So, you say you’ve got even more levels than the other guy?  I don’t want them.  You’ve got things that’ll boost my stats?  Look: I don’t care which slot, which stat, or by how much.  I don’t even care about your intricate combat systems, 30 layers deep, each excruciatingly balanced against painfully large spreadsheets full of melee attacks, ranged attacks, AoE attacks, damage types, probabilities, and resistances.  I don’t care if your strikes cause DoTs, and your nukes are cones, and every last one of your buffs has been hand-tuned down to a short duration because of the incredibly high percentage by which they boost my whatever.   I don’t want my weapon to gain an increased chance to proc– I don’t want it to proc at all.

I’ve got RPG burnout, and now these castles in the sky– these ethereal monuments to pure mathematics– have lost their thrill.  Sorry, but your leveling bonus gives me +10% to who gives a shit.  And my new points to allocate into… whatever?  Here’s a D20, roll to see if I care.  (Here’s a hint: your modifier is 0, and the DC is 21.)

Why now?  I think it’s the absence of palette cleansers.  In the past, I’ve shot people in the face (Quake), stolen their flag and then shot them in the face (Tribes), or stolen their flag, shot them in the face, and then driven over their face (Halo).  Now, my competitive fix comes from WoW’s arenas– not exactly the sharp cheddar counterpart to my complex, RPG-bodied cabernet.  (That analogy failed on both the literal and metaphorical levels.)

RPG systems are a near-perfect way to feed the gaming addiction– a constant low-level feed of new information to incorporate into use.  At some point, though, my brain simply loses the need to consume that next systemic nugget.  Maybe the problem isn’t the paradigm, maybe it’s the systems in question.  Are modern RPGs really giving my brain new toys?  I know what knockback is.  I know how DoTs work.  I can intuit the advantage of a +1 to hit.  We’ve been over this ground before, and a simple rearrangement of the objects on its surface doesn’t create a sufficiently new experience.

I recently ran into a problem where an exporter I’d written was creating output that wasn’t what the artists were expecting.  In particular, the output from the automated tool looked brighter than the by-hand process they’d been performing.

The mismatch originated from use of the single channel view.  When you view a single channel of an RGB image in Photoshop, it uses its grayscale working space (working space being gamma, more or less) to display the channel.  This can cause problems if you weren’t expecting to author anything in grayscale, and hadn’t bothered to set that working space to something compatible with your output.  In this case, the color space was set to Dot Gain 20%, which is a calculation explicitly intended for print work!  It was very noticeable: if you selected a single channel to view, even the white areas would appear much different than the RGB view.

Copying data from this single channel view into an RGB image, or vice versa, causes a conversion between your RGB color space and your Gray color space, which in this case were sRGB and Dot Gain 20%, respectively.  That means that Photoshop will actually change the color values to maintain something that looks visually identical– remember, they’re displaying at different gammas.  So you’re inadvertently changing your image.  In this case, it caused different than intended behavior in a variety of single channel applications (specular term, emissive term, etc.).

The problem, fortunately, is quite simple to fix: if you’re going to be taking image data back and forth between RGB and grayscale color spaces, just make sure your color spaces are compatible.  In this case, we wanted to work with sRGB– it’s a logical choice for game development– so we picked sGray to go with it.

I didn’t see sGray documented anywhere, but it turns out my guess was correct: it’s simply sRGB’s gamma calculation, but for a grayscale working space.  sRGB’s gamma calculation is already well-documented, so I won’t go into it here.

Joss Whedon+Musical+Free+3 Act Web Movie = Watch Now!

It doesn’t stay free for long, so get it while the gettin’s good.

TIGSource’s procedural game competition has just ended, and there are some very clever and charming entries.

Rescue: the Beagles creates a fun platforming mechanic using procedurally generated landscapes plus three parallax levels.  If you need to jump up to the next level, you’ll have to find a small enough gap to do so: but if you’re too slow, the different scrolling speeds will have taken your opportunity away.

Dyson is a miniature RTS in which you send your seedlings from asteroid to asteroid, attempting to take over the entire asteroid belt by growing trees.

They’re small games– the competition period was fairly short, and these are indie devs– but still fun.  I was surprised, especially, to see that Rescue’s mechanic felt new.

Proper respawn system design requires a depth of understanding of your game and your goals that is difficult to accomplish. (I believe “respawn system” is more accurate and “save system”, because it addresses how the user gets back into the game after death, whether it’s through loading or continuing. Maybe it should be called reentry system?)

Escape Velocity’s system on certain tricky edge cases. Bioshock’s system broke frequently because of incompatibilities with the game’s carefully-balanced inventory model: it made the resource of health infinite, while not replenishing gameplay items, resulting in non-strategic and anti-immersive zerging tactics. Mass Effect’s system functioned as a perpetual annoyance because of a lack of consideration for where players might spend their time, encouraging compulsive saving. Halo’s system, on the other hand, succeeded in almost all areas, revealing the obsessive lengths the designers went to to understand every last minute of a player’s experience.

It’s a surprise that respawn systems are as good as they are. Aside from designer masochism (”They should thank me for a save point every hour!”), there’s the simple problem that you can’t really understand your game until it’s almost complete– at which point you’re crunching, addressing critical bugs while you try to get the damned title out the door. The more ambitious your game, the worse the complexity and deadline factors become.

Conversely, the simpler your game… well, here’s a one-minute game that demonstrated a thorough understanding of the user’s play-through behavior, including the crucial out-of-game portion of the experience.

Scott Jennings over at his Broken Toys blog has a fairly dead-on writeup about AoC, I think. I’m not quite as fired up about it as he is (then again, my character can’t set stuff on fire), but he does capture the joy of playing a totally fun, unbalanced, buggy, exploitable game. It reminds me of early City of Heroes.

If full PvP was randomly enabled on WoW PvE servers, if they drastically changed my character’s power level from week to week, if core abilities were just randomly broken and fixed, I’d probably be pretty upset. (Although I did love the plague.) Age of Conan is new enough and rough enough that they can still do that kind of stuff. As Scott points out, at some point it may have to grow up, but for now it’s good fun.

Update:  one of the links on Scott’s writeup leads to a post describing, well, that female melee characters do something like 2/3 as much damage as males.  In case I hadn’t driven home “buggy” yet.

I was going to write my updated AoC impressions, about how I was really enjoying their twitchy melee combat, even more so the more abilities I got. Then, I had to update those impressions, because somehow on my PvE server I ended up in a free for all PvP zone (where all the starter quests send you). It was stupid fun: no death penalty and a respawn point just down the street. I just started attacking everyone in the zone while they tried to quest.

As this amazing video shows (via Zen of Design), I’m not the only one who thinks the best and worst thing to come out of AoC is its bizarre PvP.

There are plenty of places to get more AoC impressions, so I’ll try to keep my impressions/review brief (update: failed) and personal.

The best one-word description of AoC is “haphazard”. It’s in the feature list: they have mounted combat but no auction house. It’s in the mechanics: melee combat is innovative, fun, and obviously iterated; spellcasting is dull, repetitive, and generic. The game is technically advanced, but features no auto-config so you’ll spend quite some time optimizing your rig and your video settings. The starting area is advanced well beyond WoW, but there’s only one: if you like to level a few alts to determine your favorite play style, prepare for pain. Itemization is a work in progress: there are quest and dungeon rewards here and there, with whole dungeons and level ranges with nary a decent weapon. Some classes embody Conan (specifically, the Barbarian class), while others feel like piles of somewhat related abilities. Many of the skills and feats are broken, but AoC charges a respec cost to change them– okay, that last point was all negative.

Age of Conan’s primary accomplishment is the revolution of melee combat. While AoC’s spellcasting classes were a huge letdown from my high level WoW mage (20+ keybound abilities that I use almost every arena battle, versus 1 nuke button), the Guardian is sheer twitchy goodness. In a single battle, you might swap weapons several times to enable different moves, activate different special moves plus their combo strikes, switch stances mid-combo to increase damage on the final swing, and run around while doing all of this to optimize enemy position for area of effect strikes (i.e. most of your strikes). In the most striking demonstration of this, WoW has three stances for a warrior– AoC has three sets of three stances each, for a total of nine (three of which can be active at any given time).

Addressing a pet peeve of mine, AoC has successfully de-emphasized healbotting. Most healing classes have one big heal on a several minute cooldown, and the rest of their heals are heals over time. This means you apply your HoTs and then get to fighting.

Finally, AoC’s art direction is a welcome change of pace for any WoW addicts. You’re still running around in a swords and sorcery setting, but you’re clobbering picts instead of orcs, and living in a city that looks much grittier and more human.

AoC might be a great game in a year, if their drive to release the XBox 360 version doesn’t distract too much from much-needed improvements. Is it going to tempt people to ditch my WoW subscription? AoC’s largest hurdle may simply be its WoW-derived model: I have a hard time seeing any game tempting me away from a virtual life without level grinds, significant respec costs, and bad pick-up groups. Funcom isn’t the only company emulating the aspects of WoW that both I, and Blizzard, are already leaving behind.

I had to check out T.W.T.P.B. after I belatedly noticed how my mind immediately switched attention to something else every time I saw the name.  Go back, look at it: can you focus on that name for a long period of time?  Do your eyes glaze over?  Do you feel an immediate urge to go read about something else?  Or does it only have that effect on me?  Once I was able to bring my mind to focus on the name, I began to wonder: does T.W.T.P.B. stand for something?  How might the developers have referred to it during the months or more of production?  “The game”?  Twitpub?  T-dub?

Even Hollywood is not immune to terrible name syndrome, but a quick scan of TIGSource’s current front page reveals:

• Ginormo Sword (full title: Long and Thick My Ginormo)
• Thrustburst
• Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist

Oh, crap.  It’s a full-blown epidemic.

I’m playing 3 MMOs right now, and I’ve had it with starting zones and starting characters. They ALL suck, but developers don’t care because “WoW did it”, and players don’t care because they either don’t have a choice, or “look at all the progress I’m making– this is boring but I’m being so productive!”.

So here’s the solution: Advanced MMO Certification. It’ll be issued by some standards body… say, me. It confers a title on the bearer, so you could be “John Doe, MMO”. I suppose if you were a doctor, you’d be “Dr. John Doe, MMO”. Being an MMO entitles the esteemed title-holder to begin any MMO at level 30, or whatever point your MMO starts to become interesting. (Note to developers: take a guess as to when your MMO becomes interesting, and then add 20. Then double it.)

If you’d like to earn your Certification, you must simply provide proof of a level 60 or higher character in any approved MMO (any MMO that shamelessly rips off EQ counts), or pass the following written exam.

You have created a new spellcaster. Your Death Bolt is bound to the number 1 on your keyboard. An enemy is approaching. What do you do?

Answer: __________________________

The enemy is still not dead. Now what?

Answer: __________________________

The enemy is still not dead. Now what?

Answer: __________________________

Congratulations! The enemy is dead. A new enemy is approaching. What do you do?

Answer: __________________________

If you answered anything other than “Press 1″ to the above questions, congratulations! You fail, and are too smart to play MMOs. Go play Civilization 4, Mr. Ivy League.  (Note: leaving any or all of the test blank is also valid, as your auto-attack would probably kill the enemy without any help.)

Oh, in other news, Age of Conan is great.