[ Edited Saturday, April 1st to correct IE incompatibility ]
While I continue catching up from GDC, and fighting back the jet lag, I thought I would dredge up something from the archives share this gem from the past. Dated 1998, a rumination on the Fog of War and how one pushes it back.
A number of these ideas have appeared in games since then, but there are a few in here that I haven’t seen done yet. I like the map reveal ideas in Physical Recon, especially if they were applied to a smaller scale tactical group in modern warfare, and I think there are some good ideas in the Field Intel section.
Enjoy!
Pushing back the Fog of War
The role of reconnaissance and espionage in RTS games
In the current crop of RTS games, all units are intelligence gatherers, simply pushing back the fog of war. Minor enhancements might include the ability to cloak or sneak. The most ambitious implementation in my experience has been the diplomat in Civilization, but the structure of reconnaissance been simplistic at best.
I propose a more ambitious, more realistic, (in feel if not in fact) and much more interesting solution. The proposal that follows is structured around a modern military scenario, but the principles involved could easily be adapted to any scenario.
All aspects of strategic information within the game I will label as Battlefield Intelligence. Battlefield Intelligence is then broken down into two categories, Physical Reconnaissance and Field Intelligence.
Physical Reconnaissance
Physical recon is broken down into two categories, Ground Recon and Aerial Recon.
Ground Reconnaissance
Is limited to line-of-sight, and is skewed in the direction of movement during travel. Instead of
Fog of War, the battlefield map is first revealed as a simple diagrammatic map. (Fig. 1)
Figure 1
I was very excited about this idea when it came to me. Imagine an RPG where the standard skill tree model is augmented by the notion of generational advance. You play several generations of a family, and skills are passed from generation to generation, choices made by the parent influence the life of the child, and the technology and types of skills available change with advances in world time.
Alas, a friend pointed me to Phantasy Star III which I have not played, that uses the generational model, so it would seem I have not invented a unique and beautiful snowflake this time around. But the idea is powerful, and I think it can be used in a way that would be unique among the current crop of American RPGs, and that’s no small feat.
The narrative is inspired in equal parts by the loose trilogy of Sergio Leone films A Fistful of Dynamite, Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America, and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle.
[Note to Neal Stephenson: Do another trilogy following the Shaftoes and Waterhouses during the American Westward expansion, please! The world can probably handle that much awesomeness. Probably.]
And so begins The Blood Creek Chronicles.
I’ve just returned from GDC, the game development community’s annual meet and greet, and for some unaccountable reason, I have social networking on my mind.
Multiplayer games exist roughly in a spectrum running from player-cooperative to player-competitive. I’m going to ignore player-competitive games in their pure form, like straight-up deathmatch, and focus on games with some level of co-op for today’s post.
Cooperative games, by their nature reward the formation of social networks, from simple teams , to giant guilds , and more complex economically-driven networks in trading games.
Today I want to distill social networking to its purest form as a game mechanic, and so I give you the Promiscuous Mage.
Thanks for spending the week with Asymmetrical Representation.
Today I want to push asymmetry in another direction. In an earlier discussion about expanding the scope of the game world, I proposed a persistent online world, accessed by a variety of game clients of varying genres.
Today the idea is a persistent online world in the mold of the classic MMO. Today’s SHOCKING TWIST; the single MMO has clients on a variety of hardware platforms, and each client has a unique window on that world, and a unique set of characters and abilities to choose from that play to the strengths of the individual platforms.
Were getting near the end of Asymmetrical representation week here at the Chrome Cow. Yesterday I verged on Insanity , today I drift into Paranoia.
There are two movies that I think capture the essence of paranoia; John Carpenter’s The Thing, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 1950’s or 1970’s versions, I like them both).
There have been recent attempts to bring The Thing to the game space, and with good reason. It’s a closed room mystery, with a small cast of characters, in a great, moody setting. I was considering Body Snatchers as the narrative, but The Thing just maps too damn well.
Using this as a backdrop, I propose an online multiplayer game similar in some respects to the party game Mafia/Werewolf. Each game begins with one player as The Thing. The game ends when all Things or Humans have been eliminated, or everyone is dead.
Sanity is an agreement reached by the majority as to the basic state of reality. If five people are standing in a quiet room, and I’m the only one who hears a voice, odds are favorable that the voice is in my head, and my sanity is in question.
If I’m the only one who sees my wife as a hat, again the problem is probably my own.
And so today’s chapter explores Asymmetrical Representation as a design mechanism for simulating madness.
The fiction of H.P. Lovecraft is heavy on eldritch horrors and incomprehensible geometries that drive men to insanity.
For the purpose of discussion, a perfect fit.
I’m heading out to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Jose today. It looks like quite a lot of great content shoved into too little time.
My preliminary schedule is posted here: GDC Schedule.
I hope to keep updating the Design a Day while I’m gone. We’ll see how the old 300mhz Viao laptop (not to mention the old brain) handles the challenge.
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