DeanCon '09

On Saturday, October 17, 2009 we had our first boardgame day at my new house. A bunch of us meet up every year at Unity Games to play games, and last year I said, "Why are we paying $15 each to meet in a hotel ballroom and play boardgames when we could meet at my house for free?"

So we did.

The day started out with Chaos in the Old World, a game based on the Warhammer 40K universe, I think. Here's the best review of the game:

DowntimeTown Episode 6: Chaos in the Old World from Robert Florence on Vimeo.

Present were Kevin McGuire, Rob Palmer, Jason Lutes, Dan Tennant, and myself. We actually started with waffles and a syrup-off because Kevin brought real maple syrup from Maine, and Jason brought real maple syrup from Vermont. After waffles (which weren't all that great, I've made better) there was no clear winner on which was the better syrup.

Since Dan was late, we went right to Chaos while he munched on waffles.



It's only a four player game. I played Korne, the Blood God. I was losing miserably on the victory point chart and really didn't have a prayer, but there are four dials which afford an alternate way to win.

Basically you place units, fight, and try to dominate lands. If you dominate a land enough you corrupt it, and if you corrupt it enough, you ruin it. When you ruin a land, you get mega points. I was unclear on the way corruption worked, but it didn't matter. The Blood God just wants units to die. You don't have to win a battle, you just have to kill something, and if you kill something in enough places, you get to turn your little wheel.

Since it was clear that I wasn't going to win on victory points, everyone kind of ignored me. I decided to just spoil all their plans, so I started playing cards that forbade corruption to be played on specific areas. Then I attacked everywhere I could.

I won. It was weird.

Break for BBQ and some House of the Dead: Overkill on the Wii. Then we playtested Jason's game, which is based on pulps from the 20's and 30's.


I played the Arch Villain. It's a big, sprawling, long game with hilarious characters, and the mechanic of building wonderfully cheesy stories. I killed Dan's character, but was basically getting my ass handed to me by Dr. Radium (Kevin). He was an amazing Dr. Radium, with an authentic accent. I tried to seduce his sidekick, Gunther, who had a tommygun and dynamite. I would have totally wiped out Dr. Radium, but Gunther kept his wits and resisted my wiles. Damn you, Gunther!


That's Kevin as Dr. Radium. We were about halfway through when we noticed it was 8pm, so we took a vote and decided to call it in order to get a third game in.

The third game was... Battlestar Galactica with the Pegasus Expansion!


We've played this before, but not with the expansion. Rob played Admiral Caine, Kevin was Baltar, Jason was Starbuck, Dan was Tigh, and I was Dualla, so Caine and Dualla were the new characters. There's also a new type of character-- a Cylon leader. I was torn as to whether to take one of them, but it would seem to deny the whole "who is the Cylon?" aspect of the game, which is the best part.

We had our usual crisis at the beginning of the game, got out of it, and then had a relatively quiet period. Once the second round of "You are a Cylon" cards came out, Baltar (Kevin) used his power to see if Caine (Rob) was a Cylon. He then made Caine vice president, in order to show that he trusted Rob. Unfortunately, no one trusted Kevin, especially Rob. Rob had Baltar executed, thus proving that he was human, AND once Kevin came back (as Roslyn) there was no way for the new character to ever become a Cylon. So it was clear to everyone that Caine and Roslyn were human.

That left Tigh, Dualla, and Starbuck, and two of the three were probably Cylons. Yikes!

In these games, everyone always seems to think I'm the Cylon (because I usually am). I knew I wasn't a Cylon, and the next turn Jason revealed himself. That meant that Dan was the Cylon, but Rob was looking to execute someone:


See that look in his eyes? Yeah, he was murderous. I took my chance and had Tigh thrown in the brig. If we distrusted Tigh enough (and we did), then Caine could have him executed, which Rob did.

I've got to say, that if I were the Cylon, it would have been a masterstroke. Accuse the human of being a Cylon, get him executed, then reveal myself and throw the fleet into a pit of despair. On the other hand, it got rid of our Cylon and didn't allow him to do whatever nasty thing his card said he could do when he was revealed.

Then it was pretty much a numbers game on New Caprica. Without the expansion, the game usually deflates once the Cylons are revealed. This still had a good bit of tension, but it was like having to learn another game at the tail end of this one.

In the end, Dualla's power of moving civilian ships around saved us, and for the first time ever, the humans won the game. Well, not ever, but the first time that I've played it.


We finished about 1:30am for a total of about 14.5 hours of gaming goodness.

Puzzle @ Argfest on a cup.

Puzzle @ Argfest on a cup.

Chinese Takeout pt. 2

I was merrily following the main plotline, and checking off my little To-do's, when I come to a part where I have to rescue some kids from some slavers. Here are the little twerps:


Yeah, they're cooling their heels in a slave pen. That's fine. I could just walk through the camp gunning down all the slavers and set them free (that's what Joe did, except with his sledgehammer), but I have to go around and talk to all the slavers first. I find out I could go round up some slaves. Heck, I could even just go out and capture "evil" people (and I get to determine who is evil), and sell them into slavery. I don't want to have anything to do with slavery, aside from freeing slaves, but wanton slaughter seems to lack finesse. I can sneak into the somewhere and hack a computer and that'll probably work (I'm very good at both sneaking and hacking).

But first I meet this guy:


Yeah, I know. Vanilla Ice is now starring in his own videogame. It turns out that Pronto here runs the local gun shop. It's kind of a crappy gun shop, but he's got grit and spunk, and the boy wants to make something of himself. If he could only get his hands on 20 Chinese Assault Rifles, he could break them down for parts, and he could expand the business.

1. Get 20 Chinese Assault Rifles
2. Break them down for parts
3. ...
4. Profit!

A little bell goes off in my head (ding!). "Why Pronto, I know exactly where a wasteland wanderer could get 20 Chinese Assault Rifles. I've got a friend who found a whole factory full of Chinese zombies who were all armed with Chinese Assault Rifles. I'll bring you the rifles lickety split, and we'll be in business together!"

Now, faithful reader, Chinese Assault Rifles are pretty scarce in the wasteland. Basically every small gun seems to have a Chinese counterpart that does a bit more damage. The history here seems to be that America went to war with the Chinese when they invaded Alaska (via Russia? Who knows!) and there are Chinese infiltrators lurking about. I could just wander the wasteland and hope that I'll run into things (some Super Mutants can be armed with CARs) that shoot me with them, but they're really few and far between.

No, I'm going to head down to where Joe found the factory. From watching over his shoulder I remember it was even somewhere along the southern end of the wasteland. I even remember finding a radio signal that was broadcasting in Chinese when I was trying to get to the Arlington Library. I'll start at the library and work my way west.


I do so. It takes me a week of real time. Along the way I find a Nuka-cola plant, a hotel, various Enclave camps, another Vault, a metric butt-ton of Raiders, and even some zombies. What I don't find is a radio signal broadcasting in Chinese, or a single Chinese zombie.

This is going to require some research. I can't just go wandering the wasteland willy-nilly. I'm going to need some help.

Fallout 3: Chinese Takeout pt. 1

I got Fallout 3 over Christmas when everyone else bought it, but it sat, unplayed, until May because, based on my experiences with Oblivion, once I started journeying in the Capital Wasteland, I wouldn't be coming out anytime soon. That's exactly what's happened.


Fallout 3 has a different quest structure than Oblivion. Actually, it has the same structure for some quests, but different structures for others. Oblivion had quest chains, where you talked to someone, they gave you something to do, you did it and went back to them, then they said, "Come talk to me again when you want something else to do."

When you had a quest, it showed up in your quest journal. You might have subtasks to do on the way to the main task, and those would show up too. That way, if you put the game down and came back after awhile (or just got sidetracked with some other quest chain), you could check your journal and pick up on a quest at any point. If you finished a quest it would disappear from your "Active Quests" page and go to the "Completed Quests" page, and if you didn't want your active page cluttered up with tons of things, you could not take the next quest from the quest giver until you were ready. This gives players a satisfying To-do list at all times, and a feeling of accomplishment as things were checked off. You could even look back through your completed quests to see all the things you had done and get a further sense your progression in the game.

Fallout 3 has quests and quest chains, it has a journal where your To-do list is kept, and it keeps track of your progress in the main quests. It also has many, many things to see and do that aren't listed in any quest chain. It has random encounters that may lead to other discoveries, it has buildings that tell stories, and many of the things you do change the world, just a little bit. It even has real moral choices, but I'll get to that later.

The largest quest I've done doesn't appear on a quest chain. It isn't contained inside a building (in fact, it takes place over most of the capital wasteland). It doesn't appear on any of the strategy guides or FAQs, and I'm not even sure the designers ever intended to make it a quest.


It starts, fittingly, on Memorial Day, while I was over at my friend Joe's house for a cookout. We got to talking about Fallout 3, which he had played, but abandoned because it was a lot of the same thing over and over. He hadn't progressed very far on the main story, he had just been wandering the wasteland killing people and taking their stuff. We ended up at his computer, so he could show me his character build. Basically he could hit just about anything with his sledgehammer and it would explode. He cursed another friend who told him to take the Bloody Mess perk, because he ended up having to scour the landscape looking for bits of his victims in order to take their stuff. In the low scrub covering most of the wasteland, it was a pain in the ass.

He showed me. He happened to be inside a factory full of zombies. He walked up to one as it shot him with an assault rifle, hit it with his sledge, and boom, it was pulp. Other zombies spotted him and started screaming things... in Chinese.

"Is that Chinese?"

"I guess so."

"So these are Chinese zombies?"

"Yeah, this whole factory is full of them."

"Huh."

I didn't think anything more about it. There are a whole lot of weird things out there in the wasteland, and Joe had found a factory full of Chinese zombies. But that day started my quest, even though I didn't know it at the time.

A Final Word on Far Cry 2

I finished this last night and I wanted to talk a little bit about the endgame.

When we think about designing a game, we go through three basic steps:

1. Define what you want the user to experience.
2. Describe a mechanic that will lead to that experience
3. Write the rules that will lead to that mechanic

In the previous interview (scroll down) Clint Hocking said:

However, this high level of power in the mid-game is supposed to be the peak… in the end game, after you get your supply of malaria medicine cut-off, you are supposed to get weaker and the game systems should force you to be more brutal – using more and more powerful weapons and confronting enemies who are more and more easily and frequently wounded.

I never ran out of malaria medicine. The malaria was only a nuisance that either made me stop for a second and pop some pills when I was traveling, or made me randomly die if it popped up during combat. So whatever mechanic you had in mind, Mr. Hocking, it didn't work. Sorry.

But there was another mechanic that did work.

There comes a point in the endgame of any shooter where you have access to all the weapons, you've seen all the various types of enemies, you've fought in pretty much all the terrains, and you're good enough at the game that you're somewhat going through the motions to get to the end. This is why there are boss monsters where none of your normal weapons really work and the rules are changed. This is why you have to push buttons for endgames to set up the big lightning machine, or somehow jump into the giant babyhead, or have some sort of race against time. The normal mechanic of the game has become so repetitive (see enemies, avoid their shots, shoot them) that the designers need to change it up to keep you interested.

I like to call it "shooter ennui."

I think it might have been an accident, but Far Cry 2 uses shooter ennui as part of the story. By the time I got to the endgame, random checkpoints were more bumps in the road than actual challenges. I had an exploding projectile gun on my jeep most of the time and could kill any wandering patrols before they could shoot at me. I had a .50 caliber sniper rifle that could one-shot anyone without a head shot. I rarely even got close to running out of ammo. I started to feel bad for the guys repeating to themselves, "He's just one man. One guy. I can do this. I can get him," before I'd kill them.

I was getting sick of the killing. It seemed pointless. Nothing was going to change. There would always be more guys manning the checkpoints. There would always be another warlord stepping up to fill the shoes of the guy I assassinated. Would it ever end?

Which is exactly what the designers wanted me to experience. I became the world-weary killing machine that was all the character definition they had given me. They did it through increasing the power level of my weapons without necessarily increasing anything about the enemies I was fighting. The game actually got easier in the last third, which seems counter-intuitive for a design, but it translated into the correct user experience.

And then they finally gave me an out. So I took it. I'm not sure if there's a "bad" ending. The ending I had was bittersweet. If I didn't bother finding Jackal tapes and giving them to the reporter would he not be my ally? If I had let the reporter die? If I had gone back for my buddies instead of saving the helpless at the end of Act 1? I think my ending was the best I could hope for given the circumstances of the game. Is there a better one? I don't know, but I'm satisfied with the one I got.

Only Africa won.

Ricros & Boulder vs Hookface the red dra

It looks like the dragon is crapping Starbursts, but those are actually commoners who are about to either run away or be turned into red paste. You can just see Stan and Slashgoule behind the dragon, and you can't actually see Ricros at all because he's riding on the dragon's back.

Controlling a game w/ your mind

Controlling a game w/ your mind

Lara almost live

"Who is that guy? Do you think I should shoot him?"

Mat's mecca

Mat's mecca

GH job booth.

GH job booth.

Storytelling in Far Cry 2

I've now spent a lot of time with Far Cry 2 (not finished yet), and the story generation is still linear. The first half of the game is very open, but around halfway you are sent to a second map where stories are set up via linear terrain. Here, look at the maps.

Note the path from one map to another, that's a classic gate. Then look at the lower map (which is the second one). Note the very linear valleys in the lower right. I guarantee you that's the climax of the game right there. Note that what you've got on both maps is a hub and spokes structure. Most of the time you get a mission from the middle of the map, and you can see that there are very definite paths outward (to whatever objective), so each mission becomes essentially linear, though you have choices on how you're going to get there, but that's really just how many shootouts you're going to get into on the way.

So while they were touting some sort of emergent story, what they've really got is 5 types of missions:

1. Main story missions which advance the plot and get money
2. Buddy missions to build "history" with your buddy and give you perks at safe houses
3. "Good" missions to get malaria medicine
4. Weapons missions to unlock better weapons
5. Tower missions for lots of money

The player mixes and matches and the particular mix they choose is the "emergent" story. They talked about doing too many Buddy and Tower missions giving you "infamy" so the "Good" missions dry up, but in practice players mix and match the missions just to give themselves some variety (that's what I did, because the Tower missions are always assassinating someone, and the Weapons missions are always blowing up a convoy, which get boring if you do them over and over). In comparing my experience to others, the main story plot points are all the same. The people who give me the missions may change, but the missions themselves remain the same.

Two things from a recent interview with the designer back me up:

From Game Informer Online:

GI: Why did you split the map up into different sections?

Hocking: The game world was divided into a Northern and a Southern region for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was to allow for a progression in the story and a place for the player to be ‘exiled’ to after the coup by the leading faction at the end of Act 1. It also allowed us to have a broader architectural and environmental art palette and to show a progression in the look and feel and mood of the game over time. The Northern region is more ‘spotted’ in the way the jungle, woodland and grassland environments overlap, and is dominated by shanty and industrial architectural features. The Southern region obviously has the lake and larger sections of desert (especially in the north of the Southern region) – it also features more indigenous and colonial architectural elements. The Southern region also includes the so-called ‘Heart of Darkness’ – it’s own natural environmental art palette. Needless to say, with all the streaming going on, we were not able to have all of these environments and architectural styles in close proximity to one another, and so in addition to using these styles to show a progression, it allowed us to control the technical problems of streaming much more effectively.

GI: It seems like the game is at its hardest early on, before you get decent weapons or allies. Was that intentional?

Hocking: We wanted the game to seem difficult at the start when you are sick with malaria and vulnerable in combat (and you have crappy weapons and few allies) – and then for you to get rapidly more powerful through the mid-game as you get new weapons, allies, equipment, and your symptoms fade and your reputation increases. However, this high level of power in the mid-game is supposed to be the peak… in the end game, after you get your supply of malaria medicine cut-off, you are supposed to get weaker and the game systems should force you to be more brutal – using more and more powerful weapons and confronting enemies who are more and more easily and frequently wounded. In the beginning, you should be fighting to survive because you don’t have a choice, in the middle, you should be enjoying the luxury of good health, a moderate reputation and fairly good weapons… you should be able to use an ‘appropriate’ level of aggression to solve the game challenges. In the end, the game systems should be almost forcing you to be as aggressive and brutal as possible. In short, the game should first teach you to be brutal, then force you to be brutal. The difficulty should be shifting from a technical difficulty of reflex skill and resource management to a psychological challenge that asks you how far you are willing to go to achieve your ends. I’m not sure the extent to which we succeeded with that, but we tried.

So despite all the talk at last year's GDC, Far Cry 2 is still a mission-based sandbox game that is closer to GTA than, say, The Last Express.

I spent the morning in Africa

This morning I had the perfect sniper moment.

I crept up to the compound where I was told my target would be. It was just off a road, and I slowly crested a hill overlooking a number of buildings and a dusty yard between them. I wasn't too worried they'd spot me in the heavy jungle. Besides, I had my brand new camo suit on. It was also my first outing with the dart gun, which traded a range and a large clip for silence.

Now I've done five or six missions like this before. Here's what happens-- you creep up out of site until you see the guard walking the perimeter. If there's a tower, you better hope you see it before the guy with the sniper rifle or rocket launcher sees you. If there's a tower, you take that out first, then you try to wound one of the guards. He'll cry for help, attracting other guards. Whenever someone shows up to help him, you take him down with a head shot.

Of course, other guys will be trying to flank you, so you may have to reposition a couple of times, or if it really goes to shit you take out the grenade launcher and lob one in. Or start a fire with a molotov and wait for it to be over. Generally, it starts out as a sniper mission but it ends in chaos.

But this morning was different. This morning, I crept over the hill and looked through my scope. I saw two guards walking the yard, and I tracked around, looking to see what I could see.

A man in a suit walked into my sight. He stopped. I pulled the trigger. Perfect head shot. Just a small pop from my gun.

Objective accomplished.

I faded into the jungle for the long drive back to Mike's bar.

I love Far Cry 2.

Social issues class

So the whole, "Take a picture with my phone and upload it to the blog immediately, which will make me head to the blog and write a post actually talking about what is in the picture" idea hasn't been working lately (as evidenced by the previous two posts which sport pictures but no real text. Unless, of course, I retcon and go edit them.)

This is my Social Issues class plus a couple of auditors. It's a rambunctious group that not only likes to discuss stuff, but likes to challenge how I grade things and why I do things the way I do them. I welcome the challenges. I find the hardest thing is not to let them (or me) go off on tangents, and not to let the whole class degrade into a bunch of smaller conversations.

Overall they're a good group. Even the guy who talks all the time knows he's talking all the time and doesn't begrudge it when I ignore his raised hand to call on some other people who haven't spoken yet.

Actually, the hardest part is guiding the discussion so it actually reveals something about the text or subject being discussed. I think we all enjoy the discussion, but I'm not always convinced that any real learning happens until we all walk away and think about some of the things that've come up.

WPI GameJam

The WPI GameJam came a week after IGDA's Global GameJam. That meant we had all WPI students participating, and no outside schools. Ah well.

Over the weekend, groups started and worked on games for the Mass Game Challenge. 38 Studios sent designers, artists, and programmers over to talk to the teams, review their ideas, see what advice they could give, and provide pizza. We webcast the whole thing almost live (about a minute delay for technical reasons, not about censoring anything) which led to a strange call from Chuck Rich where he was talking to me on the phone and watching my answer about a minute in the past. He was giddy with excitement, which is always fun to be a part of.

During a lull in the excitement (aka, when everyone was actually working), I sat playing my DS and overheard Rich Gallup talking to one of the kids and suddenly it clicked (because I was just listening to him instead of talking to him directly)-- he's the Rich Gallup from Gamespot who's podcast I used to listen to! So I told him so, and we had a weird moment of not quite fan meeting, because I hadn't said I liked the podcast, only that I listened to it. And, of course, the one thing I remembered about him was that he recorded the whole thing standing up while everyone else sat down and made fun of him for standing up. Again, it wasn't exactly, "Hey, I liked your podcast," but it certainly proved that I actually listened to it. I mentioned that he left before the whole Gerstmann-gate thing blew up, and he said he was still in touch with all those guys, and then we kind of paused...

And then one of the other 38 Studio guys called him away and we never mentioned it again.

Awkward.

For the record, when Gallup left the Hotspot, it was pretty much the beginning of the end. I eventually stopped listening to it because the guys were so demoralized after Gerstmann-gate that it was a little sad to listen to, as they each got jobs elsewhere and said their goodbyes.

And Rich and all the guys were great to show up, and I know the kids thought it was great to have them there whether they were helping or distracting them.

Master class with Darius.

Despite the look of this picture, Darius Kazemi (the guy in orange, 'natch) is currently teaching a class for the upperclassmen on how to develop their own personal brand (aka networking to get a job). Part of the class was on writing a blog (and keeping it up) so I took a pic to show that you can take a phone pic and have it on your blog in moments.

Darius has now moved on to Twitter and LinkedIn. Amazingly most of the seniors aren't on either. Gotta get these kids some learnin'.