|
[I]
write this column to discuss the principles of good game design, and
ordinarily, I wouldn't devote a whole one to a single game. But every
now and then, a game comes along which so beautifully illustrates a
design principle that it deserves special attention. Activision's
INTERSTATE '76 is one such game.
In his 1997 Game Developers' Conference lecture, "Listen: The
Potential of Shared Hallucinations," legendary game designer Brian
Moriarty (who had nothing to do with INTERSTATE '76, by the way)
described the principle of harmony. Harmony is the feeling that
all parts of the game belong to a single, coherent whole. Brian
explained the idea so well that with his permission, I'm going to quote
the entire section of his lecture. Read his words carefully, because
this is rich, heady stuff:
Harmony
isn't something you can fake. You don't need anyone to tell you if
it's there or not. Nobody can sell it to you, it's not an
intellectual exercise. It's a sensual, intuitive experience. It's
something you feel. How do you achieve that feeling that everything
works together? Where do you get this harmony stuff?
Well, I'm here to tell you that it doesn't come from design
committees. It doesn't come from focus groups or market surveys. It
doesn't come from cool technology or expensive marketing. And it
never happens by accident or by luck. Games with harmony emerge from
a fundamental note of clear intention. From design decisions based
on an ineffable sense of proportion and rightness. Its presence
produces an emotional resonance with its audience. A sense of inner
unity that has nothing to do with what or how you did something, it
has something to do with why. Myst and Gemstone both have
harmony. They have it, because their makers had a vision of the
experience they were trying to achieve and the confidence to attain
it. They laid down a solid, ambient groove that players and their
respective markets can relate to emotionally. They resisted the urge
to over-build. They didn't pile on a lot of gratuitous features just
so they could boast about them. And they resisted the temptation to
employ inappropriate emotional effects. Effects like shock violence,
bad language, inside humor. You know, the suspension of disbelief is
fragile. It's hard to achieve it, and hard to maintain. One bit of
unnecessary gore, one hip colloquialism, one reference to anything
outside the imaginary world you've created is enough to destroy that
world. These cheap effects are the most common indicators of a lack
of vision or confidence. People who put this stuff into their games
are not working hard enough.
Harmony is
a principle too often overlooked in the creation of today's computer
games. There are any number of reasons why a game might lack harmony: a
dispersed development team, divided leadership, a poorly-conceived
vision.
INTERSTATE
'76 avoids these pitfalls, and it manages to do so even though it's set
in a game universe unlike any other seen before. For those of you
unfamiliar with the game, it takes place in an "alternative"
1976 in which the gas crisis has deepened to the point of chaos.
Criminals with heavily armed muscle cars are wreaking havoc in the
American southwest, and it's up to you and a few other auto-vigilantes
to stop them. The game consists of a series of missions in which you, as
the hero Groove Champion, with the help of your friends Taurus and
Skeeter, must track down the evil auto-villain who killed your sister.
INTERSTATE '76's degree of graphical and thematic harmony is
extraordinary. The cars, the clothes, the music, the language, and every
other aspect of the game closely resembles the 1970s TV shows which
inspired it. The maps are crude pencil sketches on the backs of paper
bags. Even the game's necessary bookkeeping screens - which are so often
clunky, fantasy-killing text in other products - are presented within
the game world. The options menu appears on a truck stop waitress' order
pad, and the save/load menu on a credit card receipt. No effort is
spared to make you feel like a guy driving around the desert in a hot
rod.
The
other thing that's extraordinary about INTERSTATE '76 is that it's not
set in the usual fantasy or science fiction world. INTERSTATE '76 is at
the same time both derivative and original: derivative because its look
and sound all come from 1970s television, and original because no other
game has tapped that rich (if hilariously tacky) vein of culture. Here
we have a game whose creators dared to eschew the traditional orcs and
aliens, and create something completely new for the jaded gamer... and
yet still completely familiar.
Rather than speculate about how they managed to achieve this feat, I
decided to go to the source and ask. Sean Vesce was the game's director,
and although he's no longer at Activision, he agreed to talk to me about
it.
Q: INTERSTATE '76 seems like every teenaged boy's dream game: driving
like a maniac and shooting at things. But setting it in the 1970's
slants it to an older crowd. How did the idea for the '70's theme come
about?
A: Zack Norman (Mech Warrior 2, INTERSTATE '76, Interstate '82) and I
were at lunch shortly after shipping Mech Warrior 2. We were talking
about what kind of game we wanted to do next. Zack was in the market for
a car at the time and was reading a local Auto Trader magazine.
He stopped on a page with several classic muscle cars, and I asked,
"is that the car?" He replied, "No, that's the
game!" The rest developed from there. We came up with several
key design goals over the course of lunch, the most important being
"to make a game with soul." This was one of the main
driving forces throughout the design, and I think this is what helped us
make such a distinctive game.
Q: Did you ever specifically discuss the target audience with marketing,
sales or the executives? Or did you just decide to make the game and let
the chips fall where they may?
A: For the most part we were intent on making a game for ourselves - 18-
to 30-year-old males who owned a high-end PC and were looking for
something unique to play. We also wanted to capture people who played
and enjoyed Mech Warrior 2, who understood how to play a sim, but we
wanted to give them a more compelling experience by weaving a great
story through it.
At the time we were not experienced enough to understand the changes
that were happening around us in the PC market and how that would affect
the audience and their taste for games. It's really clear in hindsight
that there was a whole new wave of users coming into the market. Spurred
by very affordable powerful PCs and a lust for hunting deer, this new
majority was looking for something less heady, more mainstream, and much
easier to play. This has had a profound effect on the state of game
design and production.
Q: Game companies tend to be pretty conservative these days, sticking
to well-established futuristic or fantasy worlds. How did Activision's
management and marketing departments react to the idea of a game set in
the '70s?
A: Our first pitch meeting was disastrous. The vice president of
production hated the idea. After an hour of pitching, we ended up
following him all the way to the elevator as he was trying to leave for
the evening. We didn't stop until the doors shut. In the end persistence
paid off. Once management adopted the concept, the entire company got
behind the product.
Q: What do you think changed their minds? And did you do anything
specific to convince them, like create conceptual drawings, high-concept
documents, or a prototype?
A: A couple of events happened which helped us sell the concept. First,
we got Scott Lahman, the Director of Creative Affairs on board. He
really helped us position the concept in such a way that management
could understand its potential for success. Second, we drafted a
preliminary design document which included tons of conceptual drawings,
excerpts from the script that Zack had begun to write, examples of game
play, and preliminary schedules and budgets. This helped tremendously by
enabling us to process and organize our ideas and develop a solid plan
for its execution. Third, we hit on the idea to re-use the Mech Warrior
2 engine to cut down on production time. Together, these forces began to
turn the heads of those who were on the fence and in charge of
"green-lighting" projects. We were given a small budget to
hire some folks to begin work on a prototype of the game. When we
completed and demonstrated the prototype to about forty or so managers,
sales, marketing, executives, we hit the jackpot. They loved it.
Q: INTERSTATE '76 is visually more consistent than most games,
because the mission briefing movies use highly polygonal characters who
look as if they could be in the game engine. Still, this must have been
expensive to design and render. Did you ever consider using live actors
and real video shoots?
A: An original goal of the project was to experiment with blurring the
line between the interactive and non-interactive portions of the game.
To achieve this we needed to maintain a consistent graphical style
throughout. Originally the design called for all cinematics to be
generated real-time using the game's engine (remember, this was a big
deal back then). When schedule restraints and technical limitations
prevented us from doing this, we decided to do the next best thing:
using low-poly models and in-game assets (car models, textures etc.) to
create pre-rendered cinematics to be streamed off the CD.
We ruled out live actors and real video shoots for several reasons.
First, it went directly against our goal of achieving stylistic
consistency throughout the game. Second, live actors and real
video shoots are extremely expensive, time-consuming, and require skills
that we as game developers did not directly possess. Third, and most
important, our team was strongly opposed to full-motion video and live
actors in video games. It was bad enough to be working in the midst of
the great "Hollywood / Silicon Valley" convergence, we
didn't feel compelled to encourage it.
Q: Everything in INTERSTATE '76 seems to be part of a coherent whole:
the music, the art, the voices, the opening movie... right down to
little details like the fact that the weapons display is done with a
Dymo labelmaker. Why do you think more games aren't like this, and what
do you think was different about the way INTERSTATE '76 was developed
that made it possible?
A: The tight cohesion that you see in INTERSTATE '76 was achieved by the
total commitment of the team in paying attention to the details. It was
our mantra. We set off to create an amazing but believable universe and
to do this, even the smallest detail had to be designed properly to fit
within the whole. It was two parts passion, one part insanity, and three
parts fear (of making a lame game).
Q: How big was the team, in terms of numbers of people doing each
kind of work? Were they all in the same office?
The team grew to include about 23 internal core team members. Everyone
was split into one of four teams including art led by Rick Glenn, design
led by Zack Norman, programming led by Dan Stanfil, and production led
by Scott Krager. The breakdown was roughly six artists, six
designer/mission implementers, seven programmers, three production
people, and myself. We were lucky enough to get an entire hall of a new
section of office space that Activision had rented (the internal studio
was expanding at an insane rate around the time we went into
production). We each sat two to an office and had a central meeting
space that was off to one end of the hall. Because the entire team was
located in the same place there was a general sense being one coherent
whole. This was a very important component in establishing the
collaborative atmosphere that was key to creating a game like INTERSTATE
'76. (On Mech 2, we weren't so lucky. We had the programmers, designers,
and artist each sitting in different areas of the building, leading to
lots of headaches and miscommunication.)
Q: Did you establish any formal procedures or guidelines (like a
"bible") to help keep the design in harmony? Were design
decisions made hierarchically, or collaboratively?
A: While we made every attempt to foster collaboration, we established a
creative hierarchy to ensure focus of vision and a coherent design.
According to our hierarchy, the final responsibility for creative
decisions fell to the lead designer and then to the director. While this
guaranteed that in a dispute, creative decisions would still be made, it
became difficult for some at times. Tough decisions had to be made to
discard some really cool ideas, which during the heat of production can
sometimes be a bitter pill to swallow.
Q: Licensing is a major issue for many games today. Although all the
cars that appear in the game have fictitious names, it's pretty clear
from their appearance that they're modeled on real cars: the "ABX
Leprechaun" is obviously an AMC Gremlin, and so on. Did you ask for
the manufacturers' permissions to use the real thing and get turned
down, or did you even try?
A: At its core, INTERSTATE '76 was a tribute to the spirit of American
muscle cars of the '70s. It was important for us, however, to create our
own makes and models rather than directly replicating and licensing
"real" cars (we were after all creating an
"alternate" 1976!). By doing this, it allowed us to do
anything we wanted to the cars like denting them, blowing them up,
mounting heat-seeking missile systems to their hoods, and a bunch of
other things that we would not have been able to do had we licensed
"real" 1970s muscle cars.
Q: Taurus may be the only black character with a central role in any
computer game today. Any thoughts on this? Tell us more about Taurus's
character, and the decision-making about the characters in general.
A: Developing a strong cast of characters was an important
production goal. Our team was not satisfied with earlier attempts made
by game developers to tell story through their games, and we wanted to
prove that it could be done. Zack had a background in writing and was
keenly aware that at the heart of any great story are great characters.
When we began early development of the story, he had already come up
with the beginnings of Taurus, Groove, Jade, and Skeeter. They were
really caricatures of popular '70s television and movie icons. Taurus
was a very special character. He was the embodiment of the attitude and
soul we were trying to inject into the game. He was Shaft, Superfly and
Samuel L. Jackson all rolled into one. Plus he was a poet. One of my
favorites was:
I'm
silver smooth.
Bathed ten times a second in an aerosol fire.
Five thousand degrees in here.
I course with electricity from my feet to my tongue
Where I vomit a torque delivering spark.
Q: I notice that your opponents don't seem to cooperate very much
with each other. It seems to me that they could get together and try to
herd you into a box canyon, for example. What can you tell me about the
other drivers' AI?
A: The AI was a difficult problem to solve. Since we created a fully
functioning auto combat simulation, the AI drivers had to deal with a
lot of stuff. At its highest level, the AI had overall mission
strategies like "destroy the Gas 'n Stuff," or "defend
Fort Davis." This was managed by AI state tables created by
the designers. From here things got tricky. We set off to create the
most realistic auto combat simulation ever made. To do this we created a
complex automotive physics system that dealt with gear ratios, engine
sizes, tire pressure, surface friction, and a myriad of other real world
calculations. To achieve as much realism as possible, the AI drivers had
to know how to deal with these things just like the player. We wanted to
limit any AI "cheating." Blow out an AI driver's front
right tire, and it has to know how to compensate to keep his car driving
straight. Bump an AI driver into the gravel, and it has to know how to
properly negotiate the change in surface and navigate back onto the
road. Add to this the need for the AI drivers to manage and use their
weapons and ammo properly, and you begin to see what a nightmare we set
ourselves up for.
Q: The game is more aggressive about strong language than most are
these days, and much more aggressive than any '70s-era television show.
Was there any discussion of this during the design process?
A: The adult language was really a part of the "coherent
whole" we talked about earlier. It was important for us to portray
these characters as they would really act. Groove and Taurus were
auto-vigilantes who lobbed heavy munitions from the roofs of their cars.
These guys didn't have time for subtle pleasantries. Surprisingly, this
was not a hotly debated issue. Management understood and encouraged our
attempts to make a game with attitude. In the end, only a small portion
of the content was edited.
Q: In retrospect, is there anything you would have done differently,
or would like to have had more or less of in the game?
A: If could turn back time and do it again, the first thing I would do
is make the game more action-oriented with easier controls, clearer
mission objectives, and greater and more frequent rewards. I would
greatly simplify the game's shell, most importantly the vehicle repair
screen that players accessed between missions. I talked to a lot of
people who were completely baffled the first time they went through. It
was far too complex and difficult to use without the manual. I would
split some of the missions into multiple missions (especially the first
one), and offer a way to save at any point in the game. On the
multiplayer side, I would ensure greater security against cheating and
hacking, as this really ruined the multiplayer experience for a lot of
people. The last thing I would do is demand more time to balance the
overall difficulty and learning curve for the game. We never really had
the chance to do this properly and I think the overall game was
diminished by this.
Q: What are you working on nowadays?
A: After shipping INTERSTATE '76, I decided to move back to Northern
California, where I grew up. I took a three-month vacation and realized
I still had the bug to do more giant robot stuff (left over from Mech
2). I met up with a very special team of programmers and artists working
out of Accolade in San Jose. They had been working on a next-generation
hardware-accelerated 3D engine and were looking for a killer concept. We
came up with Slave Zero, a giant robot action shooter due out in spring
of 1999. It's a wild game where players assume the role of a 60-foot
giant "slave" robot battling it out in a mega-city of the
future. It's kind of a cross between Mech Warrior 2 and Virtua-On. Be
sure to check out http://www.slavezero.com
for the latest developments.
Ernest
Adams is an American freelance game designer currently living in
England. He was most recently employed as a lead designer at Bullfrog
Productions, and for several years before that he was the audio/video
producer on the Madden NFL Football product line. In a much
earlier life he was a software engineer. He has developed on-line,
computer, and console games for everything from the IBM 360 mainframe to
the Playstation 2. He was a founder of the International
Game Developers Association, and is a frequent lecturer at the Game
Developers Conference and anyplace else that people will listen to
him. Ernest would be happy to receive E-mail about his columns at ewa@earthling.net,
and you may visit his professional web site at http://members.aol.com/ewadams.
You can read previous Designer's Notebook columns at http://www.gamasutra.com/features/index_designers_notebook.htm.
The views in this column are strictly his own.
|
Home
News
Contact
Story
Game
Characters
Screenshots
Downloads
Maps
Codes
Story
Game
Screenshots
Downloads
Maps
Codes
Story
Game
Screenshots
Downloads
Skins
Codes
Pre Release Pictures
Articles
Message Boards
Links
|
