Game Design Zen

Soren Johnson recently published an article, ‘The End of Games? Or, Will Free-To-Play Swallow the Industry’ in the most recent Game Developer Magazine (May 11). The article is great, but it was the title itself that struck me. The industry’s in a crazy, topsy-turvy whirl right now. New markets are emerging, but old markets are suffering. Consoles may even be dying and whole markets may be disappearing all together. There are predictions that many existing studios may not survive.

So, yeah. Soren’s title struck me. It’s both timely and clever. ‘The End of Games?’ he asks. And, in answer, I reply, ‘No!’ It’s not the end of games, but rather, the beginning of something new. What we’re seeing, at this very moment, is the birth of video games as the dominate media of our time. That’s right. You heard me. Games will soon become the dominant media of our day.

Background

Allow me to explain. I’ve been playing games for a long time. I sat, cross-legged on the floor, enthralled by the original release of Pong, on the Atari 2600. I waited eagerly for 15 minutes loading Zaxxon from a cassette tape. I spent 100’s of dollars in the arcade trying to beat Gauntlet, Golden Axe, and Pinbot (Where was Tommy when I needed him!?). I played Doom and Wolfenstein when Id Software was a fledgling, and John Carmack was an unknown. I played Everquest when it was ‘wow’, and World of Warcraft when it was ‘WoW’ too.

I’ve beaten God of War 3 and seen more Might and Magics than Super Bowls. I’ve owned the systems, the consoles, the PC’s, the handhelds, and the laptops. I’ve had the game dates, and hosted the LAN parties, and then the Wii parties, and then the LAN parties again. I’ve spent thousands of hours with my family and friends in games. And of course, I develop games for a living.

During all that time, I considered myself a gamer. I had my gamer friends, a gamer wife, and my 2.5 little gamer children. That is, until recently. You see the blessing of getting older is that you skill up in Wisdom and gain a new skill called, Perspective. So, now, I no longer consider myself a gamer. Honestly, there is no longer a need to do so. ‘Gamer’ isn’t a group anymore. It’s not a category of person or an adjective that should be applied.

Who You Calling a ‘Gamer’?

Games are more a part of my life now than they’ve ever been, but I am no longer a ‘gamer’ because there is no such thing anymore. Games are all around us and practically everyone plays games. The soccer mom in the grocery store works a Sudoku on her smart phone, while the business exec gets in a few rounds of Tiny Wings at the airport. The neighbor relaxes with a bit of Bejeweled while the retired grandpa eagerly looks forward to playing Angry Birds on his grandson’s IPod. They’re all gamers.

Consoles, PC’s, phones, browsers, portables, and tablets. These are just the beginning. The future is going to be crazily exciting. Video games are now the mainstream and quickly becoming the dominant media of our day. Even the Smithsonian Museum of Art has them on display.

Change Is All Around Us

But, Soren’s question hits on something important. Games aren’t what they used to be. Times are changing. Games are changing. Gone is the idea of ‘the next big thing’ because games are always around us and there is always a game to play. Who has time to ‘wait for the next game’ when we have tons of good games already?

Change can be scary, but change can also be great. The beauty of this change is that we now have all kinds of games for all kinds of purposes. There’s the tiny ‘got a few minutes’ games, the ‘2 hour compete with friends’ party games, the ‘4 hour epic raid night’ games, and even the ‘relax before bed’ games. Like reading material, games come in all shapes and sizes and it’s only the beginning. And, just like reading material, you have your trashy magazines, meant to be read on the John, your light summer reads, and your intense works. There are games for learning and games for pleasure, games as throwaways, and games that you share with friends. There are ‘guilty pleasure’ games and games of critical acclaim.

With all this change, of course the business models are changing. Again. New stars are rocketing to the sky and some old titans are crashing down. Again. Everything is in flux in the game world. Again. The tumult isn’t because games are dying. It’s because something new is being born: we are witnessing the birth of games as the dominant media of our time. It’s a time of change, and I say, change is good!

Last December, the National Training and Simulation Association (NTSA) put together this interview because of the positive feedback from my I/ITSEC 2010 presentation. The presentation was a lot of fun. The icing on the cake was that we went on to win the NTSA Outstanding Achievement in Modeling and Simulation – Training award for our work on the Navy’s Damage Control Trainer game.  Fun, fun!

Gigiwoo.

Thankfully, it’s publish. For all you programmers out there, I just published an article in Game Engine Gems 2. It’s titled, ‘Believable Dead Reckoning for Networked Games’ and it’s something I’m particularly proud of. I researched the topic extensively, so I hope it will help save some serious development time. Time that is better spent improving game play!

Game Engine Gems 2

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up. As game devs, we like to hit 60 frames per second (aka Hz). This is particularly important because our brain processes vision from our eyeballs at about 72 Hz (90 for peripheral motion). So, if we get too far below this, the brain starts to perceive gaps in data – which are annoying. Unfortunately, at 60 Hz, each frame only lasts 16 milliseconds, which isn’t very much time to get a position report from someone all the way in California. Bummer.

In practice, this becomes a very major problem for any sort of networked game. Players don’t care about networks, lag, latency, bandwidth, server ping, or any of that jazz. They just want to have fun and they darn sure don’t want to see networked vehicles jittering, bouncing, or warping all over the place. Never mind that it took 100 ms to get the data out and back again, making it fundamentally impossible to depict exactly where someone is right now. Your players just don’t care. They expect us to figure out all the ‘voodoo’ and make things act in believable ways.

Enter dead reckoning, also know as ‘client side prediction’ or once upon a time, ‘zero ping’. Dead reckoning was originally used by early sailors to help them find their way home, across oceans, using only stars. (Thank God for Google maps!) In this chapter, I discuss pretty much everything you need to know about dead reckoning. It starts with the basics, works through the theory, and builds up an entire solution (including algorithms and source code). It presents existing techniques as well as a new technique I call ‘projective velocity blending’. In hindsight, that sounds like a fun way to decorate a birthday cake…

If I could print the whole article here, I would. But, here’s at least a short excerpt to get you started:

“Bob isn’t a bad developer; he just made some reasonable, but misguided assumptions. After all, the basic concept is pretty straight forward. Dead Reckoning is the process of predicting where an actor is right now by using its last known position, velocity, and acceleration. It applies to almost any type of moving actor including cars, missiles, monsters, helicopters, and characters on foot. For each remote actor being controlled somewhere else on the network, we receive updates about its kinematic state that include its position, velocity, acceleration, orientation, and angular velocity. In the simplest implementation, we take the last position we received on the network and project it forward in time. Then, on the next update, we do some sort of blending and start the process all over again. Bob is right that the fundamentals aren’t that complex, but making it believable is a different story.”

A little bit of the process is described on the Wikipedia entry for Dead Reckoning.

So, I woke up this morning and had one of those, ‘Aha’ moments. You know, when you’re sure you’ve solved cancer and hunger and the meaning of life, all at the same time? Of course, I’m a guy, so my thoughts are simple. Instead of solving peace, I realized that men are ‘First Person Cameras’ and women are ‘Orbit Motion Models’. Yes, I know – it’s not nearly as catchy as that whole Mars and Venus thing. But, what did you expect? It is a game blog after all.

So, hopefully, you all know what I mean already, and you’ve realized that what I’ve just shared is deeply profound. You see the timeless wisdom derived from years of study and ties to the spirits of my ancestors. But, in case it’s not crystal clear, allow me a moment to explain. So, a First Person Camera usually means that the camera is attached to the player’s eyepoint. You know, it looks straight out in the world and sees things from the player’s perspective. When the player changes position, the camera moves right along. And, when the player rotates, so does the camera. Not only is it really clear where a First Person Camera is now, but it’s really easy to see where they are headed and predict where they will be in the future (see my article in Game Engine Gems 2 on believable dead reckoning).

But, an Orbit Motion Model is much more complex. With it, the camera is sort of attached to the player, at a distance, and looks inward, keeping an eye on the player most of the time. As the player moves around, so does the camera, but in a sort of orbital pattern – hence the name.

Although both cameras look around the world, they are fundamentally different ways of looking at the world. For the first person camera, everything is seen from the player’s point of view. Whereas, the orbital camera sees the world in relationship to the player. Consider the orbital camera for a moment. Sometimes, it moves with the player, sometimes not. When the player turns sharply around a corner, sometimes an Orbit camera will move quickly to catch up, but sometimes it won’t. It just depends on the implementation, the fine game settings, and of course, the implementation anomalies, which we sometimes refer to as ‘bugs’.

You see, an orbital camera has much more subtlety than it’s simplistic partner. With an orbital camera, you need to account for follow-distance, view direction, and soft-attachment. Heck, sometimes, an orbital camera won’t be facing the player at all. It might move ahead and look back at the player, and sometimes, it might move somewhere else all together. And, games with orbital cameras have to think about all sorts of things, like when the player turns quickly down a corridor – does the camera swing sharply to keep them in view? Or maybe you’ve got a soft tether going on, and it glides smoothly over and around. Does your camera pull back in big rooms and zoom close in corridors? And let’s not forget those tricky spots – like when the orbital camera gets shoved up against a wall or even pushed all the way through. For the First Person Camera, smashing into walls is no problem, you’re inside the player, so you see what he sees – a blank wall. Of course, being the orbital model allows the advantage of perspective. There’s nothing quite like that rare moment playing a game when the camera penetrates through the walls. The walls drop away and you get get an awesome view of the whole world, as the designer sees it.

Yes, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that it’s the perfect geeky-guy, game-developer analogy for relationships. So, the next time you’re in one of those deep, meaningful, challenging discussions with your partner and you’re sure you come from different planets, try to see things with another camera. It’s not that she’s from another planet. It’s that you view the world from completely different perspectives.

After almost 20 years of marriage, I think I just leveled up.

It took me a little while to get a get a new mac all setup, but I’m here to celebrate with my first GiGi Reviews! It’s uploaded and ready to go.

In Episode 1, we review ‘Mystic Forest’ for the IPad. This game earns a definitive ‘Bad Game’ Design through a very clunky game interface and extremely limited feedback. The game is frustrating and made for an easy first review.