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.