Why can't the game AI learn routes, etc. from the player?

I would like to see a game that really takes the player somewhere they do not want to go, but at the same time they can resist going there. Horror games can do this very well, like Silent Hill.

It's a pain when you can't think of a good idea! If you want something to do something original but are stuck for ideas, here's my suggestion: try picking something at random (not from a game! ) that catches your attention and then try brainstorming about how you could turn that into a game.

I had maps of course. If you're going to have a complicated story you must work to a map otherwise you can never make a map of it afterwards.

I always in writing start with a name. Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about normally.

No jumping puzzles. Ever.

Infinite respawning enemies, a big nono.

set-piece battles and scripted-event type stuff within quests

Difficulty modes. A given. On each difficulty there should be more enemies who are tougher, as well as new ones.

future armor that doesn't look like modified existing armor.

I keep files on the various ideas I have for books, and as I think of things I add them into the file in no particular order—it’s a kind of brainstorming, I guess. As an idea develops I begin to do some research to see if it is valid. I might start collecting research material—mainly books—if the concept shows some promise. The file of thoughts and research grows. I often write questions in the file and then slowly try to answer them (over months or years). I might start with a question about a character and then list all the possible answers I can think of. A storyline starts to form, though it can change radically during the process, and then again if I write the book. Eventually I decide which of the many ideas I will make into the next book, and I do further work on the idea file before I start to write. At this point I reread all the research material and track down any additional material I think I need. Before I can begin, I need to know an ending, though the end often changes as I work—I still need to know what I’m working toward or I find it hard to begin. Once the writing process starts I really rely on my instincts, and the book can go off in many unexpected directions, but the basis of research I’ve done over the years allows this to happen.

I'd got into the habit of goofing-off this book by doodling, and I'd started to draw a map of an imaginary world, which I eventually put aside and forgot about. After I'd seen the 73rd printing of the second book of Lord of the Rings, I went back and pulled that map out again. I made some changes; putting in different names for some of the kingdoms, that sort of thing. Then I began thinking about the people who lived in those places and wrote in that this race is like the people of Poland in the 8th century, or this one is like the Romans of the third century BC, and so forth. Finally I came up with a complete mythology, various theologies, and a serious bad guy, who turned out to be a sort of renegade god. That led to inventing various other characters. What I was doing was generating preliminary studies for what became the Belgariad and Malloreon series. It took me about a year and ran for 230-something pages."

This is a repeatitive one, how about some boats? Take a ride on a boat to maybe some small islands....Fish as the ferry-boat takes you to your destination.....Maybe get your own tiny lil' vessel as a nobody.....Or get a powerful galleon once you reach prominence...Or even a pirate ship...These could be your own little floating dwellings....Maybe ***** them out to running deliveries or pirating for some quick cash.

ust think of it late at night 3-4 caravans are returning to town after exploring the ancient ruins of items and are halfway there. It's late at night and you are in the hedges waiting for the moment to jump out and sack the caravan. Some of the gaurds jump out to fend you off the others are getting away and you kill the gaurds and quickly hop on one of the horses and make way after the other caravan.

Make the PC's actions mean something. If that means cutting off quests because the PC killed a critical character (not necessarily the quest giver - perhaps the quest givers brother or something) so be it.

As a corollary, allow the PC as much latitude as your imagination can muster. In UW, there were MANY ways to deal with EVERY situation. Although you couldn't avoid killing at all, you could get through much of the game without killing. Further, how you dealt with a situation often affected how NPC's treated you later. For example, in UW - there is a subplot involving castle intrigue. If you kill the wrong person, you get tossed in jail (the King lets you out once you make pennance). If you kill the right character, but not in time, you "lose" the subplot, but the game continues - without a very helpful character. But - if you figure out who the bad guy is in time, you can save said important character. When I played this subplot, I was EXTREMELY gratified as a gamer. Some of the best gaming experiences were in UW1 (and 2) where you could literally talk your way out of a situation. For example, in the prison tower level of UW2, you could get all the way to the top of the tower without fighting a single goblin. In fact, you could "beat" the prison tower and only have to kill one person. (You talked your way into the room with the gorilla-esque beast - and he would "take care" of the rest of the tower, leaving on the very top floor for you). I thought that was GREAT! In other areas, you could talk to the leader of an area, and either take on his quest - or just kill him and be done with it.

DO force the player to make choices. Sometimes you have to choose between one faction or another simply because they are polar opposites. However, for a more nuanced game, allow for a possible middle-ground. There was a really cool subplot in UW1 where you could actually act as a "diplomat" between two warring parties of goblins (the grays and the greens). It was great because each side wanted you to kill the other, and offered a prize for doing so. However, you could act as a messenger, and get the two sides to agree to a truce. The best part is, you could ignore the whole situation - it wasn't required to complete the game. But, the fact that you had so many options made for a very enjoyable subplot.

Write decent NPC's. I remember how much I *HATED* the conversation system in Daggerfall and Morrowind. Despite having something like 10,000 NPC's, they all said nearly the exact same thing! (bad example, I realize - given the sheer amount of unique strings required). Ultima is a perfect example of what I am talking about. You had to check with every NPC several times to really play the game, because as the game progressed, they would say different things in response to the situation. With proper voice acting or writing, you can even go to a whole other level with NPC's. You could tell when a NPC was a weasel, or hiding something. Alternately, you could tell if an NPC was a coward, a hero, or just an ordinary schmuck.

Make the PC have a visceral reaction (either good or bad) to your NPC's. Again (I know) Ultima got this perfect. Just from interacting with NPC's, I could tell in later subplots who was mostly likely what. I had a feeling for their character - and this was all done through beautiful dialog. The best part is, they only had to "speak" a few lines audibly to set the tone. The rest could be dealt with through straight text. 

Make complex NPC's. Think about intrigue, betrayal, loyalty, love, hate, deceitfulness, naivety, etc. I absolutely loved Baldur's gate for its interesting NPC's. UW II was great in this way as well - you really "got to know" the NPC's. I realized I was going to enjoy UW II when, during one subplot, I actually felt bad about killing a NPC! (you have no choice, the NPC in question attempts to kill you)

Make subquests that are somewhat open-ended. Perhaps a NPC could supply the PC with a little extra cash whenever they stumble upon certain items? (many games got this right - but it is still a good idea) Alternately, quests could take a long time to complete - and in some cases, are completed along-side the main plot. Perhaps your character has to plunder churches along the way to a main plot point looking for all the bits to something. Baldur's Gate did this well with "multi-part" weapons, that you had to take to a smithy to get repaired.

There were few things more gratifying than finding the bits to some amazing weapon, and racing back to the smithy to have them assembled. Often, the items were just great items - but not required for anything really.

Make sure there are plenty of surprises - but not stupid ones. I remember a Doom mod (the Alien TC) that was the first game to nearly make me wet myself. The whole first level, like the movie, was eerily empty. Then, when you were totally paranoid, an alien jumps from behind something and attacks you. I was playing in a MP game, and it scared all of us. It was great.

'm not a big fan of progression for augmented stats either. I want to create my character with its strengths and weaknesses at the beginning, and then those stats should remain roughly the same throughout the game. If my character needs to become better, then new weapons and armours can be used to augment combat stats, and ingame information can be used to let the character deal with other forms of threats. In a fantasy RPG, the character could find new spells or magical items that allows certain actions to be taken, or allows certain enemies to be defeated. I'm becoming seriously bored with the whole "level 1-20 progression"

Random attack to the villages was a great idea. I want also the lynching parties with hayforks and torches, you can talk them out of it, join them or state that you defend the poor witch/daemon (other race than lychers)/criminal with your sword. Maybe get the gratitude of the "victim" or just so see him/her/it to flee as fast as possible.

Plus when you cast spells like fireball for example.. the graphics change as the spell power increase[s]

With that, we wrapped up the interview. Warren took me to the room where
they edit the world of Serpent Isle. It had a master computer which
stored the world and acted as a sort of world control system, where slave
machines could check out little pieces to edit and then check back in.
The editor was at least as elaborate as the game itself and took almost as
long to write.

There are mystery elements, as you go through the space station
and unravel what actually happened. There are log messages and email
messages from the past and the present that you read during the game, and
we've tried to make them more than "you must pull lever N" and instead make
them feel as though they came from and are going to someone real.

On one level, for instance, you'll read log messages from members of the
human resistance to each other about how they're going to try to break
through the blast door and attempt to reach the next level. And then as you
approach the blast door, you start encountering all these bodies, and just
in front of the door there's this ring of corpses. So you say "Wow, this
is where the last resistance got wiped out... what's on the other side of
this door?" And then you open the door and there's a group of deadly
warbots. When you're done, on one side of the door there's a ring of human
bodies, but on the other side there's a pile of broken robots, where you've
just taken out the forces that destroyed the last humans on the colony.
And not every player will notice that, but the ones that do will get an
immense kick out of it. So we have that kind of atmosphere and context to
the things you do in the game.

Of course, all the atmosphere in the world won't be as fun for the player
unless there are also ways to interact with the environment, and ways in
which the environment 'goes out of its way' to interact with the player.
So we've made places where you want to wait for the patrol robot to go by
and then sprint through behind it; or a room you enter and the door slams
shut behind you with a clang, and then SHODAN appears on the wall monitors
in front of you and announces he's caught on to you, and then side doors
open and robots stream out gunning for you.

First-person systems are really good at presenting scenarios where you can see where you want to go but have to figure out how to get there. We have things like a
chasm that you can see the door on the other side of, and you have to go up
to the gun turret to extend the force bridge across it.

"what computer games are good for". He pointed out that computer games are fundamentally not suited for telling stories like a book or a movie, because your main character -- the player -- doesn't know what he's supposed to do!

His point was that computer games are best at giving the user a sense of
place. "You are there" in an environment with real atmosphere. Because if
you artificially limit users, you frustrate them. So instead you want to
put users fully into the environment and let them do whatever they want,
you immerse them, and then the you make the excitement come from how the
environment responds to their actions. So computer games are fundamentally
about putting the player into really exciting environments... What we're
trying to do at LookingGlass is push the limits in desig

Doug: On Underworld, the most important thing was the dynamic creation of
the game. What I mean is that there was no set of rules which we
followed, or pre-written plan. We started with the idea of a first-
person dungeon simulation. We initially had one tile height, and all
tiles were empty or solid. We wanted chasms, though, and slopes, and
angles, so we added more tiles and heights and types.

Some obvious milestones were the first polygon rendered scene, the first
textured walls, first animating creatures, first time we had smooth
walking physics in, the beginning of terrain, the first time we could
manipulate objects in the world editor, the AI's getting activated,
conversations, doors were quite a big deal, as the dungeon seemed a
little odd without them. It was a long project, and a lot of little
steps went into making the project as a whole work together.

As to more balanced, we have made various
tweaks to work on it. Skills are checked more often (lots of
conversations check your Charm, Acrobat is useful on ice, Repair is very
nice, and on)

The game is written so that the editor, the playtest game, and the shipping
executable are all the same code. Various compile time flags are turned
on and off to set what gets put in (enabling and disabling various
subsystems and subeditors, allowing various cheats and cheat menus, and so
on). 

Paul Neurath and Doug Church Interview

Doug: Much as in UW1, we hope players will explore a large area and come
back for things, rather than clearing each square foot as they go. In
fact, we are pretty sure that people will end up playing that way, even
if they don't start that way. The plot is of course somewhat linear, in
that certain events trigger others and so on, but at any time in the game
there are many things which the player can be working on.

Interactive storytelling is not "a game with drama added" or even "a game with dramatically interesting characters". It is a story that unfolds for the player at his direction. It adheres to the principles of drama yet permits the player to make interesting and dramatically reasonable choices. For example, if the player comes upon an obviously haunted house, he is not given a choice between "go inside" or "stay away", as the latter choice is not dramatically reasonable. It is psychologically reasonable, but not dramatically reasonable. In other words, the system follows dramatic logic, not spatial logic. When the captain of the starship Enterprise risks the safety of the crew to save one person, he NEVER loses the gamble; that is dramatically unreasonable for the imaginary universe of Star Trek. Dramatic logic is seldom reducible to broadly generalizable algorithms; therefore it must be created by a novelist, playwright, or scriptwriter -- but not a programmer. The product of this artist's efforts is not a story but a storyworld: a complete dramatic universe embracing all the dramatic truths the artist wishes to communicate. This storyworld is not a spatial region populated with walls, tunnels, and characters; it is certainly not a set of specifications for a physical simulation. It is instead a collection of stages, populated with objects and characters. The artist specifies many kinds of interactions between the characters, who then execute these interactions according to their personalities, relationships, and histories.

The Erasmatron project is my attempt to realize this. Version 1 is currently available on the website, but it has many flaws. Version 2 is approaching completion; I expect to have an alpha version ready in late January. The artist uses the Erasmatron to edit the storyworld. Most of this work consists of defining the possible interactions between characters; I call them "verbs". A good storyworld requires at least 500 such verbs. The artist must also define the characters' personalities, their relationships, and the stages upon which the story takes place. The Erasmatron also offers lots of analytical and testing facilities for evaluating the performance of the storyworld; I call this "rehearsal". When the artist is satisfied with the storyworld, it can be fed to the storytelling engine, an independent piece of software meant to be plugged into a front end. The storyworld, engine, and front end are used by the player to experience the storyworld. While version 1 has an unimpressive front end, I will provide only a pure text front end for version 2; I expect that vendors will prefer to build their own front ends.

It is my hope that such work will appeal to a broader range of audiences than games appeal to. It provides stories, not puzzles, not strategic problems, not tests of hand-eye coordination or reaction time.

”Warren and I have this debate all the time. Whether it’s better to take the Deus Ex approach to very shallowly include a lot of possibilities, and hope that as years go by you’ll learn to increase those experience’s fidelity. Whereas I believe it’s better to start with a complete system, and then branching out adding more systems with more interactions. Our job should be less to give them a a little piece of the plot, and a lot more about whether the player has a lot more expression to control and whether they’ll remember what /they/ did rather than remembering what /we/ did.”

Very few games have created the same atmosphere of being alone in a scary and complex world and just being free to explore and discover stuff

Of course, Shock avoided that entirely.

“Decision number 1: Delete our conversation system. We don’t like the fact our conversation system was less interactive and player driven, so we figured we’d guess rid of them. That’s the difference between Underworld and Shock.

airplanes, submarines, pirates… I think that is part of what I try to put into my computer games now – some of the excitement that you get from turning the pages and seeing a new fun thing on each page. We try not to create games that have too much technical information or too many obscure facts.

If a player feels there is something they would like to do that the game is not letting them do then that is a failure of the game.

We believe the game is most fun on the levels where the AI either doesn’t cheat or it cheats only a little bit.

The best advice I can give if you're intimidated by the work that goes into a game is this: make all your art first, or at least your backgrounds. Work out the whole game script, figure out what rooms you need, and don't continue until you've got all the background art done. Then it's just a matter of stringing it together. BG art is probably the most arduous part of design for me and it's best to get it all out of the way at the start before going onto the fun part of actually making the game and writing all the dialogue and shit.

I find that when you're close to the end of the game you'll find yourself working much faster, the end in sight, steamrolling unstoppably to the finish. Releasing it is a good feeling, but the best feeling of all is the positive feedback. Makes it all worth it.

would venture to guess that more that 3/4s of the map is covered by land. Far from being devoid of character, the land has may interesting features as well as a rich and dynamic natural world. Several mushroom species spawn in mysterious patterns, fishing holes come alive during certain hours of the day, furtive wildlife appears and disappears, delicate and rare herbs hide underneath the underbrush waiting to be found and harvested, veins of ore sit hidden underneath the earth. In fact, since T1, I'd say that the developers have done a marvelous of job of richening the natural world to the point where it is almost a character in and of itself.

There are loads and loads of extremely complex sub- and minigames. For example, everyone receives 4 seeds of a random vegetable type at a university, but when growing them, 99% of the time they will yield one seed per seed you planted. Factors like soil quality, daytime, people of certain genders and connection to you being around or not and heaps of other things can affect output and a possible extra seed. Apparently in T1 you had to plant a garlic seed under a free-roaming beetle to get an extra seed.

Basically, a dead squirrel is a pretty much useless item that you have to carry around with you to complete quests in games, but is otherwise of little interest.

A vibrating blue squirrel is an item that is needed to complete a quest, but also has useful side effects that make the player want to carry it around with them.

Lately I've been thinking about random city content for GH2. As I mentioned weeks ago, this is the next big feature I plan to add to the game. Before I start I need a good model for how it

His writing is dominated by detailed characterization and moral issues. As Card says, "We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction."

That's because if you're using dialogue properly, it will show up in scenes that matter or that entertain. In such scenes, each character will have his or her own agenda, attitude, and experiences to draw on. The content of the speeches will differentiate them enough that you can often dispense with tags. For instance, the line of dialogue, "So she was lonely! You didn't have to sleep with her, did you?" does not need to be tagged for us to know, in a two-person scene, that it is said by the person who did not sleep with the woman in question.

Notice that that line of dialogue conveys, not just content, but agenda and attitude as well. The person who says it is trying to make the other person feel bad (or worse) about what he did; but the speaker also is saying it with some degree of exasperated humor. An attitude change might result in: "Most people are lonely. Are you planning to sleep with all of them?" More sarcastic, yes? Or another attitude: "Do you think that her loneliness excuses what you did?" No humor there!

Or we can change agenda. "Everybody's lonely, and you slept with her. So what?" Now the speaker is not trying to get the other person to feel bad. "She was lonely, she needed you, you helped her. Where's the harm?" Now the speaker's agenda is to make the other person feel better. "She tells everybody she's lonely. She slept with you because she's too cheap to buy a TV." Now the agenda is to ridicule the other person.

You get the idea, by now, I'm sure. It is the character's attitude, purpose, experience, and relationship with the other character or characters in the scene that will make it impossible for his or her dialogue to have been spoken by anyone else. That is all the differentiation that is needed, most of the time.

take two idea-sources and combine them. As with a metaphor, the tension between the two ideas leads to interesting possibilities. It's a way of drawing surprising answers out of your unconscious mind.

For instance, with my story Hart's Hope, I began with a city map with intriguing (to me) street names; the idea was that depending which gate you enter through, you find a completely different city inside. I also had a completely unrelated idea of a magic system in which blood is what gives you power; living blood more than old blood, blood of higher animals more than lower, and the most power from the blood of your own child. These ideas had nothing to do with each other. But I put them together. I also threw in an idea I had been trying to develop separately, of siamese twins born joined at the face

GS: When you personally create a character or a storyline, what kind of elements do you take into account? What would you say is the number one thing you need to have in creating an engaging story?

RG: All stories have to have conflict. Without conflict, there's no drama. And the conflict doesn't necessarily have to be violent conflict. When you're building a really good story, I think what you're looking for is “what's the conflict here?” And hopefully you're not just dropping in some stereotype of some “evil wizard taking over the land.” But you can have the conflict be just a little more intricate or a little more sophisticated, and the question with the lead characters is “what is their role in that conflict?” The character should be different at the end of the story than they were at the beginning of the story. And that transformation should matter somehow to the conflict that's going on and so the things I think about are: “what is the conflict, who is this character and what is the transformation they're going to go through throughout the course of the story?”

(In fact it's said the Queen is buying up an incredible amount of land here, and America has been bankrupted in a plot (this article is endless, if you want to read it. You probably don't) by the British Crown. Which is why in the last few years, rich, influential American citizens have been Knighted; Ex-President George Bush, General Colin Powell, General Norman Schwarzkopf, ex-President Ronald Reagan, James Wolfensohn (President of the World Bank) and Alan Greenspan in September, 2002 (Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board). Some think they were knighted for being good little soldiers with their services to the British Crown and the agendas for a One World Government by the elite. But I digress...)

Great examples of secrets in Zelda are the several places where there is a strange yet obvious mark on the ground. In Zelda 3 if you see a circle of plants or stones or a cross in the dirt you can usually bet that something secret will happen there. Many of them require to you stand in the center and then use the mirror to teleport to the light world were you will end up somewhere you can't get any other way. A great one that incorporates both this concept and anticipation is the medallion you get in the desert on the light world. From the light world you can see the structure that contains the medallion up on the cliff but you can't find the way up. Later you find that if you stand in the right MARKED place in the dark world and teleport to the light world you can get there.

Anticipation: Make sure to have lots of anticipation. There are two things I mean by this. One is for example if you have a river that the player can't cross but he can see the other side he'll wonder what is on the other side and wonder what he needs to do to get to the other side. He'll anticipate crossing. He'll want to know what's over there and keep playing until he can get there. The other kind is where you put some kind of barrier in front of things that the player can later remove. For example in Zelda 3 the first one is the cracks in the wall. You pass a few going through the castle dungeon but you ignore them because you can't do anything about them. Later in the game you get bombs and find out that you can blow a hole through the wall anywhere you see a crack and then you try to remember all the places you saw cracks before so you can go back and check them out. This also happens with light rocks, dark rocks, the mirror and pegs.

speedpuzzle game

Kunzyala - Every so often, people passing through my city will get arrested for drugs or warrants or whatever. Once they are released, if they don't show up to court, it turns into a warrant out of our town. I was sent to LAPD to pick up Kunzyala, who was wanted in our city for drug charges that she failed to appear on. During the drive back to the station, I asked if she had any medical problems. She told me she had a glass eye. I asked how she got it. She told me one night a teenager broke into her apartment and shot her in the face with a 9mm as part of a gang initiation. He didn't know her, it was just a random twist of fate. She was lucky only to lose an eye. I asked how long she'd be on drugs and she told me ten years. I asked how she paid for them. "Favors..." is all she would tell me.