Category: Game Design

Progress and updates on the game design process.

About Frontier and Representation

When I conceived Frontier it wasn’t the way it is now. There was a little collaboration from others and everyone had their own idea what it would become. For one it was Sci-Fi-Done-Right in the science. For another it was a aliens done right. My vision was essentially the standard picture of the Bridge Crew in Star Trek but with one token white face – rather than one or two token black faces. It would be humanity-done-right.

Representation

I stopped working on Frontier for “personal” reasons. You can see I had a multi-year hiatus on all of these creative outputs as my life was too “busy”. But now I return, and I’ve had some education. On actual representation, on the most excluded and marginalised in society and with an expanded background in performance arts and film production, an understanding of what representation means.

Whoopi Goldberg says that when she saw Star Trek she told her mother in amazement “I just saw a black woman on TV and she wasn’t a maid!”

Can you imagine never seeing a face like yours on television? This is why movies like Wonder Woman were important. This is why Reys saga, in the latest Star Wars movies, is important. How can you tell a story when 51% of the population is just a bit part.

Reading

Frontier has a slightly different origin to most stories. It’s meant to be a roleplaying game. But then I thought it could be a movie. And then an animation. And then a video game. At the moment I’m working with a young Kenyan artist to produce art either for the roleplaying book or as conceptual guides for the other media.

I’m currently reading “Children of Blood and Bone” by Tomi Adeyemi and I thoroughly recommend it (I don’t read fantasy much but this is good). It’s much more overt in the writing than, for instance, LeGuin’s Earthsea. I’d not really fully digested that Sparrowhawk, Le Guineas protagonist, was not white.

Your. My. Our story.

There are stories to tell. While Frontier is hundreds of years in the future and not of Ireland, it is my story too. It’s about a Western civilisation so caught up in greed and hubris that it almost destroys everything. It’s about a culture we can only dream about – where contribution to society is not measured in how much money you earn (or in how much tax you’ve managed to evade). It’s about a future where humanity has reached out into space, made contact with alien races, established itself in the dark spaces between the stars and saved us all. And a future where I am that token face.

I’ll finish off with this list of names. Characters in Star Trek who had real impacts….maybe you’ll look them up.

Richard Daystrom
Nyota Uhuru
Clark Terrell
Lily Sloane
Geordi La Forge
Emory Erickson
Benjamin Sisko
Kasidy Yates-Sisko
Calvin Hudson
Tuvok
Worf, son of Mogh
Guinan

Explorers: Ten Experts

Human Unity has build dozens of these craft; their primary purpose to map the wormholes and document everything they encounter. Because they may be out of touch with Earth for long periods, they are built to be totally self-sustaining.

The vessels are equipped with up to 200 souls and up to 10 Experts to manage the vessel and perform the duties and missions assigned.

Five Experts are indispensable:

Command Expert (or Captain)
Support Expert
Medical Expert
Navigational Expert
Engineering Expert

These first five are considered the absolute authority for their position.

The Command Expert is not an AI aboard ship, it’s built into the core of the vessel itself. It is primarily concerned with the main mission and the liaison with the senior human team within the Explorer crew. The Command Expert also maintains Human Unity policy with any contact or ethical concerns. The Command Expert is usually referred to as Captain but individual ships may have other names for the AI. As far as Experts go, the Command Expert is probably most human-like in interactions and can meaningfully interact with humans, even to the point of seeming emotional. There is no part of the vessel which is not linked to the Command Expert.

With 200 crew and being out of touch for maybe more than 600 sols, the Explorer needs to be able to carry and manufacture more than 360,000 meals. Each packed meal weighs around 500 grams (providing 500-900 calories) but the Explorer would store only perhaps a years worth of those (108 tons for 360 days). The remainder would be powdered or freeze dried rations weighing 150 grams each (a years supply being (32.5 tons for 360 days). Obviously if a Captain Expert wishes to keep crew happy, they will allocate additional storage to less efficient nutritional sources (fruit, vegetables, mycoproteins). The responsibility for maintaining this is usually handed to a Support Expert, one of the potential ten Experts aboard the Explorer.

The Medical Expert has access to a subset of the Encyclopaedia pertaining to medical conditions and their effects on various encountered species as well as whatever human knowledge has been collected. The Expert can direct human medics and surgeons as well as medical drones. Medical drones themselves are little more than Specialist drones guided by the higher processes of the Expert. They can work wonders – but their bedside manner is absent.

The Navigational Expert is the busiest (and probably most pre-occupied machine intelligence aboard). The core of this Expert is a distributed sensornet on the hull of the craft, augmented by remote drones which provide additional lensing capabilities (for better resolution). Together they are a highly mobile “Redundant Array of Distributed Sensors”. This Expert is involved in constantly processing every piece of stellar data they can sense, as well as mapping the bulkspace of wormhole transits. This data will later help with navigation as well as finding new routes through the wormholes.

The power systems and life support of the Explorer are primarily maintained by an engineering crew headed up by an Engineering Expert. The Engineering Expert is not tasked with getting the last 10% of performance out of the engines and will not sacrifice power or life support to achieve a mission; quite the opposite. Experts are, by design, dedicated to the continued survival of the crew above other concerns.

Five more are optional:

XO Expert
Tactical Expert
Science Expert
Contact Expert
ISD Expert

The XO Expert is an auxiliary artificial intelligence placed to second-guess the Command Expert in decisions where the human crew is in disagreement. In theory, any Expert can be promoted to the XO Expert position. It’s purely the failsafe (and if it can’t convince the Command Expert, who can?). The XO is also the primary countermeasures against outside interference with the Command Expert.

The closest analog to a Master Expert on board is the Tactical Expert. The TE is not as aggressive as a Master Expert, but rather about winning through defence and diplomacy (as well as the infrequent Kinetic Kill Vehicle).

Science Experts are as varied as they are specialised. It’s common for at least one to be aboard but depending on missions and route, not uncommon for there to be two or more.

The Contact Expert is tasked with dealing with all diplomatic or xenosociety interactions when they’re going well. when they’re going sour, they tend to be handed to the Tactical Expert.

The ISD Expert is seldom deployed but like all Experts, can be a position an Expert is promoted into. As a coordinator for the Internal Security Department, they are mainly responsible for the physical integrity of the vessel (and the actions of humans therein).

These secondary Expert systems are employed in the support of teams of humans who use them for guidance.

Looking at a black hole…..

This is the sort of result that we got from Interstellar (with science from Kip Thorne) and validated by Katie Bouman in her algorithm to piece together collected data from a black hole and see what it looked like.

Continue reading “Looking at a black hole…..”

Is there life out there?

CETI

We present a cosmic perspective on the search for life and examine the likely number of Communicating Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent civilizations (CETI) in our Galaxy by utilizing the latest astrophysical information. Our calculation involves Galactic star-formation histories, metallicity distributions, and the likelihood of stars hosting Earth-like planets in Habitable Zones, under specific assumptions which we describe as the Astrobiological Copernican Weak and Strong conditions. These assumptions are based on the one situation in which intelligent, communicative life is known to exist – on our own planet.

Frontier….2020: progress, updates and the future

I’ve begun working on Frontier again, firstly through a collaboration with a young Kenyan artist to produce some concept pieces for the book. It’s really helping to crystallise some of the thoughts but I definitely need to lock down the dates for things a lot more to keep them in my head. Is it 500 years in the future or 200? Erg.

I present, for your amusement, some sample images.

  

Continue reading “Frontier….2020: progress, updates and the future”

Glowing Eyes

Over the weekend I watched “The Darkest Minds”. A movie of the YA novel of the same name about some kids who gain superpowers (there are very few kids around as the ones who don’t gain superpowers tend to die). So it has shades of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a little Wild Cards (edited by George R. R. Martin) and a little J. Michael Straczynski’s “Rising Stars”. Yeah, there’s a passing similarity to “The 23rd Letter” too – especially as we use a psi symbol on our cover too. But I digress.

It bothered me about the glowing eyes. A lot of stuff about superhero fiction and radiation emission bothers me. To have glowing eyes, you have to have actual light emitters inside the eyes. And that’s weird to me. Weirder than psychic powers anyway.

A few years ago I wrote a superhero background where every superpower had a basis in biology. Some people had poisonous touch or acidic spittle. Some people had enhanced strength or reactions, others had increased resistance to harm. But there was always a trade off. A reason for their power. We had flyers, don’t get me wrong, but these were people with enhanced nervous systems who could control the flight surfaces on experimental jet packs. Every super power had to have some sort of sensible grounding. After a fact. And it was a lot of fun.

No glowing eyes.

Current work…writing scripts

For the last few months, on top of travelling and attending a bazillion courses, I’ve been writing.

I’ve written five short scripts in the world of THE 23RD LETTER. I’ve written two more in the world of STATUS: REFUGEE. I’ve written one horror script. And I’m looking at writing some scripts based on FRONTIER and QABAL very soon. And there’s one very special property that I would love to pitch to the BBC…

Two of my scripts are going into production in 2017 and I’ll be doing a “mobile phone” shoot of one of my scripts probably over the upcoming holidays.

So, all change.

Games Development Seminar – Belfast, 14th Sept

Last chance to register for a games technology development seminar here in Belfast.

Wed, 14 September from 10:00 to 12:00 at Radisson Blu, Gasworks, Belfast

The speaker is Paul Durrant, Abertay University’s Director of Business Development. He has been instrumental in developing a range of projects to support digital media IP generation, business start-up, incubation, and skills development particularly in the video games area. He developed Dare to be Digital and Dare ProtoPlay to become significant international events including a partnership with BAFTA to recognise talented young developers and the development of the Channel 4 Crunchtime TV series. He also raised £2m to establish a prototype fund for small games developers and has recently launched a partnership with the Technology Strategy Board to fund novel games applications.

In this seminar, Paul will describe the Scottish experience in digital content, the contribution from Abertay and the funding opportunities available through Abertay which are available to companies in Northern Ireland. In particular, he will describe the Abertay University Prototype Fund (http://prototypefund.abertay.ac.uk/) and the Future Games Contest ( https://ktn.innovateuk.org/web/future-games-contest )

Game Prototype development quote needed

I’m looking for a prototype of a RTS game on iOS developed. Just a single level, basic graphics. 2D sprites on 3D isometric plane.

Happy for it to be done in Unity and/or another rapid development environment. Would be nice for combat (ranged and melee) and some pathfinding for units.

Can be SP, MP or 0P. For the prototype, I’m not fussy. It’s not necessary to have full functions.

Email would be lovely but you can also tweet me.

Indies on the Mac

From the Oddlabs blog:

Many game developers, indie or not, view the Mac as a freak that no one cares for or wants to be associated with. They look at statistics that show only 5% of desktop machines are Macs and say: “Why waste a lot of time and money for only 5% of the market?”
Consider this:

  • Out of the several hundred thousand downloads of Tribal Trouble. the Mac is responsible for 23%!
  • Out of all sales of Tribal Trouble, the Mac is responsible for 47%!

Not bad for 5% of the market.. And we haven’t even done any paid advertising that has been directed solely at Mac users.

What this shows is that not only are the Mac users easier to reach, they also convert at a much higher rate.

This is not a secret. Wil Shipley talked about this in 2005. Developing for a platform where the users appreciate design and good software will reap dividend (if your product doesn’t suck).

This is why I question people who make silly decisions. Like not to support the Mac when porting software or deciding to go Android-first when developing for mobile platforms. Go where the money is – where the money truly is.

And yes, it’s not an easy ride. As I said, your product has to not suck. And if you’re entering a crowded market (like games on the App Store), you may have to work a little harder to get noticed but these people do not mind paying money for quality software. That has to count for something.

Although they are developed in software, games are not software

The title of this post is from this article: You Need $100,000.

Users relate to them differently. Immersion matters. Balance matters. Drawing people into the world of the game in a way that doesn’t break their attention every few seconds matters. Any successful game weaves a web of illusion around the player to engage them at more than just a rational level, and so they are more than the sum of their parts.

This applies just as much to tabletop RPG design. They are made of words and pictures but they are not words and pictures.

It’s the difference between a well-made FPS and a poor FPS. The former is addictive, the WASD and mouse look are intuitive and it becomes part of you. You don’t have to think about it. In contrast a poorly made FPS feels like you’re fighting the system. It’s like lag in a multiplayer system – it just becomes an exercise in frustration.

Many RTS games are about whether the user interface is tolerable enough for you to learn. The control of subunits is left to grouping strategies activated through arbitrary keyboard commands. We learn the controls but we’re not learning tactics.

Skirmish MP

Following on from my last post, I would posit that there is something missing from MP RTS (Multi Player Real Time Strategy) games and that would be the lack of a feeling that success has an impact.

Left 4 Dead is my favourite FPS game because it encourages teamwork between players on both sides and even though the macro gameplay is poor, the micro-events within each of the 3-5 episodes within a scenario, make for an entertaining mix. A lucky strike and a Survivor is dead and the game becomes that bit harder for the remaining Survivors. But other than the accumulation of points, there is no lasting effect for poor performance (or even great performance) within a episode of a scenario.

Myth II almost managed because if you had surviving forces, they would become more “seasoned” in the next episode of the single player. That wasn’t extended to multiplayer (and indeed there was no way it could be) but the thought of a multiplayer game where you began with raw recruits and ended up with seasoned warriors through six episodes of a scenario is kinda tantalising. Especially, with the Myth II model, that a skirmish tends to take about 10 minutes. Historically accurate? No. Cracking good fun? Yes.

So, take the Left 4 Dead model of a multiplayer game having 3-6 episodes, add to it the concept of units gaining expertise between battles (and for high performance during earlier episodes, additional units) and sprinkle a little story across it.

Most RTS single player modes suck…

Josh Bycer writes:

Honestly, most RTS single player modes… suck. The reason is that designers try to use it to teach the player about multiplayer which doesn’t work, as an AI is not a good substitute for a player …
Over the years, the structure of mission design has changed and can be broken down into several categories:

  1. Skirmish
  2. Puzzle
  3. War
  4. Story

One of the amazing parts of the Myth series by Bungie was the focus on the single-player story. While there was a “puzzle” element to it – having limited resources and time – it was heavily narrated and each battle, though skirmish-sized, contributed to the progress of the story. So while it was a war, there wasn’t control over the outcome of the war in terms of high level strategy. You fought where you were told to fight.

Compared to the single-player game, Myth multiplayer was a poor cousin with mismatched units and allegiances. While the array of game devices (the various match conditions) was impressive and a lot of fun, I couldn’t help but want more control during match setup, with the ability to select either light or dark units and allow my opponent to do the same. The ability to vary the number of points used – to deliberately create unequal games – would have added another dimension to allow use of terrain, tactics and skill to get a victory against a far superior force. This was the essential gem in the single-player game – the tactical use of your units to defeat wave after wave of superior forces.

So, in the creation of a game to “replace” Myth in my heart, it should offer this “relatively” simple concept.

QABAL: INTENT vs IMPLEMENTATION

This thread on rpg.net asks why secret magical settings in games tend to be dumb.

My problem is, it’s never made any sense to me on an absolutely fundamental. The idea in most of these settings is that humans not only don’t believe in the supernatural, they’ll even go so far as to doubt their own personal experiences and rationalize them away, or at the very least refuse to talk about them for fear of being labeled insane. That sort of thing would make sense in the real world, where everyone (or close enough) knows magic doesn’t really exist. But the reason everyone stopped believing in magic in the real world is because it actually doesn’t exist. In a fictional world where magic not only exists but there are monsters that kill people, I see absolutely no reason humanity would stop believing in magic. It’d be suicidally stupid on a species-wide level.

My reply:

Is it going to depend on what your magic effects are?

When magic is showy then it’s going to be hard to hide it. Fireballs, teleporters, flying stuff, people walking through walls, turning into werewolves, eating people – all of that stuff is going to be reported, captured, measured, verified.

When Mage or Werewolf came out in the early 90s, not everyone in the developed world had a cameraphone. It’d be a different world now.

The pitch for Qabal was that magic would not be able to be measured. The importance in magic was the INTENT and not the IMPLEMENTATION. There may be a TELLTALE but for the most part there’s only INTUITION to help you deduct a connection.

Look at The Omen for a great example.

Damien Thorne, the son of the devil, had several telltales. The black dog was one of them but another was found in the photographs.

From wikipedia:

While developing the pictures of the day, Jennings notices the priest has a dark object like a javelin over his head in the pictures he appears in, but the anomaly doesn’t appear anywhere else on the film.
…
Jennings is also at the event, taking pictures. The pictures again show the dark anomaly above the priest.
…
As the priest leaves, a sudden rainstorm comes up and the priest is impaled in a freak accident while trying to get into a nearby church.

Jennings said he is now involved because he found an anomaly on a picture of himself in which he has no neck.
…
Jennings goes after the knives, saying he will do it, and is decapitated in a freak accident.

Damian wouldn’t have engineered the process of the falling church spire or the panes of glass. He’d have registered his intent that they die. And magic would take care of the rest.

Frontier: A Changed Man

Kibwe had returned home a changed man.

Kibwe had always wanted to be a pilot. From an early age he made airfoils from balsa and drove his parents to distraction with his attention to detail, his constant entreaties to be taken to the airport at Mtwara and, when he was older, his insistence on visiting the spaceport at Beira.

By the time he was seventeen, he already had a pilot licence and was operating trips around the countryside in a twin-rotor electric speeder. Three years later he was the lead pilot on an aerial search and rescue mission to Northern Europe.

Northern Europe had received the worst of the violence of the Conquest Wars as atomic, biological and chemical weapons destroyed city after city, town after town. The farmlands of eastern europe were burned, the industrial heart of western europe was razed to the ground. The people who survived, the few who remained in the north, were forced to eke out a miserable existence in the cold and barren tundra.

The mission lasted only two weeks, rescuing four people from the ravages of the wastelands formerly known as Belgium. The experience was traumatic. Four malnourished and diseased people from a community of hundreds of thousands. During the rescue they had to be careful of becoming prey to some of the other desperate inhabitants – warlord remnants of the old military, murderous cannibals and even other rescue parties, especially those from the recovering United States.

Kibwe was changed. He had witnessed horrors that his young 22 year old mind was having trouble comprehending. And he would never go north again. Instead he fixed his eyes upon the stars. He began training to join an Explorer vessel.

The Final Frontier. No, really.

Ian Sales writes on his blog:

And sometimes those imaginations run a little too free. A lot of science fiction is set in outer space, or on worlds which orbit other stars. Or, indeed, other types of celestial objects, both natural and artificial. In these stories, much of the difficulties associated with space travel are blithely ignored. Spaceships magically travel out of gravity wells. Spaceships magically provide interior gravity. Spaceship hulls magically protect occupants from all manner of spaceborne hazards. And, of course, spaceships magically travel unimaginable distances within days or weeks.
…
As Sir Arthur Eddington, an astronomer, said, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine”. And yet sf writers seem content to refight historical wars in some sanitised and romanticised and safe imaginery place which is supposed to resemble the universe around us. They’re ignoring the unimaginable strangeness and the mind-boggling vastness of it all. They turned the Orion Arm into a shopping mall, and the Milky Way into Smallville. They’ve taken the wonder out of the real universe.

It’s time to put it back. Please.

My reply:

There’s a non-sequitur here that adding interstellar travel to a setting takes the wonder out of the universe?

Is science-fiction/fantasy really about the locations? Or is it about the plots and the drama and the characters? I can take MacBeth to the Interstellar Court where the Zanifraxians rule and the Darkness Syndicate seeks to destroy humanity before it can be accepted into the court, but at the end of the day, it’s still MacBeth.

For some science-fantasy it may be important to be in a galaxy far far away but yes, these stories could be set nearer to home – but why restrict ourselves?

My own writing is more about the interactions between a Earth human culture which is as alien to our 21st Century minds as anything I can conjure for interstellar aliens. That’s the sort of stuff that interests me and it’s why I enjoy reading Charlie Stross and Iain M Banks.

Is there a difference between a science-fiction tale of a lone cosmonaut on a supralight scout ship meeting strange new species or a pulp-fantasy take of a Venusian farmboy deciding to join the AetherCorps? Not really. But all of these stories elicit wonder in this reader.

Just because we cannot travel these distances, doesn’t mean we cannot dream these distances.