Blogs - AJ_Quick

In the twelve years I have been a developer, I’ve mainly focused on developing online experiences. The idea that you can get on the internet with a group of strangers and go frag some monsters together is pretty captivating. There’s this feeling of camaraderie and excitement you can get from playing a really good online game that even the best single player experiences fail to recreate.

Well, I’m done trying to make multiplayer games.

Social engineering has somehow crept into game development. Questions like "how do we minimize toxicity" and "maximize player retention" are questions that every developer of a multiplayer game MUST have an answer to. Statistics and player psychology have gone from being distant considerations to being at the forefront of how multiplayer games are developed. It is common to see games with complex systems of drip-fed bonuses that reward players for good behavior and subtly punish bad behavior. Did you stick around for the whole match? Good job! You unlocked a Sparkle Pistol! Only TEN more matches and you'll get the Sparkle Shotgun! Oops! You left a match early! Now you have to sit in the low priority pool you naughty boy!

Now, I realize that these aren't new concepts. I would be surprised if these weren't considerations back when UT99 or Quake 3 was in development. Good developers recognize that they are not just creating games, but also communities, and that a healthy community makes for a healthy game. You want to keep people invested, and to do that you need to dangle a carrot on the end of a stick. The problem is that this mentality has created a community of gamers who EXPECT rewards. Games without these systems are given less attention, or passed over completely. It's a little like slipping bits of filet mignon into your dog's food bowl for years, and then asking him to eat a bowl with nothing but kibble in it. In an effort to attract and retain players, developers have conditioned entire communities of gamers into the mindset that they need to be constantly rewarded for playing.

So what’s wrong with that though ?

Well, for one thing it puts pressure on developers to focus on statistics. “What was our max concurrent player count for the month we introduced the Spark Shotgun drop?” “How many daily unique players did we see when we did the Kwanzaa themed map”? “Were they buying any DLC?” To interpret all this information could easily be a full time job for a single developer , and for small development teams this means that there’s less manpower focused on what traditionally might be considered the “important” stuff. Y’know, fixing bugs, refining core gameplay mechanics, adding meaningful content. And you’d better believe players expect that too.

What I take issue with the most however, is that it insidiously moves the focus of game development away from art and toward a social science. It’s no longer enough to implement a mechanic because it would be “fun”, or because it serves to further an artistic vision. That’s naive, old fashioned. A waste of resources. Every mechanic needs serve the meta goal of seducing players to invest their time (and money) in your game, instead of the competition. We need to have unlocks, but we also need skin drops, oh and we need achievements of course, but we also need tiered matchmaking so players can only play with people of the same skill as them. Then we have the seasonal events, but also the weekly events. “We’ll give you a bonus if you participate in both! Do you like our game? We made it for you to feel good. We love you! Do you love us? Please play our game. Please.

It’s cloying, it’s cynical, It’s pathetic, And if you want to make a multiplayer game in 2017, you’d better believe it’s necessary. None of this is to say that single player games don’t try to push the same psychological buttons - they do. But the nice thing about single player is that it’s a discrete, self contained experience. There is typically a beginning, and there is typically an end. Because of this the focus is less on creating a perpetual reward bubble for the player and more on creating memorable experiences across its duration. Oh, and you don’t have to worry about how to apply “soft punishments” to a guy who spends 4 hours a night griefing everyone in the server. If you want to be a dick to some AI enemies, go right ahead pal. They aren’t going to uninstall.

I’m not going to fool myself into thinking that making a single player game is a free pass to ignore player psychology. That would be a big mistake. I have also seen this pattern of “games as reward dispenser” reflected in many modern single player games. Assassin’s creed and Far Cry are notorious for their completionist pandering world maps, and there has been a pretty big surge of “roguelike” games that try to trap you in addicting loops of rinse of repeat. But , at the end of the day you are focusing on the needs of a single gamer. You don’t have to worry about how he’s going to feel when somebody with 5,000 hours under his belt joins the server and smashes him into the dirt before saying “l2p u fucking scrub”.

The truth is, there’s really no easy answer to that stuff. People are dicks in the real world, and they’re dicks online. You can try to apply subtle pressures to force good behavior out of them, and it can even work, but it’s a black hole for time and resources. Unless you’re a huge studio with a mountain of statistics and a small army to interpret them , you’re going to struggle.

I guess it’s just not a battle I want to fight. I don’t derive much enjoyment from finding new ways to force people to use less abusive language, or ragequit 10% less. It’s not why I got into game development. I see games as an art form, and I develop them because I want to realize a vision that is capable of pulling people away from the world for a few hours a day. If you are a developer who sees games as more of a science, this will probably come across as a whole lot of melodrama, which is fine. I don’t expect everyone will share this perspective, I just wanted to put this out there for discussion and explain why I’m currently staying far, far away from the world of multiplayer development!

I started modding when I was around 16 years old. Warcraft 3 : Reign of chaos had just come out and I thought it'd be cool to change the colour of the Orc Blademaster's armour.

At the time, Warcraft assets were compressed into a single, enormous file from which individual textures could only be extracted or even viewed with the aid of a third party browser. But being able to see the contents of the package was just the start as I then had to chase down exactly which file belonged to the Blademaster - the textures all had random alphanumeric names.

Some time later I eventually found what I was looking for and exported it to Photoshop to begin work. I masked off the areas of the texture belonging to the Blademaster's armor, and changed the brightness/ saturation to make it look darker. Pleased with my work, I saved it out to a bitmap and attempted to import it back into the game. That didn't work.

I noticed that all the textures in the Wc3 asset library were saved as format 'DDS' , which was something foreign to me at the time. After digging around on the web, I learned that DDS stands for 'Direct draw surface' and is a format for compressing textures for use in windows applications. Great, OK. But how do I make one ? More digging ensued. I finally came across an Nvidia plugin for Photoshop which allowed me to export my new Blademaster texture in the correct format.

From there, I was able to import it back into the content package, save it out, and preview my work in-game for the first time. It looked awful. The entire process had taken several days of work and it looked awful. I decided I would keep it to myself rather than release it on the public.

This was the first lesson I ever learned about modding :

" It takes a lot of work, and it's hard to make anything impressive. "

While this was a harsh lesson to learn, I saw it as a challenge. I grew more active in the modding scene as the years went on and continued to make fairly shitty little models maps and textures for a variety of games. (Deus ex, Battlefield 1942, Unreal tournament).

It was only when I started work on Killing Floor (at the time, a Battlefield : Vietnam modification) that I started to get this weird feeling. It was a realization that dawned on me when I started reading the critical comments people would post about mod news updates on a site called 'AmpedNews' (now defunct). It went something like this :

"We are giving people free content for their games. " "Shouldn't they love everything we do?"

This was my first taste of what I will call the 'Social' side of mod development. Previously, I had released very little of my work to the public. It had been a learning experience, or for my own enjoyment. Suddenly here I was showing WIP shots of models or maps to the public and wouldn't you know it, some folks didn't like what they were seeing! And they were vocal about it! This really got under my skin and if memory serves it led me to post some pretty caustic replies, which led to lengthy arguments about whether the butt of a shotgun would look better gunmetal, or polished wood.

But fan feedback was just the tip of the iceberg , there was also the issue of competition with other mods. There was this underlying feeling that all of us who were publicly making a mod for Battlefield were in direct competition with one another for the hearts and minds of mod players. Desert combat, one of the most popular mods for Battlefield at the time, had a huge fan base and seemingly could do no wrong. I found myself comparing everything I did to them and trying to raise the bar for my own work well past a level that I was comfortable with . Modding had started to feel kinda stressful.. and that stress inevitably showed whenever someone made the mistake of posting a negative comment about my work on a news site.

This trend continued as Killing Floor changed over to the UT2k4(UE2.5) engine. The UT modding community was pretty active at the time but was largely overshadowed by Source. The exact reason for this wasn't something I could put my finger on. But it was incredibly aggravating to watch obscure Source mods with next to no content to show skyrocket in popularity based on hype for the engine, while Killing Floor went relatively ignored. There were times when I would lash out at source mods for no reason at all, or belittle other developers with more fans than me who I felt weren't working as hard as I was.

It was around this time that I came to my second realization about modding ( though it wouldn't sink in until much later) :

"Modding for the wrong reasons can turn talented amateur developers into jerks with an ego complex."

This second point is a real killer . At best, you begin to assume that the world owes you something, and that criticism of your work is taboo. At worst, you will slam other talented developers for next to no reason, bash your fans, and generate a really bad reputation that stains your mod's name. In a community where content is being released free of charge and people are often fitting mod work in between school / jobs, everything tends to rest on attitude. Popularity, rather than money, is the currency modders deal in .

Ultimately, it leads to hypocrisy.

If you aren't willing to accept critiques or feedback from the public, why are you releasing your work to them at all? Why do you obsess over the number of downloads your mod has got, or the fan rating it has on moddb, while simultaneously slamming fans who suggest a new feature you don't agree with, or telling them to RTFM when they can't get it to work. Are you really making it for the fans to enjoy or are you making it because you enjoy the ego stroke that accompanies a mass influx of downloads and positive comments?

This bizarre relationship between fans and developers only really exists in the world of modding, where everything is done on faith. In the cold, hard, cash-oriented world of commercial game development, the customer is always right. Telling someone off who has just given you their hard earned money is akin to shooting yourself in the foot. Only the most foolish or inexperienced (or those with enough money they don't have to care) of developers would risk doing it.

Many people (especially those around this site) seem to believe that money is the root of all evil, and that as soon as a mod 'goes commercial' it has sold its soul to Satan. That may be so, or it may not. But one thing I can say for sure is that modders have their own form of greed which is just as unattractive. If you want to release your work for free to the public, fine. But think very hard about why you are doing it first. If the answer is : "Because I want to be more popular than X mod" , or " Because I want a 10/10 mod rating " , you should probably reconsider.

protip : The answer should be - "Because I made something fun and with feedback from players, It can become even better "

I'll begin by saying that I really enjoyed Dragon Age : Origins, and that I am a longtime Bioware fan with a deep, deep love for all things Baldurs Gate and Mass Effect. I appreciate that ME was built in the age of consoles and I still love it despite its arguably simplistic gameplay as compared to the deep and fidgety RPGs of yore.

I suppose what I loved most about Dragon Age : Origins is that it genuinely came across like a spiritual successor to the Baldur's Gate franchise, along with all of that series overcomplex statistics, inventory management, spell casting, etc. The kind of stuff you can nerd out over in the dull moments between plot expositions as you're running around from one samey looking dungeon corridor to the next.

Well, that's all gone in DA:II . And I mean - all of it.

I had been playing the game a good few hours and amassed a sizable collection of various breastplates, swords, axes, and boots. " Now would be a good time to stop and equip my companions with all this loot", thought I, smirking in anticipation of how godlike my crew would look after their upgrade. But for some strange reason, I noticed that my companions inventory screens were grayed out, and when I moused over a sword there was a small bit of text that said "only usable by Hawke". At first I thought it was just a restricted item or something, so I selected another and tried again. Same thing. And that's when it dawned on me - oh fuck I can't manage my companions inventories. This is a pretty bitter pill to swallow, as you are constantly being showered in goodies which are restricted to a certain class (ie. a warrior breastplate) and where before you could just donate them to any warrior in your party in need of an upgrade, now you are stuck with this deadweight . Worse, you can't sell them for more than a pittance (literally,a few pennies each) , I guess because Bioware figured that selling junk would make players too rich.

*Sigh*

Well, at least conversation choices are there - and the NPCs are a fun lot, if not quite as exciting as the DA:O crew. They retain their signature bickering which you can stop and listen to every few minutes for a chuckle. The interface is slick and refined (if skeletal), and the character models look noticeably improved from their DA:O counterparts, though the same basic models and textures seem to have been carried over which gives things abit of a recycled feel.

I would like to take a moment here to get one thing across : DA:II is not a bad game. But from the people who brought us Mass Effect and Dragon Age, it feels overwhelmingly lazy, and ill considered. It has this aura about it like it was designed by committee, and masterminded by businessmen - from the day one DLC which prepurchasers don't get, to the inventory being conveniently locked in the demo release to hide its bastardized featureset.

As I see an RPG, it is about freedom and choice. By removing so much of the choice (yes, even the fiddly overcomplex choice) from the game , Bioware has hampered much of what drew me to play the game in the first place. I didn't buy the game looking for visceral action, if I wanted that, i'd be playing Bulletstorm. Why they seem hell bent on creating "The world's most action oriented RPG" is beyond me. Baldur's Gate had action, sure - but it also had a great depth of choice. We could all forgive the clunky animations and slightly-too-lengthy battles because we were given the ability to micro manage every aspect of them. You were in control, you felt clever.

Dragon Age II is fun, and I'm going to finish it. But it makes me feel for all the world like a button mashing tool. Fingers crossed for Skyrim.

Trine is cheap.

And up until quite recently it would have been very clear which definition of the word "cheap" I was referring to.

I'm talking about enemies who get stuck behind scenery (becoming untouchable) , but still manage to fire homing missiles out at you. I am talking about re spawning countless times only to be spawnkilled because the game decided to restart you on top of a set of massive spikes. I'm talking about getting killed by a skeleton warrior who strikes first and plays the animation for his attack a full second later.
If you aren't familiar with how Trine works, it's basically a three-strikes you're out system involving as many different characters . In some locations you are asked to use a specific character to progress. In other words, if your key character is killed, you may as well commit suicide with the other two - you won't be getting through that section. Once all three have died you are asked to replay from the last checkpoint. That's not usually so bad, but from time to time it means traversing a mind numbingly tedious platforming puzzle involving fireballs that you had completed only a few minutes earlier. To make matters more frustrating, you spawn from the last checkpoint with a smidgen of health remaining from your total health bar. This means that if a skeleton so much as farts in your direction and your key character is killed, it's back to the last checkpoint. rinse and repeat. Often dozens of times in a row.

I can see that some of what's broken is just general bugginess, which makes sense given the game's indie status. But other stuff is just bad design. Why are there giant hanging spike balls which only the knight can get past by raising his shield up? Why can't I just jump over the spiked bit with my rogue? Apparently in the land of side scrolling platformers characters have absolutely no depth perception and are compelled to run headlong into whatever obstacle they can find.

When Trine hits its stride is when you are able to get a flow going and progress through a series of stages using each of your characters' strengths. It's alot of fun to swing around on the rogue's grappling rope and to fire arrows at skeletons from a distance. Unfortunately the Knight feels largely useless by comparison and tends to get used as a damage mop when hordes of skeletons spawn in all around. The wizard is useful in that he can provide stepping stones to allow you to reach hidden goodies, and you can use his physics objects to block fireballs and make advancing less of a chore.

Sadly, there are far far too many times when you find yourself in a cycle of die, spawn, die. And many more situations still when the game's primary strength ( choice ) is thrown to the wind and you are asked to use a single method to proceed. What frustrates me most about Trine is how the lush visuals and soothing audio trick you into believing that it's a casual game, or something you can play with one eye open. In truth , Trine is pretty punishing and seems to be best consumed in small, cautious bits.

I've noticed a recent trend among so called "indie projects". Company names are cropping up everywhere. "Dark Storm interactive" "Red Paradox studios" " Something sinister + Something vaguely metaphysical" . (I pulled those concepts out of my ass in as much time as it took to type them)

They have awesome websites full of buzzwords and industry jargon like "Dynamic combat" or "Tactical Context Sensitive Inventory buttons!" and rattle off impossibly long and intricate lists of planned features and revolutionary new gameplay mechanics. The vast majority of these "studios" also seem to be unfunded zero experience amateurs working out of their parent's basement.

Enough already. We get it, Unity is cool. UDK is cool. The notion of making a game of your own is cool. Rather than focusing on what really matters ( Coming up with a small scale, humble, manageable concept and then slaving away on it for months) These guys seem to be caught up in the notion that game development is some glamorous activity that more or less does itself. Assuming your feature list is comprehensive enough and your company logo with the eagle holding a machine gun is cool enough, you'll have a top seller in no time! Right?

Here's a wake up call :

Game development is sitting on your ass in a worn leather chair for 10 hours a day, smelling of microwaveable meals and body odor. It is months on end of painful trial and error where even the most basic of features is a struggle against seemingly impossible odds. It is spending so much time away from friends and social activities that every time you do go out, you're awkward as hell around people. If you have a snappy website and a sweet feature list , good for you. You either have way too much goddamn time on your hands, or you've attracted a sizable support staff with a vivid imagination.

In a fit of nostalgia I decided to re-install Wing Commanders 1, 2 , 3, 4, and 5.

I played 3 and 4 when they came out in the mid 90s and they left a lasting impression on me. I was so completely sucked into their world. The game had this gravitas which turned what should have been something hokey and ridiculous ( men and women in spaceships shooting lasers at giant furries) into an epic tale of survival on the fringes of space.

Wing Commander was one among a few games that actually forces you to go out and buy a joystick. Keyboard support was technically there, but good luck trying to win a dogfight using the arrow keys. In fact, even if you had "the right tools" a single stray missile would be enough to turn your ship into space dust. Likewise, if you weren't paying constant attention to the radio transmissions from your commander ( which played out in distracting FMV boxes on your HUD and were largely drowned out by the sound of gunfire) you might not realize that you were intended to rescue those ships, not blow them up. "Oops" was I word I said a lot when playing Wing commander. Actually it was another four letter exclamation. But you get the idea.

I've been trying to get this game to

not suck

for a week now, on and off.
My first major gripe was the weapon damage. You could shoot a single guy about

four or five times in the torso

and he'd come back for more. Apparently a single headshot's enough to down them ... you'd never know because the weapons fire so innaccurately

you'd be lucky to hit a target that's on-screen

much less nail the top of your enemies hitbox. This weapon failing doesnt extend to your enemies. I am regularly

sniped by guys with pistols, a km away

As i lie in bushes of course. In the dead of night.

I modded this out with a "realistic ballistics mod" which, as well as altering the damage also makes it so your bullets dont "explode" when they go out of range (yes that's another charming feature of Clear Sky, each gun has a maximum range, and its LOW )

So..
Here i am with my modded guns, back in this

shitty looking swamp,

trying to kill bandits for my

asshole benefactors.

I manage to take out an entire outpost now, by being stealthy. yay. The objective says

"hold this position until help arrives"

Well ok, ill do that.
Sit down. Cross legs. Light a cigarette.
Tick tock tick tock tick tock. And about 5 game minutes later,

no indication that "help is on the way"

So i go running off to do other stuff, hoping that when i come back later, my allies will have twigged on to the fact that i just john rambo-ed an entire enemy stronghold for their sake.
not the case...
Although it looks as though all those enemies i spent so long meticulously dispatching

have all just respawned again.

@ this point i gave up and decided it would be more fun to kill the lazy pricks @ the church.
"VAT DO YOU VANT STALKER?"
KA_BAM! right in the face with both barrels of my hunting shotgun.
Then i

murder all of my other allies

Now i notice some allied reinforcements are spilling in to replace the lads i just shot up and with them, is a single group of about

3 emphysemic soldiers bringing up the rear

Their destination : That fucking enemy base i had destroyed , and would clearly need to destroy a second time.At this point i learned an important lesson in the world of stalker :

Killing your allies fixes game breaking bugs.

If i had just let them waltz merrily into the now repopulated enemy base, it'd have been the end of them. So i hammer the sprint key to reach that base before they do , and ONCE AGAIN i take out all the enmies there. When my squad of nooblets arrrives they congraulate themselves on a job well done, and then tell me my mission is complete.

So

now its off to the cordon

i have just beat the FIRST , and EXCITING MISSION of stalker :clear sky.

After a lengthy load , i get a warning from my friend back @ the swamp over the radio.
He says that the army is around here somewhere and they might shoot me.
"ok", i think. surely ill be able to be clever, and evade them.

I press the forward key and am immediately shot.

On the loudspeaker someone rants "THERE IS A STALKER SHOOT HIM"
er..... who shot me ?
Oh i see .
a guard tower about a half kilometer away.
It's so far away in fact, and

obscured by the ugly DOF effect

that i couldn't make it out at all.
typical.

I figure i'll be tactical this time. Rather than running forward, ill try running to the SIDES to circumvent this ubertower.
Oh, but hold on
there's

convenient barbed wire fences on either side of me.

In fact, on closer inspection, the whole area is penned in,
creating a

death funnel

all the way to the tower, with just a

few skinny trees

here or there as potential cover.
So i try to run forward and take cover behind a rock.

pew pew pew

im down again.
It seems that when you get shot, your "sprint" is interrupted, so taking even one bullet - and by the way their machine gun tower spits out about

500 a second, with pin point precision

will kill your chances of making it to cover.

At this point i happen to notice that the bullets also

Clip through trees

which is fine, since it gives a reasonable answer for why the trees werent really offering me much cover, anyway.

Quickload again and

GO FOR IT !

WOOOOO!
This time i make it to a fallen log, with bullets wizzing all around me.
My heart is racing , my

pulse is pounding

this is living!

THIS IS LIVING!

OH MY GOSH!

and now i realize i can't fit under the branch, even when im crouching
yes, my character is too fat to fit under this fucking branch.
which is clearly here for the player to squeeze under.

i'm too fat.

The machine gun

riddles me like cheese

pause.
quiet facepalm.

exit to desktop.

NEXT WEEK ON Alex's stalker clear sky adventures:
Random radiation zones that poison you without warning and force you to store a shitload of vodka that will put you over your tiny carry weight :)

This is what nerd rage looks like.
kekeke ^^

Nelsoncarmo26 wrote: nerd?
FUCK YOU THEN BUSTA.
Banned me for all I care.
to hell with you two cock suckers.

Nerd is the bitch that gave birth to you mother fuckers.

You think you are something because you make mods or games?

You are fucking no-bodys.

who's the nerd?

You are the fucking nerd. you cunt.

I play video games, that makes me a nerd?

I'm 29 years old, don't fuckin talk to me like I'm 16.

So FUCK YOU!
Piece of shit. kadish cunt.
you have a big mouth cause you're hidding behind a computer.

Rage?

You haven't seen rage mother fucker, come here in real life and I'll give you a lesson in rage.
Now fuck you, and you can ban me now for all I care.

I'm not having a bunch of fuckin kids insulting me.

Go kill yourself you useless cunt.

get a real job instead of claming yourself to be programers, why aren't you working for a serious company then?
all you do is modify what other make

SHUT THE FUCK UP!