Breaking Open the Black Box

The Secrets and Stories of Game Design

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Archives for June 2014

Postmortem 6: The Black Stalker

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The Black Stalker

Alternate title: How I learned that fun for designers doesn’t guarantee fun for players.

Me: The Black Stalker is … what?
Metzen: She’s the mother. The mother of all spore walkers in Zangarmarsh. Think psychic power meets fungus meets those tripods from War of the Worlds. 
Me: So what kind of things should she do?
Metzen: Shit. I have no idea, that’s what you’re here to do right. Maybe she could grab people, shoot lasers out of her eyes, sporify people. 
Chris then walked away. 

Me: Hmmm… okay, well that sounds kind of cool. She has lots of arms. Let me ask Geoff for some ideas too. 
Geoff: sup?
Me: I’m trying to come up with ideas for the Black Stalker. Chris said she should be psychic… but this isn’t exactly pokemon, we don’t really have a psychic kit.  
Sidebar: A “kit” is a standard ability package, often used to capture either a gameplay pattern or theme and develop a standard response to a creature type. 

Geoff: Damn… did he like want you to have a brain battle with her or something? 
Me: Hahah, perhaps one of those Dragonball sequences where the two beams of power go surging back and forth?
Banter, jokes and terrible ideas are all a standard part of the creative process. In fact, bad ideas often hold the seeds of good ideas, so long as you’re willing to use them as a stepping stone. The worst thing you can do for creativity is to focus on rejecting bad ideas while brain storming instead of letting them lead to stronger ones. 
Geoff: Well, I’m not sure exactly what you should do, but the Spore Walkers I’m using in the Lady Vash’j fight cast Chain Lightning. It would be cool if we pre-taught that idea somewhere else. Maybe we do lightning instead of psychic kit. 
Me: Sure, that’s no problem. 
Geoff: It would be really cool if we had grapple tech too – imagine if she could juggle the players in her hands then toss them somewhere. 
Me: Oooooooh.  Lets just do that. 
Geoff: Wait, what? 
Me: Yeah! I’ll just juggle them. This sounds like a great idea, Geoff!
*runs off*
Geoff: Wait… what? I didn’t… mean…  well, okay, I guess. I hope I didn’t just create a monster. 

Implementation

I went back to my lair, a small closet-sized office that I shared with Stuart Massie, a QA Liason and began working.  I slapped some chain lightning on the Black Stalker, along with a channeled beam which nuked the target with even more electricity. 
Then I had the Black Stalker electrify all of the players, making them deal damage to each other if they stood too close. More electricity! More power! Ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh!
Then I added an ability that pulled players up into the air, bouncing them up and down, flipping and bouncing around erratically! This seemed like a great idea to me! How realistic!  

(Cuz what’s more realistic than a Psychic Mushroom Tripod with Lightning powers, amrite??)

So I proudly slapped the Black Stalker into the dungeon and we did a designer-only playtest. The first few bosses went pretty well, some comments about needing better debuff icons, so-on.  Then we got to the Black Stalker.  I was super proud when I watched the Black Stalker fling Jeff Kaplan into the air, merrily bouncing around my screen in the air, well out of sight of anyone else on the team. 
It was about 10 seconds before I heard a girlish scream, “AAAAAUUUGGGGH!!!!”  And Jeff tumbled out of his office into the hallway, rubbing his eyes in agony. 
“Oh god! What happened?! Oh god,” as he stumbled into my office. 
Me: “You okay??”
Jeff: “You will NEVER believe the bug that just happened. I suddenly went flying, my camera went spinning and I couldn’t do ANYTHING.”
Me: “Oh. Yeah. That’s intentional. Pretty cool, right??”
Jeff: “WHAT?!! Dude, you just made me motion sick! Holy shit! You can’t just DO that.”
Me: “… wha?”
Once he realized I was totally clueless, he sat down. 
Me: “I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean to make you sick.”
Jeff: “It’s okay. But let’s talk about this. What were your goals?”
Me: “Well, I wanted to sell a psychic squish shrimp mushroom thing and create an experience no player has seen before.”
Jeff: “Okay, so that’s good, but can we do that without making them fly all over the place?”
Me: “Probably… but why not.”
Jeff: “Well, let’s look again at what’s going on here as a player experience instead of a designer experience. Instead of focusing on what’s cool for you, what’s cool to THEM?”
Me: “Well… uhm, flying through the air is cool.”
Jeff: “The first time, yes. Doesn’t it get pretty repetitive though?”
Me: “That’s true. Maybe it could be toned down a bit…”
Jeff: “What happens if the healer or tank gets lifted into the air…?”
Me: “Er… well… I guess the party has a rough time… probably dies.”
Jeff: “So, lets fix it.”

A New Focus

So with a new mindset, I went in an made a few small tweaks:
  • The Black Stalker only lifted one person into the air
    • Someone who wasn’t the tank
  • The person lifted could cast spells 
    • This let the healer keep doing their job
    • This let the party move closer to the healer if grabbed
  • The person lifted would stop after being yanked up
  • The Static Charge could be dispelled
    • This gave the players an additional form of agency over the situation
  • Only one person could be the “Static Charged” target
    • This made it better for melee characters too
The result was an encounter much more playable, still a bit annoying, but gave players the ability to use tools to improve their situation. 
The important part though was the change in focus – an encounter is meant for the players, not the designer.

A Touch of Values

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I’ve recently been inspired by the words of a highly observant man to reflect upon myself and what I do what I do.  His name is Simon Sinek and if you haven’t seen his TED talk, if you are person who believes in deeply understanding what connects you to your players, it will be worth the 10 minutes of your time to see his free talk at the end of this post.

My Values

Why

I believe that life experiences are meant to be shared, if humanity is to grow. 
I believe that the best games to be created have yet to be crafted. 
I believe that to have a future rich in experiences I can enjoy, I need to share the lessons that have gotten me this far. 
I believe that you are a person of patience, insight and reflection who can grow faster if you reflect on my mistakes. 

How

By openly accepting my mistakes and by expressing my feelings – be them proud, humble or erratic, I will become better at sharing who I am with the many people who’ve intersected with my life. 
By breaking down and reflecting upon past lessons, I will more thoroughly understand what I’ve actually done. 
By praising the others who’ve taught me lessons, I will remember how vital the little guiding nudges of a good working environment can transform a life. 
By discussing the stories that helped me become who I am, I will help shatter the myth that good game design is a product of magic, not hard work and forgiven mistakes.

What

I happen to be writing blog posts and making video games. Care to check them out?
http://alexanderbrazie.blogspot.com
http://www.leagueoflegends.com

Simon Sinek

What are your own values?

http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action

Postmortem 5: Gha’zan and Swamplord Musel’ik

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Have you ever heard of the Blizzard secret sauce?  Well here it is:

Metzen uses apostrophes when naming everything.

Now with that out of the way, let’s break down a couple sub-bosses.

Ghaz’an

Daelo: You did what?
Me: I stuck a hydra in the water tank. You know… it’s like swimming down there. 
Daelo: No, no, not that part. The next part. 
Me: Oh, I made entire thing a timed event. If you make it to the end before the Hydra. 
Daelo: And how are players going to figure this out? 
Me: Well… it runs up the pipe and kills the NPC. That won’t happen if you’re faster. 
Daelo: *facepalm*   
Me: What?

Qualities of a Good Event

Rob Pardo used to say:  “Events are hard. But few people realize what the hardest thing about an event is. “
What is that, Rob? What’s the hardest thing about an event. Is it the itemization? Periodic reward structures? Resources? 
“No. No and sort-of.  Actually, the hardest thing about an event is getting people to recognize that they are there.”
When you stop and think about it – it seems obvious. If nobody notices an event is going on… there was no point in creating it in the first place. So when you are going to put the time and effort into creating a scripted experience – you want people to notice it. 
In fact, this art of the “sell” is where most of the time and resources go when you’re setting up an event. It’s easy – no, trivial, to spend a day setting up a comedian who tells in-jokes and silly references in Shattrath.  It’s a whole other matter to teach players that he’s only there from 8-9 pm on Tuesdays.  
Take a look at Wildstar and some of the more recent MMOs in the past five years. These games are saturated with creative spawning and unique events. They also go out of their way to ensure you see all of the major events – there’s even a little introduction to each zone when you first arrive. (In my personal opinion, the timing of this zone-intro is poor, literally the same time as a million other UI elemnents, but the idea is great!) Check it out:
Furthermore, you can see how much effort is put into drawing player attention to the important areas of the game. While overwhelming, the initial starter events in many WoW zones draw your eye and use quests to pull you to the most dramatic and well-constructed areas. 
Important events sometimes even use UI, like this challenge event I’m about to fail because I’m too busy writing this post to pick up fat bird eggs. 
The importance of selling an event cannot be understated. The more important the event, the more time spend developing it, the more important it is that players notice. This doesn’t mean you can’t do subtle hits or little touches that add life and flavor – it just means that you should be judicious about making smart choices in general about what you invest a lot of energy into. 

Back to the Overgrown Snake Fish

So what was the issue with Ghaz’an? 
  1. The event wasn’t sold
  2. Player fixation on what’s ahead of them meant no-one noticed the fight going on in the background
  3. Addition of VO would have required recruiting another voice actor (pricey back in those days…)
  4. Addition of the event would drive rewards, doubling up the work for the item dude
I could go into mechanics, but this was the real lesson of Ghaz’an – there’s no point in crafting a timed event for its own sake. I kept the mechanic around, but basically all you got out of it was a sense of pride and the ability for your healer to have  an even smaller mana pool. 

Swamplord Musel’ek

You know, sometimes you just have to own up to what you’ve done. In this case, I totally phoned this guy in. He’s a hunter with deterrence, enrage pet and an aimed shot. 
Now, he’s not *completely* devoid of gameplay. You can swap targets when he’s got deterrence up… but yeah, not really. If I were do to him again, I’d made his aimed shot deal super high damage, but someone else can jump in the way to split the damage in half with you.  
However, this guy existed for a reason…. what was that reason, you might ask?
Well, a quest designer wanted to stick a quest NPC in here to be rescued. So I slapped in an above-average toughness NPC to guard the Druid in bear form… who forgot he was a bear. (They’re druids, they’ve been sleeping forever, sometimes you have to overlook these things.)  
Anyways, when Travis ran through the dungeon, he just assumed it was a boss by the name and slapped boss loot on him. So I cranked up his stats a tad bit and Musel’ek the Swamplord came to be.  I’m not sure what he was lording over exactly… but he’s not exactly dressed to be a king. 
Sometimes in development it’s best to roll with the punches. An unexpected thing happen? Don’t sweat it. Maybe its OK to have an extra boss in this one.  As it turns out, the Underbog was extremely long and the extra loot didn’t hurt. 

Questions?

Do you guys have any questions? I’m mixing up the formula a bit here with this one. What kind of posts would you like to see more of? 
Thanks!