I love playing games. Computer games, board games, role-playing games—all kinds. I am very interested in the design and development of games, especially computer games. I hope to be a professional computer game developer someday.

This section of my website is about games. I hope to organize it better in the future, when I have more content. However, I will start with some links, and then get right into some ideas I have for computer game design.

You will find pages below that have information about a few computer games I am currently developing, as well as some general game design ideas.

New! Added January 5, 2006 Gingerbread Dungeon: Photographs of a dungeon both edible and incredible.

my games

A screenshot from The Forgotten Star.

A screenshot from The Forgotten Star

links

game design ideas

Here are some of my ideas for interesting game design. Several of these ideas were developed from the ideas of others on the Internet. If these ideas pique your interest, you may be interested in visiting the Game Design forums at www.gamedev.net.

1. Choices have consequences

All too often in computer RPGs, the player is left to complete meaningless quests in a strict linear storyline, or hack and slash in the killing fields to get experience and loot. I believe that the gameplay experience would be richer and more satisfying if the player was able to make meaningful decisions which had apparent consequences later in the game.

A good way of implementing choice is to have multiple ways of completing a quest. For instance, if given the quest to bring a renegade brigand to justice, the player might choose to:

  1. Kill the brigand;
  2. Capture the brigand and carry him prisoner back to the authorities;
  3. Reason with the brigand and show him the error of his ways;
  4. Join up with the brigand and cause some havok of your own.

Any one of these options might solve the quest with a different reward. And, depending on which way you do it, you might make friends of some and enemies of others. You might choose which one to do based off of your character's sense of morality, or on where his abilities lie (whether he is a good fighter, or a good talker, et cetera.)

2. Party NPCs should have a life beyond the player character

All too often, in CRPGs, the NPCs that party up and fight alongside the player character have an apparent lack of depth. What if these NPCs had to leave the party now and then to go run other errands or visit their families? Maybe when you're in town, an NPC wants to go buy a colorful new shirt with his portion of the swag and another one wants to spend some time flirting with tavern girls, leaving you to do your own thing until the party rondeveaux.

3. The A.I. Game Master

Traditional, pen-and-paper role-playing games allow players to interact with the game world, and the story, through a creative, human Game Master. This makes gameplay a lot more in-depth, dynamic, and interesting. What if one devised a computer game which used an AI agent to simulate the role of the Game Master?

The goal of this idea is to make a game more replayable and more realistic, and to more perfectly immerse the player in the game world and provide a more satisfying game experience.

In many games, such as Bauldur's Gate, there is a quest and story system which is set in stone. After completing quest x, you can complete quest y; after completing quest y, you can complete quest z; and so on. This provides a rich storyline, which can be of high quality because a human wrote it. However, this method is often criticized as being "too linear," and replayability suffers. If you've won the game once, there is not much incentive to win it again, because you already know the whole story.

To counter this, some designers have programmed games (such as Ultima Online), which have no storyline. The player interacts with the world in any way he wants, does what he wants, and goes where he wants. This puts the responsibility of discovering the world upon the player. The problem with this approach is that there isn't anything to guide the player. Stories are epic and that's why we play games. The best kind of game is an interactive story.

So, what if we had a good, rich storyline, but which was random? If the computer program made up the storyline as it went along, based on some predefined stipulations by the designer? At the most simple level of this methodology, we have games like Everquest which have NPCs which will randomly ask players to fulfill inane quests, such as "Deliver this item to so-and-so in such-and-such land." While this is a step in the right direction, it's shallow and, while providing a quest, it fails to provide a story. Basically, the game should use this method but take it further.

In pencil-and-paper role-playing, this approach works very well. The GM (Game Master) will prepare an adventure ahead of time, but will be constantly chainging it around in his head as gameplay progresses, making decisions based on how the players play the game.

For the programmer or designer who comes up with what I will call the "AIGM", (Artificial Intelligence Game Master), the system might be developed line-upon-line, precept-upon-precept, by trial-and-error. The developer will start with a very simple quest system. First, it will observe some of what the player does--how often he chooses evil choices over good, etc. Then, if the character consistantly makes evil choices, the computer will randomly choose an evil quest to give to the player. An NPC will hire the player to go murder so-and-so.

What if you programmed a game with three layers: 1. The presentation layer. This is the graphics, the interface, etc. It's what the player actually sees and interacts with. 2. The simulation layer. This is where the economy, the game rules, etc., are calculated. 3. The A.I. Game Master. It would observe how the player acts (speeds through dialogue, always chooses the most violent option, etc.). Then, it would tailor gameplay to be most satisfying for the player, by giving him more of what he wants and less of what he doesn't. It would also give you additional tests sometimes, different from the way you've been acting, to further understand the way you play.

Here's what bishop_pass, on www.gamedev.net, had to say:

OK, lets look at this in more detail. Envision several layers to a game program:

First layer: The graphics engine, responsible for rendering and physics simulation.

Second layer: The simulation engine, divided into several modules, each responsible for simulating either the economy, characters, weather, etc. This layer calls upon the graphics engine.

Third layer: The AI GM, responsible for learning about the player, observing the whole process, and making sure gameplay unfolds in an interesting way. The AI GM may allow the first two layers to operate uninterrupted until it believes it is appropriate to interject something.

Here's an example: Visualize the Sonoran Desert, complete with cacti, mining towns, gunslingers, outlaws, saloons, etc. Your character enters a saloon and joins a poker game with some rough looking characters. Everything is running under the first and second layers right now. The second layer simulator is handling the cards and providing a perfect simulation of a deck of cards, the NPC betting, etc. The AI is observing, but letting things run their course.

A few hands are played and the cards are reshuffled. The AI is evaluating the situation for possible 'interesting' plot twists. At this point, the AI overrides the simulation and calls upon a poker game scenario. The AI notifies the simulator to stack the deck. Your character is dealt four aces, and the mean looking guy across from you is dealt a full house. Betting ensues. The AI has decided that if you don't fold, the mean looking guy will snap, threaten you, and draw his gun, possibly creating a very dangerous situation.

Now, the above scenario cannot and should not just be randomly applied. Rather, the AI has noted its application, and knows that it should not apply this type of scenario again for a long time. On the other hand, if the player plays poker again tomorrow and the simulator creates a similar situation on its own, then that is just the luck of the draw.

This from jotaf on www.gamedev.net:

Ok... this is a really good topic and we could be all developing the next-generation titles in no time if we get something out of this

Here's my view on the subject: if you try to develop an AI that understands the world in order to keep consistency, you'll see that this task is REALLY hard. There is however another way to keep consistency - simulation. Soooo, to make a game like this, you would first have to simulate an interesting world, you can't ask an AI agent to figure it all out. This could be achieved with some simple systems like demographics, economics, some simple physics (I'm not talking about rocket science here, some of them are really easy to implement if you do some research), and planning AI entities with basic goals, which is in my opinion the easiest way to make them look alive, busy and intelligent. For this to work the world must be truly dynamic - by this I mean that you shouldn't be lazy when you're scripting what everything depends on. If there's no food because the evil player decided to burn down the crops, NPCs will die, and some of them will use the planning system to solve the problem probably by stealing - stuff like that. Just try to see how you can break down these situations into little pieces that work together to get some effect. Sorry I kinda let myself ramble on too much Here's a link, read this page and I'm sure you'll immediately fall in love with it (there's a series of articles on that subject there if you're interested)

http://www.skotos.net/articles/dawnof27.shtml

Ok... assuming you have this interesting dynamic world, like all games should have. Then you can have an AI entity that looks at stuff and tries to throw interesting situations to the player. It should have some knowledge of cause and consequence, like this: how can I make the player happy? (looks up some list of actions that may achieve this) -> he likes dueling with rude humans, so I'll let him do that. how? (the conditions are: an NPC is angry and he's near the player; again look for actions that make this happen) -> by chosing some NPC that looks like this, making him angry and ordering it to go to a place near the player. This uses the same planning system, just with different sets of actions - which means less work for you

The AI would only influence stuff that should be random and the AI of the NPCs, to make it believable. It can't just decide that a portal should open out of nowhere and monsters pop out. Or something that in the context of the game world would look even less believable.

4. An Idea for Immersion

Here is what bishop_pass, on the GameDev forums, had to say:

I'm beginning to think that an excellent component of a game would be for a program to fabricate a small story as to what your character has done since you last played him, and give reasons as to why he is now in the situation that he is in.

Basically, you play your character in realtime, doing something interesting or visceral or enlightening or engaging in suspensful activity, whatever, and then you stop playing for the night, assuming whatever you've done is basically done. You play again later, and the game has immersed your character into a new situation, possibly days later, maybe a month later, or thereabouts. Presumably, the game has generated an interesting situation once again for your character, and has taken into account your past, digging up old skeletons from your cloest.

Now, the program must articulate or narrate the background to place you within the context of your new situation. This is similar to the other thread I created, where I suggested a program could manufacture fictional histories. So, imagine a one paragraph describing what has transpired for the last three days, or month, or whatever.

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