The modern AAA single player first person shooter consists mainly of two things: shooting faces in implausibly realistic levels with a pistol, machine gun, shotgun, sniper rifle, or rocket launcher -- and obeying NPCs when they trap you inside a room so they can emit voiceover lines at you. Half-Life's legacy in the latter is well-mythologized in history, but what if we re-visit Half-Life as a masterpiece of technical design, enemy encounters, AI scripting, weapons tuning, and architecture? Spoiler: we'll find out it's a pretty well-crafted game.
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Well-Made: Back to Black Mesa (PRACTICE 2013)
1. Well-Made:
Back to Black Mesa
SLIDES PDF AT: tinyurl.com/backtoblackmesa
Robert Yang (@radiatoryang)
NYU Game Center / Parsons MFADT
PRACTICE @ NYU
17 November 2013
2. "When we made the first [Mario 64]
prototype, Mario and Luigi were on a flat
field. [...] because of hardware limitations
we had a choice between cutting Luigi or
making more elaborate landforms.
Then, in tears, we had to ask Luigi to
leave.”
- Yoshiaki Koizumi
http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/super-mario-3d-world/0/0
7. FOOTNOTE:
mythologizing
crunch is gross.
* This is the dev floor at Bungie, which as far as I know, actively tries
to avoid crunch instead of scheduling it as part of a “natural part of
the development process” like certain other AAA studios... crunch
is of course a complicated topic, the result of poor planning +
publisher demands + market forces + blah blah blah... but I think
the first step toward fighting it, like a disease, is to stop claiming
that “crunch” is worth it OR that it is inevitable OR honorable?
Do you know Guildhall mandates crunch for its game dev students?
Isn't that sad? Learned helplessness? “As a result, The Guildhall was designed to
simulate the pace and work style of the games industry. During heavy development periods,
students sometimes spend up to twenty hours a day coding, designing, fixing, debugging.”
15. ART HISTORY TO GAMES:
AAA sandbox / open world =
LARGE SWEEPING PASTORALS
even w/ post-apoc or urban setting,
function / values are the same:
Awe + manifest destiny
This landscape is big + beautiful
AND IT IS OURS?? (*boring!*)
xoxo, Thomas Kinkade
16.
17. Game dev =
Code + asset + content +
concept + design +
workflow + politics =
transcendence?
20. So one of the programmers on Half-Life
created a track train that would move
over long distances and turn and pivot
[and when he told me about it] the first
thing that came to my mind was an actual
train. I just took it too literally, and I
started thinking in terms of, "What could
we do with a train in Half-Life?"
- Marc Laidlaw
46. "When we made the first [Mario 64]
prototype, Mario and Luigi were on a flat
field. [...] because of hardware limitations
we had a choice between cutting Luigi or
making more elaborate landforms.
Then, in tears, we had to ask Luigi to
leave.”
- Yoshiaki Koizumi
http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/super-mario-3d-world/0/0
51. "The line in question was
something a programmer
considered a private joke. The
skill naturally has a completely
different in-game name and the
script reference was also
changed. What is left is a part of
an obscure debug function."
- developer's response
52. "I found a way to alter the items
you get when choosing a chapter."
- a Dead Island modder, on the
functionality of default_player_setup.scr
2+ weeks after release / day one patch
54. “PRIVATE” TO
WHO? JUST TO
EVERY SINGLE
DEVELOPER?
"The line in question was
something a programmer
considered a private joke. The
skill naturally has a completely
different in-game name and the
script reference was also
changed. What is left is a part of
an obscure debug function."
- developer's response
“OBSCURE DEBUG” AS IN
“RUN THIS EVERY TIME A
PLAYER STARTS A NEW GAME”
55. "... First, we want to establish
the idea that a computer
language is not just a way of
getting a computer to
perform operations but
rather that it is a novel formal
medium for expressing ideas
about methodology. Thus,
programs must be written for
people to read, and only
incidentally for machines to
execute."
56. 10 PRINT
CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
by Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost
Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas
Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter (2012)
Criminal Code: Procedural Logic
and Rhetorical Excess
in Videogames
by Mark Sample (2013)
57. “Screen essentialism”
"… the graphical user interface is
often uncritically accepted as the
ground zero of the user’s experience”
- Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008)
in “Mechanisms: New Media and
the Forensic Imagination”
58. this is game development
cultural, political, social,
technical, scientific,
artistic, creative,
diverse, relevant
THANKS! @radiatoryang
!["When we made the first [Mario 64]
prototype, Mario and Luigi were on a flat
field. [...] because of hardware limitations
we had a choice between cutting Luigi or
making more elaborate landforms.
Then, in tears, we had to ask Luigi to
leave.”
- Yoshiaki Koizumi
http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/super-mario-3d-world/0/0](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)