The Eyes of Master Chief

"Why are you getting Halo 3?" my co-worker asked.

I gave him my answer. "I cannot go another day forward as a game designer without playing Halo 3. It is too important of a game for me to have missed." (And I'm over a year late!)

I had read the reviews and back story, of course, and I'd had many long conversations with fellow game designers about the glories and wonders of Halo 3, but somehow, none of that prepared me for playing the real thing.

At once, I drank in the beauty of the game. The music, the environments - and all the loving detail put into the weapons, vehicles, and characters - it was delightful.

In the initial sequence, my teammates help me up. They're so happy to find that I am well - they treat me like we've been friends for years. They have so much respect for me, I don't know if I've ever felt so welcomed.

What an unexpected sequence of emotions! I thought I'd be shot to death many times over in the first few minutes, not step into a living world surrounded by friends.

Then, at the end of the intro, the camera shifts to become the eyes of Master Chief.

Somehow, I wasn't prepared for it. Yes, the first two letters of "FPS" stand for "First Person" - you'd think that would be a big giveaway.

So I try moving around. No good - apparently my armor is still locked up. However, my friends are here to help, and one of them offers to recalibrate my suit.

He asks me to look up, so I look up. Then he asks me to look down, so I look down. We repeat the process. And then he tells me he's set my look style to "inverted."

I'll admit that I'm most accustomed to 3rd-person-style controls. In many 3rd-person games, your camera sits on the outside of a sphere and always looks inward towards your character's head. Thus, when you move the camera downward, you see more of what's above your character, and likewise, when you move the camera up, you look down. While it is "inverted" to move in the opposite direction from the way you want to look, it's completely natural for someone used to playing in the 3rd person (like me).

Satisfied with my inverted controls, my armor unlocks, and I'm free to move about on my own. I try all the buttons. Movement with the left stick - check. Shooting with the triggers - check. Reloading with the bumpers - check. Jumping - how do I jump again? Ok, the A button makes sense.

And then I try looking around. I can't do it. Looking up and down is great - we tested for that - but every time I try to look left, I end up looking right, and vice versa. What gives?

Unable to aim my weapons, I hit pause and go straight to the configs. I check all of them, and realize my problem. Inversion is only an option for the Y axis, not the X axis.

I try to get used to it. I run around, trying to look at rocks, plants, and my companions. It's a no-go. I'm moving the stick the wrong way every time.

Disheartened and frustrated, I go online to see if anyone else has my problem. Yes! Games with unalterable X axis controls are frustrating people on both sides. Final Fantasy XII has an inverted X axis that you can't switch to normal, whereas many FPS games, like Halo 3 and BioShock, have a normal X axis that you can't invert.

Sadly, many of the forum posts I read were hurtful. To put it nicely, players said that those who use inverted controls are backwards, and players who use normal controls don't know how to use a camera. Arguments on both sides generally ended in "just get used to it!"

So that is what I did. It took me a long hour of play to start looking in the correct direction, and it took me another hour to learn to aim accurately.

During those two hours, I spent a lot of time hiding behind rocks, being frustrated, and not shooting aliens. I felt like I was letting down the Arbiter, Avery Johnson, and the rest of my team. I could have jumped right into the game if I could have inverted the X axis.

With this experience, I have taken this lesson to heart: It's important to make a game's controls be configurable in as many ways as possible without breaking the game.

Designers can't assume that they know where a player is coming from, and players should not be forced to re-map what's intuitive to them - nobody likes to hear that they must "just get used to it."

Aside from that point, I took to Halo 3 fairly well. In fact, it's probably because the rest of the game is so intuitive that my X axis issues stood out like a sore thumb... or should I say, a confused thumb!

GDC Swag

At GDC, it is a steadfast tradition that the booths at the expo offer swag to potential customers and hires.

Some booths offer buttons. Other booths offer pens, candy, notepads, toys, gadgets, cloth bags, plastic necklaces... and T-shirts.

However, none of the booths I visited had any women's styles or sizes of shirts.

I stayed hopeful, though. At each booth with clothing available, I would ask, "Do you have anything for women? Or any men's sizes that would fit me?"

The answer was no. Most booths had run out of everything "small" and "medium" on the first day of the con. Size "large" had disappeared soon after. By Thursday, the only size most booths had left was "extra-large".

The folks at one booth, though, had a story to tell that's worth repeating.

This particular booth had, in fact, stocked a significant quantity of women's style shirts - you know, the kind that are just a touch narrower at the waist. The kind that keep women from looking like amorphous barrels.

Anyway, a small group of women discovered this rare stash on the first day of the con. So pleased were they with their discovery that they proceeded to inform other female conventioners. A crowd of women soon appeared at the booth, nabbing every last shirt.

Alas, I didn't make it in time.

So, my thoughts on the matter are these: If you are in the position to stock a GDC booth with swag, do not underestimate the number of smaller-sized attendees. And, if you want more women to attend your booth, by all means offer clothes tailored just for them!

Shamelessly Reposted from Cuppytalk

The

Peggle vs. God of War

In my quest to learn more about game design, I decided to play God of War this past weekend.

I enjoyed the character, Kratos, and had a great time spinning his Blades of Chaos with Apollo's Ascension to hack enemies to bits. Then I came to the Rooftops of Athens, where I promptly got stuck. The room is like this: archers shoot at you while you jump from one vine-covered pillar to the next, then onto a platform.

Easy enough, right? I jumped over and killed the archers, then hopped nimbly back onto the vine-covered pillars. I could jump between the pillars easily, but the jump to the platform was simply impossible. I tried it dozens of times, and even recruited a gamer friend to help out. He just kept falling, too. Neither of us could figure out the catch.

I looked up three different online walkthroughs, and none of them spoke of that jump as being difficult at all. I went back and tried the jump another several times, then gave up in frustration.

Eager to feel some sense of success, I decided to give in and download the Peggle trial that Cuppycake suggested. The juxtaposition of genres nearly broke my soul.

After I won a few games, and got over the rainbows, woodland animals, and flashing colors, I found myself playing with the main menu. That's right. The main menu. I discovered that each of the buttons plays a different note on mouseover. There are eight buttons, one for each note of the scale.

Of course, the first song I played on my new Peggle xylophone was Ode to Joy, the music that plays when you win a game of Peggle. And I couldn't stop laughing, because that's exactly what the designers of Peggle must have been thinking when they assigned mouseover sounds.

On that note, it reminded me how important it is to include little things in your game that allow players to not only play in the game, but play with the game.

The other design lesson of the day is to not make jump puzzles so hard that the average player can't make it after several tries.

As for me, I'd love to see a Peggle interface mod with God of War graphics and sound. Can you imagine Kratos shedding a tear as you mouseover the Quit button?

New Toy!

I was going to write a nice serious post tonight, but I've been thoroughly side-tracked by Game Maker.

It's a fun little game-building tool that I was introduced to at AGDC. If you haven't played with it yet, give it a shot!

I've been tagged!

Well, after all of that esoteric pondering about the nature of emotional cycles in games, Cuppycake has tagged me with my first chain blog.

Here we go:

~ The Rules ~

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List eight (8) random facts about yourself.
3. Tag eight people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving them a comment on their blogs.

Ok, random facts:

1. My favorite living animal is the Northwestern Crow.

2. My favorite extinct animal is the Magnificent Teratorn.

3. I like making chainmail. I suppose that says something about my tolerance for tedium.

4. Raw salmon is my favorite food.

5. I broke my right arm just before a birthday where I received colored markers and art supplies. I had to wait three weeks before I could use them. (I'm right handed.)

6. One of my favorite non-computer games is Carcassonne.

7. I am native to Oregon.

8. I have a Warhammer Fantasy lizardmen army. Someday maybe I'll paint them.

I'll have to skip the tagging part this time. I like making chainmail, not chain mail :)