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.