David R. Lorentz

Archive for May, 2009

[This is the second entry in my "Incredible Hulk Diary" series, recalling my experience as a mission designer on "The Incredible Hulk" in 2008. For more information and links to the rest of the series, click here.]

Mission 2.2.2: We’re not Giving Up – Part 2

Summary

Here’s a quick summary. For those of you who like to read, hit the jump for a truckload of detail.

• This mission is about protecting Rick Jones in a helicopter as he travels from rooftop to rooftop disarming bombs.
• The mission ended up very fun and memorable; this is mainly because the mission is built around a fun and novel challenge–jumping from rooftop to rooftop.
• The first major design task was to find a suitable set of rooftops to provide compelling inter-rooftop locomotion. I found this in a set of unique skyscrapers in midtown west, which offered challenging and varied locomotion challenges.
• The next task was to settle on a central challenge for the mission. I quickly decided to focus the gameplay around rapid inter-rooftop locomotion. To achieve this challenge organically, I set the helicopter to circle each rooftop, continually damaged by enemies until Hulk arrives to save it. All of this emerged from the focused premise of rooftop locomotion.
• I decided against adding peripheral challenges like protecting Rick himself when he leaves the helicopter; these proved a confusing distraction from the mission’s main trajectory.
• I did, however, throw in some unexpected variety, in the form of an emergency crash landing late in the mission, accompanied by a special objective to carry the final dispenser to Rick’s position on the ground. As a one-off event, this added some variety to the mission without throwing it off kilter.
• Hence, my recipe for a compelling mission: Hone a central challenge for your mission that drives the gameplay forward and makes a story for the player, without extraneous challenges getting in the way. Once you’ve accomplished this, throw a wrench in the works somewhere for a little unexpected variety.

For much, much finer detail, please read on!

Read the rest of this entry »

Dear readers,

I returned from Toronto a couple of days ago. Toronto was really great. Everyone was riding bikes around–and as a means of transportation, not as a sport. How refreshing. Ji-Ming and I thought the busy, happy urban atmosphere felt a lot like Taipei; of course, we were staying in Chinatown.

I was up there for Flash in the Can, a very fun Flash conference. This was my first Flash conference, and it was very interesting to discover how the Flash community is different from the game development community. Their terminology is all backwards–they say “developer” instead of programmer, and “designer” instead of artist. Oh, and there are actually women in the Flash community.

What I didn’t like is that Flash developers tend to be so reverent of advertising. Someone might say to me, “yeah, my company worked on campaigns for Nike and McDonalds,” and they expect me to be impressed. I know that ads drive most of the money in the Flash world, but it makes me uncomfortable to think about this. One of the reasons I first went into game development, having happily left careers in science and education, was because I wanted to make things for real people. I wanted my paychecks to come from people who pay for my stuff because they want it, rather than because I convinced the government or some agency that what I’m doing is valuable. Of course, once I got into the AAA game industry, I quickly realized how shallow and non-artistic it is, and (like most people in the industry) I yearned to break off and go indie. So now I’m doing small games on my own, and I’m doing whatever I want, even if that is sometimes an experimental train wreck like this. But in order to actually make some money, I find myself signing contracts and making deals with marketing companies. So without realizing it, I’ve started drifting back toward the situation I fled–I’m making things for agencies rather than real people. Maybe I’m just complaining too much, but I feel very conflicted! I mean, for heaven’s sake, back when I had functional convictions I subscribed to Adbusters! Now look at me, making art for ad men who live in L.A.

Okay, I’m done. Back to FITC. I was attending the conference as a representative of actionscript.org, and I ended up posting a bunch of blogs over on their site. Here they are:

FITC Day 1: The intersection of math and art
FITC Day 2: Flash in Console Games
FITC Day 2: Running a Freelance Business
FITC Day 3: Dimension Wars
FITC Day 3: Cool Japanese Stuff