Design Blog

Monday, December 1, 2008

Left 4 Dead

Work and games have been keeping me pretty busy recently, so I haven't had too much time to work on updates for the site. I've got stuff in the queue, but just playing catchup with all the games I missed out on while I was at Guildhall studying is taking a lot of time! Plus even work wants me to check out some of the competition in order to help make the game good.

...Incidentally, the part where my job asks me to play games is part of the reasons I think my job is super awesome.

Today I want to talk about one of the games I've been playing recently: Left 4 Dead. While it wasn't one of the games I was recommended to play, enough people at work play it so that I think it's worth talking about.

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LEFT 4 DEAD REVIEW

So Left 4 Dead is basically one of the best co-op games I have ever played. It's a first-person-shooter set in a zombie apocalypse movie. You can choose to play as one of four generic personalities although it's a purely aesthetic choice since all the characters can perform the exact same actions in game and use every weapon. The game focuses on a heavily cooperative experience by using several design techniques. I'll go over some of the ones I though were impressively done.

Limited Inventory: When you play Left 4 Dead your character is only allowed to hold 1 primary weapon and pistols (with infinite ammo) as defense against the zombie hordes. Additionally you can hold one grenade type item, and one of each of the two health items. Because of the limited inventory space on your person you rely on other players to carry other items that can be used to help the group. Additionally, because of the sheer volume of zombies, its good to have four times as much ammunition. You can even use the health items on other players if you want, which is important because losing any player to the zombie horde drastically reduces your chances of success.

Disabling Enemy Attacks: A few of the special boss zombies you fight in the game can completely disable your character, leaving you helpless while slowly taking damage (or quickly depending on the difficulty level). While this sounds like a bad design choice, it actually works amazingly well for this type of game because it forces your teammates to be aware of each other and stick together in order to avoid being isolated and killed. In addition to the special zombies, normal damage from other zombies can simply "incapacitate" your character which causes you to slowly bleed out unless another character comes and helps you up.

Procedurally Generated Content: Here's a big one. With only 20 maps total in this game it would seem like it would get pretty old, pretty fast. The addition of two AI "directors" that control enemy spawns and music respectively make each experience really unique and different. The four campaigns that this game has have been keeping my interest for a long period of time. Even with other great games from Valve like Half-Life 2 I only played through once, because it's still pretty much the same experience every time. Not knowing when enemies will spawn or if you will find ammo or health in a certain area gives each playthrough a great unique feel. All this serves to support the co-op experience since you have no idea when you might get suddenly ambushed.

Friendly Fire: Okay, I'm normally not a huge fan of this, but for this game it works very well. Because bullets tend to do far more damage than most zombie hits, communication and awareness of your teammates becomes essential to keeping your health high. A misfired shot that hits an ally at the higher difficulties will do more damage than nearly every zombie in the game short of the tank or witch (the later can kill in one hit on the harder difficulties).

So in general I really like the game. It's got a few faults though, and I don't think it would be fair not to mention a few of them:

The Director Can be a Huge Jerk: Procedurally generated content is nice, but sometimes the director goes a little overboard and seems to be going out of its way to kick me and my friends when we are down. Sometimes it'll put a witch (and enemy you are encouraged to avoid) right in the critical path of the level, in a position where avoidance becomes impossible. Other times the director will see it fit to send the tank (and incredibly tough and damaging enemy) after the party, right after barely surviving a group of zombies, and when you are within a few feet of the exit to the level. It doesn't happen that often, but when it does, it's not cool.

The AI are Kinda Slow: Most of the time the AI allies you get to fill in any missing players are pretty useful. They have impeccable aim and can see zombies hiding in the thickest trees almost instantly. However I find that sometimes they need to work on their battle tactics. When planning to hold out in a certain area, like a small room with one entrance for example, it's difficult, if not impossible to get the AI to come into the room with you, usually they end up fanning out a bit and standing in a tactically unsafe area, where zombies then proceed to mob them from 5 directions instead of 1. They also don't understand the finer points of ducking to allow the person behind them to shoot over their heads. Even when I'm very careful, it's usually inevitable for one of the AI to step into my line of fire and take some team damage.

The Witch Instant Kills on Expert Mode: Okay, now I know it's expert mode for a reason and that you should be prepared for increased difficulty of the enemies. But with this happens in conjunction with "The Director is a Jerk" you get to the point where the player no longer blames himself for his failure, he blames the game. Just in general, as a piece of my own design philosophy, I'm generally against the idea of instant kill mechanisms. While they work for some games, that are built around them (Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for example), most games do not. Even a two hit kill is better than this, since it at least gives the player a more reasonable chance.

In the end, I recommend this game to anyone who like co-op play with their friends. There are some faults, but in general it's great, well made game... and one that I think I'd like to build a map for once the SDK comes out.

Labels: design philosophy, guildhall, instant kill, left 4 dead

posted by Saikyo at 5:13 PM

Monday, November 17, 2008

After 4 weeks of work

I finally manage to get around to posting on this blog again. I definitely need to shoot for once a week from now on, otherwise I'll start feeling too complacent.

So first how the job has been after 4 weeks, in a word: AWESOME.

In more words: SUPER AWESOME

Seriously though I think working at Big Huge Games is a fun and interesting place to work where I can do all the stuff I studied for back in Guildhall, except now I get paid for it! The only odd part is that now I seem to be much more of a money hoarder than before even though I have income coming in instead of going out, it's a very strange effect.

I mentioned before that I can't say much about the game I'm working on due to the NDA I signed, but will say that I work with great people in a relaxing and casual environment that is pretty amazing when I remember that in addition to all this I'm working on stuff for a video game and getting paid for it.

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I promised I'd talk about YANPA this time so here's the idea.

YANPA stands for: You Are Not the Player's Adversary

It's a funny acronym that I always try to remember when working on a level. The goal of the game is not to torment the player or to make a puzzle that the player is going to have to try very hard to solve (although this second one may be part of it). The point of the designer is to provide fun. Now I said previously that I don't really agree with the entitlement mentality that some people have. I believe that as a designer, the player is entitled to the chance to have fun, and that the designer should make every effort to provide that fun to the player. However I don't think that the player deserves to win because he bought the game or regularly pays a monthly fee (in the case of MMOs). Winning with skill is part of what creates fun, and it's the designer's job to work that fine line between fun and frustration to create a challenging experience for the player without becoming the adversary of the player.

The term YANPA was coined by an instructor I had when I was in college at ASU taking the first iteration of a "programming for game design" class taught by some graduate students. Admittedly, the class was fairly rough and I didn't have the best of experiences in it, but I did learn some important lessons about game design that I still keep in mind today.

I hope the instructors for this course have been improving their teaching methods and class structure in order to get more students interested in game design.

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Next time: Left 4 Dead and why it is one of the most awesome games I've played this year.

Labels: big huge games, design philosophy, entitlement, left 4 dead, YANPA

posted by Saikyo at 4:31 PM