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Structuring Key Design Elements Case StudiesIt is now time to apply these tools to modern games that are of greater complexity than Pac-Man. Each of the following two games, Diablo and Gran Turismo 3, has enjoyed legendary marketplace success, and each has spawned a lucrative franchise of sequels, expansions, and licensed products. Is there a common thread between these games? Did the developers in each case just get lucky, or were the developers just extraordinarily brilliant? I honestly do not know how much luck was involved, but someone with a lot of intelligence, skill, and time honed these two game concepts into production plans that have succeeded far beyond the industry standard. I can show you the elegance in the design of these games, illustrating how, looking back, these were mega-hits from their conception. Case Study I-Diablo Diablo is a computer role-playing game for the PC developed by Blizzard North, originally an independent developer of another name bought by Blizzard during the development of Diablo. Diablo featured the killing of hordes of monsters like skeletons, wandering around in a dungeon, gathering gold, and collecting magic items all in the quest to vanquish ultimate evil-all straightforward fun stuff. The key concept behind Diablo was to make the user interface priority #1, not the story, not the size of the game, not the number of different character types, not customized character appearance, not a rich role-playing game mechanics set; no, the focus was the user interface. Indeed, the mouse controls were a stunning left-click on monsters to attack, left-click on chests to open, and right-click to cast a spell. The interface itself was appealing to look at with large glass spheres that held blue and red liquids representing remaining life and mana (energy to cast spells). Shortly I will more carefully break down the use cases of Diablo; but there is a tremendous amount of courage and insight behind the user interface design of Diablo. In the summer of 1995 I was up late one night with a bunch of other game developers talking about games we could make. I remember we suggested just a simple variant of Gauntlet, the arcade classic where you just went around bashing monsters, collecting gold, and powering up. I remember how we all laughed at the time and said there was no way it could be viable. No publisher would see the game as feature-rich enough to fund. Perhaps as a bit of forgotten shareware, but no way it could be a commercial game. At that time RPGs such as Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series were vast worlds with hundreds of NPCs, dozen of cities, hundreds of locations, actual weather, and time of day. Imagine making a game that left out all of these features and just concentrated on a tight interface and high production values-that was Diablo. Use Cases of Diablo Diablo is a simple game, a polished game with strong production values such as superb voice-overs and movies, but we will see that Diablo is a simple game behind the features. I will cover the major features and elements of the game; I do not propose to create an exhausive reverse design document.
Quick Analysis of the Use Cases of Diablo Looking over the use cases of Diablo you will notice that I have partitioned Diablo into three subsystems: Display System, Game Objects, and Character Management. Below is a short discussion of these systems.
The display system is just a 2D isometric engine that is capable of rendering animating 2D sprites (quite probably used for both the characters and the spell effects). This graphics technology was hardly groundbreaking in 1997; isometric engines have been around since Q-bert in the arcade. The game also uses a 256-color palette incidentally. There is no question that the graphics in Diablo look strong; the art direction was strong and led to a consistent look that was foreboding and well supported the theme of the game. Touching on character management for a moment, the display system is called upon to also render menus such as the menus of the town shopkeepers who have stayed behind after the arrival of demonic forces to make a profit selling adventuring gear to the player's character and the inventory, spell, and character management menus. These again are just menus, displaying customized fonts, buttons, icons, and cool negative space textures. The characters in the game animate well due to the aggressive use of 3D rendering to produce the 2D frames from which to composite the 2D sprites. This technology is not new either; our example Pac-Man uses just a few frames from open mouth to closed mouth to animate our hero, and the Wing Commander series used an array of images (about eight to sixteen individual images) from all angles around the starfighter to produce its "3D" starfighter game. The plan for Diablo was to again use established technology but take it to a quality level never before seen in games by using over 5,000 frames of animation for just the three main protagonist characters. This dedication to visual fidelity represents a lot of confidence in staying with established technology but taking it to a very high level of quality. I know of another game I will not mention by name that became severely distracted with the pursuit of volumetrically projected pixels, known as voxels, for the rendering and animation of their characters. This distraction helped to cripple this title. The game object interaction system runs the heart of the game. This is a game of hack and slash and loot gathering. The context of this hack-and-slash has something to do with a crystal in somebody's head, demons from hell, a butcher, and dead townsfolk-plenty of motivation to keep our player character hacking away at the monsters in the game. The game object interaction handles the combat, spell casting, opening doors and chests, triggering traps, and level changes. Notice that my use cases above do not have any detail on how combat, spell casting, or the opening of doors and chests works. Those are detailed use cases that would be covered in the design document; this article is focusing on the key design elements of the game in the effort to be sure we have the correct scope for our game. My use of UML's use case notation has been purposely slim with the use of just the simple table format of major user interactions and a few diagrams to show the relationship of these interactions with each other. Case Study II-Gran Turismo The Gran Turismo series for the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 platforms published by Sony is all about racing cars. Every conceivable subgenre of racing has been explored over the years as well as many sequels offering the latest technical wizardry for themes already visited. Racing cars have been a staple of video games since the days of the Atari 2600 with Night Driver, where the road and terrain are a solid field of black demarked thoughtfully with some magenta lane markers. Nighttime racing has continued to evolve to Tokyo Street Racer on the PS2 and Project Gotham on the Xbox. Racing games deliver an experience that almost everyone wants to do-race cars. Some want to race at night, some off road, some want to race taxis, some want to run over pedestrians, but hey, there is a racing game for everyone. What is it about Gran Turismo that makes it a mega-hit? Was it luck? Was it a large budget? Or was there some sort of planning and direction behind Gran Turismo? I am presenting a case for thoughtful planning. Gran Turismo's (GT) vision statement was most likely something like "The best racing simulator on any platform." To back up that vision statement we need to look into what it would mean to be the "best racing simulator." The best is so encompassing in its superlative that Sony set out to dominate all other racing games. Hmm, that is a tall order. The first step is to pick the type of racing Sony would model. In the end, Sony chose to model a variety of racing from raw amateur racing of minivans to world-class events featuring million-dollar racing machines achieving the highest form of automotive engineering. So, at first glance it would appear that Sony violated the design guideline of focusing on one game and a tight set of features and doing them well. However, if we take a look at how they presented these various classes of racing to the player, we will see that it was a seamless presentation of gameplay from the lowliest of minivans to the Suzuki Escudo. When you load up the simulation mode of Gran Turismo for the first time (it doesn't matter which version), you are given a small amount of credits to purchase your first racecar. Taking a look at the various car manufacturers, the player has only a couple of choices in the beginning of the game. After spending all his cash, the player then sets out to race some beginner races to build up a supply of cash so he can modify his car. The car modification gameplay is the hidden weapon of Gran Turismo. Here players can ogle new tires, polished ports, oversized turbos, and a host of other modifications to their car. The exhaust improvement conveniently enough has the highest bang for the buck and will most likely be the first purchase for any player. Here the player bonds with his car, and all the cool parts available drive the player to go back to the track and keep racing. This context for the racing is compelling. It is the same inventory/party growth dynamic from a role -- playing game like Diablo -- a most compelling feature. This racing around a track and modifying the car goes on and on throughout the whole game. What changes are the events, the tracks, the competition, and most importantly, the car the player is racing. Gran Turismo features hundreds of cars, dozens of tracks, and scores of events. The events are classified into licenses from Beginner to International A. Players can always find a race and almost always can earn some cash to make forward progress on acquiring new goodies for their car. This car modification meta-game is what ties all of Gran Turismo together and presents to the player a world where they can start with a modest real-world car, and through racing, modifications, and licensing they too can be an international racecar driver. This is the brilliant vision behind Gran Turismo-it slowly builds up to the super cars, and all along the way the player is hooked and believes in the world and knows why he is playing this game. Later in the series Gran Turismo added rally racing. This additional mode of racing was also seamlessly integrated into the core game. Indeed, the player's rally racing cars just needed to change the tires to racing slicks and they would often do well in the pavement events. In classic arcade fashion, new tracks would only be revealed to the player after completing a racing series or a licensing program. The rally events in the later GT series upheld that tradition with their own set of rally tracks to unveil. the Gran Turismo series is the greatest of the racing games because it fully delivered on the gameplay that is central to racing and takes players from knowing nothing about racing cars to being able to carry on an extended conversation about gear ratios and coil-overs. I justified Gran Turismo's success without ever mentioning that the game has always boasted the most realistic physics model for its racing, the most gorgeous graphics, and a complete aural experience second to none. All of these technical features are of course critically important to an electronic game; however, it is the key features of a game that will lead to success and enable the project to fully realize the efforts of the whole game development team. Use Cases of Gran Turismo
Quick Analysis of the Use Cases of Gran Turismo Again, this article is not discussing how to complete a detailed design document, so I have only covered the higher-level functions of Gran Turismo. But in two areas, driving the car and modifying the car, I drilled down to the individual interactive activities the player has to play with. Driving the car and modifying the car is the game; everything else is in context of these two activities.
Gran
Turismo is successful largely due to a clear vision and plan for the
game. It was perfectly designed to capture the largest segment of the
market who would enjoy racing games. In fact my father and his best friend
went out and purchased PlayStations after playing Gran Turismo
1 at my house and went on to compete with actual cash prizes for
virtual driving seasons. These two men in the over-50 demographic were
not hard-core gamers; they were mass-market consumers who bought the PlayStation
just to play Gran Turismo. That is a true hit.
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