Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.

This mind-boggling technical demonstration from Kevin Karsch et al. from UIUC shows just how far algorithmic interpretation of imagery has come. The possible uses for it are many and varied, but the potential for games has really piqued my interest.

The age of the point-and-click adventure has come and gone, but many will remember fondly the days of Monkey Island, Space Quest, and Gabriel Knight. The defining characteristics of the genre were simple enough: a linear, narrative-led journey through a series of static locations with interactive puzzle elements that had to be completed in order to progress to new locations. With such a limited mechanic it wasn’t the gameplay elements that we loved — in fact they were often obscure and frustrating to the point that they spawned an entire industry of premium-rate help phone services — it was the stories and the sense of immersion that the intricately-crafted settings offered.

Of course, static locations, no matter how elegantly-rendered, were a limitation of hardware capability that vanished with the advent of real-time 3D. From the moment that Wolfenstein and Doom appeared on the scene the days of the point-and-click as the dominant gaming genre were numbered.

The thing that really captures my imagination about Karsch’s technology, then, is how simply it could be used to generate photo-realistic point-and-click adventures from photographic source material. Want to recreate the black-and-white horror of WWI trenches without employing several dozen artists and animators for a couple of years? Or the gothic majesty of 1930’s New York? Grab your source photos, spend ten minutes setting up the geometry of the scene with this software, then drop in your 3D interactive elements and you’ve got the basics of a game engine with a visual fidelity that current top-end 3D engines would be hard-pressed to rival.

[verb] Give up (something important or valued) for the sake of other considerations

Giving up. It’s not really something you associate with the timed-reward structure of most games. Gamers have become accustomed to a steady accumulation of, well, pretty much everything, so who in their right mind would ask players to give something up?

Trading within games is a well-established mechanic, and one that players will recognise immediately from the world outside of games. You give something of value, and you expect something of equal (or hopefully greater) value in return. Whether it’s foraged rupees for a boomerang, or disenchanting epics for their crafting components, the bargain is clear and mutually beneficial.

The differentiating factor with sacrifice is that it’s not a straight trade as in a barter system, but the immediate surrender of something of value for the potential of future benefit. The implication is that the future benefit will be greater than the immediate gains of retaining the thing that is sacrificed, however this is not guaranteed. Sacrifice is almost universally an act of faith.

One common aspect of sacrifice — be it to the gods for a bountiful harvest, or to the volcano to ensure its peaceful slumber — is that the thing to be sacrificed must be of value and significance to the person offering it. Food and drink are perhaps the most common of sacrificial offerings, which is hardly surprising given their immediate value for survival. In ancient greek culture it was normal to sacrifice a symbolic amount of wine (normally the first cup at a meal) as a libation to the gods, a practice that is still common in eastern cultures today. Many cultures practice the ritual sacrifice of food animals, such as the muslim Eid al-Adha or festival of sacrifice, in which a domestic animal is sacrificed and the meat divided between the owners, their relatives and neighbours, and the poor.

Fortunately, the practice of human sacrifice — though common throughout ancient history — is universally treated as murder and exceptionally rare nowadays. Though extremely popular in mythology as the image of a terrified virgin girl tied up and left to a terrible fate by cowardly villagers (usually to be saved in the nick of time by the hero of the tale), the true image of human sacrifice more often resembled the mass execution of slaves to follow their master in the afterlife.

Regardless of the exact form of the sacrificial offering, its value more often than not was in its scarcity. In game design, scarcity is often overlooked as a limiting factor outside of defining the game’s difficulty. Whilst scarcity of ammunition is a common method to force a conservative strategy on the part of the player, it’s seen as far less acceptable to limit the rewards offered to the point that the player is unable to earn something that she desires.

Scarcity, whilst the more common basis for value, is far from alone. Investment is another means by which the player may imbue her possessions with value. Many games offer some means by which a player can invest some combination of time and resources into the creation of a new item or artefact within the game world. Whilst crafting or customisation tools are predominantly the domain of role-playing games, these mechanics are finding their way across a broad range of genres to encourage player investment.

Finally, beyond the physical bases for value, one aspect that cannot be overlooked is the player’s emotional attachment to a potential sacrificial offering. Whilst emotional responses to games are far less predictable than the simpler (and heavily conditioned) responses to scarcity and investment, skilled game designers have a wide range of narrative and psychological tools with which to manipulate a player’s emotions in ways both subtle and profound. It is in exploiting the emotional value a player assigns to an item or character that the most significant reaction to sacrifice may be observed.

There are 3 levels of sacrifice immediately apparent: token sacrifices, major sacrifices, and self-sacrifice.

Token sacrifices

Obviously the thing should be of value to the player, otherwise it’s not a sacrifice. The aim here is to prompt the player to assess what’s important to them within the context of the game. There might not necessarily be a right choice here, and the result of the sacrifice might not be an absolute requirement for progression.

Token sacrifices may be renewable resources, though it is expected that the player should invest some effort to replace her sacrifice lest it devalue the act.

Examples:

The player could be asked to sacrifice score.

As play progresses, game gets more difficult and the player runs the risk of losing. At any point the player can retire, permanently sacrificing a relatively larger proportion of score in order to not lose. (Although score is accumulated throughout the game, as the player’s last act is one of sacrifice it cannot be reclaimed later.)

Score could be used as a proxy for player power, a resource to be exercised in order to perform some action. The player would have to find a balance between accumulating score with low risk strategies, or risking the loss of score for potentially higher gains

The player could be asked to sacrifice her most useful weapon.

Determining which weapon the player favours and asking them to relinquish it for possible future gain is a difficult choice for many players. It’s also a great twist on the cliche of having all your weapons except your weakest magically removed in an FPS.

The player could sacrifice a pet, or other such replaceable resource.

Great examples of this are the Warlock sacrifices in World of Warcraft, where a summoned demon can be sacrificed for a temporary bonus such as brief invulnerability or increased damage. As demons have a high summoning cost sacrifice is usually an act of last resort.

Major Sacrifices

The player is asked to sacrifice something which in normal circumstances a person would never consider sacrificing.

In general terms, the point here is to offer the player a moral dilemma. On the one hand the player’s natural instinct should be to protect whatever it is she is asked to sacrifice, but on the other hand there must be a valid moral imperative to the sacrifice. (Or at least the appearance of one.) Again, the sacrifice might not be an absolute requirement for progression, however the apparent consequences of refraining from the decision should be significantly detrimental as to warrant the decision being difficult.

Examples:

The player could be asked to sacrifice the life of an NPC in order to prevent more lives being lost.

The climax of Mass Effect 2 can put the player in the position of choosing NPCs for potential suicide missions and thus losing them.

The player could be asked to sacrifice her friendship with an NPC.

Several Bioware RPGs require the player to sacrifice her friendship with one NPC in order to become closer to another NPC, such as choosing to let Loghain live and join your party causing Alastair to permanently leave in Dragon Age: Origins.

This makes for a great setup for the cliched return of the NPC as an adversary later on.

The player could be asked to murder an NPC as an order from a superior.

The player could choose to sacrifice an NPC for considerably greater power.

This is used to its logical extreme in the Star Wars games as the critical differentiator between the Jedi and Sith factions.

Self-Sacrifice

Self-sacrifice is the ultimate act of selflessness, and an oddity in games where players are conditioned by the medium to look for an optimal winning condition. There are significant barriers to encouraging a player to sacrifice himself in order to progress in a game: from a logical standpoint it’s impossible to progress once you’re dead, and from an emotional perspective you have to convince the player to care more for the outcome than she does for himself to satisfy the narrative impact of the sacrifice.

It’s probably for this reason that self-sacrifice is an exceptionally rare mechanic in games, and for games where it does exist the cost is generally mitigated by other game mechanics that allow a rapid return to life. The final, permanent death is rare enough that it is normally considered the ultimate form of punishment or failure within a game.

One game which makes use of this mechanic exclusively is the short but provocative art-game ImmorTall, where the player’s only available choice is whether or not to sacrifice himself to save a small group of civilians caught in a war.

It’s important to distinguish here between self-sacrifice as a specific gameplay mechanic, and self-sacrifice as an emergent gameplay style. Taking World of Warcraft as an example, the Paladin class gains the ability to sacrifice the player’s life in order to confer temporary invulnerability on another player. This gameplay mechanic is extremely useful, however its serious nature is negated by the prevalence of resurrection abilities and negligible cost of death. For the player it’s a decision taken lightly as a normal class mechanic.

An example of emergent gameplay might be a situation where, in order to prevent the death of another player, a player attracts the attention of monsters and as a result sustains damage resulting in death. The first type of sacrifice requires a deliberate choice and action on the part of the player, with no uncertainty as to the outcome for him. The second type is the natural consequence of taking on an overwhelming foe, and the player may not always be certain of death. In a game where the cost of death can be crippling such as Eve Online, emergent mechanics such as these are literally life-and-death decisions in the game: players in smaller cheaper ships will often sacrifice themselves in order to prevent larger ships from escaping combat and thus earn their fleets valuable time to turn the tide of a battle.

Over the past few years one of my major problems with project development has been getting appropriate feedback on which to judge the effectiveness of change. Naturally, this has made me a huge fan of integrating automated metrics into the development process at a very low level, and nowhere more than in my own game development.

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to hit some frustrations with some of the analytics packages commonly used by indie game developers, such as Google Analytics (good event tracking, patchy game library support, massive reporting lag), MixPanel (excellent real-time updates, based around funnel analysis for sales / conversion tracking), and Lumos (nice debug event tracking, immature reporting tools, Unity-specific).

Enter brief.io, my latest project. The goal is to provide platform-agnostic deep analytics with custom reporting functions — in real time — for game and app developers. I’m currently accepting applications for a closed beta period to test library integration for Flash, Unity, and HTML/Javascript, and hope to be rolling out the first deployment in the next couple of weeks.

If you’re interested, head on over and sign up for the beta, or drop me a line in the comments below!

Hybrid race / collecting / combat game set inside derelict spacecraft. 2D overhead space ships in zero gravity; small arenas with environmental hazards. Single player against AI, possible multiplayer.

Aim:

To collect more resources than your opponent, in the shortest time, and with the smallest losses.

Mechanic:

You pilot a ship around an environment avoiding hazards and collecting resources. Your opponent pursue the same goal, in competition for the same resources. You and your opponent may try to prevent each other from collecting resources by damaging or destroying each other by a number of different means — using various weapons, or by causing each other to come into contact with hazards in the environment.

Environments:

Small arenas (single screen) with hazards placed to encourage tactical movement. Collision with environment causes damage. Hazards may include radiation clouds which damage the ship, electrical discharges which cause loss of control, and smoke clouds which restrict visibility. Hazards may also include explosive devices which can be detonated, causing area damage.

Ships:

Small, agile craft operating in a zero-g low friction environment. Motion is controlled in a newtonian manner (thrust in one direction causes motion in another; motion must be cancelled by equivalent thrust; rotation occurs around centre of mass; rotation does not affect current movement).

Ships may have weaponry such as lasers, missiles, mines, guns.

Ships may have differing attributes such as mass, thrust, armour, shields, health, rotational speed, etc.

Ships have limited, directional visibility, defined as a circle in immediate proximity and a large cone forwards. Visibility should be obstructed correctly by the environment. Exploring the environment produces a map of it; moving objects have a last-known location and a vector plot extrapolating their movement.

Ships may actively scan to locate moving or unknown objects. This immediately reveals their location to the opponent.

Players have a limited supply of ships; losing all of them loses the game.

1. Apps (especially games) targeting a specific device could be coming to an end soon. Google’s announcement of Chrome being able to run native code in a sandbox (caution: really dry technical presentation) is a game-changer. Bye-bye OS-specific applications that you buy on (ugh) physical media. Hello things that you open in a browser, which have full web connectivity and presence, and which will run on any platform supporting it. Yes, I’m well aware of the less-than-illustrious history of thin-client network computing. What I think makes this different is that Google have already got the platform in the hands of tens (if not hundreds) of millions of customers. For free. All they need to do to enable it is flip a switch. Oh, and they’re about to release an operating system based on this technology.
2. Games are about to get big. By this, I don’t mean that people will buy more copies of games, nor that mainstream game devices will become more popular (though both are a given in the short term). No, I mean that more people are about to start making games. There are a couple of things that are bringing this about. The first is the massive ubiquity of platforms that can play games, and the second is the emergence of content-creation tools that don’t require computer-science or art degrees to use. Unity3D, which coincidentally was announced as an early launch platform for creating content which runs under Google’s Native Code system, is just such a platform, but there are many more with similar aims, such as MIT’s Scratch.
3. Which brings me to: the next big software revolution will be in the creation of interpreted content. What I mean by interpreted content is content that the user does not have to create in painstaking detail. Instead, the user sets guidelines and parameters for what they want, and the software interprets the user’s intention and generates content. Procedural content has gotten us most of the way there, and there are some fantastic (though limited) examples such as Spore’s creature creator, the MakeHuman project, and LaDiDa available right now. However, the next wave will seamlessly intermediate between clumsy, inexact humans and the rigorous demands of content creation. I’d really like it if the interface to such software sounded like Jarvis from the Iron Man movies.
4. Driving is an under-utilised platform for gaming, and could make roads much, much safer. Think networked vehicles with sensors that score your driving according to how safe and green it is, with high-score tables, local and national leagues, full social media connectivity, etc. Quite why the full extent of car manufacturers’ use of game mechanics so far is a tree that lights up green in one eco-friendly Honda remains an utter mystery to me.
5. Talking of people that don’t get it… copyright reform has got to happen now. When everyone can make content, and content can go everywhere, people will be remixing and creating on a scale that utterly dwarfs the current Big Content industries. We need to ensure a strong creative commons and a legal framework that enables people to draw from the rich tapestry of our collective culture without fear of prosecution.

So that took a lot longer than expected, mostly due it turning into a stream of consciousness that I had to edit down from about 11 different ideas that suddenly occurred to me. More on points 2 and 3 coming soon.

As a constituent whose career and majority of personal communications are conducted across the internet, I’m very worried that the Government is planning to rush the Digital Economy Bill into law without a full Parliamentary debate.

The Bill contains measures that favour the protection of commercial interests at the expense of an individual citizen’s rights — specifically measures that allow copyright holders to issue requests to limit or even terminate the internet connections of private individuals based only on the belief of the copyright holder that the individual has infringed their copyright. In effect, this creates a situation outside the bounds of a fair and just society where a person can be punished by the withdrawal of a service that the UN is proposing be considered a basic human right.

In the digital age it’s only fair that copyright holders have greater recourse when their rights are infringed — but the measures in the Bill are a step too far. Millions of UK citizens depend on the internet for the ability to conduct their daily lives, their jobs, and for access to essential services. Restricting or withdrawing access to internet services is a disproportionate response, especially without the safeguard of a fair legal process.

Whereas a rights holder can impose penalties on an individual without the burden of proof and with almost no impediment of cost, the only recourse for an individual so restricted is through the courts — a massive, and clearly asymmetrical burden. The EU has adopted the position that any punitive measures affecting internet access by member states “must respect the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens”. In particular, it the EU requires that citizens are entitled to a “fair and impartial procedure” before any measures can be taken to limit their internet access.

Industry experts, internet service providers (like Talk Talk and BT) and huge internet companies like Google and Yahoo are all opposing the bill — yet the Government seems intent on forcing it through without a real debate.

As a constituent I am writing to you today to ask you to do all you can to ensure the Government doesn’t just rush the bill through and deny us our democratic right to scrutiny and debate. As a life-long labour supporter whose career would be ended without internet access, I see no way that I can continute to vote Labour if the Bill passes unaltered.

Yours faithfully,

Sebastian Potter

What’s that you say? A 3-D ray-tracer? Yes indeed, as promised in the second part of this series of development diaries, I’ve now finished work on an update that turns this:

("A", "I+[A+O]-->>[--L]I[++L]-[AO]++AO")
("I", "FS[>>&&L][>>^^L]FS")
("S", "SFS")
("L", "['{+f-ff-f+|+f-ff-f}]")
("O", "[&&&C`>W>>>>W>>>>W>>>>W>>>>W]")
("C", "FF")
("W", "[`^F][{&&&&-f+f|-f+f}]")

Into this:

Rendering of an olive bush from pyplants povray renderer

Unfortunately it’s now 2am, so the write-up will have to wait for the weekend. Do feel free to grab the code and have a poke around. You’ll obviously need povray, pygame, and pycairo installed, but everything else should work with python’s included batteries.