This is Harry the Hobo, LUUG's lead organiser, scouting for locations (Source)
The show this month featured Tom Matcham, a solo indie developer and founder of coAdjoint with a maths background, who was discussing the idea of personalised, adaptive games and non-linear narrative as a tool for creating a more involved experience for the player. Also featured was Danny Goodayle from JustAPixel, a small indie outfit who are set to release Light: The Game, a Team17 published stealth-puzzle game on the 14th of July. Danny was discussing procedural generation and the techniques and methods he had used to create terrains, water, environments and buildings.
Tom Matcham believes that games, especially AAA titles, have illusions of cinematography. This is a very true statement for a lot of reasons; games are still a relatively young medium while film is now over a century old. Games often take cues from film as the tropes are well established and any time not spent explaining things to your audience the easier, quicker and cheaper it is to create something. We are now at a stage in our society where the budget of video games is fast overtaking the budget of even the biggest movies. Bungie's latest offering, Destiny is reported to have cost $500 million to make, a far larger budget than any Hollywood movie has ever had. With such a large amount of money riding on a title it's understandable that companies want to reduce risk and appeal to the masses, and a cinematic format is a good way to do that. But as young as games are, they have proven time and time again that they are capable of presenting more than just mindless entertainment and it is certainly time to push the envelope and design games as a medium all of their own and not rely on the conventions of another medium. Tom believes that dynamic, responsive games are a step in the right direction.
Tom's background in mathematics really pays dividends in his approach to a solution as it seems to give him the tools he needs to break down and analyse his response to the problem. His method of injecting more dynamism into a gameplay experience is quite central on data collection and runtime analytics; by collecting data and using the right tools to analyse it a game can adapt and change based on certain criteria. Tom showed a demo of his software, Orbit (available on the Unity Asset store along with Tom's other contributions) which collects data based on rules set by the designer. In the example shown it was used to analyse morality of a player based on actions they chose; a player who chose to adopt a child would have be assigned a more positive morality rating, but if they then chose to rob a bank that rating would be reduced until eventually, after enough robberies, the character would be assigned a negative morality rating. This allows for a deeper morality system beyond the Infamous style binary system of "this action = bad; this action = good". Instead, each action is evaluated by a number of criteria, and while some actions are inherently good others cover more of a moral grey area and this is displayed in the data. This data can then be used to inform the structure and narrative of a game.
Tom mentioned his love of the old "Choose-your-own-adventure" books that he grew up reading in the 90s and sees non-linear narrative such as this as a way forward, and I'm very inclined to agree, though Tom does make the point that branching story lines like these books are based on decision trees, which can lead to repetition and a less-engaging experience. When an experience is new every time it is played users cant help but be intrigued as to how it twill turn out next time, what decisions they could have made to change things, and thus is the beauty of non-linear narrative. A point was raised in the Q&A after the talk that non-linear narrative is not a goal of the AAA industry simply due to the economy of game creation. In a AAA producer's mind a whole section of game that many players may not even see is not worth the time and money spent on it, and so it is avoided. But this is where the indie community can and does really shine, especially with the ease of access we now have to professional grade software. It is up to us to shape and form the future of games as a medium and creating a truly interactive experience that not only learns from the player but responds is a a great way to increase and improve player retention and interest.
I spent an entire holiday choosing my scare once,
true story (Source)
Tom goes a little deeper into the theory behind his tools and his method for modelling player-game interactions and has even written a whitepaper on the subject (And you thought maths was boring!). Tom's an intelligent man with a noble goal and it is my belief that his desire for deeper experiences through interaction modelling are a great leap forward from the usual binary morality systems we see. Combining this with non-linear narrative and the possibilities become almost endless. The issue lies in convincing larger budget developers that this is a way forward, and that is the job of the indies; push boundaries and break barriers, create amazing experiences and show the industry that games can be more than point, shoot, pretty explosion, cut to expositional scene . Just because a player may not necessarily even see part of your game due to their play-style it is not a wasted effort, as to create a more personal, engaging experience one must also create a unique experience. This inherently means that they may see parts others don't or miss parts others were able to play, but the experience is entirely their own. Doesn't sound like a bad thing does it?
What you did there, I see it... and I like it (Source)
Danny Goodayle was up next explaining some techniques he'd used in procedural generation in Unity. His discussion was more of a forum for conversation about techniques but he did go through some of the basics of what he had done. Using various methods of pseudo-random number generation, e.g. Perlin Noise he was able to produce a mountainous landscape including rolling waves and a daylight system by using noise to affect the height and position of verts and a sine wave algorithm to produce the wave effect. The demo is available on JustAPixel's website and Danny is always looking to learn and pass on his own knowledge via his personal blog and his Twitter account. Danny also showed off a piece of procedural generation that could create cityscapes by taking user-generated data about the size and shape of buildings and applying them to a map. The example he showed was of downtown Manhattan and the effect produced was great.
As always, the guys from Space Unicorn were there to catch the whole thing on video and get some exclusive interviews with the speakers so keep an eye on their YouTube channel, like the Facebook and follow the Twitter for updates on the next video. On a further note, the new horizons spoken of in the title of this post refer to my new role as host of Space Unicorn's weekly news show! So follow my Twitter and keep up with my blog for news of my first episode, which was filmed this week. There's a little teaser below so you can see how cool I look with a bit of editing but the full episode is OUT RIGHT NOW so go ahead and watch for all your gaming news needs!
"Space Unicorn, made with 100% Dan (from concentrate)"
Thanks to everyone at LUUG, speakers and organisers alike, for another great evening. If you want to attend LUUG tickets are free but they run out quickly. They are always released exactly a week before the event, so 7pm the previous Thursday. Get yours quick or miss out! If London's a bit too far or rooms of real people aren't your thing then catch Space Unicorn's coverage, usually released the week following the event. Hopefully I'll see a few new faces for LUUG 31, and remember, LUUG needs free venues! Help the cause, be a pal :)
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