Carthage Proposal

CARTHAGE

Proposal for Game Design

High Concept: Historic Espionage of 'Assassins Creed'
meets the brutal world of 'Gladiator'.

Premise: A slave in Ancient Carthage,
your fate seems a certain death. That is until you are paid visit by a mysterious benefactor who buys your freedom. However, your benefactor has plans for you and freedom proves more perilous than the fighter's pit as you must sneak, steal, slash and vault your way through Carthage to uncover her secrets.

Synopsis: Our heroes consist of lower members of Carthaginian society. One, a Carthaginian pauper and convicted thief. A Celtic warrior, a last survivor sold for his(her) ferocious martial
valor. Lastly, a Berber mystic born into debt and servitude.

Our Heroes find their freedom bought by an unknown master. However, in return this master expects something which requires their special talents. They are to intercept something of value believed to be in the hands of pirates in a smaller nearby town. Furthermore, if they succeed they are promised enough wealth to begin a new life.

It isn't long before our heroes are approached by familiar people's who seek to guide them and outfit them with their traditional items and training but with the training comes warning to be mistrustful of the Aristocracy and foreign ways.

Eventually they find themselves embroiled in a web of political deceit pitting the two great superpowers of Carthage and Rome at odds. But not everyone is playing on the side they appear and the players must be careful for the consequences may well be the destruction of an empire.

CARTHAGE

USPS:

·
Unique Cooperative Action Playstyle

·
Historical Setting

Features:

·
Detailed Character
Customization

·
Fluid Real time Action Based combat

·
Beautiful Hi-def graphics

·
Multiple Fighting Styles

·
Player choice driven plot

·
Multiplayer

Genre: Action-Adventure

Target Platform: Playstation,
PC, other consoles secondarily

Target Customer: Male 18+, some female enthusiasts. Primarily interests 'action' console gamers as well as potential historical game and RPG buffs. Characters will be available in both genders and their roles as such are historically accurate and appropriate to the story.

Competitive Analysis: Contemporaries: Assassin's Creed II, God of War II

THE X = 'COOPERATIVE physical action challenges in a fantastic setting' (c) Brian McIntosh 2010

Game Design Concept for 'Carthage'

So I haven't posted much here in awhile, I've been pretty busy with work and school and frankly, what little time I have for gaming I've played some SC2 (great game btw, although I felt WC3 showed more innovation in gameplay).

I thought I'd share some concept documents I wrote in a previous semester for my game design class. I suppose most people would be concerned that the idea would be stolen. In my case, I don't have the possibility for producing this game in the near future and frankly I have so many ideas for games that having one 'stolen' really doesn't concern me that much.

The concept is centered around Carthage. Why Carthage? Well I love history, and I think to make a fun game you need to choose something you are absolutely passionate about. History has such amazing stories to tell and I think the thing I like about it the most is that once you read enough you begin to realize that everyone is from somewhere else that we all share history. That all of these cultures and people are somehow related, its really the best argument against the ignorance of racism.

What's significant about Carthage is that it represents a place and time that can only exist in that one place and time, things were uncertain for their multi-cultural city. They existed on the 'edge' so to speak. This huge hub of trade and communication that must eventually come to terms with the rise of an expanding Roman Republic.

First Left 4 Dead Level 'Zombie Farmers Must Die!'

So I'm just posting an overview of my Summer 1 final class project. We had 23 days to learn the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools and then develop a small L4D campaign. This was pretty intense as I only had a little over 2 weeks to apply what I had learned and build.

Student work I know, but I did mention that I'm a 'Wannabe' designer right?

Our Back story:

In the not so distant future, online video games have warped and saturated the minds of virtually the entire population. You and your friends are the last holdouts from 'Farmertown', a game who's phenomenal popularity has reduced the world's entire population to mindless zombies.



This wouldn't be so bad if FarmerTown's poorly optimized code wasn't hogging virtually all of your bandwidth and you are continually harrassed by maurading zombies which will not accept that you have refused their Spacebook 'friend' request.
Your mission.. destroy the internet.


The plan is to infiltrate one of the physical site locations of a DNS backbone server and poison the server, disabling the world wide web. Theoretically it will domino, taking down every website while leaving the global network intact.
Unfortunately, the only other thing the zombies have time for besides fertilizing crops and trying to friend you is protecting the servers! It will be a hard fight and you will have to flee for your lives should you succeed.

The mission begins outside of the Intertrode company's headquarters. This place was mostly empty long ago as all the workers 'maintaining' the servers are residents of a small island who believe that we are gods and who are compensated with a weekly allowance of sea shells. The servers pretty much are running themselves at this point.

Welcome to Intertrode!

Basically, I knew I would be doing 'corporate' stuff that most people see everyday. But I thought some buildings have nice architecture.. and mine should be inviting. I actually used a great deal of real estate making the lobby area and trying to draw the player in from the start.
The inside Lobby

Here again, I'm trying to convey that feeling of inviting the player. At the same time I don't want them to rush through. Using few working light sources and low lights I think helped alot because you are forced to use the flashlight and it kind of makes sense as this place would be relatively abandoned by normal people.

I spent a decent deal of time on the kiosk and the skylights. There is actually a trigger on opening the door where a hunter zombie leaps through a skylight onto the players below. I didn't manage to get the screen cap of this however.

The reception desk was fun, but in retrospect I probably should have used a modeling app like softimage and just made an mdl file as all those cylinders created really long build times.




I felt like I had to address the 'elevator' issue of an office building to help to create atmosphere. In the absence of a great deal of time to build lots of props, I think this helps a little and gives the players alternate pathways to reach the 2nd floor. While I'm trying to guide the players by things such as locking the doors to the cube farm area on the 1st floor, I don't want players to feel their hand is 'forced' to go a certain way.


I'm pretty proud of the elevator actually for a first L4D project. It has interior and exterior sliding doors and can move between the two levels at the touch of a button.

I had added a custom sound file here but for whatever reason, the tutorial seems to be missing some information here. Basically I packed the file but it won't play. Will work on this. Was hoping to have an 'intermission' feel as you move between levels while listening to a midi version of 'Stayin Alive', complete with a midi flute ensemble.

The important thing here, is L4D uses what it calls a 'nav mesh'. This is a mesh that you can't see in game, but that must be tweaked and given instructions on how the AIs can interact with the map. Largely for AI pathing and spawning. So in this case, the AIs can and will follow you into and out of the elevator.

The other route up to the top floor is the Stairwell. Here again I tried to apply the philosophy that I should make the environment interesting to look at.

While the set in L4d is generally pretty mundane stuff we see everyday (except for zombies of course), I think that's no reason the spaces can't be interesting. So I created some nice crawlspaces under the stairs as well as a full wall window to open up the area visually and some ability to overlook and have gunplay between floors.

Here I had alot of fun, basically this is a large balcony on the top floor overlooking the lobby. It has alot of potential for gunplay as well as you can see the main hallways from either the north and south side of the building, you can shoot at windows looking into the south side of the lobby from the top floor and of course you can overlook the lobby to the west and the elevators to the right.





This brings us to the server room, Lots of zombies protecting their precious :). Basically this room triggers lots of boss spawns and a panic event when you poison the server. A panic event is basically a mass of zombies that more or less bum rush the players.





Now the players are ready to make their escape and must get back downstairs and across the building to the rear parking area.



The cubefarm area was fun because I got to take something that most of us hate seeing and then turn it into a destructive playground. The cubes are sprinkled with zombies who will attack as players move through the area.

For an added touch I decided to make the cubes destructible. Basically if you open up with the auto-shotgun here you will be showered with exploding shards of cubicles mixed with zombie blood spray.

The finale is admittedly a little underwhelming. Basically I was running out of time and I had to get the triggers working here. The finale can't be triggered until after the server is poisoned and the players make their way out the fire exit to the back alley next to the parking lot.



First I really like the dark here because when you trigger the radio to call for rescue.. lots of zombies come in the dark. Except its probably a little too dark. During reload times you have no flashlight so you have no visibility at all. I think at least one good flood here would have been nice.

Another thing I did was setup the area so that the infected can come from two general directions.. they will charge you in waves from the fire exit alley and from the far end of the dark parking garage.

Additionally, I threw in some nav areas on the top of the garage where they can pour off the side onto the unsuspecting players.

This finale has no minigun and is actually relatively hard compared to other L4D finales I have seen with the dark and the lack of high ground for the players. In fact, its just the opposite, the high ground is controlled by the horde.

The good news is they are still moving through relative choke points so the players have ample opportunity to thin them out until help arrives and the final credits roll.

Since I ran out of time, I really wasn't happy with just rolling the credits. Honestly I would have liked to have had an A-Team like van come busting through the gates but thats also more custom content and I feel pretty good about completing this first L4D level in a little over 2 weeks.

Multiplayer Cheating and What to do about It

Now Streaming PB Bans!

So I was recently playing a current favorite of mine online, Battlefield Bad Company 2. I say 'recently' although it was actually some weeks back. Regardless of time, the point is that there had been a recent update to the PunkBuster software at the time.

I chose a low ping server like always with PB enabled and logged in and basically just began my usual evening of mayhem and explosions and all the goodness that is a combat simulation game. About a minute into the game a message splashed across the screen, this server was streaming PBbans. Meaning the server had just kicked someone for having detected that their client was using a hack to gain an unfair advantage.

I sat back for a moment and chuckled to myself, the turkey deserved it and I was pleased that the message was splashed across the screen for all of the other players to see. Then, almost before I could refocus my attention on the task at hand of destroying objective alpha, another ban streamed across my screen. Wow, two cheaters caught within a minute. I thought that was pretty cool too. Twenty minutes and a dozen bans later and it wasn't so cool. In fact, it was detracting from the game itself because it was difficult to see and aim with a constant barrage of text across the view space.

Destroy the competition!! For the low price of..

This got me to thinking, how many people are there actually cheating out there? In a little under a half an hour I had watched nearly fully half of the players on one server banned for cheating. I wasn't gathering statistics so I thought to go look online for some. There just isn't that much documentation statistically on this problem. In fact when I googled Bad Company Cheats, instead of seeing a list of blogs or articles addressing the problem, I was actually introduced to pages of ecommerce sites SELLING the cheats.

Wow, really? an entire industry built on the concept of dishonest gaming? I tried to dig a little further, but most of my research ended in deadends simply stating that 'cheating' is difficult to prove. In large part because, every time someone develops a detection method, a new hack is engineered. Somewhat the way the virus writers go back and forth with the antivirus software developers. We do know that Blizzard recently banned 320,000 Battlenet accounts citing that these people were in violation of ToS and that includes using hacked client software or software intended to give those individuals an unfair advantage.

Why do people cheat? I don't know exactly. It seems to be for bragging rights, many of the games have online 'ladder' systems now. That and the anonymity of the internet and difficulty in proving a hack means that individual can gloat around a perceived dominance in a particular game. Surely its mostly about ego, and perhaps in some cases there might be prize money at stake.

So why do I care?

Ok, so why should a game designer care if people cheat? This is a tough one to answer. Personally I feel that every company is responsible to try to make a profit. Simply, a business can't take care of its employees or its customer if it is going broke. Well what if most of your customers want to cheat? Is that ok? My gut tells me 'no', but for reasons other than business. If the business is founded around people as a core resource then surely we want to engage people on a positive level? And maybe that's something that can't be measured.

In an article last month on GamaSutra, Ernest Adams refers to a presentation by Zhan Ye, the president of GameVision as he describes some of the factors driving the success of his MMOs.

"Let rich people organize family clans, hire poor people, lead them to fight with other clans, and reward them. Think about who those rich people are in the real world -- business owners and factory owners. They manage and lead hundreds of people in the real world and are used to the leadership role. In the F2P world, they still want that feeling. We just offer them that in the game, naturally. "

This hardly seems fun to me, however people are willing to pay for it. However, I think its fairly safe to assume that encouraging people to behave a certain way because they will pay you for it isn't necessarily a good business to be in. Hence the correlation between some of the early MMOs and 'crack'.

But its just a game, no harm no foul

So its just a game, who cares right? Well yes and no. You can tell great deal about a society by how they play their games. Consider ancient civilizations like the Romans or Mayans and some of the violence associated with their games and what those things meant. Surely they were symptoms of a problem, but more than that they were also a driving factor in the morality and human interaction that took place in those societies.

Games are very relevant to all aspects of society and human development in this way.

So what is a designer to do?

I don't have all the answers, but the idea comes to mind that the game designers need to be proactive in creating a community which is interested in PLAYING the games. Not unleashing automation to play the games for them. Punk Buster is a good tool and tools like it should be required and used for online ranking systems. But even PB can't be expected to keep up with everything.

Having done some research, it seems that many of the 'mods' break when new game versions are patched or updated simply because the server is attempting to validate the client files as legitimate. Can this be leveraged more? The day following the most recent patch of BC2 my K/D rating shot up to 18:1 and was consistent across a half dozen servers. Within a week that rating diminishes to 2:1. I can't help but think this wasn't an accident.

What if there was a daily client build process with quality control procedures and rollback/failover present and automated? Would this kind of thinking help? Instead of forcing ourselves to come up with new detection methods, force the people writing hacks to continually update their own software. I don't know.

If we take this 'high road', it means that as designers we are responsible on some level for attempting to create a positive or healthy sense of 'game', even if it just so happens the point is to gib each other beyond identification in a virtual world.

I think I'm ok with that.

Killing Floor, that other zombie shooter

Killing Floor delivers what one might expect from a game referring to itself as 'survival horror'.

Zombies? Check.

Lovely big guns? Check.

What about Story? See 'zombies and guns.'
















So where is the campaign and what are perks?

So having those expectations in mind, I loaded the game. There was no intro cinematic and I was dropped right into the game screens. At this point I'm not really sure what to expect, but I notice my menu options and one stands out called, 'profile and achievements'. I'm wondering what kind of a 'profile' does one have in a zombie shooter?'.

I was pleasantly surprised to see something akin to other modern shooters, I have some kind of perk options and character customization. The character models don't offer much to choose from however, and If you want more, you can pay for a few additional downloadable models.

What are perks? At first I can't tell, but over time I deduced that this was a way of simply choosing what in game bonuses I would like to have on a given map. It took me awhile to understand the mechanics here because the in game help is very weak.


I made the mistake of starting my first game with the 'berserker' perk. Based on the description, the berserker is a specialist in melee combat. Unfortunately no one warned me that everyone starts with only a knife and a 9mm pistol. Let me be clear that it is ill advised to take on a zombie horde with a knife.

So I proceeded to load the 'single player' game. The screens take me to a map selection menu. I find this curious because I'm expecting to see some kind of campaign settings. Instead there only seems to be an option to choose a map similar to what one would expect of a more sandbox or a death match game.

Where am I? and Where are the Guns?

Ok so that seemed simple enough. I'm loaded into the game, I have my perk chosen and I'm ready to go 'berserk'.
The graphics aren't bad but they seem dated, the designers relied on some really nice texture mapping to make up for the less advanced lighting and shaders from an older Unreal engine.

I'm in some kind of hospital or something, there are large double doors and the occasional room with what looks like an operating table. I seem to only have a knife and a pistol, and there appears to be a counter timing the next 'wave'. I decide that perhaps I should look around for weapons, but it isn't long before waves of zombies start piling onto me. I also discover very quickly that I'm much better off with the pistol trying to keep the hordes of attackers at range instead of engaging them close up with the knife.

As you can imagine, this ends badly for my in game avatar and he winds up as so much zombie chow.

The good news is that there is some mysterious voice who speaks in my head and wants to sell me weapons if only I would stop dying. Judging by her speech I can deduce that perhaps I'm in England?

Oh, you meant COOPERATIVE Survival Horror!

So where did I go wrong? I have to be honest, I'm not sure. I resist the urge to search online for a guide. Is this what 'survival horror' means? I'm not sure, so I take another look at the box which clearly reads: 'co-op survival horror'. How could I have missed this?

I decide to take another stab, but this time I go all out and go online. Understanding now what weapons I'll be starting with, I choose the 'sharpshooter' perk. This gives several bonuses with the 9mm pistol I'll be carrying at the start. I read that the sharpshooter 'levels' by making headshots.

It doesn't take me long to find a low ping server labeled as 'beginners'. I join the game, and my strategy changes significantly. There are a couple of other players present and before long I'm taking down waves of zombies with my 9mm like a pro. The headshots are particularly satisfying as the zombie heads seem to burst like a melon. I think I'm actually starting to have fun at this point.

All the little things I had questions about, the players are more than happy to answer. Some of the weapons even had a 3rd mouse button option (how was I to know that?). It is also alot easier to fight waves of zombies if someone has your back. For instance, players can weld doors shut while someone else covers a corridor from attackers.

Another gimmick of the game is a built in 'bullet time' mode that seems to activate periodically during heavy firefighting. It seems largely random and never lasts more than a few seconds. Distracting at first, it actually gives you an opportunity to take in some of the gibs as they occur. At the very least you can chuckle at the voice acting on very low speed. This is a feature that probably would have benefited more from a newer graphics engine as you really have a time to take in visuals and animations as they are happening.

Weapons matter here!

So we cleared the first wave, and that mysterious saucy Brit woman is enticing me to her shop again. There's a particle effect and arrow in game directing me toward her but I have a limited amount of time to get in and look around.

At this point I realize that as I've been killing zombies, I've been amassing a small cash reserve as well. I can use this for new weapons. As a sharpshooter I choose a pair of hand cannons and a lever action rifle.

Each of the items has an icon next to it indicating which perk generally benefits from its use. I'm also given the option to change perks now before the next 'wave' of zombies.

I have to draw a comparison here with Left 4 Dead. The biggest problem I had with Left 4 Dead were that my weapons meant little, I simply had to choose whatever could put the most lead in front of me.

This is not the case in Killing Floor. Each weapon has strengths and weaknesses and they all create a slightly different 'feel' of play. To further this experience, the perks are tied to the weapon types and the weapon graphics are well above Left 4 Dead's simple models. These weapons have working actions and a good deal of detail so you really get a 'feel' for them.

The hunting shotgun for instance is a simple breach loading double barreled shotgun. This might seem inferior to the pump action, however the double barrel packs a serious punch and the alternate fire can use both barrels at once creating a wall of destruction in front of the player. If used correctly, this can give them adequate time to reload.

That's It?

After a few waves of mindless zombies, we are tasked with killing the 'Patriarch'. A really big nasty boss with cloaking abilities. I've got to say that the patriarch feels fairly anti climactic. He's hard to kill and once dead, your reward is that you get to start the process over on a new map without weapons again.

Conclusions

In some ways, Killing Floor suffers some of the same problems as Left 4 Dead. The 'content' simply isn't there. I'm not sure how long I'll be able to keep playing, although the alternative perks probably give this game more replayability than L4D.

The maps themselves would also do better to incorporate a more 3d or leveled approach in their design. Some of the zombies have the ability to move over walls but we rarely get to see this. The game is 3d but much of the game play feels 'flat', like a modern Wolfenstein. It could benefit greatly if there was more opportunity for attackers to come from above or below or if players could jump to higher ground more often. The good news is, there are some well thought out 3rd party maps available online that address just this.

The biggest problem for the game I think though comes in its presentation. I simply isn't polished. I had to go online to read about the back story. There was no starting tutorial, no intro cinematics, and no 'high scores' or special screens at the end of a wave. It may turn players away before they've had an opportunity to see some of the good game play it has to offer.

As for game play I think it exceeds its contemporary L4D. I can overlook the older engine, and the 'flat' maps because so much detail was spent on the weapons. Face it, in a zombie shooter you are going to spend alot of time using a weapon and not doing or thinking about much else.

For what it promises, Killing Floor is a good game. The lack of content leaves the single player experience lacking, this game really should be played in coop to fully appreciate it. It could also be so much better if the levels had more vertical considerations and if they had spent more effort on the new player experience.

Killing Floor is a copyright of © 2009, 2010 Tripwire Interactive, LLC