Content density in Life in Vegas, an upcoming open world game that looks like it would be really cool if the tone weren’t so relentlessly immature:
Open world games have so much content, but do you ever worry that you’re working on this content that no one’s going to see, necessarily? Someone doesn’t go all the way down that tree?
[…] we’ve also made it a very big point for design, to make sure that the missions were covering — we literally have coverage graphs all over the map, how much time you spend in any given area, and when. So it’s all paced so that you’re going from location to location, and really utilizing the game environment.
It’s literally a tool that we’ve used behind the scenes, so that we can tell how people will play the game, basically, so we can tune the missions to make sure people are using the world appropriately. It’s completely transparent to the player.
The toolset that you’re using to design the game, you have this tool, so that when someone’s designing that mission tree, it will encourage them to place the missions in different parts?
AP: Yeah, exactly. So, when the designer is literally placing the missions, first we make up, “OK, we don’t really go to the Fremont area, you know, for the first two hours of the game, so let’s put a vigilante gig there that’s going to reward the players for exploring that area.”
And then, within the vigilante gig, we may go, “OK, in this area, no one’s really hitting that for another two hours, if people played linearly through the game, so let’s reward the player from that.” So you’re really making sure that players are hitting all locales within the open world, no matter how they play; whether it’s just going off the rails, doing gigs, which again are optional missions, or doing the narrative.
I’m curious about what the tool looks like. I’m picturing a room full of level designers working under density maps on monitors like the NYPD.
I return from ION 2008 and a whirlwind tour of northwest Oregon and southeast Washington. We drove from Seattle to Portland to Salem to the coast and up 101 until somewhere in Washington before returning to Seattle via Olympia … in two days.
The conference itself was pretty good. Executive heavy.
Rather than talks, I mostly went to panels on topics that I already knew well, which made them into interesting exercises of seeing who knew what they were talking about. Sadly, I missed the couple of real talks that I was interested in.
My talk, Design for Longevity, was a little under the radar — I think I should have gone with the original title, “Your Tools Suck.” Because that’s what it’s about: you can get more done with fewer people and less money if you think about workflow up front. But most designers and tools programmers and middleware providers never thought about it too hard, so it takes us forever to make content, and then we lose subscribers the longer we go without updates. Obvious stuff, but people keep making the same mistakes. Here are the slides. I cleaned up the notes so that it could feel more like you were there.
There may be better ways to approach solutions to these problems, but I pointed out the ones that have worked for me — tools that I can build on my own with (comparatively) limited technical skills. And remember that it’s from the perspective of a small-team balance designer, which is what I was doing Back In The Day.
(Aside: I would like to point out that, while presenter view is a great idea, it really sucks that you can’t practice it until you’re hooked up to two monitors. When you create the bulk of your slides on a plane and in a hotel room, you only have one monitor. And hey, would you know it, but clicking on different parts of the screen in presentation mode appears to do different things, but of course you couldn’t know it, because you couldn’t try it! They are apparently taking cues from World of Warcraft raid encounter design … once again, a failure in workflow foresight.)
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