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Tag: design

Review of Thimbleweed Park

Posted in entertainment by Adam
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Be sure to check out the arcade, if you can dig up some tokens.

Thimbleweed Park (Wikipedia: “Thimbleweed Park”) is a retro-modern take on the classic graphic adventure game. Made by some of the very people (i.e., Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick) who made Maniac Mansion (among other games), it is set in a run-down town visited by a pair of FBI agents investigating a murder.

Thimbleweed Park definitely shows the experience of the creators and of the art of adventure game design itself. It is a layered story that shifts from the murder to the characters living in and visiting the town. It is a solidly-built game with some head-scratching to puzzle your way through.

The game features two modes of play: hard and casual. I played through on hard first, and I think that’s the way to go. The casual mode is there if you just want to get through the story, but it’s very much a carved-out version of the harder playthrough.

Besides the no-deaths and puzzle dependency methods, each character has a journal or to-do list that helps the player keep track of what’s on the character’s plate at any point in the game. A lot of thought went in to trying to keep gameplay smooth and not let the player feel too stuck or lost, and I can say that I beat the game without getting any hints. That’s a good signal that the game is well made, as my general record for adventure games is that I eventually break down and get at least a few hints before I beat them. (To be fair to me, most of the time I know the solution and only need guidance on some minute detail about where to click or that I needed to do some non-obvious thing first. Like you can’t butter the bread unless you let the butter soften, or you can’t tie your shoes unless you study a knot-tying book first.)

The game was funded via a Kickstarter campaign, and there are some nice in-game contents that reflect those pledges, including the books in the mansion library and the extensive phonebook of Thimbleweed Park. (There are achievements for reading enough books and calling enough answering machines, but even if you don’t go for those it’s worthwhile to spend some time with the backer-contributed content. Some good stuff there. It would have been nice to have an direct interface to browse through them out of game, possibly after beating the game.)

The phone system does play an in-game role as well. The game-related phone numbers (listed in red in the phonebook) are worth jotting down out-of-game, to save the trouble of getting a character to look at the phonebook if you’re focused on a puzzle or goal.

Thimbleweed Park took me about 19 hours to complete, including all achievements. I like adventure games, and I enjoyed this one. Each one has its own quirks and offers a different take on the genre.

Parts of Thimbleweed Park are a comment commenting on the genre and give the player an overview of the process. Ron Gilbert has written a bit about how he sees adventure game development and what he thinks makes a good one (see Grumpy Gamer, Ron Gilbert’s blog), and this game definitely reflects his philosophy of the genre well.

The parts played as a ghost were a high point for me. I think it’s an underrated aspect of games that let you experience foreign perspectives like that. I had a similar feeling in playing Amnesia: Rebirth (where the player-character is a pregnant woman). The character of Ransome the *beeping* Clown was also a fun addition.

If you like adventure games, this one is worth a spin.

Thoughts About the Heavy (and Medic) in TF2

Posted in entertainment by Adam
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Thoughts about the need and ability to balance the Heavy class in Team Fortress 2.

A lot of people think the Heavy Weapons Guy needs balancing in Team Fortress 2. Often seeming underpowered for gamers used to the pace of a Soldier or Demoman, the Heavy seems due for a buff (an increase in his abilities).

Meanwhile, the high-skill Heavy players present a huge challenge to that idea. They mow down whole teams, so the notion that a direct improvement of Heavy’s items can suffice misses the problem that Valve faces. If they direct-buff the Heavy, the skilled players will only become that much harder to beat.

Back before TF2’s Heavy update came out, Valve’s design problem was how to make Heavy less reliant on a Medic. The Heavy-Medic combination is very powerful, but lots of times there isn’t a Medic to help. So they added the Sandvich to compensate, and let the Heavy roam free of a Medic.

While that was itself a positive move, there was likely another side to that design problem: how to get more people playing Medic. Medic stands apart from the rest of the classes in being almost purely support. Medics do not get the same sense of achievement (that of actually getting frags). They can provide major help to a team, but without that reward of a kill it’s harder to quantify their ability.

If you play Soldier on a losing team, you can still see if you got a lot of kills and points. You made some difference. A Medic doesn’t have the same feedback, and being the one player that counts on others’ abilities makes Medic a niche class. Even using the Medic’s big ability of an Übercharge (making a teammate invulnerable for a period of time) still counts on them doing the killing.

A game like TF2 requires at least some damage-heavy classes. Too many Snipers or Spies sinks a team very quickly. There is something of a food pyramid to team construction. Roughly:

  1. Soldier, Demoman, Pyro
  2. Heavy, Engineer, Medic
  3. Scout, Sniper, Spy

It varies a bit by game mode, map, whether a team is attacking or defending, and a player’s skill in a class. But that’s the general shape of things. The first tier consists of classes that are good at dealing a lot of damage both offensively and defensively. The second group is area denial, slow pushes, support. The third is countering, distracting, and slowing the other team.

But skilled players can take their class of choice and push it up to the top tier, which is why Valve has to be careful about a buffed Heavy. If they found the right alternative (akin to Demoman’s shields), Heavy could straddle the line a bit more without making him too good for the skilled.

On the other hand, they could seek to tweak the Heavy to make him sit more securely in that second group. That would mean the players that can currently turn Heavy into an offensive powerhouse would find him in a more support-oriented role. It might not go over too well, but if that change involved new toys it might.

As for the Medic, it’s not clear what such an alternative would look like. Back in QuakeWorld Team Fortress the Medic could infect enemies. It’s not clear if that mechanic would do much or be something Valve is interested in reviving. Others have suggested making Medic a walking dispenser, but that would be overpowered unless the ammo dispensing capabilities were fairly limited. My guess is that a dispensing Medic is partly borne from the desire to see Medic have something more to do than just healing and Übercharging.

It’s also clear that the team pyramid is a good thing in itself. Small games need damage classes. Larger games need diversity of classes. I don’t think Valve will move away from that general landscape.

Improved Discovery of Functions via Socialization

Posted in design by Adam
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Some thoughts about when cargo cult behaviors by users may point to opportunities for improved design.

You have probably seen a comment on a website do something like:

Hello, world!
I am a block quote.

One common, simple styling of blockquotes is to throw a left border on them, maybe some indent, and call it a day. Even some rich-text-esque e-mail programs do that for quoting in replies.

Now you may have seen a comment on a website do something like:

| Hey, answer my question: what?

The answer is mu.

That use of the vertical bar (|; a.k.a. pipe; see Wikipedia: Vertical bar) is an example of cargo culting. People reading comments see the left-bordered replies and say, “okay, good, a distinctive way to quote exists,” but they fail to guess that the quote character is > (a.k.a. greater-than).

Still, if you see users cargo culting something, it tells you a couple of things:

  1. They think the behavior they’re trying to mimic is valuable for some reason.
  2. It isn’t easy enough for them to discover how to do it.

I nearly wrote “the right way” for [2] there, but if it were the right way, then it would be discoverable.

There are options:

  1. Adopt the cargo-cult attempt as the new way (or an alternative way).
  2. Implement a rich editor (e.g., with a shiny “quote” button).
  3. Make it easier to “view-source” of existing comments so users can see the secret sauce.

Something like [3] is the way to go in this instance. Let people learn from each other without explicitly needing to ask, “how?” If a user sees another with a fancy comment, they might dig into the source (when available) to see how it works.

This is the way we traditionally learn: observation. That’s how we learned to speak, and to a lesser extent how we learned to write and read.

In general, if you see mistakes being made with a piece of software that’s an opportunity for improved design. One source of inspiration should be video games. If you watch the commentaries from Valve Software’s games, they have a common pattern for learning game mechanics.

  1. Show the user the mechanic in action.
  2. Let them try it in a simple example.
  3. Trap them until they show they’ve got it down pat.

The games Portal and Portal 2 are chock-full of this pattern. You start out not even holding the portal gun, only learning you can move through portals. Then you only control one portal. Finally you learn to control both.

In more advanced puzzles you learn about conserving momentum to fling yourself, or in the second game how to paint with and make use of the gels.

Only after you have completed what amounts to a whole set of portal classes do you get to the part of the games where you are apparently fighting to win, but the whole experience (classes and all) are kept enjoyable.

We don’t currently approach general software in that manner. The first time you fire up Firefox, you aren’t presented with a puzzle of how to open a webpage, for example.

But maybe you should be.