Tue 21 Mar 2006
DD15: AR: Starcraft meets Fantastic Voyage
Posted by Sean Hyde-Moyer under Game Design , Design A Day|
Welcome to day two of the Design a Day Theme Week: Asymmetrical Representation.
Today’s design continues yesterday’s groundwork on Asymmetrical Representation, so be sure to check that out first.
[Be sure to check out the comments too, a couple of people pointed me toward America’s Army, which is using AR in much the way I described.]
I love a good RTS. One of the things that strikes me about old school RTS’s like Blizzard’s StarCraft is their similarity to infectious disease epidemiological simulations. Duh.
The initial base is the point of infection, and the infection grows outward from that site, consuming resources, starting new nexus of infection, and ultimately fizzling out or spreading to all available areas.
Once again, we enter the realm of thought experiment.
This is not quite ready for the lads in marketing.
I’m going to continue using StarCraft as an example. It’s widely known and provides a solid base for extrapolation.
We return to our friends Team A and Team B. This might be a good time to point out that Asymmetrical Representation is really only a useful tool for multiplayer interaction. It takes two for such deceptions.
Team A is playing StarCraft against Team B. Team A starts churning out SCVs at his home base in the jungle, harvesting minerals and gas, building marines and siege tanks. Eventually, he sees Team B’s Zergling begin to pour into his base, and the battle is joined.
Team B is playing Fantastic Voyage: Disease Vector against Team A.
Team B starts churning out bacteria at their starting point in the intestines, breaking down special food cells for energy, spawning a variety of deadly bacteria. Team B decides to rush Team A, and invades his lymph node, attacking his T-cells and antibodies. The battle is joined.
When we strip away the graphics and sound effects, we generally have a very simple set of interactions (unit deals damage to one other enemy unit within 20 pixels range), and it doesn’t matter if we dress it up as a FireBat or Streptococcus Mutans, as long as the interaction make sense in their native game.
It’s still hard to make the case for practical application, until this piece is added: the games themselves do not need to be congruent.
I’ve been kicking around this notion of AI as Available Intelligence, the basic idea being the best AI is some bored teenager in Nebraska with a cable modem and time to kill.
Let’s take a discrete problem like pathing through a complex map. Suppose you have a basic pathing algorithm handling the movement of your bots in a game like StarCraft.
In addition to this, you have a separate casual game like Rocket Mania. These games communicate with each other seamlessly, behind the scenes. While Team A is playing StarCraft, the bored teenager in Nebraska is playing a casual web game that is solving these pathing problems in novel ways, quietly taking over from the game’s built in pathing.
It’s like Seti@Home for creating unique gameplay.
Okay, thanks for tagging along for this one. Tune in next time for an AR idea that might actually work in a commercial product.
-game over-
Tomorrow: Asymmetrical Representation Theme Week continues with H. P. Lovecraft: AR as Insanity.
Thanks for reading another action-packed installment of Design a Day. For background on the Design A Day challenge, take a peek here and here.
March 22nd, 2006 at 1:43 pm |
Exactly, yes. And the game Andy was playing is Uraban Dead, which I cited as a source of inspiration. You should check it out.
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:45 am |
Hehe…yes. I would propose that when you become a zombie, the way way you see the world fundamentally changes. The color of the environment leeches out, live humans are brightly colored, and as they move through the world, they leave a trail that zombies can follow, their brain-scent.
Any time you can have players do the heavy lifting AI wise, I think the gameplay becomes more interesting.
(I think Andy M. was playing a text zombie MMO recently that did some of this, btw.)
Also, why stop at zombies? Werewolves, with yet another world representation, vampires who don’t see walls. Lots of cool possibilities.
March 21st, 2006 at 7:41 pm |
You know…that’s kind of interesting. It reminds me of an idea I came up with one night while I couldn’t sleep, which was in itself inspired by the game ‘Urban Dead’ which I played for awhile before becoming agitated with the unforgiving and repetetive design.
I thought, what if you had an MMO about a zombie infestation? Have the players create their characters, pick their facial features, clothing, build, starting gear, etc. Content-wise you have a zombified version for every piece of art in the game. So, a player enters the game as himself…walks around, kills some zombies, finds some gear…then gets bitten by a zombie, and becomes a zombified version of himself. At that point, it becomes a different game. The player has direct control of his zombie, and perhaps can even squad control other AI zombies, with the sole purpose of killing other players. Maybe killing other players is what allows him to come back to life (points or some such mechanic). So that way, you’ve got a world of player vs. environment….but in actuality, it’s PvP. No need to write fancy AI when you’ve got the players doing the AI’ing for you.
What do you think?