Settling Down

Right, it's time to start filling out brief specifics. The first mechanic I want to focus on is the mobility a grappling hook provides. In my earlier post I mentioned Just Cause and Worms, but another game that has heightened mobility from a grappling hook-like mechanic is Attack on Titan flash game. It is very simplistic but the grappling hooks allow you to propel yourself through a city of titans with incredible speed so the player can reach the titan's weak points on the back of their necks. The game required players to react quickly to escape the titan's attacks and move around to their back in time to strike. Despite its simplicity it was an incredibly entertaining game.
Other games that give the player a tool that provides heightened mobility is the Portal series. This is different to pulling yourself up to a ledge but the mode of thinking it provides is very similar in that no place is out of reach and exploration of the tools abilities becomes a large part of the game experience. Imagine if a grappling hook or portal gun was available in Assassin's Creed? I would totally be down for some portal assassinations.

The second mechanic I find interesting is that of the 'lives' system. This points to the mechanic of 're-spawning' as it is pretty much the only reasonable alternative. Looking at the old arcade games like Pacman and Missile Command, or another personal favourite; Crash Bandicoot, lives are a way of telling the players how many mistakes they can make before they have to suffer particular consequences, be it losing all your progress since your last save or losing the game entirely.

The arcade games were a lot harsher with their lives system because the games weren't designed for extensive progress-making, instead more of a 15-30 minute burst of excitement. They were supposed to be played by lots of people over a short amount of time to earn maximum profit. Games like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro were more of an investment by gamers in that they were to be played on a personal disk, therefore played over several sessions. Having a less critical failure system made sense.
It is arguable that this type of thinking was what developed games that use the re-spawn mechanic. Players can die and return to the action within seconds with few, or no consequences. The games flow becomes much faster paced and progress is a natural part of the game. Games like Dark Souls require the player so die so that they learn where certain obstacles are. There is still risk involved for losing your best loot but the dying itself doesn't ruin a player's game.

Other games like Halo incorporate re-spawning in such a way that dying is only a minor setback which can be overcome with only 10 seconds of patience. In the campaign it may mean starting again from the last checkpoint but there are no other real penalties.

The Devil May Cry series used the mechanic of re-spawning after death in such a way that if characters did die, starting from the last checkpoint was easy enough (and even had items that resurrected you on the spot) but you would take a heft score penalty post-game. The main consequence of death was the player's own dissatisfaction of their final score and the mist determined players would try to get through without dying. This meant that the value of a re-spawn was determined by the player's own standards.
The last mechanic I will focus on is that of a time limit. Many, many games utilise time in one way or another. Be it a time limit to survive by, a way of earning better rewards/score or a means of competition. I will be looking particularly at count-down timers an what they represent and encourage. In Starcraft there is a mission where the player must defend their base from waves of enemy onslaught for half an hour as evacuation vehicles arrive. This mechanic changed the player's behaviour in multiple ways. Firstly they knew exactly how long the mission was going to last for and had to attempt to get as many resources and upgrade accomplished as they could before it ran out. The timer also encouraged players to fight more and more desperately because as the timer ticked down, enemy waves became more intense and the longer they played the mission for the harder it got. When there was only 30 seconds left all hell would break loose and strategies such as using your basic workers to hold the line was valid as long as you held out for that 00:00.

A countdown timer in a game such a Warcraft takes the form of a "cooldown" time where a spell or ability, once used, has to wait a predetermined amount of seconds before it can be used again. This balances out the game so that more powerful abilities take longer to recharge and using them becomes quite a strategic choice. Often such abilities will tip the balance in the players favour and they open a fight with it, or they save it for when they are desperate. Abilities with a smaller cooldown are used far less sparingly because the player can count on being able to use the ability multiple times within a fight and it is just a matter of micromanaging fast enough.

Lastly, a countdown timer could be used as a length through which an ability lasts for. In Spyro there were fireball and flying power-ups that only lasted for a short amount of time This set a challenge to a player to make the most of the ability before it depleted. It was never critical to progress in the game but rewarded more skilled players who were quick enough with better rewards and a higher completion percentage. Putting a time limit on parts of the game automatically creates tension for the player. They have to perform under circumstances that they have no control over. Unless the game specifically has objects/abilities etc. that affect the time, that clock is going to keep on ticking down regardless of what you do. Sometimes that can be incredibly exciting as you make it with .17 of a second left (see my "Never tell me the odds" achievement on Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, I nearly cried, it was beautiful) or they can be endlessly frustrating as you fail time and time again because of one mistake you made just before you finished.

Brainwave!

Okay so a particle of inspiration collided with my brain on the way home this evening and I thought of an additional mechanic to go with my cloning/teleporting/respawny thing. The character can not only send out their life force to reanimate piles of junk but they could send out little probing version that when they strike other object create certain effects, e.g. shooting a charge at a spotlight could reveal blacked out sections of the map or shooting a smoke machine could reveal laser tripwires. A charge could be shot down an electrical socket and a maze-puzzle could take place as the player navigates the charge down the cord network. If the player lacks an attack mechanic then they would be required to use items set in the environment to trick or eliminate foes.
A good targeting system I saw was similar to that of Missile Command was from a game called Intrusion 2. Not only does this game have a series of amazing boss fights but it is very simple in how the player plays the game.

The yellow triangle is the targeting cursor which the player's avatar shoots at. It is simple and effective and allows for accurate aiming. If the game required the player to make shots under pressure then the point and click style works well.

Cloning, Grappling Hooks and Death

Having looked over several mechanics I'm getting closer to a solid one I want to work with. I was looking at the cloning/ghost mechanic of Company of Myself in ways that it could be used in a different ways. One variant was to replicate the ability to summon clones of yourself in a fight of some sort that have a memorised attack pattern that you program them with prior. They would run their course then dissipate and you could execute this a number of times in one level. Certain moves could only be available from specific parts of the game meaning hanging on to particular clones could promote strategic thinking. This would be similar to the mechanic in Megaman X where players can cycle through weapons utilized by past bosses to attack in different ways.

Some weapons allowed you to access items that were otherwise unreachable. This sort of mechanic with the summoning clones to attack would have to have a limit on how often it could be used otherwise the better moves would just be abused.
An alternative to the cloning idea was that the player would be able to launch their character's life force across the map, targeting special objects that can be animated to recreate the character's body. This could manifest as a pile of junk being animated into a robot that crumbles when the life force leaves it. Certain areas could be inaccessible unless the player animates something within range that's in a different area. It would function rather similarly to the grappling hook mechanic that games like Just Cause and Worms have.

 The grappling hook allowed for incredible manoeuvrability and some rather silly gameplay that made an entertaining experience and if it was mastered became an incredibly powerful tool. Implementing this would of course require a decent physics engine.

Yahtzee Souls!

And that was the title of the game Andrew, Chris, Mark, Joe and I created this afternoon. It takes after the Dark Souls game in that the first iterations were incredibly difficult and we ended up dying a lot, mainly me... In a nutshell the game was a combat focussed RPG using a combat system that revolved around the scoring system of the game Yahtzee. The 'hero' would face off against foes that increased in difficulty in an attempt to slay the strongest enemy, in effect winning the game. The outcome of combat was determined by each party rolling their dice to make a combo from Yahtzee; three of a kind, full house, low/high straight etc, using the ranking of these combos to determine the victor. Before beginning the game the hero was able to choose one of three classes that had a set of unique abilities each. These could be used once per fight to adjust the odds in the player's favour.

These abilities went through several changes as to balance the game so that the hero couldn't just sweep through the levels but also that they held enough strategy that made them valuable. We also introduced a levelling mechanic that made players grow in strength if they defeated key opponents. One last balancing mechanic we introduced was a arbitrary die that had to be used by both parties. The opponents had four dice to make combos with this middle die but the hero had five, having to discard one before their final combo was taken into account. Only Chris was able to get to the final battle and win so the difficulty curve was desirable as he swept through lower levels with ease but once he got to the last three or so fights each one was really intense.

Mechanics Part 2

I found the article by Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek to be a  lot easier to decipher than Sicart's. The analogy of golf 'mechanics' being the clubs, balls and course hazards really simplified the idea of game mechanics. I suppose a personal definition could be that game mechanics are the means by which the player engages with the game world and how the game world affects the player's experience.
A simple arcade game I love is the classic Missile Command. The mechanics of the game are easy to learn and as the player advances through the game very little actually changes. The increase of speed of the missiles that threaten the player and the amount of missiles released is a very minimal change but the difficulty ramps up steadily. An interesting thing I noticed that nearly all the arcade games had was the lack of an ability to "win". The end state of games like Pacman and Asteroids is determined by when the player runs out of 'lives' or some other mechanic. The player has to lose to win and have their score recorded.

The Game Mechanic

It sounds like a frustrating job. Game mechanics, in the non-punny sense, are interesting indeed. I've always found it fascinating how some games can be deemed fun and others not, and arguably it take just one well executed mechanic to make or break a game. Think of Tetris without the ability to rotate blocks.
Miguel Sicart describes game mechanics to be "methods invoked by agents for interacting with the game world," and argues that there is a fuzzy line between what is a mechanic within the game and what is a rule. With a bit of leniency on the exact definition of a "game mechanic" I have a couple of examples from games I've found of what I though to be interesting mechanics.
Here is an excellent example of how a game with only a few well done mechanics makes an enjoyable puzzle experience. This free online game is called called The Company of Myself and implements a mechanic where you can create solid duplicates of yourself that follow your last path of motion. The game also has a friendly way of teaching users how to play.

The goal is simple: get to the green door.

This is an example of the much loved sub-genre of real time strategy games known as tower defence. The primary mechanic is the ability to plant towers on specific zones that automatically attack nearby enemies. An important mechanic that builds on this is that the towers behave differently. The variation in statistic and effects allows the strategy to enter the game as players decide the best places to put the different towers.

The enemies also had varying statistics, validating the range of different towers available
and heightening the strategy and need for careful planning.

This game had a particularly good reward system. The completion of each mission rewarded players with either one, two or three stars which can be spent on upgrades for your towers. This acts as an incentive to replay earlier missions to get higher scores once you've obtained better abilities.

There are two mechanics that define the Devil May Cry series; the ability to attack enemies with a multitude of different moves and a score system (arguably a 'dynamic') attached to these moves. These manifest in the aesthetic of a "style meter" that features in every game released to date. The style meter increases when different moves are linked together in quick succession, encouraging aggressive but intelligent play. The player is shown to be doing well by higher style marks and is given an overall higher grade at the end of missions which can go towards buying upgrades.

The latest Devil May Cry game made the style meter even easier to understand with real time visible additions to the players score and each addition reference something the player had done. This way players knew if they were doing well or not and could figure out ways to improve themselves.

The score mechanic is as old any game. A representation of the player's skill within a game brings with it many different things, as mentioned above, including competitiveness. Competition, with others and oneself, addresses a primal instinct to prove dominance over others and self-improvement. It feels good to be the best at something and game score mechanics make it easy to monitor how good you are at that particular game.

Upgrades have been mentioned several times already and on their own are key mechanics to many games. The ability to improve yourself in a way that can be monitored within the game gives players a reason to keep playing. The more upgrades they get the less difficult it will be to overcome future obstacles and achieve greater things. Sometimes these upgrades take the form of in-game statistics. It is a self-merit system.
Take Pokemon for example, where leveling up and evolving your pokemon gives them higher stats, making defeating opposing pokemon easier to achieve.

Many games have mechanics that provide players with numerical representations of their abilities within the game. Whether these numbers are low or high has in-game effects that makes the experience different depending on what each number represents.

The mechanic of being able to produce light from a torch in the Penumbra series contributed greatly to its atmosphere. The whole series was designed to provide an atmospheric experience that immersed players within the world, allowing the games to have an intense psychological effect. The use of a torch with limited batteries illuminated rooms well and provided comfort but also made players conservative of the torch's use. Either they brave the dark now and save for a more crucial moment or make use of the comfort it provides and risk their future mental state.

I'm Such a Fanboy

Hopefully the title didn't put you off. But it's true, I am. I found a pair of videos that I think are excellent. The first is a fan-made video from the game Devil May Cry 4 and for someone who doesn't play it is a very long clip but some of the transitions between footage are quite cool and some are rather beautiful. I also like how the footage is composed with the chosen music as well (the gameplay is sped up to match the tempo of the songs however).

The second is a bonus video unlock at the end of the game Kingdom Hearts Final Mix which I find has a stunning blend of music and imagery. The video start off with a pace that gradually becomes move and more climactic that matches the build of music. The glitch aesthetic isn't overdone as to look tacky and combines well with the mix of old and (at the time) new imagery. I also love the use of text throughout the clip and I remember getting shivers from the countdown when I first saw this :)