Next Generation Game Design

This talk happened yesterday, but electricity is a rare commodity here (as with many conferences, and it's a pain in the arse), and I ran out of battery half way through. Can't write notes like I can type 'em, so this is all there is. 

Peter Molyneux & Ron Millar are collaborating on Black & White 2.

 Peter: I’m going to start with an apology which goes something like this: I haven’t had enough time to do enough slides. I think this talk was all about next generation design, so I’m going to show demos instead. What we mean by game design. This is OUR view, there are some of you who will disagree with what we’re saying and I respect that. Have a look and see what you think.

 Let’s move on to the core of the talk. If we’re moving into next generation, well hardware is hardware. It’ll give us challenges. The enormous mountain of content that we’re going to have to build for each game. Some of it is the fact that me - I’m tired of existing genres. RTS again and again. Action, again and again. We need to think in a different way. Next gen is also going to be about new concepts. All fine, and we’re getting prepared for that, but we have to face the fact that slowly this industry is beginning to become truly mass market. Lots of people don’t want to take the time to do the things we’ve asked them to do in the past. They don’t want to learn, they want to play. They want the experience straight away. Also, what they do in the game is gonna be different.

Clear concepts: Firstly, next gen design starts with a concept, something as clear that a sentence can convey. We want people to say,  ‘mm, I get that’. In Fable’s case: "Be a hero". The Movies: "run a movie studio". Clear concepts. GTA – "Be a gangster".

Accessibility: Then there is the idea of making things more accessible. I reckon now that we have 10 seconds to grab someone and get them playing a game. The demos .. one rule we’re gonna try to experiment with is that at e3, instead of us doing demos we’re going to get the press to demo the game we’ve just made. No instructions. Clear, consise controls.

Simpler to understand: what you do must be simple, what you're able to do must be simple to understand.

Deeper interaction: these simple things must mean more and more things. The ability to experiment and play with the environment. Play the adventure, or just sandbox play in the world. Like they’ve done in GTA very well. Experiment with yourself, refine yourself into what you are.

Play and experiment: these things will come together. One person’s experimentation is another’s gameplay.

Morphable gameplay: if we’re making a game, why make it for one particular audience? Make it in such a way that all those audiences can enjoy what they’re playing.

(Ron: YOU FORGOT SOMETHING)

Oh and.. new cool shit. We have to do that too. So that’s the brief.

 The Movies:
... is about running a studio, making stars and making movies. Pretty cool and pretty similar to Theme Park, but – in The Movies what we have is.. the problem actually making a movie, creating totally unique movies.. that’s a hugely complex game. These sort of games, these simulations, normally are really quite complex. About a year ago, one of the revelations we had, I was playing The Movies and these windows were coming up.. lots of stats.. lots of star tracking.. and I suddenly realised I hadn’t looked at the 3D world for about an hour. I’d been looking at all the windows. You can’t play a game in the HUD.
Look at this game: no HUD!

Left button is pickup, right button is interrogate. That’s it. So here we have a queue of wannabes. They need to tell me info, but I don’t want dropdowns. We use AI to try to guess what you’re doing by where your cursor is. As you rollover the actors, the information pops up contextually.. pick up an actor, and this ‘stream of consciousness’ points out the most sensible things to do. But I want players to do what they want. Let the player experiment. 

We apply this to a moviemaking process. This system replaces something like 38 tiered-down menus that we had in the original 2D interface. I place my stars in the scriptwriting area and my film pops up on the top right hand corner. My HUD is building itself.

So you can drop your film into preproduction. You can choose b&w or colour – remember we’re playing through the history of the movies here – and you can totally write your own stories and scripts. We have 60 people on the movies team, and we got everyone to do their own movie. Have a look. The slightly worrying thing is that at least a third of my team's movies contained slightly homoerotic content. Maybe they’re working too hard.

 [shows movie - it's funny, zombie classic. Avatars acting out familiar scenes of zombies, huts in woods, axe murdering, etc. Creator's own voiceovers are hilarious.)

 OK. I want to talk about B&W2. Guess how me and Ron met. Guess what happens when you put two game designers in a room together. Ron and I started off with 2 days of slagging each other off. We wanted to do this because.. I love god games. I also love RTS and have a lot of time for Warcraft. So we sat down and wanted to redefine what people think of both RTS and god games here. My bold claim is that B&W2 is going to redefine what you think of a god game and what you think of RTS.

How many of you played B&W? yes. Ok. I didn’t really know what that game was. It was a bit unstructured. Here’s what B&W2 will be: are you the god of war (Ron: YES) or the god of peace (Ron: BOR-ING)? Do you want to build cities? Do you care about your people? Or are you a player that wants to go out and destroy things? (Ron: YAH! OF COURSE!). So we brought them together. (Ron: WE SAT AT YOUR HOUSE AND HAD BEER AND BURGERS).

That's it. The game looks interesting - curious, really. The Movies is a fantastic looking Sim where you really can write and direct and create your own animation / machinima. Just fantastic.

B&W2 is indeed a hybrid of RTS and village-building, with the familiar altars and Creature from B&W1. I think it's two player, and at the moment the Creature seems fairly superfluous to the game .. not quite clear yet what he actually does. Possibly a right proper experiment this, and kudos to Peter and Ron for having the guts to try it: at this stage it looks like it could go either way, and creating a whole new genre (Real Time Strategic Gods and Morals Sim?)  is always going to be risky. I very much look forward to the result. 

Comments

[Robert 'Groby' Blum]

3rd floor behind the big black boxes at the entrance to the ballroom is the secret power supply ;)

What's much more aggravating is the lack of wireless here, though - only in the lobby. Sigh!

[Alice]

Ah! Excellent :) Yeah, not having wifi in the rooms is a pox, although rather common at conferences .. embarrassing though, cos I'm clattering away at my keyb and getting 'weirdo' looks from people, instead of *everyone* clattering away at keybs and me revelling in happy anonymity.

Tum te tum.

[Robert 'Groby' Blum]

Heh - I'm over the weirdo looks. (I get 'em anyways, so who cares ;)

(Almost) completely offtopic - I think I sat right next to you when you were writing your latest entry. (At least I thought the woman right next to me was typing something while on wonderland). Funny - we could've talked in person instead :)

[Alice]

Hah! I'm easily spottable - there's a chick in a bikini on the back of my jacket.
As you do.

[Robert 'Groby' Blum]

I don't know about any chicks in Bikinis, but the new pic you posted looks decidedly like it was you. If I see more chicks in bikini tomorrow, I'll wave hi ;)

As I do what, though?

[Alice]

Heh, sorry. As you do = English expression for.. er.. uh.. "The previous sentence had something in it that is possibly slightly unusual to most, but acceptable to some". Or is it the other way round?

Crap. Too much wine.

[Robert 'Groby' Blum]

Ah - you never stop learning. I suppose you are referring to British (or "proper" ) English, as opposed to the colonial style? ;)

And there's never such a thing as too much wine :)

[Alice]

Indeed - I'm British, innit! Sorry - should have said something like, very *english* expression..

A.

[Robert 'Groby' Blum]

Don't worry - I figured from your e-mail addy. (Saw you on women_dev)

And even if it wasn't, I'm a "furrinner" as they say hereabouts - so plenty of idiomatic english that I just don't grok. Every explanation helps.

Carry on, then ;)