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Camera Obscura Enemies

Some new enemy art going into Camera Obscura. Aren't those walkers cute?

Orcs Must Die! Design Analysis

I haven't been moved to write one of these for a while, as you might have noticed. However, I started up a game called Orcs Must Die! today, and I am enjoying it pretty thoroughly. I had just finished hurling a column of hunched, waddling orcs into a pit full of acid with a wind spell and was watching my character drop some ridiculous dance moves when it occurred to me that the game was, on the whole, pretty silly. Orcs Must Die! uses silliness pretty effectively to create a fun and satisfying game, and that's what I want to examine here.

Watch this so you know what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pioXot-rQ2U

Orcs Must Die! is a game about an apprentice whose master has just died defending a Rift from invading hordes of orcs. In a departure from tradition, said apprentice is not wracked with grief, but is instead rather excited to have acquired his master's tome of traps and spells ("Rest well, crazy old man!"). He takes up the task of defending various Rifts from the aforementioned hordes of orcs who would like nothing better than to fling themselves into them.

The reason Orcs Must Die! is so successful as a game is that it knows exactly what it wants to be. By that over-used saw, I mean that the developers had one guiding goal or theme for the game, it that theme is present in all parts of it. For Orcs Must Die!, the theme is "just have fun!" The short introduction cutscene sets the tone quite nicely, and the effect is maintained by the gameplay. At every point in the game, the design maintains in the player the sense of non-seriousness it begins with. Between the orc graphics, which are certainly cartoony in a Bastion sort of way, to the trap designs, which include such things as plates that fling orcs down the hall and the classic falling chandelier, there are certainly enough reminders of fun anywhere the player turns. Perhaps the best, though, is the character himself. The game is third person, and the main character has a definite identity seperate from the player. He keeps up a stream of snarky comments ("Here, mister orcky orcky") ("Gee, I hope no one gets hurt. Eh...not really.") that are the best anchor for the well-crafted atmosphere of "just have fun".

Of course, I don't believe that games that don't say "just have fun" are bad. Amnesia, for example, is themed after mystery and horror and of course suceeds in creating a game focused on just that. Where games fail is when they lose sight of the overarching themes they began with. The serious opening cutscene narrated by the character's master serves only to make the main character even more comical by contrast when it becomes clear that the game is not as dire as he makes out. A game similar to Orcs Must Die! that is, in my opinion, less successful in this field is Dungeon Defenders. It is strikingly similar, in fact, so it makes an excellent comparision. It has the potential and the setup to be a comical and fun experience like Orcs Must Die! - the opening describes how the four heroes that protect the land are lost, and it's up to their apprentices (miniature and caricaturized versions of the heroes themselves) to do so. Dungeon Defenders, however, loses sight of this theme in the midst of an RPG-style leveling and equipment system that is very reminiscent of games like Torchlight. It too uses a cartoony graphics style but there is little beyond that that follows up on any kind of overarching goal, and the themes of the game during gameplay don't extend much beyond "medieval style".

Now, there are a lot of Orcs Must Die! vs. Dungeon Defenders discussions on the internet, and they show that while these themes are important, people often buy games on criteria other than how fun the game was. On commenter said, "I'm waving on the side of Dungeon Defenders even tho I enjoyed the OMD demo a lot more," referring to the higher expected replayability offered by Dungeon Defenders by its RPG elements and multiplayer support. Themes and atmosphere are clearly not the only elements that make a successful game, but they factor in significantly.

Camera Obscura Trailer

We've just recorded a new trailer of this nearly feature-complete version of Camera Obscura. It demonstrates some of our cool new features, like the crawler enemies (shown briefly) that can climb walls and walk on ceilings. One of my personal favorite features of the game so far. It also demonstrates the basic ideas of the gameplay more clearly, without all that mucking around testing collision ;).

Camera Obscura Status Update

Camera Obscura is still trucking along. Summer is drawing to a close, and we hope to be done with the game's code by the time school begins. Most of the work that is left is with our level designers and our excellent artist, Dean Bottino. More gameplay videos and maybe some post-mortem-type stuff will be forthcoming.

Far Cry Design Review

I played Far Cry (yes, the first one - on the PC, by the way) a few weeks ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it (well, a good 90% of it, anyway). While I'm pretty tolerant in general and don't often find a game that I don't like, there were a number of interesting design aspects of Far Cry that I think made it good. I wanted to look at a few of those, as they are things that others can easily emulate and that I think are better than their common alternatives.

I'm generally one of those people who says, "oh boy, it's another generic first-person shooter where you can kill completely unrealistic numbers of generic aliens/soldiers/terrorists while following the terrible linear plotline". And yes, Far Cry is this. But Far Cry does this in an extremely interesting and fun way that made forget about its genericness and really enjoy playing it. The main reason for this is the amazingly believable and interactive world Far Cry's designers have crafted. They have somehow created a world that is fun to interact with and explore, even though it's built around a cheesy rehash of the old Time Crisis mad scientist theme and populated by a really unlikely number of mercs.

How do they achieve this? What Far Cry has done is thrown out every cop-out design choice commonly used by designers of first and third-person games and replaced them with elements that serve the same purpose, but also feel like a natural part of the world. I guess the word to use here would be "immersion", though it seems overused in this field. I've picked out some of the great features of Far Cry's world below.

There are no hard world boundaries or "invisible walls", at least none that are reachable in the course of normal game play. The gating that keeps the player moving roughly along the route built by the game designers is incorporated realistically into the world. For example, steal a patrol boat and attempt to leave the island for the open sea? Almost every other game would place an invisible wall at some point out in the ocean, or perhaps kill the player with no good explanation as to his cause of death. We've come to accept these methods, and we don't (conciously) hate them, even though they are lame and immersion-breaking. But Far Cry does better. If you try to do this, the NPC narrator who keeps in contact with you via radio warns you that the mercenaries' radar systems will spot you on the open water. If you proceed, an attack helicopter flys to your location and guns you down. If you're looking the right way, you can even see the helicopter take off from the jungle and pursue you. This doesn't feel out-of-place or even unfair - I've neutralized attack helicopters before, and I feel like I have a chance against this one, but they're powerful enough that I don't feel cheated when it does get me. Most importantly, it doesn't break immersion like the repeated and highly unlikely excuse that there are "enemy mortars covering the area", the "return to the battlefield" warning, or the invisible wall.

The other common gating cop-out Far Cry revises is the "jungle path". Games that take place in a jungle, as Far Cry dominantly does, often try to keep the player on their neatly laid-out rails with walls of impassable shrubbery on either side of the path, or perhaps embankments that are just too steep to climb. These sorts of methods have the effect of slashing away huge portions of the game world in the player's mind. It doesn't feel like one world that they happen to be currently inhabiting a small jungle path within. It feels like a small path that exists only for them to run along it and complete the level. Far Cry, however, thrives on its small but (seemingly) unified world. It avoids this "jungle path" effect in two ways. One, it rarely tries to restrict the player closely to a path. Most games have to do this because they have laid out their enemies and their cover such that they expect the player to approach the encounter from a specific point, and if the player were to approach from a different direction entirely, it would break the difficulty of the encounter. Far Cry allows its level design to ignore these narrow restrictions because its enemy placement and AI are designed around this idea. The enemies mind their own business in camps and outposts until the player is spotted, at which time they are capable of taking cover, providing covering fire and attempting to flank and attack, and no matter where the player approaches from, they are capable of reacting dynamically to preserve the difficulty of the encounter. This allows Far Cry to achieve a very cool unity in its world, despite the fact that it is technically linear and divided up into a number of completely seperate "levels" as most games are.

I could go on, but I'm going to stop there for now.