Liner Notes: Polaris

[Campaignjunkie]

These are thoughts / anecdotes behind the development of each level. Beware - there are SPOILERS. You're encouraged to play through the level once or twice before reading these. No, really, SPOILER ALERT. Don't read any further if you haven't played the respective level yet.

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I conceptualized and built Polaris in about 2 weeks, back in January 2009. Then it was 5 months of on-and-off testing and polishing. It's probably the most personal level in this pack, inspired by a good ol' dose of young unrequited love and romantic troubles.

It was the second "fivetwelve" I made, a personal challenge to make a small self-contained level within an area of 512 x 512 units (the real world equivalent of 40 x 40 feet). Most of my levels spiral out of control when I decide to keep extending onto hallways and adding additional rooms, so this size limit helped me focus on the game mechanics. Originally, I planned Polaris as a giant sprawling forest, and you use the stars to navigate through it - except I prototyped a giant forest and the result wasn't very interesting, and I found I had no control over the player to teach them the required skills.

All first person shooters consists of two basic verbs: looking and moving. Mirror's Edge brought on a lot of discussion about the "moving" aspect of an FPS, and it seems we're headed towards some holy grail of body awareness with that - but what about the "looking" aspect? (To my knowledge, no one other than Valve pays attention as to how to go about directing the player's gaze, whether through Alyx being blinded by a flashlight, NPCs pointing, or birds flying somewhere.) The "looking" verb usually has no cost associated with it, no power - it is a passive action on the part of the player. So how about we attach some more significance to the act of looking in an FPS? Can "looking at stuff" be fun too? In an FPS, shooting and looking are basically the same verb anyway.

That's where stargazing comes in. It's still passive... and to many, it's still boring. Which leads me to what I consider my failures in Polaris - it's not very "fun" and the tasks and instructions are still very game-like. "Do this. Look at that. Do that." It's all basically one big tutorial level until the end, when Dylan disappears and the player finally has to make a decision for himself. Originally I had less overt instruction, and it was embedded within the text of the narrative more - but playtesters would get confused. "Do I click on the Big Dipper?" So yes, my biggest regret about Polaris is the "game" part.

I'm also interested in education as a career, so one thing I'm doing with Radiator is demonstrating how I think educational games should be built: you incorporate the skill directly into a "regular" video game. You learn how to find north with the stars by running into a situation where you need it. (The Big Dipper method taught in Polaris actually works in real-life throughout the Northern Hemisphere, by the way.) You learn arithmetic by calculating the optimal DPS for your character in World of Warcraft. You learn about history and economics by playing Civilization 4 and realizing that mercantilism is impractical in the late game and how global trade is just so much better... What you don't do is digitize some flash cards and sell a glorified Powerpoint presentation as an educational game, as much of the educational game industry is doing today because that doesn't let you model or test understanding and thus it fails as education.

But I think I had the most success in establishing mood. It's relatively quiet and somber - and this comes through in the endings. There are three: (1) You leave early, perhaps even a minute into the game. The narrator regrets not staying. (2) You go north, where Dylan confesses he doesn't really "believe" in stargazing so much as its romantic power. The narrator goes home with him and they break up. (3) You don't go north, and Dylan calls you a bitch, and you break up... One playtester lamented that he wasn't able to reach the "good" ending - and I think that's a false promise offered in many games. In real-life you might do the "right thing" all the time and you're lucky if you get good results from it. Plus, I was still kind of pissed off about how my last semi-relationship ended, so I wanted to make something pessimistic.

[hero twin]

Campaignjunkie, thank you for sharing Polaris. You're very much on to something with this project!

The feel was great, and the experience was great since it explored a lot of meaningful ideas. I think however that what you consider the failures of the game aren't really failures at all. The scenario isn't really fun (there's a lot of tension between Dylan and the narrator) so I don't think the game has to be fun in the traditional sense. It could benefit from more interactivity, but it wasn't bad for this little vignette. Then you said the instructions are game-like in a bad way, but you made them that way! There may not be a good way to make the instructions speak to the meaning AND be completely clear to the playtester. In this experiment you're challenging our expectations and our notion of a video game (whether you like it or not), so maybe it's OKAY and it's natural for people to be confused when their expectations aren't satisfied. Maybe that means you're doing it right.

So good stuff! I love your manifesto, I'm looking forward to the next issue.

[PeaceBringer]

Awesome. Going to show this to my friend who never shuts up about "games as art". I just want to have a fun or relaxing or funny experience...

This game is very Zen. Best screen saver ever. I was sitting there drinking a beer looking at the stars and the game was gentle enough to not flip out after a while that I was ignoring the instructions. I could see running this on a atom-based system hooked to a giant widescreen LCD tv just for the mood...

Where the game failed for me is that even though I had learned to use the stars to find north, I hadn't recalled there being any clue that he would choose to go north rather than any other direction. I was thinking of trying it again but I wanted to make sure there actually were other endings, so I read the liner notes.

Thanks.

[Campaignjunkie]

hero twin: Thanks for the defense, even if it doesn't convince me ;)

PeaceBringer: uh, yeah, I couldn't think of a viable reason he'd want to go north, so I just kind of left it unexplained. It's refrigerator logic.

Other stuff of interest:

- One playtester was drunk and he got through it. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

- Over on RPS, someone remarked they wanted to break a bottle over his head - and I had planned to allow that as an ending (HL2 even has a cool function that would've made the NPC instantly ragdoll onto the ground) but I couldn't figure out an easy way to detect throwing stuff at him - C17 train station metropolice, he ain't. Maybe I'll add it in the next release.

- With the text, I wanted to keep it short and relatively snappy. I always felt Minerva, as amazingly well-written it is, had too much text for players to read. At the same time, I love Adam Foster's treatment of Minerva's voice, so I focused a lot on my narrator's voice as well (maybe it's all the interactive fiction I've been playing) - I wanted it come off as a brash college student who thinks they know everything but secretly suspects they don't. It's the skeptical voice of the gamer, manifest for them on the screen already - "This mod is stupid. Why am I playing this?" - and hopefully it'll lead to an "A-Ha" moment that happens in Braid so often.

[Psyborg]

Hey Campaignjunkie, thanks for the mod, it was pretty excellent. The liner notes (and manifesto, natch) were interesting and very well thought out, and gave a lot of insight into your design process.

A few thoughts:

I have no problems at all with text as substitute for spoken words to give instructions or plot information- you rightly bring up Minerva, a system where it worked very well. However, in this case I feel that the game might have been effected negatively for its usage. As you said, you were trying to make 'looking' into a game mechanic, and therefore having to switch from looking at the game itself to the instructions was a lot more distracting than it would be in a traditional gameplay mechanic. I realize trying to dick about with Faceposer is a pain in the ass, but I think the effort would ultimately be worth it in this case. Not only would you gain the ability to allow the player to continue engaging with the gameplay while being fed the instructions, you'd also gain a level of immersion which the beautifully realized map calls for (the table, for example, is fantastically lit and the scattered bottles and so on feel like they actually belong there, a feat not often seen in even professionally created mods).

Speaking of immersion, you talk about not wanting to go the hardcore art-game route, which is admirable (despite the massive critical acclaim The Graveyard got, it was better as a concept than as an actual experience), but I feel like you could go a lot further in developing the actual gameplay in a new direction without it feeling too 'gamey'. Let me explain- right now the storyline, as fresh as it is, seems simply tacked on in order to explain the gameplay; what I'm suggesting is actually incorporating the story AS the gameplay. Games like Indigo Prophecy (and presumably Heavy Rain) have attempted this to an extent- your choices ARE the gameplay. So, for example, a game where you play a hunter whose friend has accidentally just shot another hunter in the woods. From that point you have a branching tree of options, each carefully selected with a logical endpoint (to keep the game within logical boundaries)- for example, you could try to talk your friend down, whereupon he'd freak out and pull a gun on you and force you to bury the body, and you could alert a passing car while getting the shovel and try to escape. Or, alternately, you could just run away immediately, and disappear into the woods, without learning any more about what your friend is going to do. The way you've decided to keep the episodes small, and stick with a 'short story' format really allows for such scenarios; they don't have the issues of branching huge convoluted storylines that a larger format would; and they allow you to break away from stories revolving around a narrow gameplay mechanic.

I would encourage you to explore the boundaries of what you can do with the format you've chosen, and freely offer up any assistance I can give (uh... I can... uh... voice act... and... uh... shit.).

Of course, Episode 1 was fantastic without any of this, and you probably know what you're doing far better than I do. Just food for thought, anyway.

Thanks for the good times, really looking forward to the next one.

Jon

[Campaignjunkie]

Psyborg: I chose text for several specific reasons - mainly to suggest interiority and reflection on the narrator's part, but also for another reason that'll hopefully be clear when episode 2 is out.

re - 'story as gameplay' - I agree story and gameplay should be closely related, but they still need to be separate. "Fun" / immersion usually emerges from mastering something or getting better at something; where would the mastery be in that homicidal hunter scenario?

One thing I always ask of students in my outdoor games course - "ideally, what would a good player do in this game?" In Polaris, a good player would recognize the patterns of stars and relate them to each other - and maybe glean some sort of commentary about relationships from it. In Deus Ex, they would tie together sniping / assault / infiltration skills into a workable combination.

But in Indigo Prophecy... what can a good player do? They can't predict where any of their choices will lead because that would compromise the novelty of the plot.

So I respect their work and I appreciate the artistry, but I think stuff like that is in the "Choose Your Own Adventure" vein - and it's a dead-end in terms of interactivity.

[Campaignjunkie]

New, bigger regret: absentmindedly normalizing all the guitar WAVs that play when you find a constellation - I guess everyone has their sound volume turned way up high and the WAVs are way too loud. It only took me a few minutes to revert all the sound files for the next release, but it looks like the damage has been done and it kind of ruined lots of peoples' experiences already. (Thanks a lot for catching this, playtesters... *grumble*)

[boholikeu]

[quote="Campaignjunkie"]
One thing I always ask of students in my outdoor games course - "ideally, what would a good player do in this game?" In Polaris, a good player would recognize the patterns of stars and relate them to each other - and maybe glean some sort of commentary about relationships from it. In Deus Ex, they would tie together sniping / assault / infiltration skills into a workable combination.

But in Indigo Prophecy... what can a good player do? They can't predict where any of their choices will lead because that would compromise the novelty of the plot.

So I respect their work and I appreciate the artistry, but I think stuff like that is in the "Choose Your Own Adventure" vein - and it's a dead-end in terms of interactivity.[/quote]

While I understand your point, not every game that integrates plot and game play needs to be reduced to a "choose your own adventure". The dialogue in Mass Effect is a good example. You can learn how to manipulate the dialogue to always get your desired outcome, and a good player can earn extra story snippets once they master the system.

Also, I realize it may be a bit too "art gamey" for you, but not every game needs to include a "mastery" of something in order to be fun. People play games for a variety of reasons, not just challenge, and so I think it's a shame when developers limit themselves with requirements like that.

[Campaignjunkie]

If you find a better definition of fun that doesn't involve mastery or challenges, please tell the game development community.

(Keeping in mind that "mastery" and "challenge" are used in the broadest senses - mastery can be flying around with finesse in Flower OR executing a 50 hit combo in Street Fighter. But given how addictive and satisfying something like WoW is, a pretty traditional form of video game based on accumulation and mastery, it's hard to argue that this definition is wrong. As humans we LIKE mastery and challenge, we just need to channel it into different modes of play.)

[boholikeu]

I'm just trying to say that not everyone plays games for the challenge aspect of it. Take The Sims for example: many people play that game simply for the storytelling aspect of it. What skill is a player trying to master when they derive their fun from simply putting Elvis in a house with Britney Spears and watching the drama that plays out?

To my knowledge the development community has no clear cut definition of "fun". Though there are certainly many developers that use challenge as their core design goal, there are plenty of others (such as Maxis) that games based on on creativity, experimentation, etc.

[Campaignjunkie]

But in the Sims 3, Maxis added even more challenge to it with a Dream / Aspiration for each Sim - which works a lot better than cramming it all into the Career system as in Sims 1. Even in a "creative" or experimental space there has to be a goal, there has to be a direction to go. Give most people a blank canvas and they'll stare at you for a bit - but tell them to paint a cat and they'll start painting, or maybe ask for clarification, or start thinking about cats.

Plus, you have to consider what kind of person plays single player mods for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 - pretty much only hardcore gamers who even know that such mods exist AND still have HLep2 installed. They're very familiar with most video game genres and HL2 gameplay conventions. And at the risk of stereotyping and generalizing everyone... they aren't looking to fingerpaint.

[boholikeu]

You're right about Sims 3, but like you explained above I think it's used more as a way to focus player creativity rather than a challenge that must be met in order to have fun. Creativity and storytelling are still the main goals of the game here, since a player looking for entertainment through challenge alone will likely be very disappointed with the Sim's dry micromanagement system.

In short, just because a game isn't about challenge doesn't mean it won't have any challenging aspects or goals in it. My point was only that challenge isn't the only way to have fun in games, and that even though most games include some sort of challenge or objective, that isn't necessarily what makes the game fun.

"Plus, you have to consider what kind of person plays single player mods for Half-Life 2: Episode 2"

And you also have to consider what kind of person plays experimental mods. Dear Esther isn't a mod that I'd call challenged based, but it's still pretty well regarded.

Anyway, based on you latest episode I wouldn't be surprised if we actually agree with each other and are just explaining the same thing in different ways. Even though Handle With Care has some challenging aspects to it, I wouldn't say that mastering those challenges is needed in order to have fun. It's part of the reason why I think HWC worked a lot better than Polaris.

[some dude]

"Where the game failed for me is that even though I had learned to use the stars to find north, I hadn't recalled there being any clue that he would choose to go north rather than any other direction."

not true.
somewhere along the way, he mentions that orion was looking for polaris to chase after his dreams. that was a pretty good reason for me to head north!
great work, i really enjoyed it.

[Scab]

This failed in the sense that it's supposed to be a story-telling format. This narrative told me nothing significant or interesting. It does have multiple results, up to three as far as I can tell, but none of them are interesting or seem relevant. You star gaze with some dude, he teaches you about constellations, you break up with him . . . no matter what.

So yeah, the choices are, break up with him, break up with him, or break up with him. It's okay if all the endings are negative and/or invoke unpleasant emotions, so long as the audience understands why. I don't mind it wrapping up on a down ending, I just want more information . . . more substance. I couldn't really feel anything negative, or anything at all for the characters because I don't care about them. The story teller is supposed to make the audience care for, despise, love, hate, or whatever for their characters. I wasn't given enough to feel anything for them. I seriously ended up reading the linear notes because I was doubting that I truly unlocked all the story, but it turns out I did. Essentially you've just made a sandwich, but you didn't add cheese, ham, or mayo. It's like you just put two slices of bread together and called it a snack.

I don't mean to be too overtly negative here, but I do so because you did invoke a sense of wonderment in me. After playing Dear Esther, and seeing your work, I definitely see grand potential in what you have here. Just add some ingredients man, because it's just a bit too bland.