Trying out a new format

Instead of my standard posts for blogging, I've tried to make a sort of video lecture or tutorial where I'm talking while drawing over example images. It is harder than most people would believe to consistently say interesting things while doing something.

The film itself is embedded below, any and all feedback is great. In case you want a regular post as well I think I'll put it up tomorrow or something, I've got all the images and most of the text already.

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Advantage analysis: breaking a map down

In this post I will try to explain a method of analysis that can be applied to a map, finished or in development. The different types of advantages in this post were things that I came across as motivations for why an area looked a certain way while trying to analyze one of my own maps but I will try to apply it to another map just to see if it holds water. While I'm sure that much of this will sound obvious to an experienced gamer, this is a more detailed approach. Starting with a more limited FPS with no classes would make the discussion simpler but I will still base my discussion around Team Fortress 2 since it's the game that I'm most familiar with.

Since this discussion will also be very theoretical I feel a bit limited in my vocabulary but in this post I will use "path" as an one-dimensional object between areas, generally not allowing travel between separate paths except in the case of one-way travel. Due to the sticky/rocketjumps available in Team Fortress 2, paths that you can switch between via special jumping are defined as 1½-way.

The basics of the method is to take a certain number of advantages and then rate a path or an area of the map and rate it according to those advantages. You can also start from the other way around and design the purpose of an area first and what type of classes you want to take that path and then design the advantages around it. Either way is fine, as long as you have a thought process for why you're doing one thing or the other and not just building and then seeing what comes out.

Let's get to it.



While this list is not set in stone, there are five general advantages that seem to come up most often in my own work as reasons for one thing or the other. A few of them have subgroups and you may want to add your own. If you do, go ahead and tell me why you want one thing or the other and I'll see if I add it into the list.

Advantages:
#1: Height - high ground is generally important in most tactical games. Not only does it allow you to see further and gather information, it also makes splash damage weapons more powerful when firing them onto low ground.

#2: Proximity - just how close that path is to the action, getting to where the fight is and quick reinforcements is never a bad thing.

#3: Resources - in Team Fortress 2 this mostly consists of health and ammo but if you're analyzing another game that has weapon pickups or other types of rare-spawning power-ups (quad damage etc.), those are even more important to consider.

#4: Cover - this isn't clearly defined as cover from everything, it could be cover against one class while allowing another to fire at you. One example is the upper area on Hoodoo stage 2 where the only class able to fire up on the cap 1 balcony is the Demoman.

Another side of cover is whether it allows vision or not. Having a covered route with windows on one side that allows perfect information gathering while being fully protected is a powerful thing in itself.

#5: Objectives - while only applicable in cases where there is a separate objective that's not just "kill everyone". Having a Demoman camp the other team's spawn door in TF2 is powerful to the point of being game breaking but it will not by itself make you win.

#6?: Path layout - I've had a hard time wording this part but I don't want to leave it out. What it means is the angle between separate paths and how they work together. Having to defend a 180 degree arc is harder than just having two entrances side by side and defending several different levels makes a team have to split up even more. It's not something that you can apply to a single path but rather where and how they merge together.

Badwater analysis:
I will do my analysis mostly from the attackers perspective. The defending team generally spreads out a lot more to cover all different angles while the attacking team picks one lane to push with one (or more) übers. The advantages will still be mostly the same for the defending team though the use of 1½-way paths and resource placement will favor one team or the other.

While I don't find the payload mode quite as fun as 5cp, pl_badwater is my favorite among all the other game modes. The second and fourth stage are the difficult ones for the attackers and the other two can generally be captured by most teams that get there. The class that I find has the hardest time on this map is the spy, but since I'm such a bad spy to begin with you'll have to take that with a pinch of salt. Maps that allow the defenders to build up sentries also make it really hard for scouts as well but it's not quite as bad as dustbowl.



Step one general layout: a wide open area making it possible to jump nearly anywhere with a single sticky/rocket. Snipers and wrangled sentries are very powerful while pyros, spies and heavies tend to not be. Since the area is so open the gameplay focuses more on pure pushing and explosive spam, the main source of surprise attacks being the defending team jumping down on the cart near the tunnel exits.

#1: Top left cliff - with a height advantage but very little cover, this side is generally cleared out with an uber or not at all. The big ammo pack allows for fairly quick building of a defensive sentry and since a defensive uber on a pyro can airblast the attackers off the cliff this is fairly risky. Even if you push the top with a heavy and clear the sentry out, once the uber is over you will have perfect information on the other defenders but generally can't kill them due to the damage falloff. The high ground also makes it possible to jump down onto the cart once it's gone through the tunnel and continue taking the first stage.

#2: Tunnel - fairly long, very tight and with no cover. The only resource is the cart for the attacking team that resupplies health and ammo. Fairly easily spammed by explosives because of how tight it is. Focused on the objective and will generally not be used for pushes, due to the risk of having the medic sniped. Viable as a route for spies though they are not able to run the whole length cloaked.

#3: Right side slope - very wide and with only one rock formation as cover. Like the top left, this is fairly hard to push without losing the medic to a sniper and fighting uphill will make attackers take a large amount of damage from defending demomen. Since it is still the closest path it will see a lot of action by players focusing more on preventing reinforcements than capturing the point itself.



Step two general layout: two lower ground flat areas with a high ground between them, making it the primary goal for both teams. The roof is one of the most important non-objective areas to hold across all Team Fortress 2 maps.

#1: Cart lane - like the cart path on the first stage but a bit more open, making it easier to avoid splash damage. Tends to have a high amount of sniper fights and is hard to push through with a medic, even though it has a very high reward if you manage to camp the door around the corner. The roof and a sniper at the end tends to shut down this lane entirely.

#2: The roof - a massive height advantage, fairly high on resources as well as having cover in case you need to heal up. The only bad sides is how hard it is to get to as the attacking team, fighting up narrow stairs, a doorway and then destroying the usual sentry without being airblasted off the roof, sniped or just killed by reinforcements. Also quite far from the objective itself, you need to jump down and run back to push the cart.

#3: Container yard - high on cover and resources while being fairly far away makes this a prime area for fast classes like the scout, spy and pyro. The main purpose is as a flanking opportunity for both teams, making it possible to come in the back of either team going up the stairs to the roof.



Step three general layout: unlike the first two stages, the cart path here is the widest route as well as being below both of the other ones. The house on the left as well as the walkway running across the cart path are two areas that make this stage interesting.

#1: Left stair side - higher ground than the cart path but not higher than the defender house on the left, this is an interesting path. Has a long sight line with fairly low cover as well as being a bit too far away from the cart, making it a hard route to push. The low amount of resources also makes this an area that is suited only for a low number of players at a time, especially ones that spend a high amount of ammo like the demo and soldier.

#2: Cart lane - while the area here is very wide, the attackers are still fighting uphill and will generally receive a fair bit of grenade spam. There are powerful resources to the left but there is no cover and you're likely to get sniped if you go for them. Since the path slopes upward on the attacker side as well, the defenders have an equally hard time of pushing back as well, and there are no real flanking opportunities if the attackers have someone in the window.

#3: Right side - while being the closest route as well as having a big ammo and health pack, the exit from this room is also easily spammed with grenades. Since it is so close, pushing an uber with a heavy is fairly easy though sentries around the corner are still hard to take out since the uber generally has to be popped early.

The window here is also an interesting detail since it gives near-perfect information. If you're not actively trying to push forward there is not much to do for classes up here though and you generally have to run back and get the cart even if you manage to take out a sentry nest.



Step four general layout: the upper part of this area is extremely open for both teams, again making the team with the better sniper(s) have a small advantage. The lower part has much better cover with the two nooks for defending sentries as well as the slope leading to the Red spawn, where it is very hard to even notice players.

#1: Window side - the windows being a fair bit above the cart path offer a good high ground while having decent cover from sniper fire. There is some resources and it's a very short path to take. Before deciding to push here you need some information from the rest of your team on where the sentries are since jumping down commits you and makes it impossible to get away. While an uber through the window will generally clear one or more sentry, you will almost never be able to push the cart and it is very hard to get backup.

The biggest problem is getting there in the first place. The defending team has locations with high ground in the two rooms leading to the windows as well as having narrow, easily defensible doorways. There is even a medium healthkit and some ammo even though the defender has to sacrifice position to get them.

#2: Cart lane - very open and with extremely limited resources, this is the least interesting area until you get to the lower part where the defenders have their cover. Pushing the cart further than the beginning of the slope is generally suicidal unless you have team support.

#3: Top right - much longer than the previous two paths, offering a high amount of cover and a fair bit of resources. The windows offer a great sniping spot or information gathering while being extremely far away from the objective. Pushing this route will allow you to get the balcony high ground or camp one of the three spawn exits while not being able to push the cart.

This lane is very similar to the window path; jumping down commits you and you will usually end up far away from the rest of your team or the cart. There is even the same type of 1½-way where the defenders can get in your back.

All the rest: If you've read through this document, two things should have become apparent: the number of paths to any given location seems to be three and the cart is by itself so powerful that it never runs on the high ground. Three separate paths with different advantages and a dash of 1½-way paths seem to offer enough difference for the nine classes in TF2 without making a map too difficult to learn. Especially in the linear form of payload where the paths themselves generally run along the cart path.

The cart, both being the primary objective as well as resupply health and metal to the attacking team makes the cart path itself not require all that many resources. Those that do exist are primarily for the defenders and should be placed where there is some form of cover.

In general, I'd say doing a deeper analysis of a map is very helpful, no matter if it's a finished map or still in development. You may or may not agree on the different advantages I've tried here but the most important part is to design with a purpose and not just go "this is too tight, it needs another path". Break down and define what is already there and what classes or advantages you want to design for before adding something.
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Design layers: from the ground up

The most interesting part of mapmaking has for me always been the early stages of prototyping. It's where you get to start seeing the world that only used to exist inside your head and it's also where you get to make the big rough changes to everything that didn't work, because quite frankly, doing designs only in your head doesn't work for an entire map.

Unfortunately I've yet to find a work flow that I'm quite happy with and I've tried several approaches.

Failiure #1: starting out doing a two-layered design in photoshop did, not unexpectedly result in a map that was extremely flat with only one upper level, much like ctf_2fort but without the underground tunnels.

Failiure #2: making sketches of the art style and theme of the map first and then trying to build good gameplay around it. Starting out with a big valley on one side with a river at the bottom, I managed to make a fairly good first point of a CP map but when I wanted the players to run across bridges to the second point I ran into huge optimization issues. While it's possible to pull off, I would recommend putting the scenic things in the 3D skybox and leave it there.

Failiure #3: jumping straight into Hammer and trying to use big world brushes as a sort of Lego prototype. This seems to be the best of the three, creating a fairly interesting map. Unfortunately it also looked a lot like mix-and-match of selected parts of Dustbowl and Goldrush and was on the whole rather uninspired.

A major benefit of working with large brushes is that you'll virtually never end up with the thin wall problem where you want to make one area bigger or place a big prop where you can't because there is another area on the other side of the wall.

After so many failiures it would be a shame if I didn't learn anything. My latest version of prototyping works is taking a more basic approach, trying to start out with gameplay and the reason of why an area looks in one way instead of another.

Having the motivation for doing an action as the primary concern is a concept I've come across before, mostly while trying to learn poker or Starcraft 2. Doing something bad with a clear and distinct reason for it is often better than doing something good just because you felt like it. A formal and defined thought process is one of the first things you try to get when playing poker and it should hold true in design as well. Instead of "this house is boring, add a door and some windows" it should be "this area should be a low ground area that is the fastest attack route but suffers from weapons with splash damage and has bad sniper cover".

I've mentioned layers before and that is mainly because I think the two-dimensional sketching is still the fastest and easiest way to work on parts of your map, while I wouldn't recommend making the entire layout only in Photoshop.

Layer #1: the gameplay layer.
Having a layer dedicated to taking notes and trying to define your areas is my newest addition to the prototyping phase. Though still mostly untested and unrefined, I think it will be a solid part of my design phase.

What it boils down to is making a lot of notes, trying to define the purpose of an area and then adding on the other layers. Instead of just drawing a doorway on your flat surface, start out with writing a description "choke point with high ground on both sides" and then the reason for it "easy to defend on both sides, fast to push through with ubercharge". Once you've done that, the gameplay of an area has been defined without constricting the brushwork or graphic style.

Since this concept is so abstract it will also help out as an analytical tool, helping you to figure out why some parts of your favourite maps play so well and what sub-parts certain areas break down into.

Layer #2: the brush layer.
After the reasoning for an area is complete (and sometimes before that), it is time to start with the early heavy brushwork (grid size 32/64 Hammer units for "sketching"). If you're making a room, only make the walls that the room itself requires, no roof, windows or other details that make it one single type of structure in your mind, only the actual walls you need for your design.

After your design layer is complete you will also be able to work on several different versions of the same area. As long as it does what is defined in the design, changing a doorway is fine. In early alpha testing you should also try to focus as much as possible on doing changes to the brushwork first and only when and if you notice the design itself being unbalanced should you go back and change it. Since fast iterations rely heavily on fast responses and playtime from your testers, it might be an issue at non-professional levels where custom maps are played rarely if at all. Fortunately, testing small areas one at a time instead of testing the map as a whole should allow for faster iterations.

Making sure to stick within the design while changing architecture also puts more focus on the analytical skills, making sure that you're able to put bad parts into definitions of why it's bad.

Layer #3: the detail layer.
After the brushwork is done, you can put your attention to making the world look good but detailing generally has no place in a prototype thought process. In fact, one of my problems is that I put time into detailing too early, which I will hopefully be able to avoid by focusing more on the design layer. Jumping back between the design and brushwork layers is likely to happen but I think you should stay away from going back to the design layer once you've started on the details and lighting of a map. In essence, the higher layers constrict the lower ones. If you spend hours on detailing, you're less likely to make a needed change on a lower level.

My current five capture point map is my first attempt at using this process with the design layer but I have a good feeling about it, nothing that makes use of a more clearly defined reasoning can be all bad.
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Artpass contest finished

So Valve's art pass contest is over (though not yet decided) and I've taken some time off because I didn't want to look at my entry for a while but here it is as I turned it in. Unfortunately I seem to have turned it in with a few glaring (to me) errors but it's nothing that can't be fixed. The embedded youtube link below is me flying through the map, exactly as it was turned in on the day before the contest ended. For pictures in higher resolution than 720p, click the screenshots after the jump or visit my Dropbox gallery here.



As a reference, the original fly-through of the euneditedmap can be found here.

Warning: massive amounts of pictures after the jump.





































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At a crossroad

As usual, I haven't been posting much but right now that's a good thing because I have been working on my art pass map instead. While I've seen some great entries that are likely to beat mine, I also manage to get pleasantly surprised by how the map looks in-game. That is indeed a rare thing since I'm usually my own worst critic.

The problem I've run into though is the texturing. Since my planning phase I've been using a mostly blue industrial theme with the high-contrast light maps. My first plan was to have the blue attack their own base after it has been overrun by the red team. The problem with this was that the red capture points clashed a lot with the generally blue theme of the areas around them. It made the points themselves stand out more but since I don't think anyone would really be interested in the backstory, people would just wonder why the red points were there but never look around to try and find out.

After that, I thought about switching the teams around, having blue quite naturally defend the blue base. Apparently this is a bad idea. Story-wise, it would make sense for the read team to attack every once in a while and on 5 capture point, king of the hill or capture the flag type maps they do attack. But there is no attack/defend map where the red team is attacking and several of the users seemed to think it was a bad idea to send one in for the contest.

I'd still really like to go with the blue textures for the main occluder building between blue spawn and capture point B just because they look awesome with my lighting setup but I can agree with everyone's opinion that it might "feel weird" to attack as red. Playing on a new map is in itself so confusing and most players play both attackers and defenders on any given map anyway so I think it would be possible to get away with it.

Am I just reluctant to kill my own darlings or will the Red eventually get an attacking map, who knows? For now I'll likely stick with the blue-neutral-red transition though. Even though it's unlikely to win, it's a bit more likely, I can always make a 5cp or Koth map later with one end using my original theme.

Click the link below for images.

RED theme CP A:


BLU theme CP A:


Neutral theme way to A:


Red-ish theme CP B:


Blue-ish theme attacker spawn exterior:


My "official" map thread can be found here
To check out some map theory worth considering while maybe not not following exactly, go to nodraw.net
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So many contests, so little time

Summer is here and both Valve and Blizzard has released a fan contest and I want to win them both. The only slight flaw here is that I'm quite busy with work and probably won't have time to do great in both of them (and the odds of winning are astronomical).

I have the feeling that it's easier to reach your maximum potential faster in the novel contest, mapping takes a really long time. Mapping also happens to be a thing I really enjoy so I suppose I'll focus on that on my days off and then try to write the novel on the days that I'm working and only have a couple of hours to spare.

The good part about the novel is that I've already planned a single-player campaign for Starcraft 2 and thus had the story and characters mostly done. The hard work with writing only starts after you have all of the story down though and you have to revise your own words (or have other people do it). Reading something you wrote yourself for the n+50th time is likely to make you go insane.

I've made some progress on the art pass map as well, screenshots included after the jump. If you want to you can check out my tf2maps.net thread and post any comments there.

For anyone interested I've also enabled comments as well as subscription since my updates are currently quite unpredictable. If someone knows of a widget that allows you to put permanent links on the side, that would be excellent for my mapping projects.









Sunday update with WIP picture of capture B:


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Game design and the sunk-cost effect

The sunk cost-effect or the sunk cost dilemma is a theory of economics and game theory. The basics of the problem is that as projects keep going, it's more and more expensive to change your current implementation but you keep on working on it instead of starting over because of all the time already spent. Since most game developers seem to be working iteratively, all the fast iterations are in the beginning of a project and that's when most of the big scrapping of design happens. Most of the testing in a development cycle still happens near the end though, after all the modelling, animations and sound effects are already close to finished. After that, only minor details are changed to fix things like game balance and timing.

This is where I feel the cost-effect really start kicking in. Starcraft 2 is nearing it's development cycle now with beta phase 2 launched and only two weeks until full release. Blizzard's MO has always been (officially) to only release a game "when it's done". But is it really done?

In my own humble opinion, there are still several units that could use a change. It's just not going to happen. I expect the game to release mostly as it is now, with only one or maybe two minor balance patches. I had high hopes for the patch between the two phases of beta but it didn't really do much.

There are three units that I feel have the biggest issues in the game as it is now: the corruptor, reaper and ultralisk. The corruptor and the reaper have problems since their roles are so narrow they don't allow for any creativity. Now that the corruptor has even lost its corruption ability (given to overseers), it doesn't quite live up to it's name.

Since it has extra damage against massive targets and a long range, the corruptor seems to be intended as a counter to the tier three air units as well as colossi. As of right now, ninety percent or more of my games played don't last long enough to get any tier three air so the only reason to ever get corruptors is to kill colossi. After your opponent's big walkers are all dead, your heavy investment is basically only useful as extremely expensive scouts. Once games start lasting longer, the corruptor might be useful to great to get air dominance, until then I feel like it could have something like Brood war's Devourer, a small aoe that makes your units do more damage.

The reaper's main problem is that it costs a massive amount of gas, enough to not be cost-effective against anything else than workers and zealots in low numbers. They are also fragile to the point of dying near instantly to anything with a ranged attack. While this makes sense because the reapers have excellent mobility and decent damage versus light units, it also makes them worthless (except as scouts, jumping up on a ledge) after around five minutes of a game. If we compare the reapers to other tier 1 (or 1.5) units, there is the marauder, the stalker and the roach, which are all viable throughout most of a game.

I would like to see something that makes the reaper be a bit more useful later on, like allowing the combat shield upgrade to give additional health to reapers as well as marines, maybe even allowing them to stim and be a sort of anti-light part of a unit composition. This would allow a terran to micro better against banenings while having really expensive units up front, making for an interesting dynamic.

The third and biggest unit is the ultralisk. While Blizzard has said they would work on ultralisks for the beta 2 patch, the only changes have allowed them to no longer be stunned by Thor 250mm cannons and have less health, which I guess evens out. The purpose of the ultralisk seem to be as an anti-mech counter as well as base destroyer instead of cracklings but they are still terrible as tanks. The biggest problem with ultralisks is that they are simply too big.

The other expensive units like colossi, thor and tanks all have the benefit of having a ranged attack which means they don't need to be close to the unit they're damaging. It also means they can use a choke to their advantage while ultralisks need big, open areas. Most of the maps in the current active pool have really few open areas to fight in, meaning the zerg player will have to be extremely active with creep and try to flank and pincer their opponent, which is a lot trickier than a-moving. Just letting ultralisks walk over zerglings would fix a whole lot of problems.

All in all, the zerg feel a bit stale. They have a couple fewer units than the other two races which means they have fewer options to be creative with strategies. They're not bad and the balance feels pretty good. But I played 300+ games as zerg in the beta and I've decided to switch to terran for release which should say something, I'm just not a satisfied customer. The protoss are the only ones with no units I could find to complain about and they're also the ones who have the most viable unit compositions in my opinion. They also have storm, drops and warp gates which allow for excellent mobility and interesting games.

Do I expect Blizzard to go back to their drawing board and change any of the units? Not at all, the game has just come too far to stop but people have been talking about the ultralisks since patch 7 and that was three (?) months ago. The cost has just been put into the game and there is no going back, the game will be released as-is.

Is it ready? I don't think so.
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The marginal advantage versus defender's advantage

In my recent forays into Starcraft 2 tactics I've come across Sean "Day9" Plott, who has a web stream (Day9 daily) several times a week where he discusses strategies and tactics. While he doesn't cast a ton of games like other commentators, I watch most of his shows because since he pauses mid-game the strategic discussion has a lot more depth than other casters. He also does hilarious intros, which you might or might not like.

Apart from his dailies he's written an article, "The marginal advantage" that discusses expert play across several different games. While I recommend that you read the post in full, the focus of it (my interpretation) is that higher level players have a smaller edge on their opponents. A smaller edge takes longer to turn into a big enough difference to defeat your opponent (like a poker player has to play thousands of hands to realize their edge). As players learn to handle all the standard strategies you will have to invent new things to try and keep them off balance and try to force them to make the mistakes.

Instead of discussing it from a player's perspective like he does, I will try to approach the subject of marginal advantages from a designer's perspective. While his article discusses several genres of games, I will mostly write from a RTS standpoint and with Starcraft and Starcraft 2 as my major examples.

If balanced games make for interesting matches, where does the balance come from and how do we allow the marginal advantage without turning it into a slippery slope?

I will try to make the argument that defender's advantage is a feature built into the Starcraft games and intentional or not, it makes for exciting matches. Most high-level players grasp intuitively that attacking someone too early is bad but I'm not sure they define why.

One of the things from the first Starcraft game that has been discussed to the second one is high ground advantage. Instead of having a flat percentage miss chance they've removed the ability to attack things you can't see. If you have vision there will be no reduction. I think this has a reason and a good one at that: defender's advantage. If two players had exactly equal economy and production, the one who killed a unit or two early on would eventually win because of higher damage. Defender's advantage works like a kind of equalizer, forcing players to get a bigger edge than the defender's advantage blocks.

Let's say two armies worth 100 points clash in the middle of a map. After the battle one guy has 55 while the other has 50, making one player have a 5 point edge. If you make the defender's advantage be worth 20 army points, if the player with the edge attacks he will lose more points attacking, making the action in the game be back and forth. Not until one player has a big enough edge to overcome both the opponent's army and their advantages will the game end.

A defender has more types of advantages available to them than high ground and the importance of all of them change as the game progresses. High ground is good for blocking off armies during the entire game but blocking vision becomes harder late-game since most armies usually include some flying unit. The races in Starcraft are designed to have different types of defender advantages. The zerg relies mostly on mobility and vision, terran are slow and can turtle up and and the protoss are somewhere in-between.

One advantage that becomes less important later on is the shorter reinforcement path. Having your opponent near your base means the units you build to counter his army show up earlier. In the beginning of the game every single unit is a bigger percent of your army and will make more difference as they pop out of your structures. Being closer to your own base allows you to pull workers away from the resources to work like temporary army units. Another slight effect is that it's easier to keep macro up in your own base, something that matters more at lower levels.

Scouting and intelligence is another factor that heavily influences your troop movements. It becomes more important later on as players get more bases and instead of just having one or two ways of attack you have several different choices. One of the features of the zerg is the creep which gives you vision. Spreading it out between your bases allow you to predict your opponent and make traps with flanking and/or burrowed units. Having your tanks pre-sieged in a good position as terran will make a significant difference.

As the game progresses, troop movement becomes an issue. This part of defender's advantage has different designs for the separate races. The zerg have creep for mobility and almost perfect vision. Protoss have invisible observers for vision and warp gates to teleport in units. Terran suffers a bit from having slow units but the medivacs are pretty easy to get and stimpacks let your infantry move quickly while sacrificing some health.

It is not a coincidence that most early advantages result in some kind of contain by the victor of the early battles and then a focus on economy. Since the defender's advantage is a big factor early on, instead of trying to overcome it taking a safer route is a way of maximizing your expected value. The edge itself is something that works like an economy in itself. You can sacrifice your army edge now to try and get an economical advantage, giving you a bigger army edge later or you can use your edge to attack. The attack might give you a bigger edge or hand it over to your opponent but either way it's usually riskier. If you think you have a skill edge, you want the game to take longer but if you think your opponent is better you want to push early edges hard and finish it off quickly.

Am I reading too much into things that are features in most of the games of the genre? I could be but if it hasn't been changed, there usually is a reason for it. Even if it was unintentional to begin with, the reasons why it's still there are solid. The easier it is to defend, the longer your games will last but don't make it big enough that games are lost long before they actually end. Defender's advantage should be a small thing but it really makes a difference.
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Metagame integration: YABOT

As you might have noticed by my earlier post, I'm all for anything that helps players get better at a game. The YABOT (Yet another build order tester) is one of the best tools I've seen in a game yet. And it's a fan-made custom map.

Since the Starcraft 2 beta is currently closed and I've had a big interest in both Starcraft games at a high level, I wanted to be able to practice while I can't play on Battle.net. What YABOT does is allow you to choose a build order (or make one yourself) and practice it against an AI opponent that does a specific build order (or a random one). Essentially, it allows you to test a strategy to find it's weaknesses as well as try to get better at building timing to make your resources match better.

What it doesn't do is react to what happens in the game. It will still spawn the exact same army even if you killed all his workers or didn't even scout. It is probably the only bad side but it should be mentioned.



Since it is a small fan-made project it doesn't need all the bells and whistles of a release product but what it does is show potential. If one (or a few) custom mappers can create this in just a couple of weeks, there shouldn't really be anything stopping the game developers themselves. If you want to create a game for competitive play, making good practice tools should probably be high on your list of priorities. Good spectator tools like those in SC2 are a huge improvement but they don't matter that much if the players don't get good enough for anyone to want to watch them.

Even though I've never been top level in the SC2 beta and I don't expect to play enough to ever get there, I still like to be good at a game. Unlike a lot of designers I know, instead of playing a lot of games for a couple of hours I'm more interested in metagaming and strategy development over time. There's a good feeling that comes from just having perfect timing when you have the exact amount of minerals and gas for the building you want to build. Practice makes perfect and when you can practice enough playing single-player to not get killed within a few minutes in a multiplayer game it's a good thing. This is where I'd like to see more development instead of having more bloom on your shoulderpads.

The YABOT site with downloads can be found here, the TeamLiquid.net thread here. Click for full post

Map improvement: 3 steps

I've started to think the reason why I stop working on my maps when they're ready for first release is that I run out of clear goals. Since lack of improvement is a bad thing, the past couple of weeks I've been trying to find a work flow that lets me state a problem in a way that makes it easier to find a solution.

Stating the problem in the first place is a good thing because then you've actually got a more specific way of determining whether you're improving the area you're working on or not. My problem has been that I've just said to myself "this is bad, it should be better" instead of trying to say exactly what is bad and how it should be made better.

The last couple of weeks I've been trying to clearly state what is a problem and why, noting down things that need to be there and working from that. The latest area I've been trying to improve have been the second story area between the first and second capture point.



Since the second floor balcony was overlooking the first spawn point for Red, it was a bit too powerful to begin with, if Blu managed to get a Heavy+Medic team upstairs the defender reinforcements couldn't really get out of their spawn door. Rebuilding the spawn points gave Red three separate paths out of the spawn, allowing the second floor more freedom since it only blocked one of the exits.

Another issue with the first layout was that the stairs being inside the houses blocked nearly all the space, making the houses feel really cramped. Having the two houses with a bridge between them also made it look a bit too much like the buildings at Capture point 1 as well as taking up even more space.

Step 1: make sure you have a clear goal. Writing down the problem it came out to: make the second story area bigger while keeping the sniper paths run along the sides.


Right side showing balcony overlooking Red spawn #1

Step 2: after setting the goal, make sure you pay attention to all the limiting factors. There might actually not be a lot of them, some of them are just lazyness, continuing to build on your old houses because you already built them.

After clearing out the houses that were there to begin with and just raising the platform there was a lot of space to work with. The only necessary walls were the one blocking the stairs to the second spawn as well as a big wall mostly to block visibility for snipers.



Working from this small number of limitations there were several ways of doing the layout. The solution I finally chose has the added benefit of being able to also extend the skybox inwards to optimize visibility and keep players from seeing too much of the second area while attacking the first stage of the map. It also keeps players from standing on the right side (top in the screenshot) and sniping any of the exits from the Red spawn.

The bottom area that's been blocked off from seeing the sky feels a bit cramped instead now so I'm not sure if I need to put non-skybox lighting there or not. I think it looks pretty cool either way, with a couple of props it'll be pretty nice as well as offer more variation from stage one. If it doesn't work I'll just block it off and make the first floor of the houses have a way through since it's currently entirely empty.

Step 3: test it to see if you've lived up to your goal. I thought of putting this first but there'd be nothing to test if you didn't build it first so having it last applies to the first case as well as the last.



I haven't really decided if this is the way to work in every case but right now it feels good. I haven't been doing too much mapping on occasion of the holiday keeping me busy with work (that I get paid for) but hopefully it'll pick up over the summer. Here's to hoping and writing down clearer goals.
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Mini-review: The Whispered World

A couple of weeks back, I bought The Whispered World (WW) mostly based on its graphic style. I like the hand-drawn look, in fact the game I'm currently playing is Valkyria Chronicles on the PS3.

The game is presented as being "In classic point and click tradition" which is actually an understatement. It's exactly like an old point and click game like King's Quest and not at all like an old game like The Dig. The difference between those games are in my own opinion mostly that in one of them the puzzles mostly make sense and in the other they require you to spend hours in your inventory using item X with item Y and seeing if it will work.

There is a difference between doing something in the style of old games, ie. hand-drawn backgrounds and doing something just like old games and unfortunately WW falls into the wrong category.

While I'm talking about a lot of weak points there are some positives as well. The best one is Spot, your weird worm companion. He follows you around and as the game progresses you'll be able to transform him into different forms, using him to solve puzzles. While this acts as another thing to try to rub against everything, he's also really cute and it's an interesting mechanic that shows it's learned something from the 20+ years of adventure games.

Another thing is the space bar button that highlights all the items on the screen that you can interact with. The reason why this is not entirely a good thing is that you can't actually find out that there is such a button because there is no "controls" tab in the and there is no game manual. I only found it out by accidentally hitting it. Turning the controls into a mini-game of "press every key hoping it does something" is not quite good game design.

I want to like the game, I really do. It's just a bit too much pretty graphics and annoying voice acting. Having a couple of guys working in the design department that actually wants to do something about usability would probably help the game a lot. I can't believe some of the puzzles actually got through the testing phase unchanged. I ran into a couple of spots where using one item on another made Sadwick say "That's a great idea" (or something like it) and still not doing anything because it was missing some component. If it's a great idea, I want you to do it, otherwise I want feedback telling me why it doesn't work.

While WW is a nice game that will take a few hours and has some nice puzzles, I'd still recommend you getting a Sam & Max pack instead. It's around the same price and you'll get 24 episodes with 2-3 hours of play time with puzzles that make more sense. If you want an old game that is excellent and cheap, get The Dig.
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If at first you don't succeed

So I made a first release of my map for last week. Unfortunately it didn't do so well, in my own opinion mostly based on the spawn points. Not so much that they didn't do their job but more because the spawns and the paths leading away from them weren't really as intuitive as they should be.

I was hoping that avoiding signs would force me to make it better and better until everyone understood where to go, then when I add the signs it should be perfectly clear. It seems to work so far, since I've changed three out of four spawnpoints for the second release of the map.

Spawn #1
The first spawn had a problem that was really easy to fix since it mostly relied on moving it back to where respawning players had vision to the first capture point. This shouldn't really have made it into even the first alpha release since I was aware of the problem already. Guess I was just so happy that I finally got all the entities working that I wanted to playtest immediately. Moving it back a couple of hundred units as well as up the stairs.

I'm still considering moving it back a bit more into the house upstairs but I'm also a bit concerned with the sniper vision, currently fixed by a couple of crates being in the way. I want to test this location properly then if it doesn't work I'll just rework the entire corner to remove vision from the first capture point.

Spawn #2
While the first spawn was easy, the second one was trickier. It is used for RED to defend stage 2 and for BLU to attack the final stage and since it's used for both teams it needs to be easily accessible for both. I just didn't manage to do it with any of my solutions using the same spawn points for both players so I went with a single spawn room with separate spawn locations instead.

Before- and afterimage.


Spawn #3
The last spawnroom is only used for RED defending the last 2 capture points and it's working great for the very last point, not so much for the third one. My first solution just had a rather narrow walkway doing a ninety degree turn which most players ignored and just jumped down instead.

I've tried both making the area more open to be inviting as well as making it a straighter route from the spawnroom to the point so we'll see how it works out.

The map is not done yet but it's improving. I actually woke up yesterday having dreamed about mapping so I think I'll be taking a couple of days off.
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pl_shaft alpha 1 released

I think that my map is fully functional and playable and have done tests with low numbers of players. The spawn rooms and captures are working, there are no development textures and a bit of optimization.

It's not pretty but it's playable. Finding 15 good testers is another thing entirely. If my own server is up and running, you can find it at 83.176.206.248 and come join us. You can also add me as a steam friend "Huckle" (with the question mark heart) and ask when it's coming up.

Map can be downloaded here, via rapidshare. Click for full post

A life-changing moment?

First of all, this will only be indirectly about game design. I watched a speech for the second time and this time it actually made me better at doing what I do. Not in the way that I understand something better but that I constantly have a demon in my head saying "is this really what you should be doing?". As soon as I open up a firefox window, answer private messages or make playlists in spotify it comes back and that's a good thing.

While I don't have the minor gift of talent, I do have the love for what I do and I'm constantly thinking about how to make my work better. With the added bonus of actually putting in the hours of work, I can't help but think that eventually I'll be an awesome mapper. It might not show yet but wait a couple of months and keep your eyes on this page. I'm going to be one of the people who ship.

The speech: Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain, try it out for yourselves.

For the last week I've gotten so much done and it feels great. If this lasts until my 30th birthday I'll get a hold of this guy. Not so much because of what he's done for me but because of what he made me do to myself. Click for full post

Current mapping project: pl_shaft

Here it is, my current mapping project. It's a single stage payload map (like badwater basin). I've made some good progress the last couple of weeks after my trip to LA and I might be able to get a functional alpha out for game testing this weekend. It's currently fully functional even though I have some issues with the spawn doors.

It looks like crap though and doesn't have any displacements. It's not supposed to, it's an alpha test, I expect to change everything quite a bit. The only part of the map that's actually been tested is step one, it's also the only part that has any kind of details and houses that have roofs. Detailing is meditative, it's where I go when I'm too tired to think of how to continue.

Pictures after the jump.


Capture point #1, facing forward

Capture point #1, facing back

Capture point #2

Capture point #3, facing back

Capture point #4, facing back

Capture point #4, facing forward

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Critical hits and short-term variance

One of the things that poker and Team Fortress 2 have in common are that encounters are often decided by short-term variance while the game goes to whoever is better on average. In poker you're trying to merge your own range as well as playing against your opponents range and you'll run into the top of your opponents range every once in a while. In TF2 critical hits (especially crockets) will decide the outcome of a fight, even if it's not as extreme as in poker.

I've noticed that as I've become better, I like natural criticals (as opposed to kritzkrieg etc.) less and less. The reason for this is the same reason why criticals are also a good idea: it allows a worse player to beat a better player through randomness. As I wrote in my post on transparency, this is one of the things that make it harder to improve but also keep players in the game. So if new players want criticals and better players don't, you need to implement a system that reduces variance as skill level increases. Something like the resilience stat in World of Warcraft.

There has been a lot of talk about resilience gear in WoW and while I haven't been an active PvPer I think it's a great way to reduce variance to acceptable levels. Playing 3vs3 in arena when you could get killed instantly by two damage dealers on the other team wouldn't be much of a skill-based PvP system. Instead as you move up in the ladder and gain gear you will have a larger health pool as well as resilience to reduce critical hits, letting you live long enough for skill to be a bigger factor.

The only issue is that it becomes really hard for new players to get into the PvP game from PvE since you start with no resilience. This has been fixed with later patches as you can now get PvP gear from badges awarded by killing bosses. It is a MMO after all and Blizzard wants you to keep paying.

If poker players had the opportunity to reduce variance I think they'd like to, losing actual money and not just in-game points can wrench your heart out. In the end, the random factor is also what lets new people into the game. Instead of reducing short-term variance, poker players live on playing more hands and not looking at their account balance too often.

When designing games, considering if and how the game will change between low- and high-level play should be considered, whether it be critical hits, damage spread, spawn locations or some other random factor. What you decide on is not as important as making sure you make informed decisions.
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Dynamic scaling of multiplayer maps

Playing multiplayer games off peak hours can be a frustrating thing. My current games of choice are Starcraft 2 and Team Fortress 2, both having issues when at lower player numbers (but SC2 is still in beta).

Joining a server in TF2 with a small number (<10) of players removes most of not all of the teamwork. Since one or two of the players on either team are also respawning at any given time, the game degenerates into something close to a team deathmatch game. If the offensive team ever has 2 more players than the other team they can also capture the point/intelligence/cart to move on to the next stage.

Instead of being forced to play on the big sized maps even with 6 players, why not create a system that lets you open and close off parts of the map depending on the number of players? TF2 might not be the best game as an example for map scaling, I'll use it here just because I'm intimately familiar with the maps and game mechanics. A better suited game might be Unreal 3 deathmatch but the concept still applies here.

The technology for creating this kind of maps is possible and almost but not quite possible to create in the current version of Hammer. Using models to block off entrances and using trigger_hurt to kill everyone in the enclosed areas works and is used for a single area on cp_egypt. Being able to tie terrain and geometry to a func_door to be able to lower and raise them is not possible, probably because the compiler can't sort out how to bake the lights. The biggest issue is of course that the map doesn't react to players on the server and the map doesn't respond to settings (choosing to play on full-size maps should be available).

Just closing off existing maps isn't the best solution either, maps will have to be designed from the ground up to support this. I still think it's a good solution instead of making separate maps for few and many players. That way you'll be able to switch between all maps no matter the number of players instead of only playing the small number that is catered for your preferred playing style. It might be worth looking into. Click for full post

Electronic distribution and pricing models

The latest comment on PC game piracy comes from Blizzards Frank Pearce. What they will be doing with their new Battle.net 2.0 is very similar to how Steam works. You need to use an internet connection once to activate your game and after that you can play offline. Instead of going for a number of installations like SecuROM, they're hoping that by providing a good community (with Facebook integration) and a fun game, most players will want to buy their game to get to use those features.

This is not a bad idea, I've been playing Starcraft 2 for a few months now and it's a really solid product that will sell ten million copies or more. I have already pre-ordered my version and even though I doubt I'll use many of the Facebook features I will enjoy the game.

Making a good game will definitely help you sell more copies but something I think more companies should look into is alternative price models and easier digital distribution.

A point that few game developers are willing to admit is that from a pure usability standpoint, piracy is easier than buying games. The trackers are organized on torrent sites no matter what company the game is from and you will not have to install software like Gamers gate or Steam. I think that Steam is a great product and use it every day but I will not install something else that does the same thing because it has other games, I'll just not buy them instead. A single distributor having world domination is actually a good thing from a user point of view.

From the economic perspective that is not quite the case unless the distributor is nice enough to keep their prices low. Right now they aren't, a new game on steam usually runs at 50€ or 10% more than what you pay for an actual physical copy. With the purchase of the physical copy you also receive a box with DVDs that has to be shipped across the world as well as the vendors themselves making a profit. Digital distribution is all about data transfer costs and bandwith can't be that expensive so I guess they just don't want to compete.

Digital distribution doesn't just open up ways to get your games easier and publish smaller, cheaper games it also gives you the option of being paid in new ways. One example is Telltale games releasing Sam & Max adventures as episodes where you can buy just one, an entire season or all three seasons. I think this sort of pricing model will work great for other types of games as well.

Instead of putting up your 50€ at once with the chance of feeling cheated when it's not as good as you hoped, you can pay no money up front and instead pay per hour until you reach the 50€. If your single-player campaign is supposed to last 25 hours, just charge 2/hour. Once you reach the price point for that game you own it and can play it as much as you want, no extra charge.

Using an hourly price model like this would also allow you to have instant demos. Just allow the player to play the first few hours free and then let them have a confirmation box when they have to start paying. Instead of feeling cheated you can play as long as you are entertained, essentially being able to choose how much you think that game is worth.

Will the players stop playing a game because they have to start paying or will they keep playing because they want to see what happens? I don't know but I think it's worth trying.
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Transparency and learning

I came upon a concept in a poker video that I've never heard before, humans as a self-correcting system. What it means is that as long as you get punished for doing things wrong and rewarded for doing them right, everyone will improve over time. The reason why poker is so hard to adjust to is that it is also a game with a high amount of short-term variance, you just don't always get rewarded for doing the right thing, which might make you mislearn things or apply them incorrectly. This is also a reason why it's possible to make money in poker. It is more likely that bad players stick around longer because they feel like they are really good or "just got unlucky".

The two primary ways of improving at anything is by doing it (playing) and studying (reading strategy, watching videos etc.) but not everyone is interested in meta-gaming. If you're making a game which is based more on skill and has less short-term variance, what you need is transparency. If a player does the right thing, he needs to be rewarded instantly so that it's blatantly obvious what is happening. While playing a FPS game, you might occasionally kill the entire other team in a round or die as soon as you meet the enemies which makes for variance. But if you just run into an entire team and get killed in one second, you will probably learn pretty fast not to do it again.

So if having good feedback and a transparent set of rules should make players be better and better at a game over time, they will also probably notice that they are suddenly crushing some opponents over and over again. This will make them happy. Noticing that you're suddenly able to do something you used to fail at over and over again is in my opinion one of the greatest rewards.

This is why it bothers me so much when game designers put in non-obvious things in games. At the release of Left 4 Dead I played it a decent amount. In this game there are tanks who can take a lot of damage. There are also molotovs, which make things burn. What is not apparent is that if you set a tank on fire, it will die in 30 seconds no matter what happens. Doing the amount of damage to kill it over 30 seconds would be fine with me, but if you're playing the tank and run into some fire, you will still be surprised if you have 6000 hp and die instantly after a while for "no reason". It was patched after a few months but I still find it amazing that it was in a shipped game to begin with.

Having a high amount of transparency is easier the shorter every encounter is. In a fps game, an encounter is usually only a few seconds long, in a beat 'em up maybe half a minute, but the real problem comes when in a strategy game a match is 30 minutes. It might just take such a long time before you actually know that you're beaten it's too late to do something about it. If you watch a super good player at for example Starcraft, when they lose a game in a tournament, they have to go back and watch the replay to see what actually made them lose. And those are the best players in the world.

All of my examples here are based on games that depend a lot on hand-eye coordination. Of course if you dominate your opponent here, given equal strategical "skill" you will win no matter what. This is only somewhat lessened in strategy games, but not entirely unimportant and in some cases critical.

Shooters
A fight one on one in a shooter is very easy to make transparent and very dependant on preparation. If you show up with the most powerful weapon and three times as much health as the other guy, you're probably going to win no matter what he does. Fortunately this is offset by the fact that duels are more about playing for total map control, but having the map being designed to not allow for total domination. And in my experience, people mostly play shooters in groups of people, where you only have time to maybe grab one weapon before running into your first encounter or maybe not even that.

Since the game mechanics are so easy most players manage to grasp it on an intuitive level. If you click when you have an enemy in your sights, he will bleed. If he bleeds more than you do, he dies before you. Bigger guns make your opponents bleed more.

Fighting games
If you play a fighting game, a fight is probably half a minute, or divided into several rounds of that length. But the encounters themselves are usually (unless one is dominating the other) only a few attacks, and then the players split up to catch their breath. This allows for much more adjustments in-game trying to find the perfect play before you run out of health.

Transparency is usually not a problem in fighting games. You can't hide from your opponent, all your moves are given but adapting to the situation, dependency on hand-eye coordination and reflexes is what makes the game interesting.

Strategy games
This is where it gets interesting. Most strategic games are games of incomplete information and the difficulty lies in adapting fast to unexpected challenges. Thus you strive for complete information and using a strategy that is superior to what you expect your opponents to do. Coming mostly from a Warcraft 3 background, I have been in a lot of situations where I just tried building my army in a quiet corner of the map and then being ran over, having no idea what hit me. While nearly all strategy games (that I've played) build on this concept of slow adaptation and incomplete information, alternatives are not inconceivable (though in this example balanced with a certain lack of control).

The biggest problem with slow adaptation is that if you do the wrong thing at the start, you might be doomed later and having to wait half an hour to find out. For example, the start of a Starcraft (and SC2) game is designed around the premise that rush > expansion > defending > rush. This means that if you defend and nobody shows up because he chose to expand instead, you've already lost a major advantage. This also means that lack of information or choosing one option because of faulty information will lose you the game.

However there is no way of knowing that you're supposed to lose if you just defend at the start if you only play the game. In the single-player campain, most of the maps are based around defending early just because the AI already has fully developed bases. Going online after finishing the single-player mode and then being stomped into the ground (you will be, especially if you start playing now) is not a lot of fun. You just don't get any feedback.

An example for a solution
Save the replays after a game and adapt the AI to be able to run, telling you what it would do, updating only every few seconds. Since it should be able to read a situation and the actions are mostly there already, the only thing that's missing is a way of putting it up on screen. For example "Expand" and then give a green area that should hopefully be safe from enemies. Scout, attack, build a unit, research, all are things that the AI would do given the same starting conditions. The micro-management will not be there and it would not be perfect in every condition but it would probably improve the games for people interested enough to play but not interested enough to meta-game. Starcraft 2, the newest RTS game I've played (still in beta) does this decently well in how many spectator tools it provides. If you lost a game you can check if you just had worse economy, less units than you thought or your opponent just had better upgrades. You still have to know what to look for, that is why an AI-based guide would help you do.

Of course, this would make things seriously difficult for programmers. I said it was a solution, not that it was a very practical one.
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Versatility and weapons in FPS games

When picking up a new FPS and jumping into the campaign, you're usually handed a generic weapon and thrown against the enemy. I've been playing a lot of shooters in my life and it wouldn't surprise me if 90% or more of all the enemy kills in single player games have come from either 1: a machine gun or 2: a shotgun.

My biggest issue with versatility is not that you're almost always using a weapon similar to the ones used in other games, it's that they make you revert to using the same playing style. I've mostly been using the same strategies against NPC enemies since Doom and it usually goes like this: peek out with your machine gun, kill an enemy or two then hide behind a corner. Use a shotgun or similar to kill the stupid enemies that come charging towards you. This is not interesting gameplay, it's abusing bad AI.

In cases where the AI won't mindlessly charge you as soon as they've "seen" you, you might have to be a bit more clever but the basic weapons will still suit you extremely well. They are just so versatile.

Versatility depends on several different factors but these are the ones I think most important: accuracy, clip size and reload time. A weapon with decent-to-good accuracy and large clip size, like the machine gun, gives you a big margin of error in short encounters. It also makes it possible to conserve ammunition, using only the necessary number of shots to take out low HP enemies instead of using overkill weapons. In most games you will have enough ammo to use the first weapon throughout the game and with a high damage upgrade like the grenade launcher in Half-life it will work against bosses and several enemies at once.

Later on in a FPS you will usually receive more powerful weapons that are meant to work in one situation and that situation only, like a sniper rifle or rocket launcher. Since there generally is no way to use them cost-efficiently I tend to save them for boss-fights and cases where I don't feel my first weapon is strong enough. Once I've run an encounter that's meant to be beat with one specific weapon I tend to hang on to specific types of ammo for the rest of the game, effectively turning the weapon into a key for a challenge. If there is no more similar challenge, I will have carried around a weapon for the most part of a game and never used it.

Instead of giving the player one or two weapons to use the entire game, I'd like the other way around: you start with a weapon that limits you to a specific type of gameplay and as you progress you will receive upgrades that let you tackle all kinds of challenges. Then at the end you can find a super weapon that works for all situations but has a limited supply of ammo (will probably be unbalanced for multiplayer). Depending on the size of your enemies, the size of the area where you're fighting, your own cover vs. the enemies' cover, range etc. there are enough ways to create different types of encounters that making the weapons reliant on different situations should be no problem.

Less versatile weapons will not create excellent games by themselves though. One of the major problems is enemy AI. As long as hiding with a shotgun in a corner will make the enemies run up to you, people will keep hiding. In games like Gears of War where you're even supposed to hide behind walls and anything that runs up to you will just get chainsawed to death. While giving players too versatile might make a game stale, making the enemies more versatile will make it less predictable. The first time I had a grenade thrown at me in Half-life I was shocked that just hiding behind something didn't work. I needed a more advanced strategy. The new one was hiding and running away if I heard "grenade" but still.

By giving a specific enemy type two separate attacks and then mixing enemy types you will get very complex patterns of attacks with only three or four different enemies. If a player has to keep track of what weapon to use to take out the most dangerous enemy in that group composition, enemy encounters will become more difficult.

Limiting the player, forcing them to be creative and clever in coming up with their own strategies and adapt to situations creates good gameplay. Having a simple solution for every situation doesn't.
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Diablo 2 and attack patterns

After having played Diablo 2, it's hard not to notice how much it's focused on projectile attacks. Projectiles that travel in a straight line (for the most part). While watching the trailer for Bloodline Champions, I noticed the same trend and I'm not sure if I like it.

Now I've been playing player vs player games for quite a while and I believe that strategy and counter-strategy is more fun than the World of warcraft style where crowd control and healing is key. Not just because it doesn't take control away from the players but also that it allows everyone to adapt more easily. The games I'm going to talk about today all have one thing in common, movement is the only defense. By changing the attack patterns, the players will have to move in different ways, changing the strategies.

The linear attack game
Let's say we have two players, A and B. Player A has only one type of attack moving in a straight line, X. There is only one way to counter this, moving to the side. Player A will not really have any strategy in this game, he will only use X as often as he can.

Player B will only have one type of counter to this, moving to the side all the time. This causes movement but is also quite a shallow game.

The 2x2 linear game
In this example, Player A has two different attacks, X and Y. Y does more damage but also has a recharge rate of 5 seconds. To maximize damage, there will be four X's for every Y attack. Assuming both attacks have the same attack pattern, this is the only adjustment to A's strategy.

Player B still can't do anything to counter this except try and move to the sides and try to inflict more damage than he takes, basically by being more accurate than A while dodging.

The 2x2 mixed attack game
Instead of the linear attack, let's say Player A has X and Y again but this time attack X moves in a straight line but Y arcs around the sides of player B. When the only defense is to move, the attacks that are made to deny areas make you have to change the strategy. For simplicity's sake let's say player B will always get hit by X if he's dodging Y and vice versa.

Now what is Player A's optimal strategy? If he will use four X's to every Y again, maximizing damage, the perfect counter will be extremely simple. Move to the side for four seconds, then stand still. This counter only works against the player who is trying to maximize damage. This is first level thinking.

And if the counter is extremely simple, then the previously optimal damage rotation will never hit, making perfect strategy completely different. If player A stops using Y every five seconds and is instead preemptively countering the easiest counter strategy, that will be second level thinking.

By giving A two moves and B two moves, we have a 2x2 symmetric game where both players can affect their payoff. Assuming both A and B have the same attacks X and Y, there will be two different 2x2 games running. If we remove the simple attacks where X and Y will always hit and instead make it so moving will protect you against the powerful attacks but also make it harder to land your own, things will be getting interesting.

Diablo 2
The enemies in Diablo 2 are rather dull, they are usually either melee (single target attacks only), ranged (single target line attacks) or casters. The casters have a couple of different spells but they are mostly line projectile (fireball) or line damage over time (inferno).

There are also a couple of area of effect type spells that are divided into three categories, novas which are expanding circles, randomized projectiles (Charged bolt) or damage over time area effect spells (meteor/firewall).

Assuming that you play a character that is not dependant on the random AoE projectile spells like Charged Bolt and Tornado, you will probably hit with every single attack. Since the majority of the enemies only use melee or line attacks, you will only ever need to do two things: move back from the melee and move to the side against the ranged.

While this is generally fine since Diablo 2 tries hard to put enough monsters on screen to make you have to move your mouse around a lot, it's still just a twitch game. To add strategy you need to add different options.

Diablo 3
While I'm trying my best to keep my high hopes for Diablo 3 up, rewatching the gameplay trailer with this specific subject fresh in my mind, I can't help thinking it's all the same. Most of the attacks seem to be based upon three basic types, line, arc (melee) and AoE.

The only skills that seem different are probably Zombie wall (area denial and damage) and Carrion swarm which is a chain type attack, hitting enemies nearby but not quite AoE.

While the attacks themselves seem to be quite simplistic, the fights are organised a bit differently. Since enemies are supposed to be tougher and there are several scripted events in the gameplay demo, you will not have such an easy time of clearing an area then moving on. Instead you will get thrown into fights with enemies on several sides, having to pick one way to go. This is one way to get away from Diablo 2's gameplay but I feel it's a bit too easy. Sure you will have to evaluate which side you will run to but the attacks are mostly the same. And if the attacks are simple, you can never really chain them to show your awesome teamplay.

Different types of attack patterns
As I've been discussing before, there are a few different types of attack patterns that are commonly used and a few I would recommend at least thinking about. In games where movement is the only defense, area denial is a really powerful tool and should in my opinion not be left to environment alone.

Most of the different types of attacks will have the possibility of travel or activation time. This is usually balanced along with damage and ease of use. You don't want a spell that's easy to hit with to also do massive damage. Another modifier is also if it is direct damage or damage over time. The direct spells will usually not provide any area denial, instead you will have to make it a projectile with a high travel time.

Line
The line is the most basic of all attacks. Since it's so easy to hit with, it usually has a travel time. While the damage is usually point-based direct damage (Firebolt), having some AoE is not unheard of (Lightning bolt)

Arc
The arc is usually used in melee only. As a ranged weapon, a fast moving arc doing direct damage will be too easy to hit with. That said, as an area denial move it can be really powerful. Let's say you have an attack that shoots an arc at an enemy. As soon as it hits something, it stops and turns into an damage over time effect. While not completely limiting player movement, depending on the curve it might block three or more of the eight directions.

Circle
Like the arc, the full circle is easy to hit with (Frost nova), requiring either a limited range or travel time. Since a ranged circle effect might completely block movement in all directions, it should be very hard to use as an area denial attack. If it stops movement and damage, it's essentially a crowd control ability.

Cone
Like arcs, the cone is usually a close-combat weapon. There is no reason to not add an extension to it though. Let's say you get the ability "Scatter bomb". With your first mouse click, you fire a projectile and with the second click you detonate it, making the cone damage originate where the projectile exploded. You can even make it more advanced, firing a projectile and then pointing in the direction you want it to explode, making sure it will always do some damage. If you add a minimum detonation range this could be a really interesting ability.

Random particle
While the random particles (Charged bolt) are useful at close range, at long range they are just too unreliable. Assuming you use it many times, it essentially turns into a weak cone based damage. For simplicitys sake and game balance, you can probably just scrap this type altogether. Too random damage is not fun.

Area effect
Most of the area effect spells are usually either circle damage over time (Meteor) or random particle damage over time (Blizzard?). Since most of them have a huge AoE they usually don't do a ton of damage. This is one of the most boring ways to add damage to your game, either keep it small and hard to hit with or make it have some kind of utility. Big area effects need to be so powerful to work as area denial attacks that they will be quite overpowered.

Some less used attacks that might be worth looking into:

The sine wave
Use one or two mirrored, it doesn't really matter. Assuming you have the curves far enough from eachother, players might be able to stand in the holes between curves. That way, moving forward or back will make you take damage from both beams, moving to the side only one, but if you stand at the right distance, you won't take damage at all.

X marks the spot
As an area denial effect this is really interesting. Let's say there is half a second delay between a big X showing up and it actually starts doing damage. Then you have that half a second to decide which quarter you want to be in. After picking one, if you decide it's not the right one, you will suffer for it.

Increasing damage
While more of a modifier, let's say you add increasing damage based upon travel time. That way, you can have attacks that do more (or less) damage close or far away from you. If added to area denial effects, you basically give the opponent a short time where the penalty for crossing it is not so bad and then increases as time passes.

The fan
While not quite a cone, it works in much the same way. The closer your target is, the more damage he will take. If it has a bit of travel time, you can also choose if you want to aim directly at your opponent, hoping he stands still or slightly to the side, hoping he will keep moving.

Controlled effects
Making attacks take more effort from the user, you can also make them more powerful. This works a lot better when you need the mouse to both move and attack because then the player might have to stand in fire to make that last killing blow. Examples could be the extended cone, an area of effect spell getting bigger the longer you target it etc.

Boomerang
For everyone who has played DotA, Rexxar's wild axes. One (or two) projectiles, moving in separate arcs, meeting at the point where you targeted the spell and then returning to the caster.

Spread patterns
Again, mostly a modifier or combination of other patterns. Two lines can be parallel, crossing or forming an L, area effects can form basically any type of pattern, depending on which of the directions you feel you want to block.

PvE vs PvP
The 2x2 game and other game theory strategies only apply to games between players that can adapt to different situations. Since trying to pay attention to player habits and working out strategies in real-time is quite a task, the number of enemies and their different attacks must be limited. Let's say 3-5 for number of attacks and 2-5 for different enemies. This way you will still have complexity far beyond any human real-time computation.

The enemies in a PvE game will usually be limited to one or two different attacks though on the other hand there will be more of them on the screen at any given time. Since the player's own attacks will require less focus as the AI monsters don't have enough common sense to evade, there can be more complex area denial, forcing the player to work out more patterns.

In a PvP setting, most of the fights will also usually take place in a mirrored arena, letting the level designer decide how some battles will play out. Combining static maps with blocked areas and real-time area denial attacks will make the combinations endless. Since I have limited myself to mirrored games and mirrored maps, everyone will have the same possibilities of using the map.

In PvE though, the players will have to adjust to the areas as they go along. There will be choke points that are easily defensible and there will be open areas where some attacks will be less useful. As long as there are always a couple of different attacks that are useful, players will hopefully adapt.

Discussion
Notice how fast things get to the point where it's getting hard to calculate? Even if we make a chart where every player gets a certain payoff for making an action, the 2x2 game can get quite complex. But players can't just move in one direction. Let's use the standard D-Pad or arrow/wasd keys. That's 8 different directions. It's not all that hard to come up with attack patterns that correspond to those directions. You can even add attacks that are easier to land but making them do less damage and seeing if versatility truly is power.

Even though every finite game has a stable Nash equilibrium, that doesn't mean it can be solved in real-time. Even if you do, it will not be a perfect counter against a non-perfect opponent. And what if you add more players?

Line, cone and circle attack patterns are fine, but what about boomerangs, tornados and firewalls? You don't need to get fancy, just make a ton of squares, take a pressure-sensitive pen tablet and make dots and lines. Most will be junk, but some can correspond to actually useful patterns.
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