CITIZEN: Mapping out Residential

I'm mapping out the Residential sector.

It's becoming  a congruent area. Previously, I wanted to split it up into smaller bits  to make easier to manage.

But I found this a bit problematic. First, I couldn't take my imagination into it. I couldn't invent what corridor that was to follow because I just didn't know what it was about.

Second, the idea that we jump from one mini-scene to another might have seriously impeded the stealth/combat gameplay. I imagined that the combat gameplay would be played out in a wide area where the player character would be able to avoid the robots by being clever with corners and hiding places. That entailed an 'arena' of sorts, and sequential corridors don't the bill.

As an adult, I can't take for granted that some creative techniques don't necessarily give you the tools that encourage to 'follow the fun' and actually be creative. The making of this Residential sector has given me some interesting discoveries about myself.

In my post of my analysis of Torment's level design, I had drawn a few principles that seemed to be relevant to solving my probems. One of those principles was giving levels centres of interests.

I drew a top-down map, placing key areas I knew needed to appear in this level: Citizens Tracking Bureau, apartments, shops, market, park, SubRail stations, Homeless enclaves.

I didn't have any specific rationale on their placement on the map. I simply just drew out the CTB, my first centre of interest, and placed everything else around it

Usually at this point I would feel a bit anxious. This anxiety almost always revolved around the rationale of something, of whether there is a mechanical reason why this here building is here and not there. Sometime I can have anxiety about whether this map will work well in isometric perspective.

But I wasn't anxious this time. I believe it's mainly because I just made the CTB as my focal point. And the logic of where things were placed became less important. The level itself was more satisifed with having a centre intereset than it was about having some rationale of why things were put where they were. After all, in the real world, things end up inexplicable locations, too.

After the top-down map was drawn out, I jumped into 3d to execute it. This normally fills me with anxiety, too because I've been in this road countless of times before. I didn't actually know how to express the top-down map in a way that would excite me.

Then, when I was figuring out a way to express doors/doorways, I unlocked something in my brain. And its importance surprised me.

For a while now, when I usually want to depict a door, I create a solid rectangle and place it flush against the wall; that's the representation of the door.  Whilst it certainly looks like a door, it doesn't look like it's trying hard to be one. Understandably, I've always been unhappy about this.

So I tried reversing it by modelling a doorway instead:

That looks better certainly. It looks better because it feels there's some volume at play, that the door/doorway depicts a recess and that leads you into the building; it reads much better. But why did I say it was so imporant?

What it really does is that it helps my imagination move forward. It's a step towards the correct impression of how the level should be. Obviously, it is not the final shape, but when used to generically populate every door entry, it brings my imagination to a level where it has something more to chew on.

This brings me to the creative techniques, and specifically to greyboxing. A greybox is literally what you see in the screenshots above. You might have heard this word in the game dev scene. In greyboxing, you place rudimentary shapes (primitives) into the scene as stand-ins. As you can see, that is what I'm apparently doing, and yet in deeper sense it isn't at all.

For a long time I had struggled with greyboxing because as an activity it felt like a creative dead-end. Perhaps it's because in greyboxing the designer is told to 'play around'. However, it wasn't actually fun to play around with boxes; I don't play that way. On its own greyboxing was not feeding my brain with something to play on and imagine further. Cylindres were literally just cylindres, and boxes were literally boxes; grey was literally grey, and though I did use greyboxing for programmatic aspects of the game, it was a creative dead-end.

Then the doorway modelling happened and I learned two things.

Greyboxing is too trivial and self-explanatory an idea to be worth any name given to it, and that I should never have paid attention to it at all. 

Second, and more importantly, find ways that feed your imagination; find ways to play off the work and make the work play off of you. Your work should speak to you and cause you to engage with it all the time. Let's say: if I moved this wall or that, or added something, do I think 'wouldn't be great if this were a place where the homeless hung out"? In this case, creative activity is prompting new ideas back.

When I look at the map now, I can see how I'm feeding off of it. I've since introduced more shapes because I can start the see how the level itself it going to look like. But when I began I needed to see something much more  then boxes.

There's also a problem of too much detailing. Once I sketched a medium-sized level as an isometric drawing. I thought that it would be easier to imagine and design the scene in pencil. This was not actually the case for me.

Drawing offered me no creative advantages, and only made my workflow more tedious; I still turned out unsatisfying designs. But what really was the problem here was the same problem as greyboxing: all the while I'm drawing my level, I'm feeling extremely uninspired.

It's not my disposition that's uninspired. Instead, the drawing is not talking back to me. As I'm trying to give it its form, is it feeding anything creative back to me?

I see now that whilst it's not simply about which process is better. Whether I'm doing things in blocks or detailing, following workflows might blind us to what this is all in aid of. For me, every creative process must elicit more imagination from me. Drawing is not always the answer, and neither is industry advice.

CITIZEN: Workflows: Frustration

Weekends always come to me and I always say to them that they're never enough. The rest of the week is gone to hell regardless of whether I wrote Early to Rise or not. I didn't write Early to Sleep, did I? So that recipe is no good.

Today, I touched the map in the morning. But then it was a walk to the bookstore, then a lunch, then training, then eating, then watching, and watching some more that leads me to back here, asking myself, 'what the hell am I doing?' What, indeed?

What would I have done different?

I would have just wanted to take the afternoon. I could have, but I wanted to go out. Then, I would have wanted the evening, but it is habitual to take it easy and have your palate cleansers and uncleansers. Perhaps I could have taken the last bit of energy, but what good does that do for Early to Rise?

So perhaps I could have the early morning. That would be tomorrow, and since tomorrow is not today, I effectively just gave up today. And now, it's too Late to sleep to be Early to Rise. Time moves forward, is the frustration is keep my body awake to write this when I should be sleeping.

I can't find minutes or seconds of time to recover, or any space in the mind to carve out. Motivation is so rare that I don't expect it anymore.

Sometimes I build up momentum, despite that it is more often a drudgery. The violence is not just in the beginning, but in each inch of travel. There's no easy part.

What am I looking for?

It would be capital to have a bit of fun with this. Or to feel that this project is going somewhere. I'm anchored to this deadweight project, unable to find the groove. There's no rhythm to it. It's stop and go. It stalls and it takes an heroic struggle to get it to totter on.

But  am I really progressing? Clearly, I've been through this bit of road more than dozens of times before. Yet it less to do with the iteration than it is the constant stopping.

I blame Time on principle. But even in Time, there's no way out but through: I ought  to use Time; I ought to find my rhythm. Discipline, anger, planning, sleeping, waking, etc, may all be parts of the answer; I have to keep on moving.

Find the rhythm, man. Or else you're dead in the water.

CITIZEN: Mazes and Open Spaces

In Torment and in Fallout I noticed that the maps may be designed in a couple of patterns: 1.) open space, 2.) connected rooms.

Icewind Dale:

Diablo is like a DnD map, 3.) mazes or dungeons.

However, it doesn't always have to depict indoors, even though you could interpret the map that way.

In this Diablo II - Act 3 Jungle map, it is interesting to see how it just seems to be random:

I just remembered that some Diablo maps were randomly-generated, too. And this Lower Kurast one looks to be just structures plopped over a field.

More Diablo maps here. 

In XCOM:EU, they depict more obstacles, though if you look at what's traversable, it also looks like an interior dungeon map with lots more obstacles in the open spaces.

It's interesting to see how most of them are set up as a scene, like a 'key' scene (DnD parlance of 'key'). It's obviously not just some random-looking maze of corridors, although they do that, too, especially for the procedural ones.

In Torment, there's a lot more emphasis on the fact that they are set pieces. 

Obviously there's a purpose to all these maps, and they work with the game's design purpose as well. Diablo's expansive maps give some space between areas to hack-and-slash. XCOM is more compact and needs all these obstalces because it has a cover system that's a big part of combat. Fallout and Torment don't have a cover system and both have a big worldbuilding and role-playing aspects, which lends itself the grander set pieces which aren't tactical in nature.

The cover system in CITIZEN is a major game mechanic, which is why I've normally used maze corridors, and coercing obstacles onto open spaces. Stealth is not always in play at every location, and that makes it easier to design the aesthetics of the map.

In Torment, I'm getting the sense that there are certain city sectors that are cleanly partitioned by large portals. This works in trying to resolve the nature of Robot patrols; they'll be only patrolling their jurisdiction.

I'll mention Shadowrun.

Shadowrun maps are made either for exploration, or for combat. I don't think they are be both. This differs from Fallout or Torment where combat can occur at any time. In my opinion, they might have come to the decision that was simpler to design a combat map with appropriate and reasonable obstacles than try to make combat mechanics work on an exploration map. Note systems Shadowrun also employs cover systems. 

In CITIZEN I chose the middle road where all areas are combat-ready except for shops and establishments. A combat-ready map is one that supports a cover system.

What I've thought about during the writing of this post is that 1.) you can start with open space or a room as long you use a set piece mentality to give it a centre of focus (or centres of focus);  2.) have entry and exit points to limit the expansion of the set piece/s; 3.) use mazes only when it makes sense (e.g. Sewers); 4.) establishments should have a purpose, and that is driven by the narrative. The tighter the narrative, the easier to make map design decisions.

Although I make lots of mention of Diablo maps, it doesn't seem that they're fit for purpose as they don't provide any advantage: they don't use a cover system, and they are expansive with no activity in between. It's exploratory from a geographical point of view, and not from worldbuilding where you expect to glean more details per square metre.

CITIZEN: So, speaking of a game...

So, speaking of the game, I believe I want to actually write about CITIZEN. But first something in the way of an introduction.

I bought an old game called Planescape - Torment from GOG the other day. Although I liked playing fantasy games in my younger years, I've lost interest in them because the bit about magic never really sank in with me.

I wasn't very good intuiting how best to use magic. Offensive spells, like Fireball or Magic Missile were easy to understand and use. Other types, like those that give temporary boosts to your skills or attributes, although easy to grasp, gave me a strange anxiety as I didn't know when it would be best used since their effects last only a short time.

The fantasy setting is why I never bothered with this title, even though these were the same devs that created Fallout 1 and 2, titles that have had a formative impact on my brain. Even if I knew it back then, I still probably wouldn't care, since the Torment is such a different game.

Several years ago, I replayed bits of Fallout 2, though not the whole way through. In Fallout 2 and in Torment, parts of the game certainly was rooted in the kind of fun that felt fun for me. If I were to summarise, I'd say it was simply discovering the world through descriptions and talking to NPCs and then having the privilege of interacting with them.

But another aspect is the narrative writing of these two games. Torment was released in 1999, and is indeed written better than many games nowadays who tout themselves as 'great narrative experiences'. An example of one such modern disappointment is the Red Strings Club, which I will never recommend for those who value their time. Torment's writing is not what I call concise nor succint, nor is it always on-key, but even at its worse, it doesn't offend my sensitive intolerance for wordy or uselessly vernacular writing.

This is important because Torment rides on the text; it is a text-heavy game. The dialogue choices are simple and experience points can often by earned by talking to another NPC in a certain way.

There is an aspect about dialogue role-playing that I've not really explored when I played the Fallout series. Whether it was my young self that prevented more exploration or experimentation, or whether it simply the difference between the design of Torment and Fallout, I found dialogue role-playing more accessible in Torment, almost to the point where it felt that dialogue choices were as good as any other choice in the game.

There are other events that lacked feedback for their significance, if any. What happened is: you go into a house of an old couple; old man is asleep, wife is over cooking something; you talk to the old man, but he's upset that you've just barged into his house; in CRPG games, trespassing into other people's homes is usually a normal thing to do, but here, the old man reacts realistically; he tells you to skedaddle, and although you have the choice to confront his rudeness right there and then, you choose to back off (this is happening through the dialogue system), but as a parting gift he still hits you over the head with something, and you have the choice of retaliating; when you do -- I did -- the wife rushes over, and they officially start assaulting me, and combat ensues; I kill the old man, then the old woman; I've become a killer of old men and women. Of course, I didn't mean to kill them; I thought I would just reciprocate vindictively at the old man's vindictiveness, but one thing led to another, I said to the judge.

I've not experienced any repercussion from this fatal encounter. In Fallout I expected the Hand of Game Designer to rain down some kind of punitive event that will set my morals right, but in Torment, I have gained a place to rest and heal up for free. Time will tell if this comes to bite me in the ass, but you can see how interesting this is from a player's point of view. It may be genius, or not. I have avoided searching the Internet for other people's explanations.

Another good example of dialoge role-playing is when you meet the Damsel-in-Distress NPC. You talk to her; she's afeared for her life, and her friend/sister/whatever has been kidnapped by goons; she wants you to help her by following her into some alley. Whilst the dialogue choices are usually comprised of speaking lines, it sometimes indicates actions you can do, like inspect the woman's dress, of which you'll find that the bloodstains seem old, and the dialogue leads you to believe that something's not right. You can choose to believe the veracity of the Damsel's story, or you can challenge it. I chose to challenge it.

At some point, however, I get chased around by thugs (and subsequently they kill me) for some unknown reason. Has it to do with my frustrating the Damsel's ruse? I can't say. If so, the free-flowing design didn't indicate that there was a cause-and-effect.

In any case, this doesn't really detract from the good role-playing experience that the Damsel-in-Distress dialogue produced.

The question I have is whether any of these may be applied in any way to CITIZEN itself, since it fairly driven by text, too, though with deliberate emphasis on conciseness.

In the old man and wife scenario, the dialogue role-playing allowed things to transpire through the use of words and interpersonal interactions, which are different from other direct but passive actions such running, crouching, or showing your weapon, which are some of the actions that the player in CITIZEN can do.

It is important to note that I observed that the old couple's deaths gave me a free place to stay, but not that it was ever written in words in the game. I gained a practical thing, and that is tied also to the fact that resting is a mechanic in the game. More abstractly, I gained something through combat (killing the couple) but which was first instigated by a dialogue-level interaction, noting that these are two different game mechanics.

This isn't unique, though. Fallout does this too. However, my highly sensitive moral nature is often plagued by the doubt that I played the game correctly: should I, or should I've not offended this NPC? Whoops, I did, and now they want to kill me, but instead I kill them! Is the game going to close off doors because of this? What am I going to miss?

Perhaps I was more troubled as a child than I originally thought.

Yet as an adult playing Torment, killing the couple only added curiosity. Because I was wounded after combat, I needed a place to rest, so I rested there for free. I saw the reward immediately although I wasn't told there was going to be. In contrast, in Fallout, an event's repercussions might not only come back to haunt you, but there sometimes missed a short-term feedback for things you do. This gives me anxiety unjustly especially when we just want to enjoy a nice game, eh?

Thus, if I were to glean some principles from the Killing of the Old Couple: 1.) allow role-playing dialogue to instigate non-dialogue events, 2.) allow player to re-choose decisions that they might have skipped in order to disabuse them of the notion that the dialogue is engineered as a one-choice-one-result assumption, 3.) give feedback as immediately as is sensible to choices, both good or bad, or both, which will remove anxiety of what they might have possibly missed with the interaction. 

The role-playing in Damsel-in-Distress is also covered by the above principles. I could add, however: 4.) remember that you can add interpersonal actions in the dialogue to add more possible avenues for role-play and get away from just a conversation, and 5.) allow NPCs to change through role-play dialogue.

Principle # 5 is rather interesting because I never considered NPCs should change. But of course they can; an NPC can start out as suspicious, or your enemy, and after the dialogue (where you can presumably do a non-combat fisticuffs by describing how you out-martial-arts him and break his legs) he becomes your friend. That latter bit actually touches on Principle # 4.

In Torment, the combat aspect is de-prioritised over role-play, which surprised me. In CITIZEN, I've tried to downplay the role that combat plays in the game because the glamourisation of guns and violence in many modern games turns me off. I still want to introduce combat-fun but I'm trying to be careful about going off the deep end.

I ended up analysing Torment because it's actually encouraged me about the validity of the vision I have for CITIZEN.  I've often rethought my game over the years, scoping out the boundaries, with much difficulty, between what I'd like for it to be and what it can realistically be. Torment has given me some reminders that, at the very least, good writing can actually be enjoyable to read (for those inclined to read, that is). It encouraged me not to shy away from quirkiness of game design or writing; if there are missing bits, the player may fill it up. It's given me some ideas of how to approach role-playing dialogue.

And it tells me that combat isn't everything.

In the next or near-future blog post, I might actually start talking about CITIZEN...

CITIZEN: Workflows: Early to Rise

Months ago, I got into a groove of waking up 4am and working 3 hours before having to log into work. I found that if I had switched context from the beginning of the day, it was easy for my mind to switch back to it in the evening after finishing work.

What's more, I was able to switch context in the course of the day, if I wanted to. By being engaged with the game project at first light enabled my mind to keep the attention throughout the day.

The problem is the early rise, of course. It's hard to maintain because if something happens to interrupt the routine, and most of it is out of my control, then it's easy to fall back into the usual cycle. Yearly seasons affect the sunrise and sunset times and that affects sleeping habits as well.

Discipline is truly needed.

Though I've been wayward as of late, it is clear to me that early-rise routine is superior to working in the evenings. The main problem was context-switching. After work, I could try to work on the game, but I often could not focus because my mind was still working on the problems of my full-time job (which happens to be vfx programming). By the time I switched focus, I was already either getting ready for dinner, or I had to get dinner ready. Sometimes I would prefer to out and exercise.

If I deferred until after dinner, post-dinner entertainments -- watching TV with my wife -- set me back 1 or 2 hours more. I could work on my game from 9pm until midnight, a good solid 3 hours, but these hours were not the optimal times: by this time I would be mentally tired, completely taken out of game context, and still need to take care of the dishes.

But the hardest part is not just the suboptimal available hours, but the mindset that settles in with this sort of routine. A mental weariness inevitably sets in from having to constantly fight against the context-switch. As a result I become less and less inclined to work on the game: if there is a problem that gives me anxiety, it becomes very easy to give myself an excuse, 'I'll sort it out tomorrow.' But I actually don't sort it out, and this routine of procrastination deepens before I realise I'm actually procrastinating.

I've compared the differences and I've pretty much made up my mind that though I am really an evening person, I objectively get better results when I work on the game in the early morning.

I've taken to write down to myself things I think will help me get back on the wagon.

1. Early morning is dark, so lamp must be ready at the table before bedtime.
2. If drawing, drawing equipment (paper, pens, ruler, board) must be on the table before bedtime.
3. TODO list must be written in advance and placed on the table beforehand. It may not be a literal to-do list, but even as thoughts that need to be thought through more.
4. Decide to wake up the moment I open my eyes to look at the clock*.

* These days I normally wake up at around 5.30am; I open one eye and look at the LED clock across the room. However, if I didn't make a decision the night before to wake up early, I'm normally going to decide that morning to sleep in. If this happens, I wake up at 7am, which is far too late to do anything.

My wife was the one that started this early-morning routine when she came back from S Korea and had to adjust to the time zones. She would wake up at 2-3am, and at some point, I got into it as well. We kept on this for months. But we've fallen back to the usual time now.

There are other challenges, like when to take breakfast. But I think that a 4am is the sweetest spot.

CITIZEN: Rambles: What do we blog?

In the game development context, what is the best kind of information that a blog can share?

Explaining story (narrative) requires caution because you don't want to give the story away, or  try to explain the way your mind thinks. It seems to go against the purpose of storytelling. 

Sharing technical information is useful for documentation, useful for deliberating, useful for future planning, useful for making you look smart. Documentation, however, if best handled internally where the data/info is better managed than a CMS.

Experiences can be shared, but what kind of experience do you get from sitting in front of a computer all day? And if I'd be honest, that's mostly what game devs do. Fancy going out for a photography session to capture textures or taking a video of someone taking a walk for reference. Everything's online anyway.

Game developers taking a piss at game development seem like a good pastime if we go by the popularity of these types of things. I'm not qualified, however, because I've not really worked professional in game dev before. Also going along with the gaming news crowd is a bit like taking a second serving of vomit. A bit boring if not nauseating. To be fair, I like reading the game dev day-to-day experiences, but that's for consumption, not for dishing out.

Some things fall between all that, though, like game design. But I'm just winging that. I get these moments when I think I've come upon some good ideas like GMAC or a new way to do graphical sorting. I tried to make a fuss about it, but I just heard crickets. I still think they're good ideas, and no one listen to a nobody. Boohoo... If I get off the ground, and get off higher than the stratosphere, so much so that I get a chance to present in GDC, I'll rub these two things in people's faces. Boohoo....

(I suppose the Making of Karateka fucked it up for some of us because now we're tempted to think that if we make it big we need some kind of material for own documentary.)

But until that comes to pass, what do I blog about?

Well, at the end of the day, no one's reading, right? I can say anything. Isn't that what this is about?

Watch out! Here I come!