The flak cannons have been placed where they are as they are a short range weapon. Therefore by placing them relatively close to the centre of the map where combat is likely to occur most often is, we feel the most sensible placement.

Shock Rifle
The shock rifle is the main range weapon on our map, therefore it has been placed at a point which promotes the range abilities most of all, as it is right by the upper ledge on both sides of the map, to allow players to move out along the ledge and attempt to snipe the other player.

Minigun
Because the minigun is the all purpose weapon of the map, it makes sense to place it near where the player will spawn, as it will be the weapon we feel the player will use most often, so it is advantageous for them to get hold of it early on and familiarise themselves with it.

The work I did on the design document

This week our team completed our full academic pitch. Following on from the lit survey of last week, this week we added our design document.

We believe that the best game genre to complete our tests in is a first-person shooter. The reason for this is that we believe there are more statistics to analyse; for example, how many shots a player fires, or how many different weapons the player uses. Also, the game is more flexible in that you can give the player a motive and bend the narrative to suit our own will easier.

We are currently looking at using either Unreal Tournament 2004 or Half-Life 2 to create our map and subsequently test people. The reason we feel one of these programmes will be best is that, as a team, we have the most experience with these two and so feel we could create our best work within their editors.The players' matches will take the format of one-on-one games, with a time limit of ten minutes per match. We have elected to have one-on-one matches because it erases the elements of team play. We believe that the possibility of teammates interacting with each other could skew the results, whereas we can have more accurate data with a purely one-on-one match-up. As well, we have decided on our ten-minute time limit because it will give the player time to get to grips with all of the prominent details and features of the map.

The test subjects will be playing their matches against us. We will thoroughly test ourselves on the maps against each other in order to rank us in order of competence. The reason we are not using bots to play against the test subjects is that we feel there is too large a chance that the bots may not run properly all the time, and if their AI breaks then it will ruin the test. We will perform according to our pre-set script, depending on the difficulty which we are telling the player that they are competing against.

Literature Survey - My Work

This week our group wrote the first draft of our literature survey. The following are the sections which I wrote for it.

The work of Roger Caillois

Roger Caillois (1913-1978) was a French sociologist most noted for his 1958 book les Jeux et Hommes, translated as “Man, Play and Games.” He applied the term game to all play activities.

The principle value of Caillois' work for modern game design is that his framework for considering games provides us a unique perspective for examining play. (Bateman, 2006)[1] In order to examine theories of play, Caillois came up with four different classifications of play. They are:

Agon: This means competition, or a collection of games whose primary motivation is to test the player’s abilities against others. Caillois uses for example children competing to see how long they can hold their breath under water.
Alea: This means chance. It is seen as the counterpart to Agon. Each competitor has an equal chance of winning and the player is more passive.
Mimicry: This means simulation. It is based on forgetting, or shedding your personality to assume another. The essence of mimicry is in pretending to be someone or something else.
Ilinx: This means vertigo. It consists of momentary attempts to destroy the stability of perception and inflict temporary pain upon yourself. An example of this from Caillois is children spinning around to deliberately make themselves dizzy.

[1]Roger Caillois’ patterns of playChris Batemanhttp://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2006/05/roger_caillois_.html

Agon

“So central to the modern videogames industry is agon (competition) that many people considered ‘game’ to be almost synonymous with the notion of competitive play.”(Bateman, 2006)[1]

This opening sentence to Bateman’s article highlights how important agon is believed to be within the industry as people believing games to have an inherently competitive aspect to them. There are always high scores to beat or other players to kill. This is also backed up by Markku Eskelinen when he writes “in ilynx and alea the player is a passive intrigant whereas in agon and mimicry she has to be more active.”[2]

It is important to look at is how the theories of ludology and narratology fit into the concept of Agon. It is easy to envisage how well ludology fits into the concept, as many games which base themselves on being pure competition often do not feature much in the way of a story other then the bare minimum, for example first person shooters or sports games.. With these games, there is always one fixed objective which doesn’t change, be it to score more goals then the other team, capture the enemies’ flag or kill all the other team.

Espen Aarseth argues however, that “gameplay is part and parcel of what makes the story; in some senses, it is the story.” (Wallace, 2006)[3] Therefore when people try to exclusively try to label narratology as the storyline, they are missing something. It is possible that what is missing is experience. The player’s experience of a game must surely be taken into account when discussing narratology. Because it is hard to quantify an experience which no two players will share exactly, it is possible that experience has been neglected from the argument. Although in a football game for example, the end goal of the game is defined purely by the rules, how the player achieves those goals is the story. No two games of football would ever be the same therefore they cannot simply adhere to a basic set of rules.

[1]The challenge of Agon
Chris Batemanhttp://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2006/03/the_challenge_o.html

[2]The Gaming situation
Markku Eskelinenhttp://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/

[3]The play’s the thing
Mark Wallacehttp://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_36/220-The-Play-s-the-Thing

Alea

Roger Caillois described Alea as the following: “Alea is the Latin name for the game of dice. I have borrowed it to designate, in contrast to agon (games of competition), all games that are based on a decision independent of the player, an outcome over which he has no control, and in which winning is the result of fate rather than triumphing over an adversary.” (Caillois, 1958)[1]

The discussion here is where do ludology and narratology fit into the concept of alea? With a game being probability based there obviously must be a heavy ludemic element to it.

Chris Bateman himself looked into ways to introduce aleatory elements through narrative in his tabletop role playing games. “I made the chances of success tend to be quite high (80-100%) but provided an alternative aleatory element in the Criticals system, allowing players to succeed to wildly differing degrees. In this way, the alea was not will I succeed or fail, but can I succeed to a degree significant enough to impact the flow of the narrative.” (Bateman, 2006)[2]

Giving the player varying degrees of success is a good way to introduce alea through narrative by opening up the rules. In computer games, a good example of an aleatory element is loot dropping from bosses in online role playing games. The player doesn’t know beforehand exactly what will drop from the boss, but still participate on the off chance that loot which they will want will drop.

Bateman also gives an example of where aleaic elements fail, where the player is tempted to use the save function to simply reload the area if the chance does not fall in their favour. Therefore I believe that whilst there is the potential for narratology to be applicable to alea, whilst the player has the ability to undo anything that goes wrong then the suspension of disbelief is there to be broken.

[1]Man, Play and Games
Roger Caillouis
University of Illinois Press
ISBN 025207033X

[2]The rituals of Alea
Chris Bateman
http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2005/11/the_rituals_of_.html

More links of the works of Caillois

http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2006/09/the_role_of_the.html

http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2005/11/the_rituals_of_.html

http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2006/05/the_joy_of_ilin.html

http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2006/05/roger_caillois_.html

http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2006/03/the_challenge_o.html

http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2005/12/the_anarchy_of__1.html

As found by Keith

21st century game design – Chris Bateman

Having read this book initially with the intention of looking at sounds and player experiences, I stumbled upon what I believed to be a more interesting section on game classification. I would like to bring it into our project if at all possible. Basically the writer looks at the work of sociologist Roger Caillois, who identified four distinct categories of play, back in 1958.

Agon :- (Competition) This means a collection of games whose primary motivation is to test the players abilities against others. So we are talking competition here, the writer uses for example children competing to see how long they can hold their breath under water.

An example of a modern day game using elements of Agon would be an online First Person shooter, such as Counterstrike

Alea :- This means chance. It is seen as the counterpart to Agon. Each competitor has an equal chance of winning and the player is more passive.

An example of a modern day game using elements of Alea would be Mario Party

Mimicry :- This means simulation. It is based on forgetting, or shedding your personality to assume another. The essence of mimicry is in pretending to be someone or something else.

An example of a modern day game using elements of Mimicry would be World of Warcraft

Ilinix :- This means vertigo. It consists of momentary attempts to destroy the stability of perception and inflict temporary pain upon yourself.

An example of a modern day game using elements of Ilinix would be Resident Evil

I believe that there is some merit in taking a look into his work and seeing how it would apply to modern day games design, given that his work was done in 1958? Obviously tying it into ludology and narratology, for example, trying to come up with ludemic and narratological ways of designing games under each category.

We could do a huge research into the current games in the Market, classify them into the four areas above and identify trends within certain genres and try to identify which games and classifications appeal to certain people.

A brief literary review

Okay basically what I have done with my piece is break it down into chunks and then dissected what I believe to be the most pertinent points, and laid them out in sequential order below with my comments about them.

1. The piece begins with a brief bit about the first ever computer game made, Spacewar. Apparantly, it was the most “natural” thing to create when its makers first had access to technology. Given that there had never been anything else like this made ever, what inspired them to create it, what about the aspect of playing a game seemed so natural to a group of guys who couldn’t ever have seen something like that before.

2. One quote that I particularly like is this: “She views the computer as a medium for designing action where users play equivalent roles to both the drama performer and audience member.” It is true that when you are playing a game you are both actor and spectator. Taken from Brenda Laurel (1993)

3. Janet Murray (1997) distinguishes three main qualities in the medium of computer games. They are:

Immersion, this means the ability to construct belief rather then merely suspend belief. What I suspect this means is that with a film, you suspend your belief for a while, you know what you are seeing isn’t real but you don’t let it bother you. In a game environment, you populate the world and interact and create your own story.

Agency, which is the capacity of the medium (computer games) to allow users to perform actions which have consequences on the representation (I take this to mean game)

Transformation, which is the ability to morph into multi-perspective, simulated worlds that can enhance the two previously described characteristics. I’m honestly not sure what that one means though.

I like the idea of having another author come up with those three points as it gives us an idea of someone elses attempts to categorize things. One thing it is worth Bearing in mind is the age of these papers which the article quotes, the newest is 97 and the oldest is 93. Therefore it is worth considering the modern day validity of what they have to say.

4. Espen Aarseth (1997) analyses textual representations exclusively and so while most of his stuff is not so helpful to us, he does analyze text based games and argues that to claim there is no difference between games and narratives is to ignore essential qualities of both categories.


Link to my article: http://www.ludology.org/articles/thesis/representation.html

I also thought it would be worthwhile taking a closer look at the writers from my piece, namely Brenda Laurel, Janet Murray and Espen Aarseth:

Laurel: http://www.tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/BrendaBio.html

Murray:http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~murray/

Aarseth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espen_J._Aarseth

Final Year Project

As of right now (12:11 pm on the third of October 2007) this blog is being used exclusively to chart my progress on our third year project.

During the first week I have signed up to our group forums, which was set up by Ivan. The forum is an excellent idea as it allows us to share ideas, links to good reading and leave each other messages when we are not all together.

I have also began reading up on narratology and ludology papers online, which were posted on our group forum for us to all read.