Ether

Currently, I’m on a work placement at White Paper Games as a tester. I’m there to test out the game for bugs, and also to help with design decisions when any problems with it come up. On my first day, I acted as a playtester and just played through the game while Pete, White Papers Games’ technical designer, sat and watched what I did, noticing where I had trouble progressing through the game. A few issues came up.

A big issue was to do with these Ribbons.

In the game, you need to collect them in order to progress onto new levels. However, I didn’t feel the need to collect them. I wasn’t told at any point by an NPC and there was no indication that I could or should be interacting with it. This is even taking into account that the game revolves around exploration, and investigating items by clicking on them. Although I clicked on pretty much everything else, I didn’t click on these.

Although the ribbons were eye-catching, I don’t think I felt the need to collect them for a couple of reasons. Firstly the level was taking place in a town with a Morris dancing competition. A voice over from an NPC and several notes and signs around the environment cemented this fact. As a result, I thought that the ribbons were just decoration. I don’t know if I would have felt the same way if the town didn’t have such a heavy narrative around it.

Secondly, everything I was clicking on looked like it could be picked up or otherwise looked like it could do something. Things like doors, drawers, pianos, small objects etc. These ribbons weren’t loose and where attached to a pole, so it didn’t follow the same design rules as all the other small objects that I was picking up. So I didn’t think I could pick it up.

After I had played the game, the team implemented a wispy, ethereal sound effect of people whispering that would emanate from the ribbons. This gave them an over-worldly, odd and unrealistic semantic. When other people were brought in to playtest, they picked up the ribbons with ease.

It seems that adding the sound made the ribbons themselves stand out as objects. What I mean by that is that they, as objects, weren’t seen as important until they started making a sound that in real life, and in the game, they hadn’t ever done before. By making a sound, they were breaking the rules of the game’s narrative world that had been established up to that point. I don’t think it had to be a sound, it could have been something visual and the effect would have been the same. In the Sands level I did a couple of months ago, at the end of it, the player picks up a rotating cube. None of the testers had trouble knowing that they needed to pick up the cube, regardless of how experienced they were.

If that cube was rooted to the ground, I’m sure people would have had trouble.

I’m considering doing a small map to test this idea applied to environmental navigation on some less experienced players.

Another issue that came up involved how I was viewing the objects in the environment.

At one section of the game, I was inside a mine, and need to strike a piece of iron and tin a certain number of times in a sequence. When I first started this puzzle, I quickly deduced that I needed to strike the material, but I couldn’t find where it was and ended up looking around for some time. After being told where one of the materials was, I went around looking for another object that would be made of the other material. However, both materials were on the pictured pipe mesh. It hadn’t occurred to me that different parts of the pipe could be different parts of the puzzle that I needed to interact with.

I’m curious to see if this was just my previous experience of how I thought that games were structured, or whether or not this is something to do with how people comprehend games in general. I’ll think about doing another map which uses the same idea, and see if less experienced players have any trouble with it.

Rise of the Triad Post Release Level

During September, while working on Rise of the Triad, I was tasked with creating an additional multiplayer map to be put out in a post-release patch. I didn’t experiment a lot with it; it was mainly an exercise in consolidating my knowledge of player directing and communication into something that will be part of a paid for product. I mainly concentrated on using colour and the map’s layout itself to communicate its shape and to guide players towards each other. However, I did some experimental use of the players’ real world knowledge to communicate certain aspects of the map.

The map is split into two contrasting areas; a large, dangerous open arena area, where the meat of the action takes place, and a tighter corridor horseshoeing around it, which acts as a refuge area. For the design to work I needed to communicate the roles of the two areas, and guide players into the open so that they meet one another.

First of all, the open area is a bright warm colour and the refuge area is a very dark cool colour to ensure a visual contrast. The large arena area is outdoors and the refuge area in indoors, this gives justification to the colour scheme and taps into the idea of people in a wide open environment will find smaller indoor refuge areas as they make their way across the expanse. In semester 1 I read an article from Christopher Totten explaining his theory about how people did this in pre-historic times and how this was used in architecture. This wasn’t something I had tested myself, however there were a few maps in the game already that had used the idea.

To entice players into the open, I used a mechanical incentive of the game’s powerful weapons. Exits from the refuge area to the outdoors were lit with a red light, to hint that the outdoors would be dangerous for them. The corridors themselves also funnel players into the open by having them point diagonally into it.

A key feature of the map, and USP of the game itself, are jumpads.

They tend to stand out by themselves because their material pulsates with a bright sky blue colour. To add to this I’ve used different artistic methods where appropriate. In the refuge corridor, I’ve placed lines adjacent to them leading players who are on their way out of the corridors towards them.

In the central building, I’ve used a contrasting orange colour and an additional bloom effect. I didn’t want to use a warm colour inside, as I was already using that to designate exits to the outdoors.

Something I saw in the MA research was the idea that repeating use of key environmental features confuses new players. I wanted to prevent this from happening, as the game’s target audience were players’ who had stopped playing FPS games around the time of Doom, and weren’t fans of modern games. To do this I made sure that each area had its own key environmental feature. One area contains a row of radios, whereas another similar area has a ramp and a lift.

Object semantics

This past couple of weeks, I’ve created a few maps continuing the idea of object semantics, and using that to guide players to different places. I’ve attempted this in a couple of different ways. The first map uses the same idea as the statue level, placing certain items that are semantically tided to the objective in order to guide them in the right direction. The second map uses the entire aesthetic of the level to communicate the goal to the player. I haven’t had anyone play that level yet, but I have had people play the first map.

In the level, players start off in a house with pictures of lighthouses on the wall.

There goal is to go to this lighthouse and pick up a crowbar, which they then use to gain access to a mine with a waterfall beside it.

The level is made up of a tight path, with a junction in the middle splitting the level off into two paths, one leading to the lighthouse and the other to the mine.

The path leading to the lighthouse is marked with deck chairs with a stripy pattern, and the path to the mine marked with a river.

I essentially want to see if the pictures at the start influence where the player wants to go, and if the objects they encounter successfully communicate where they think they are.

I made a variant of the map which switches the pictures of the lighthouse at the beginning with pictures of the mine, to check if the pictures are an influence.

I’ve had one player play the first version and another play the other. The tests were successful in that both players went where I thought they would go, however the reasons for them to go there weren’t what I expected.

The first player looked at the pictures of the lighthouses, and tried to interact with them by pressing E. When they went outside they had a look at the electrical box outside and pressed E against that as well.

When they came to the junction they went down the path to the lighthouse, and went inside it. Inside the lighthouse I tried to influence the player to think about the mine by placing rocks, gems and pictures of it inside.

They pressed E against the pictures like before, as well as pressing it against the rocks and the gems. When I asked the player about way they were doing this, they said that they didn’t know. It would seem like they are trying to interact with the world in a similar way that they would in real life, but it could just be that they are testing the waters to see what this particular game worlds rules are. However, it that was true, then why would the same player try to interact with both these pictures and the one’s in the house at the start. Why would they think the outcome was going to be different?

As an aside; it seems that the attitude of non-game players in these 3d environments in one of ‘I wonder if…’, where they try and see if things in the game world match that with reality. I’ve noticed that the non-game players I’ve tested with are naturally curious about what they can and can’t do, and also want to explore as much as they can in these mechanically blank game worlds.

Back to the test level. After the player collected the crowbar, they then went back to the junction, went down to the mine and went through it successfully. At the end of the level, I had a scripting trigger which would exit the level after the player went a certain distance into the mine. However, when the player saw the total blackness after they had removed the planks, they thought that nothing was there, and walked away from it. This was something that came up in semester 1, where some players of the dark and light town level didn’t go into the dark not necessarily because they were afraid, but because they didn’t think it was significant. Essentially it was a blank area.

When I asked the player about why they decided to go down the deck chair path, they said that it looked more interesting. They also said that it looked like there might be people there, like that direction lead to activity. This is something that came up before with the Sand level. A couple of players were drawn to the structures at the beginning, mentioning that they were because it looked like ‘civilisation’ was there. Maybe there is a natural tendency for people to be drawn to social situations, and these instances are tapping into that instinct.

The second player played the version of the map with the mine pictures at the start.

This player played the game in the same way, pressing E next to the paintings and the rocks, and investigating around the outside of the house. When they came to the junction, they chose the path down to the mine. When I asked about it, they said that they knew that the lighthouse was going to have something interesting, so they were going to the boring parts first just in case they missed anything. It should be noted that this player had more experience with video games than the previous player. Also, in this version of the map, the player could see the lighthouse from the start point and the junction, whereas in the previous level they couldn’t.

The idea of guiding players with interestingness is a cool idea. But it has the same problems as using the something like light and darkness; different people are going the find different things interesting. For instance, the first player found the chairs and the prospect of other people to be interesting, and the second player though that the lighthouse was the interesting thing.

A behaviour I’ve noticed quite a lot amongst players is how they progress through the environment ‘room by room’. They notice how the environment is structured and go into smaller, less significant looking areas first, before committing to what looks like the ‘main’ path. From this current test, it looks like it might be something exclusive to more experienced players. I’m going to do a smaller level which looks into this, seeing if the introduction of rules will change non-gamers behaviour to this ‘room by room’ pregression.

My next step is to get more playtesters on this level and others, mainly a version where the player has lighthouse pictures at the beginning and can see the lighthouse as well.

One of the big issues I’ve had this semester is not being able to get playtesters who are inexperienced in games, to the point where I’m getting worried about the state of this MA. I’ve got a plan to place posters around UCLan, and set up appointments with non-players who find them. I’ve got a few more idea for some new tests which shouldn’t take long to create. This should reinvigorate this MA.

An elderly couple play some test levels.

This week, I got an elderly couple to play some of the test levels. This proved very valuable, as it brought up the issues and difficulties they have playing games which I hadn’t considered. I had them play 3 levels:

First of all was the bridge level.

I set them up playing one of the bridge levels without any enemy npc’s. Straight away they had trouble controlling the game. They often would get caught on the low railings, and be confused when it wouldn’t let them go forward. The interesting thing about how they played was how they viewed their relationship with what was on screen, the game world as a whole, and themselves. They didn’t appear to mentally place themselves within the game world, and didn’t think of playing the game as controlling themselves or a character going through it. But rather it seemed like they viewed the controls as a way to change what appeared on the screen. As I was explaining the controls, I mentioned that they pressed a key ‘to move yourself forward’, at which point they both looked confused and asked what I meant by that. At one point, one of them had lined up the camera to see a diagonal view of the bridge, but when they needed to turn the camera to the side to negotiate an obstacle in order to cross it, the bridge went of screen, and they immediately said ‘I’m lost’ and tried to get me to sort it out for them. They were panicking a little bit. Other frustrations they had was not being able to move forwards and turn at the same time. Although it’s possible to do that with the games controls, it takes a bit of skill and muscle memory to know where the keys were and to be able to control it confidently enough so that they didn’t fall off the bridges.

Because they had so much trouble controlling the game, only managing to get past two bridges, I don’t think that the materials the bridges were made of played a significant part in where they choose to go. Nonetheless, they both decided to go over the metal bridges only, which were also lined up in a row almost end to end. After first going over a metal bridge, it appears they decided to stick with what they were comfortable with.

The next level they played was the light and dark town.

I changed the level a little by adding in another little experiment. I changed the goal from ‘can you find the cake?’ to ‘can you find the stone statue?’, with the goal written down in the game world on some paper by a dead body.

I had the idea of using similar or related objects as a cookie crumb trial leading them to the stone statue. For this level I placed a statue, but this time made of copper, at a junction leading to the one made of stone. This was done in the hope that players would see the statue, and because of that think that they were on the right path to the statue they had to find.

They got on with this one a lot better than the bridges level, mainly due to it not having a failure state and them getting a bit more used to the controls. However, they didn’t appear to actually enjoy the experience, finding it a bit boring due to its lack of rewards.

The use of the two copper statues ended up working quite well. Both of them were drawn to it and it gave them some motivation to carry on playing, but they felt disappointed when they realised that the statue was copper, not stone. They thought they had won the game and then it dawned on them that they hadn’t.

After finding the first statue, one player carried on down the path it was part of, and the other when the other way, in a 'just in case I miss anything' fashion. The look of the area gave some troubles later on when one of them arrived at the main square at the end.

They had previously noticed the falling yellow leaves near the first statue, and when they saw the falling leaves in the main square, they asked if they were retracing their steps. After a moment they realised that they were in a new area and carried on as normal, but it still gave them a brief moment of confusion, which could of resulted in further confusion if they decided to go back the way they came. Either way, this is someone else who has felt lost when arriving in an area which shares visual features with a previous area.

One final thing to mention was that both players followed the illuminated path and didn’t go near anywhere that was dark. One player asked me in a matter of fact way ‘I take it I need to go towards the lights’, so it looked like their decisions were logical rather than emotional.

And lastly the 3^rd person with a fixed camera cake collecting level.

This was the level that they liked the most. Only the wife of the couple played this level, as the husband at that point had gotten pretty fed up of it and didn’t want to play it. The wife liked how often she got rewarded, and how the game was centred around using skill to control the character on the screen. Every cake picked up felt like an achievement. What I found interesting was how she reacted to her failures in controlling the character. In the other levels, if they bumped into something, got lost or fell off something, they would get a little down and frustrated, in a kind of sombre rather than angry way. But when controlling a character, instead of feeling bad about herself, she got frustrated at the character. She kept on saying ‘you stupid man’ when things weren’t going her way.

Again, she followed the lit areas and didn’t attempt to go down any of the darker paths. I ended up having to finish the game for her, and when I showed her the dark foresty areas, she didn’t seem too surprised, so it looks like she didn’t go down those paths due to some emotional connection with the dark or because of disinterest.

I’m going to carry on experimenting with the idea of object and environmental semantics, using similar objects to what players need to find to point them in the right direction. However, I’m also going to be looking into different control schemes. One which is simple but relatable enough for players like the elderly couple to pick up easily. I’m going to think about how I could add it some kind of ‘touch’ element to the controls as well.

Sandy Level

Over the past few weeks, I made a puzzle level using the ideas and potential conclusions that have come up with the few experiments I did during the last semester. I did this to further test them, but also as a way for me to practice level design in general, as the majority of the work I’ve been doing so far has been more to do with creating a virtual environment than a set of rules. The level is essentially a couple of puzzles, where you use buckets of sand to turn giant wheels that will open doors, with a main, harder puzzle proceeding an introduction puzzle.

Players start off in a large open, agoraphobic area. I wanted to practice guiding players to certain areas using interesting objects and composition. There is a ‘cookie crum’ trial of wooden man-made structures leading towards the cave, and the rocks on the outside are placed so that if a player follows it, it will lead them to the levels entrance. The fog is heavy enough so that from the start position players can’t see the entrance, but they can a little bit of the rock. I wanted to see what direction they would go in if they didn’t have any immediate stimuli.

This first room is the introduction puzzle, which shows the player a wheel being turned around by sand, another wheel with a container above it and a valve like wheel beside it, and a bucket. I’ve used some of the same methods I used when working on Rise of the Triad, with the most important objects in the room coloured to contrast with the rest of the room’s palette, namely the container being a bright turquoise, and the stone door (of which this room's goal is to go through) being a dark blue. The bucket the player needs to pick up doesn’t have any highlighting on it and isn’t a vivid colour. I wanted to see if the object being in this specific situation gave it the affordance of being usable.

This next corridor is testing a few things I’ve looked at before in the previous test. The waterfall is there to see if it affords any sort of danger or if players think it to be impassable. There are two bridges in the room, one has a hole in it and the other doesn’t, and neither of which look like they are leading anywhere. I wanted to see which bridges players’ are put off from crossing.

One of the things I found from previous playtests was the idea that new players could find the idea of going backwards to feel regressive and unsatisfying. The fact that this idea came from watching a racing game fan playing a horror game meant that I really needed to look into it more. With the main puzzle, players are required to pick up multiple piles of sand and share them across two containers to exit and thus progress. In total there are 4 piles, but players can get away with using 3. 3 of the piles are in this room, but the forth pile is located back in the previous puzzle room, and players can open a side door to quickly get back to it. 

If backtracking was seen as regressive or otherwise undesirable, players wouldn’t collect the 4^th pile even after opening the door, and I imagine at best they would open the door to the previous room, and then go back after realising that they had been in there before.

After the player has gone through that room, they travel across an outside area. Again, this was to see if anyone felt that they were somehow regressing, like what was seen with my Dad playing Silent Hill Shattered Memories.

In the final area, there is this treasure. I wanted to see what the players reaction to this floating cube would be, and whether or not they try to pick it up. The wall behind the cube is also different from the other walls, and I wanted to see if players felt that it was somehow significant because of it.

This time, I decided to experiment with only using keyboard control to make it simpler to control. Whenever the player is required to or is aided by looking down, a camera animation takes care of it for them. I want to see if new players find this helpful and ends up helping them make their way through the level, or if they find it frustrating as if it was taking control away from them.

***

At the recent open day at UCLan, I had the opportunity to have some fresh faces playtest the level, who were a mix between younger more experienced players, and their parents or friends who were less experienced, which helped in seeing if there were any differences in how they played. Beforehand, I had an inexperienced family member play it as well. In total 7 people have played the level.

In terms of play experience for them, it was an outright failure. The majority of players didn’t get past the first room, either from failing to solve the puzzle, or by not reaching the room in the first place. Two players managed to complete it.

The first couple of players at UCLan, who were pretty experienced, as well as the previously mentioned inexperienced family member, all turned around at the start and climbed up the sand dune behind them. The inexperienced player said he did it to get to a high point to survey his surroundings. The two experienced players didn’t mention this explicitly, but they followed the same actions of getting to higher ground. This looks like it might be a natural behaviour shared between all players; when lost with no visible landmarks to see, they will reach higher ground to find something. I’ll test this out in a later level.

All three of these players did manage to find something in the endless desert eventually. The experienced players ended up at the levels end, and the inexperienced player managed to get around again and went to the level's entrance. Because of the low test base I’m not going to read any differences between new and experienced players.

After these three played the game, I decided to reduce the density of the fog at the start so that players would see the entrance of the cave more clearly, so I would have a chance at seeing how they solve the puzzles. All of the players afterwards ended up going into the cave, but they still wanted to explore what was behind and around them.

What was interesting about this opening area is how the inexperienced players processed the objects in it.

Both inexperienced players thought that they could climb up these scaffolds, which were just props that I was using as platforms elsewhere in the level. The experienced players did look at them but didn’t try to interact with them. From this it would seem that these new players felt that they afforded climbing, but experienced players didn't. The experienced used their previous game experienced to deduce that they were static, but the inexperienced what to interact with the game world in the same way they would reality.

This goes against previous tests that showed that players didn’t take into account what material and structural state certain bridges were made of before making a decision about crossing them. In that test, players (albeit mostly experienced) didn't interact what the game world in a realistic manner. It might be that new players will attempt to interact with a realistic environment with realistic actions, or maybe they were attempting to reach higher ground to see further. I’m going to get some inexperienced players to play the previous ‘Bridges and Material Semantics’ level to see if they have the same reaction that experienced players do.

The few players that reached this first room ran into some trouble. They didn’t know what they could interact with, and some of the things that they thought they could interact with turned out to be static. For the 2 inexperienced players, one of them picked up the bucket straight away and then asked if they could put it down again, and the other player didn’t understand that the bucket could be picked up. I think that this might have been because this had attempted to interact with the scaffolding outside by pressing the interact button. I had told the player about the button just after they started, which probably influenced them to use it somewhere. I hadn’t told the player who had picked up the bucket about the button until they asked me how to pick it up. It seems that the failed attempt at interactivity had coloured their perception of the game world, and wasn’t inspired to pick up the bucket as they felt that they wouldn’t be able to use it.

Of those who did pick the bucket up, a popular thing to do was to try to hold the bucket under the sand that turns the wheel. They knew, or at least wanted, to collect sand in the bucket, and the method they decided to use made perfect sense, I just didn’t let them. This was a pure design flaw on my part.

What was successful however, was that many players, possibly after picking up the bucket and definitely after picking up the sand, managed to assert that they needed to put the sand in the bucket and rotate the valve wheel. This would have been easier for the players to understand if they could look up however, as then they would of been easily able to see the connection between the valve and the container. All of the experienced players at some point resorted to using the laptops touchpad to look up at some point. Inexperienced players didn’t do this, most likely because they didn’t know they could do it. As I was watching them play I did overhear both of them mutter something about wanting to look up. It looks like the control scheme didn’t give players the freedom they wanted.

As only two players managed to get past the first room, an inexperienced one and experienced one, I’m not going to draw many conclusions. But, both players didn’t think they could pass under the waterfall, one attempted to cross over the first bridge after seeing it (and succeeding by going over the rope holding it together), and both players tried to walk over the second bridge, even though there wasn’t anything to go over to. This is a nice little back up of the idea that bridges afford crossing over. Even though both players didn’t try to go through the waterfall, I’m not going to assert that this is representative of all natural world stimuli. As I was watching people play, I felt that the waterfall made much more of a barrier then I anticipated. So, as with the broken bridges in the ‘Camera anims’ test, I’m going to say that it is more to do with geometry than it is materials.

These two players also had some trouble with the second room, they didn’t realise straight away that the room used a double door, only doing so when they placed some sand in one container and then being shocked when they realised that they couldn’t get out so easily. I quite liked having that as players gave strong reaction. However I’m sure that not all players would consider that moment to be fun.

Neither player collected the 4^th pile of sand from the first room. Both players opened the door to the room, however after realising what it was, they turned around. Again more testing is needed, but this is more evidence of backtracking feeling regressive for players, and thus something that they naturally don’t want to do, regardless of how much experience they have.

Even though the wheels in either room were coloured differently, the inexperienced player felt that they had been in the second room before when they approached it. This wasn’t a problem for the experienced player. I would like to get some more inexperienced players to playtest to see if this is a behaviour that is shared amongst the inexperienced or is just something that this individual player does.

The final area played very smoothly, and players did what I expected. 2 of the 7 players didn’t reach this area, and those that did reacted in more or less the same way. Players would walk across the planks, enter the building, successfully pick up the cube and then turn around. All of the players who got that far hesitated  little after picking up the cube, wondering what they needed to before doing the only thing they could do, which was leave the area. If I had placed a locked door like object in the previous cave area and replaced the cube with a key, I’m sure there would have been less hesitation.

The 2 players who turned around at the very start of the level manage to find this area, and by jumping managed to climb on to the scaffold and make it to the building. One of these players starting going down the cave before turning around, and the other didn’t really seem to notice it.

So far, I think I’ve arrived at two big conclusions.

Firstly…

From what I saw with the testing, it seems that if the player doesn’t have any goal, and no previous knowledge of a realistic looking game world or any other similar worlds, they will approach it in a realistic manner. However, there actions are based on the sensual information that they are given. In the case of the wooden and metal bridges test, I think that players reacted the same to both bridges because the strength materials is something that is felt rather than seen or heard. You feel how hard metal and wood are. You can’t see hardness.

This has given me some strange ideas of how to incorporate touch into video games. Perhaps I could look into haptic feedback, or maybe try to come up with some sort of cross between video games and theatrical performance. In the light vs dark test, were players were split 50:50 on whether they travelled down a light path or a dark path, but I doubt it would be the same if someone was standing directly behind them breathing down their necks when they were in the dark. Of course, a theatre troupe isn’t something that you can pack away at home and take out when you’re bored, so I’m going to think of ways that can do similar things but just with what the computer can do.

There are plenty of examples of games which try to bring the game out of the computer and into reality, (such as Deep Sea, where you wear a paper mache mask, and any games which use a combination of the Oculus Rift and the Virtuix Omni) but all of the experiences that I know of do these to ‘increase immersion’ or simply because there creators thought it would be cool.

I’m going to try to propose that things like these could be used to increase the effectiveness of navigational cues for newer players, by making certain stimuli feel more realistic, and thus remove any ambiguity about what said stimuli does in the game world. And I’m going to try to do it without using anything fancier than a mouse and keyboard. And probably a touch screen.

Secondly…

The one big thing I am learning is that all players think differently.

Something I would like to investigate later on is using this test-like level design in order to generally determine a players personality. By monitoring what options they take, the level design could on the fly be adapted so that the guidance that is used suited the player. Something that I mentioned right at the start of this semester was a desire to use O.C.E.A.N. personality tests on players, but due to said tests taking at least 15 minutes to complete, it didn't seem practical to do them.

Affordance using camera animations

During the past few weeks, I experimented with manipulating the affordances of certain objects using UDK’s camera anims, which let you move the player’s viewpoint around while still letting them move it around by themselves. I created a map where the player crosses over different wooden and metal bridges in order to collect glowing magenta crystals, which in turned are used to open a door.

The crystals in question

The player needs to place a crystal on each of the stand to exit the level.

During the first semester, I created a map which showed that players didn’t approach wooden and metal bridges differently, or have different expectations between them. What I tried to do with this map was make the wooden bridges feel dangerous to cross. I used the camera anims to make the players viewpoint sway from side to side as they crossed them, making it feel like they were teetering precariously or that they had difficulty balancing. Additionally, one of the wooden bridges broke after being crossed, one broke while being crossed and some of them had planks missing. 

Conversely, most of the metal bridges were made to look as safe as possible, with guard rails and a canopy.

I placed fog in the level so that players wouldn’t be able to clearly see what was on the other side of the bridges, making it feel more dangerous and putting the players focus on the bridges themselves and not what they would be arriving at.

This was all done with the hope that players would avoid crossing the wooden bridges, and start crossing the metal ones first.

I put in a mini – experiment as well, out of interest.

The extra crystal in the distance cannot be collected. There are in total 7 crystals in the level, but to finish the player only needs to collect 6. The only way to collect this crystal is to cross a broken looking bridge, which will collapse if crossed.

I wanted to see if players would give up or would carry on trying to collect it.

I’ve had two players play this level so far, both of which have very little experience in 3d games. My main takeaways from the results ended up having less to do with how players navigate, but more to do with how they interact with the environment and the level's mechanics.

When the first player approached the first crystal, the first thing she said was ‘how do I pick it up’. In this level I had made it so that collecting the objects was as simple as walking over it, with a sound acting as feedback. However, the player was hesitant for a while, wondering what to do, before I ended up telling them how to do it. For this player, the fact that the brightly coloured object could be picked up was obvious, and how to perform the act of picking up was obvious too, it just didn’t match with the level’s mechanics. I had made picking up objects automatic to make it simpler for the player, but it looks like making hassle and frustration free level is less a case of making interaction simpler for new players, but making it more realistic. The problem of informing players of the controls would need to solved as well.

There is a section of the level with some water flowing across the ground.

I added this in purely for aesthetic reasons, however, the player felt that it might push them off the edge of the level. Looking into the natural world for indirect controls might be a good idea, however it might just show that this player is exceptionally cautious as they were the only one to think this.

In terms of which bridges the player crossed, it again mainly depended on which bridges they could see first, rather than anything to do with what is was made out of. The use of camera anims, even though the player mentioned that they ‘didn’t like’ going over the wooden bridges, didn’t necessarily influence them to go over metal bridges first. In fact, the camera anims seemed to increase the immersion and attention grabbing qualities of the level, as the player started physically swaying in time with the animation, and only moving the character forward when the view was momentarily in the middle of the bridge. This novelty did wear off after a while. 

What was successful in deterring the player from crossing the wooden bridges were any holes or missing planks, as they thought that they would fall through them. What was interesting was that they didn’t ask if they could jump, which does go against the previously mentioned idea of new players thinking that they would have realistic interaction with the environment. Perhaps it would depend on the player. A young, extroverted boy’s first thoughts might be to jump over the bridge, but that wouldn’t be instinctive to older, more mellowed out adults who don't physically jump on a near daily basis.

I had placed two different types of wooden bridges in the level, ones with planks and ones which were more like rope bridges. The player did have some hesitancy going over the first rope bridge (which wasn't repeated with the others in the level). At that first bridge, there were no other bridges to cross. So in a future experiment I would like to see which bridge a new player would cross if met with a metal bridge next to rope bridge.

This player also had a similar reaction to my Dad when encountering similar looking objects in the environment.

First, the player encountered this area.

And then this area. To get to it, the player needed to cross a couple of bridges, and turn a through a couple of right angles. Even though the bridge itself was the same, the surrounding structure was different, yet some however both player still felt that they had been in the area before. I would like more evidence, but it closely becoming a conclusion that using similar structures or environment types can confuse new players. This could be that they do not have the confidence that the game itself will linearly guide them through the experience, and that they must always be thinking about where they are going.

This first player did not finish the level. In order to direct players to the finishing point, I placed a wooden bridge leading up to it. One of the planks falls after the player steps on it, which was a pretty dumb decision on my part, as then the player didn't believe it could be crossed. 

For the second player’s go at the level, I kept the bridge from breaking, and thus they managed to get to the finish. However, they ended up finding the finish confusing.

When the player approaches the finish, the number of crystals they have collected so far appear floating above the pedestals, and the door opens. If they haven't collected enough, they need to turn back, get the rest, and return make the rest appear on the other pedestals.

The main issue came from the automation, as with the first player picking up the first crystal. When they appeared on the pedestal, the player wondered what had happened, asked if he had finished, and then asked if he could pick them up again. Using a simpler, automatic form of mechanical interaction in a realistic setting looks like the wrong thing to do with new players, as there seems to be a schism in what the player intends to do and what the game will do for them.

The second player followed a similar response to the level to the first, they got confused by similar looking areas, felt in danger going over the wooden bridges, avoided bridges with holes or missing planks and were hesitant going over the rope bridges. However, they seemed to choose metal bridges more often than not. This could just be luck of the draw, but it if this player didn’t like camera anims or found them a nuisance, then it would make logical sense that they would choose the metal bridges first. I would have to run the experiment again with more people.

The mini-experiment, involving the uncollectable crystal gave interesting results. The first player tried to get around to it, using spatial navigation skills to find the correct bridge to cross. They hesitated before attempting to cross. The second player also tried to collect the crystal, but instead of finding the correct crystal, they found another one, but ended up assuming that it was the same one they were looking for.

What should be noted is that both players felt that they had to get the crystal, and that the amount of crystals on the level was the amount that they need to collect. From this, it looks like new players use their expectations from other games, like sports and board games, to estimate the goal of the game, if it isn’t presented to them explicitly.

Here are my main takeaways from the experiment:

Having automated interaction is a bad idea, it’s confusing to new players.

There’s increasing evidence that new players are confused by similar looking areas, because they feel like they’ve been to the same place twice.

Using an animated camera is a good way to grasped the players attention, and can be used to make something feel dangerous, however it seems unless that danger affects the mechanics of the game, or the player resources, or if it actually a nuisance, it won’t affect how they approach the rest of the environment.

There is a question that the experiment has brought up which I’ll look into moving forwards:

Do new players need natural feeling controls to engage their real world knowledge and expectations?

This is interesting, as usually games are made more accessible by making them simpler, but instead it looks like the same if not better results could come from making rules and mechanics more represented of how we interact naturally, the popularity of touch controlled games could be further evidence of this.

So I got my Dad to play a non-conflict exploration game

I ran into a time management problem with the beginning of this semester. This month, I have been finishing my work for the initial release of Rise of the Triad, and as a result, have had very little time for MA work. However, I have done one experiment that produced interesting results.

Not having the time to create something of my own, I had my Dad, someone who plays very little video games, and what he does play is exclusively racing games, play through the first level of Silent Hill Shattered Memories.

I chose it because this first level is non-conflict and exploratory focused, with only the minor challenge of navigating through the level. The objective only has a narrative context, you are searching for the player character’s missing daughter, but exactly where she is is something the player is required to discover for themselves. This means that the player's only task is navigating around the map, which makes it easy for the player to play, and easier for me to see why certain choices are made.

I looked at the game during the first semester to analyse its indirect control techniques, where it mostly used brightness to make certain doors and objects standout against its dark environments. The contrast of brightness isn’t too obvious, because the player can use a torch which lights up the majority of the screen, so the brightness of these objects appears in the corners of the players vision.

Even without the light shining on it, the door is still slightly illuminated

My Dad had never played a game like Shattered Memories before, and I feel his thought process (which he rather helpfully gave a running commentary on) is going to become very useful in the future when finding inspiration for new techniques, granted that other people follow it.

There were a few big takeways from watching him play.

Firstly, the indirect control methods used by the game worked. Doors that were highlighted in the dark were noticed, and he successfully and smoothly managed to navigate through the level. There were a couple of instances where it was required of him to climb over a fence (by walking up to it and pressing a button), and he ended up not knowing how to progress, which was due to not knowing that the fence could be interacted with in the first place.

The second was how much affordance played a part in his decisions. There is a moment in the level where you’re in the back room of a clothes shop and you need to get past a locked door, which has a note pinned to it. The first thing he did was start looking around the room, saying “Where would I put a key?”, thinking in a grounded, realistically logical sense. He spent a few moments looking at cupboards and shelves. What he didn’t do was read the note on the door which told him that the key was in one of three jackets on display opposite the door. People not reading text is something that appears to be shared between active and non-game players, although I would like to test on more people before using that in practice. Last semester I observed that when players are confronted with different problems and stimuli, they first use their experience of other games to decide on how to approach it. What I’ve seen here could mean that people with little or no game experience could use their real world experience instead.

The third big takeaway was how he interpreted progression. Any semblance of backtracking was met with some frustration. The level starts outside in the snow, and as you continue on you go into and out of several buildings, alleys and parks. The first time he exited a building, about a ¼ through the level, he sighed and said that he had ‘already been outside’. This didn’t stop him from quickly getting back on track though. However, at one point, the player walks into a diner, meets with an NPC and is then required to walk outside again and partly backtrack through the level to progress. This didn’t go well, as he spent a good 5 minutes in the diner, wondering where to go, attempting to walk through a non-interactive door. He became confused and didn’t want to continue playing, and only walked back outside after figuratively ‘giving up’. To him, progression is strictly linear, with a constant stream of new novel places. Any resemblance to any previous places feels like going backwards. Of course I would like other people to play to see if this idea of progression is shared, because and I have a feeling that he may feel this way due to him only playing racing game regularly.

Something that surprised me was how much he explored. Upon entering an area, he would look and walk around the area thoroughly for potential exits before choosing one to go through. This exploration mindset seemed to be the main driving force of his play style, as there were a few moments where he would enter a room with the exit lit up right in front of him, but he wouldn’t notice it and instead looked around the area. He didn’t appear to be impatient, which seemed strange to me, considering how much he wanted to skip the non-interactive opening cutscenes. This could mean though that exploration gameplay is something has the potential to be enjoyed by a mainstream audience of people who’ve never played video games before.

Moving forward, what I would like to pursue is the idea of affordance, and how you could make an environment not just look but feel more real. I would need to run the test past more people, but if people do fall back onto real world experience as much as my Dad does, making something in game feel more or less dangerous than it actually is could be a key idea for indirect control for non-gamers. During my time on Rise of the Triad, I’ve learned a lot more about Unreal. My next experiment will be taking the metal and wooden bridges test from last semester, and use ‘camera anims’, which let you control the position of the player camera while they are still playing, to try make the wooden bridges fell dangerous, and see if that has an effect on player choice.