     |
 |
 |
 | | | | |
 |
|||
 |
||||||
          |
 |
 |
||||
|
Postmortem: What Went Wrong 1. Design Changes and Communication Thereof. Previously I discussed how we shifted away from the console-style, target-lock-based shooting of DMC to the aiming-based shooting of PC first person shooters. Without a doubt this was the right decision to make. Unfortunately, though I was never a big fan of emulating DMC, we went down that road for the first third of the project and invested a significant amount of time in game mechanics that we threw out. If we had more carefully analyzed what type of game we were making from the start we could have saved six man-months of work. Also, when we finally decided to make the switch, the change was not properly communicated to the whole team, and people frequently asked me, "But I thought we were trying to be like DMC?" In a collaborative large-scale project, having a design vision is useless unless it is clearly communicated to the entire team.
2. Puzzle and Boss Gameplay. Even given our best efforts and despite being granted time to iterate on the game, our puzzle and boss design was not up to the standards we wanted. Both the puzzles and bosses were flawed because of their unpredictability; they caught players off-guard by involving multiple complex mechanics that players had never used previously. Part of this was due to the fact that we re-did each individual puzzle multiple times, and thus whatever puzzle progression had been planned over the course of the game was no longer applicable. Our bosses were further problematic because we tried to force platformer-style bosses into a PC shooter-style game (indeed, the bosses fit better when the game was more in the vein of DMC). This oversight was not recognized until it was too late. It was also a conceptual goal to make the bosses involve non-violent conflict to contrast with the extremely violent nature of the rest of the game. This made designing them and making them fun quite difficult since our non-violent mechanics were significantly limited and not nearly as much fun as our violent mechanics. All of our bosses and almost all of our puzzles were redone one or more times prior to shipping, and though they improved tremendously they were never anyone's favorite part of the game. 3. Weapon Variety and Distribution. One of the drawbacks of setting a game in a real-world environment is that you don't have the opportunity for weapon diversity that you do in a science fiction or fantasy game. This is especially problematic for a shooter like The Suffering, where constraining yourself to real-world weapons and avoiding those that don't fit the setting (rocket launcher, anyone?) means that you're hurting the gameplay experience for the benefit of the story. In the end, we really could have used one more weapon. Also, our desire to make the game accessible to a wide audience resulted in a bit more ammunition available in the world than we would have preferred. This had the unfortunate side-effect of most players not using the "Insanity Mode" creature; most simply didn't need it unless they were playing on the harder difficulties. Though we did include multiple difficulty levels, most players will tend to pick the default and stick with it, even if they find the game too easy. Indeed, by the time they figure that out, they're a fair ways into the game and it's hardly fair to expect them to restart their game from scratch at a higher difficulty. It would appear that the answer is a dynamic difficulty adjustment system that automatically makes the game harder or easier based on how well the player is playing the game moment to moment. This is something other games have dabbled in and that we will undoubtedly be using in the future. 4. AI Design Issues. Though we tried to make our game more accessible to players by supplying them with plenty of ammo, the primary reason our game is too hard for novice users is because our AI design was not made with our controls and player mechanics in mind. Having a creature that runs right behind you may be cool in concept and is something fairly well supported in a PC shooter using a keyboard/mouse control scheme or a console shooter with target-lock. However, with an aiming-based game using a console controller the player's ability to react to such events is significantly more limited. Indeed, our original target-locking control scheme supported this much better, and having the creatures move in this frantic fashion is another disjointedness that resulted from that transition. Furthermore, this is a classic example of a problem the development team is likely to be completely unaware of: since the developers have been playing the game for so long, they are extremely familiar with the controls and see a problem like this as a challenge instead of an annoyance. Indeed, whenever I see "controls are sluggish" in reviews of the game, I interpret that to be because of this AI-behavior and the controls disconnect. 5. The Denial Factor. After you've worked on a game for a year and a half, it's easy to overlook certain glaring flaws with your title. Thankfully our publisher and gameplay testers were able to point out many of these problems and we were able to fix most of them before we shipped. Nevertheless, we spent too much of the project in denial about problems with the game. This was true across all departments, but also in design, where poor puzzles, AI, and mechanics were ignored for too long. Since we put off fixing these issues until so late in the project we often had to use shortcuts and didn't have the time to polish the new solutions. We delivered a "first playable" of the game seven months into development that was supposed to be "shippable quality." Looking back on it now it's hard to imagine what drugs we were taking to make us think it was actually close to good enough. In the future, we plan on being significantly more strict with our quality levels over the course of development and to fix problems before we become accustomed to them.
Heart of Darkness I see The Suffering as somewhat unique among
console action-adventure or shooter games in the seriousness
of its subject matter and the moral themes it endeavors
to explore. This is something that I wanted from day
one and I am fairly happy with the result we achieved.
To accomplish this, we made a number of key design
decisions, from the player's ability to effect the
world in a believable way (killing friendly humans),
to the storytelling techniques we used, to the morality
system that leads to the distinct endings. In the
end though, the compatibility of a game about human
atrocities over the ages within the "gory shooter"
game milieu was perhaps our biggest limitation. As
games seek to engage the player with more and more
serious subject matter, the game mechanics need to
evolve along with them, giving the player a wider
expressive range than deciding whether to kill or
not to kill. But as they say, Rome wasn't built in
a day.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Features
|
|
|