Project Diary

People sometimes wonder what game designers actually do. Well, the
team had a flurry of email the other day which captured a design flame in text
for a change, so

Randy: Another comment concerns the ability to sneak around. A
spiderman-esque walking-on-walls-and-ceilings power-up was suggested, which
seems like a fine idea on one side and a monstrous can-o-worms on the other.
More realistically, it was suggested that we could get the invisibility potion
working which seems much simpler to implement and perhaps can demonstrate the
visibility elements in the demo in some powerful ways. But without AI's having
the ability to hear, this seems a bit rocky as well.

Tim: I agree, though for "monstrous can-o-worms," read "total madness." An
obvious idea to consider, but only until you think about it a bit more. Extra
physics and biped animation work for a power-up that destroys our ability to
keep the player in the mission area, extra work to keep him from walking on the
sky, etc. Consider the restrictions we put on the rope arrow precisely to
control where the player could and could not use it, then think how much worse
Spider Climb would be.

One cool thing that this would get us is cool, odd perspectives, which brings
us back to Doug and my idea to let you hang upside-down from ropes, maybe as a
way of freeing your hands while climbing. The main fly in this ointment being
complicating the problem of sorting the rope and the PC together during
climbing.

While we're on the subject though, it seems like a good time to advance Tom's
Shrinking Potion idea. Potentially relatively lightweight work to implement
(feasibility comments anyone?) but it profoundly affects your visibility and
access to certain spaces in a straightforward and constrained way.

Randy: What happens if you are in a small space and the potion wears off? Do
you die? Are you effected by gravity to the same extent or less? Do you suffer
absolute falling damage or relative to your size? IE - lots of little issues
need to be considered, none of them seem too difficult to handle.

Tim: I don't really have a problem with having (shrinking) just not wear off
until you've got clearance. You can't stay stuck in a hole forever.

(Are you effected by gravity to the same extent or less?) Ask Galileo.

(Do you suffer absolute falling damage or relative to your size?) We're the
kind of people who would make you take less, but only 0.5% of our players are
the kind of people who would notice.

Dorian: I wonder how hard to would be to have small rodents who scuttled
about in certain parts of the game...small, mindless AI's who generally ignore
people. But when you're shrunk, the rats become actual monsters to worry about.
You could lure them away with cheese, use your tiny rope arrow to flee up to the
undersides of tables...

MAHK: Invisibility is just as huge a can of worms, because you can never
really be sure whether it's working. We've done (and will continue to do) a
whole lot of work to make the AIs tell the player ("Is someone there?") when
they've not quite been seen/heard. I'm wary of unleashing a mechanic that
completely emasculates all that yummy feedback.

Chris: Well, hopefully their feedback will be of the sort that they convey
not only how much they've detected you, but also the means by which they do so.
So they'd say "did you hear that?"-type things if you were invisible. It seems
to me that this could really illustrate how the AIs are perceiving the player...
so you'll know that you don't have to worry about being seen, but still have to
pay attention to noise you make.

Randy: Whatever was the UI for informing the player about being shaded or not
could be used to inform the player about being invisible or not.

Tim: Ding! Point to Chris. The point isn't that there won't be UI feedback to
the player that he's invisible, it's that he'll be invisible and guards will
detect him anyway because they hear him, and the player will then say "this
invisibility potion doesn't work. It's a bug." This is exactly what happened
with the invisibility spell in Underworld 1, where we had a very plain icon on
your spells-currently-in-effect bar which told you you were invisible. Which is
why the invisibility spell in Underworld 2 (as I recall) also made you silent.

It's been our hope that the AIs' broadcast (speech) feedback about sense
information would obviate this problem, but in the presence of
non-sense-specific broadcasts, the problem remains. We can hope but not
guarantee that we'll have trained our players sufficiently in the existence of
different sense modes that the mere fact that they were detected while invisible
means that they were heard.

All of which suggests that if a player is detected while invisible, AI's
should use their hearing-specific (speech) schema exclusively if they have them.

Erin: Perhaps this has already been considered/taken care of, but if your
invisibility runs out while you are standing in front of (a) guard(s) will they
react appropriately, or will thier usual "they've spotted you" reaction just
come off as canned...? I guess I'm saying perhaps there is a large surprise
element that might be lacking...

Tim: Aha, and yet there is a notion of "surprise" in the AI spec which is
being implemented even as we speak, so that in any case where you reveal
yourself to an AI too suddenly, he'll be surprised.

Ha HA!

Chris: Another problem with being tiny is object interactions. I know that if
I suddenly became a foot tall (in the game, not in real life) one of the first
things I would try to is is hide under a table, or under other such
things...which won't work with the table's current physics model.

One of the reasons we can get away with using sphere or bouding-box physics
representations is that most of the objects are relatively small compared to the
player. If we suddenly cut the size of the player by a factor of 3 or 4, we've
decreased the apparent fidelity by which we physically model objects by the same
amount.

Overall, I'm not too keen on the shrinking potion...it seems like a neat
idea, but the more I think about it the more I'm unsure about the interactions
(both technically and gameplay-wise) that it will cause to become problematic.
Does it really fit into our stealth gameplay? Are you effectively both invisible
and inaudible while shrunk (or just nearly so)? If guards can detect you, can
they step on you?

The implications of having objects interacting of wildly different scale seem
pretty unexplored, and is certainly not just as simple as changing the player's
scale.

Tim: It's not clear to me that "wildly" different scale is called for. I
confess to not knowing about the shrinking effect in Duke Nukem, but it seems
like even going down to 1/2 size or 1/3 size is potentially pretty relevant.
This may still raise some of these issues (like walking under tables, ugh), but
it doesn't make you "invisible and inaudible" nor raise the prospect of guards
stepping on you.

(Regarding rats, even if you're not shrunk): And fish. Doug and I have been
craving fish.

As to whether I could "interact with them directly," I'm sure I'd still want
to kill the little buggers every once in a while, and find it pretty
satisfying... 8-)