Game Design – Page 6 – Viridian Games

The Indie Thing

July 16, 2007 Anthony Salter

16 Comments

Soundly situated in obscurityland
Famous in inverse proportion to how cool I am
And should I ever garner triple-digit fans
You can tell me then there’s someone I ain’t indier than
– MC Frontalot, Indier Than Thou

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the indie gaming scene for a while.

The love, of course, comes from appreciating and identifying with people who can make games in their spare time.

The hate comes from…

Well, it’s complicated.

But it’s basically all Steve Pavlina‘s fault.

See, Steve ran Dexterity Software back in The Day(tm). He had forums on his site (like any good small developer who understands that building a community is just as important as making games). Those forums attracted a lot of other people who wanted to follow Steve’s path…thus, they became the unofficial “indie developer” forums.

But then Steve stopped making games and closed the forum down. The indies needed a new forum, so they created one. They named it the Indiegamer Forums.

That was their first mistake.

Why? Because by overtly stating “This board is for indies only” they made it necessary to define what an “indie” is…and there are lots of definitions.

And thus, there has been a lot of heat generated on the board over the years as people do things that “betray the indie code”…as perceived by some of the main posters there. Lots of people have run afoul of this over the years…usually for doing completely prudent things necessary to keep themselves in business.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing good there. That’s not true. But the board has been susceptible to vituperation in the past and that’s why I don’t read it any more, even though I’m allegedly their target audience.

Example? Well, here’s a good one: GameTunnel, the leading indie game review site, recently released their Top 100 Independent Games list. A list like this is always going to be contentious, but there’s one game that absolutely should be on that list and isn’t.

And that game is Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations II.

Why isn’t it? Well, this just goes straight back to their “What is an indie?” problem. Stardock is too “big”. They can get retail deals based on the strength of their past games. They have their own Steam-style system for purchasing and downloading games directly over the internet. Their stuff gets reviewed by all the major gaming sites. Thus they aren’t indie. “Indie” to the denizens of the Indiegamer Forums is one guy in his bedroom making whatever he wants (er…as long as he doesn’t dare make a “casual” game).

Of course, that’s exactly how Stardock started. And Stardock has never sold themselves.

They fulfill my requirements for indie – no one can tell them what to make and no one can tell them when to ship.

It’s pretty obvious to me that Stardock is an indie gaming company that has simply made real good.

And now Retro64 has been purchased by PopCap. Retro64 is owned by Mike Boeh, a consummate indie developer and the creator, maintainer and host of…the Indiegamer Forums. Retro64 also hosts Game Tunnel.

PopCap has long been decried on the Indiegamer Forums as a corporatized clone-making machine; a company that cares only about money and simply steals every good game idea they come across. Go ahead, search for “PopCap” and “Zuma” on the forums and see what you get.

Mike has escaped the white-hot backlash his “selling out” would normally have generated on the forums because he’s the host – and frankly, everybody likes him. He’s a great guy. But lots of people are seeing this as yet another “true indie” swallowed up by the machine. And although Mike has made it clear that the forums and Game Tunnel were not part of the acquisition, some are wondering what their future can possibly be if the company hosting them is now owned by a “corporate clone monster”.

Frankly I think it’s all much ado about nothing. PopCap could not possibly gain from shutting down GameTunnel and the Indiegamer Forums; and if they threatened to do so those sites would simply move.

But then that’s the other aspect of “indie” that they embrace…the idea of the renegade programmer, coming up with radical new ideas that The Man(tm) will eventually either have to steal…or destroy. ‘Cause you know, the indie scene is the only place where true innovation can take place.

Please. Sometimes I feel like yelling, “Just shut up and make your games!” Though frankly I should take my own advice.

Riding in Cars with Game Designers

June 25, 2007 Anthony Salter

Game Design Games The Game Biz

6 Comments

Overheard while driving back from lunch last week:

Game Developer 1: “Hey, is [COMPANY REDACTED] still working on [GAME NAME REDACTED]?”

Game Developer 2: “Has E3 happened yet this year?”

GD1: “No, don’t think so…”

GD2: “Then no.” (grin)

One of the worst things about working in game development is knowing cool stuff and not being able to tell anybody. For instance, I am currently working on The Sims Castaway Stories. I can tell you that because the web site announcing the game is up. I can’t tell you anything else about it. As I’ve mentioned before, since Aspyr Media does almost all contract work, it’s absolutely vital that we not get a reputation for leakage.

I can’t wait for E3 to finally pass so I can tell you about the [COMPELLING FEATURE REDACTED].

What the…I can’t even tell them about that? Damn.

Amber

May 24, 2007 Anthony Salter

Game Design Games

5 Comments

A friend of mine on the GameDevelopers IRC channel (#gamedevelopers on irc.starchat.net) watched my video blog about Powermonger and pointed out that Powermonger, like Populous before it, was a real-time strategy game, and wondered why it wasn’t recognized as such in articles about the history of RTS games.

Well, because if you presented these games to modern gamers as RTS games they wouldn’t recognize them as such. Because of amber.

In the early days of game design, practically every game was an experiment. Designers would stalk off into radically new directions using newly developed technologies in an attempt to make something truly unique and thus successful.

The problem is that when a developer really hits on a good permutation of a play style it tends to fix that play style in amber, like the mosquitos in Jurassic Park. It “defines the genre”, and thus games that don’t follow the convention don’t count as being in that genre any more.

Thus, in order for a game to be an RTS, it needs resource gathering, base building, and individual unit control. Doesn’t have all these? It’s not an RTS, even if it’s a strategy game that is played in real-time. Seriously, I ran into people online who claimed that Myth and Myth II weren’t RTS games because they didn’t have resource gathering and base building. “They’re strategy games, and they’re played in real-time, but they aren’t really RTS games,” went the refrain.

I once read an article on Salon where a guy bitched about how Ultima Underworld was the first true 3D game and if it had just been marketed more aggressively and more people had played it, first person games would have been slow and cerebral from then on and we wouldn’t have gone down the run-and-gun path of Doom and Quake. I guess he felt that once Quake was released no one ever did a first-person game that wasn’t a straight shooter ever again (well, except for Underworld 2, System Shock, Elder Scrolls: Arena, Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, Thief 1 and 2, Arx Fatalis, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Morrowind, Oblivion…)

Now, he was an idiot, but the succession of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake really did solidify what it meant to be a first-person game in most gamers’ minds – first-person is for shooting. Games that were first-person but didn’t do shooting tended to feel like odd men out, and sometimes it caused them to suffer in the sales department. It didn’t help that most first-person games that weren’t shooters had terribly obtuse control systems.

But that isn’t unnatural or even unwelcome. It just is. It’s just amber.

Now, I will admit that it may be getting to a fairly ridiculous point. I mean, what am I going to tell people when they ask what kind of game Planitia is? I can’t call it an RTS because that will create a false impression in their minds. I can call it a strategy game, but that word covers everything from Final Fantasy Tactics to Civilization IV so it’s not descriptive enough. If I were going to sell Planitia it would be hard because it would be difficult to market – I can’t describe it accurately enough and fast enough to get a random internet surfer interested in it.

Good thing I don’t plan to sell it 🙂

Planitia Design Pass: The Final Chapter

May 21, 2007 Anthony Salter

Game Design Games Planitia

4 Comments

In this post I said that Planitia was basically going to be a remake of Populous II.

The problem is that Populous II doesn’t really need a remake. Populous II still rocks. It’s still just as fun now as it was then (and runs well under DOSBox, for those of you interested in trying it out). Yes it does have some minor interface quibbles and yes it’s annoying when you start a new land to discover that your best school of god powers has been banned, but those don’t actually prevent the game from still rocking.

(And I know some people out there are saying, “Minor interface quibbles! The interface on Populous II was just as bad as the one on Populous!” Well, that means that you never hit F7 while playing the game, which changes the interface from this:

To this:

Nice, huh? It looks and feels very modern and is much easier to use than the default interface. Populous II was the game where the Bullfrog boys finally figured out how to lay out a GUI.)

Also, remaking Populous II meant giving up on the world simulation that had been a part of Planitia’s design since it’s inception. That felt wrong.

In fact, there’s a lot about Planitia’s design that has been feeling wrong. Planitia as originally designed was going to consist of four elements:

A world simulation
An economy-building element
An RTS element, with direct control over military units
World-shaking, screen-destroying god powers

And I am currently unhappy with how every one of those elements feels.

I began to understand this when I was implementing the RTS input scheme. While I wanted direct control over military units in Planitia, I also wanted the RTS elements to be very light. I thought I could get that by trimming down the number of unit types to three, but as I implemented the control scheme for the RTS elements I realized that even with a small number of unit types, the input system was going to be very complicated – and it had to be, because that’s what people would expect. You got band selection? Yes. How about double-clicking a unit to select that unit type across the screen? Yes. Holding shift to add to the current selection? Yes… Assigning groups to function keys? Uh…well…I didn’t want it to be that complex.. Come on, man, how can you leave that out?

This is a YouTube video of master Warcraft III player Grubby doing his thing. Listen to the first minute or so of the match. What you are hearing is everything that is wrong with modern RTS design.

And here I was re-implementing it. It felt tedious and wrong, but what other way was there?

Then I played Powermonger, and my eyes were opened.

Now I’m sure you’re thinking “What the hell?! Viridian, you just completely castigated Powermonger in your video blog!”

True, but Powermonger does some things very right, and one of those things is the General. The General is a single “handle” through which you control your entire army. Thus you do not need to click on each individual unit and tell each individial unit what to do click click click click click. Want to move your army? Click the General and give him a move order; the entire army moves with him. Want to attack something? Click the General, have him attack it. The soldiers in his army are smart enough to just do the right thing in most circumstances. A lot of the player’s work goes away – and a lot of my work goes away as well. No more having to make sure units are far enough apart that they can be individually clicked on. (Because being able to do that is so important…)

Now you might be thinking, “Well, that takes a lot of control away from the player and thus won’t be that fun.” No, it probably wouldn’t be that fun…if that were the only gameplay element in Planitia. But it isn’t. It’s one of a series of elements that will support each other and (hopefully) make for a fun experience.

Playing Powermonger also reminded me of my love of little people. I share Peter Molyneux’s love for little people and I’ve always wanted to make a game that featured them. Thus, the world simulation is coming back. I have no idea how I’m going to do it, but I will do it because I want my own little people. Besides, that technology will really come in handy when I move on to 3D RPG That Really Needs A Name.

As for the economy-building…again, I’m stealing from Powermonger. On every Powermonger map are several pre-created villages, each one running a village simulation. Most of these villages start out neutral and you always start your conquest by finding the weakest one and taking it over.

Hmmm…pre-set villages that provide resources after aligning with a side…sounds like control points to me!

But control points can feel very tug-of-war, and frankly I hate tug-of-war games. So I may make it so that once a village reaches a certain size, people leave it and start another village nearby if suitable terrain can be found (and that’s your job, of course). So while there are initial control points you can also make your own if you can hold out long enough. That feels better. Remember, always give the player a way to trade time for skill (at least against the computer).

It’s weird…these decisions feel good. They feel right. They make me want to work on Planitia full-bore again. Will things change? Probably. But I feel like Planitia’s design has gelled now, which is something I frankly thought would never happen.

And goshwow…

When you know more about what it is you like about these games specifically, then a design will start to form.

You were right, Dave!

Little Jabs of Pleasure

May 9, 2007 Anthony Salter

Game Design Planitia

4 Comments

Okay! The reason I haven’t updated in a while is because I bought a copy of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence.

I’m just getting around to playing MGS3 because I was so afraid it would be as bad as 2. Metal Gear Solid 2 was one of the worst games I ever played, yet it reviewed really well. Why? Because none of the reviewers had the balls to actually come out and say, “Uh…dude, this is one of the worst games I’ve ever played.” Thus, I didn’t feel I could trust all the glowing reviews MGS 3 got when it came out.

But it’s obvious that Hideo Kojima understood that he’d really screwed up with 2 and he had to hit 3 out of the park or his series would become an industry joke. Fortunately that’s exactly what he did.

I also recently completed Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, which is probably the best Castlevania game I’ve ever played (and yes, that means I’m saying it’s better than Symphony of the Night.) If you’ve never played Castlevania and want to try it and you have a GBA or DS, this is the game to get.

And I noticed something similar in both games. I’ve said before that game design is all about giving the player interesting, meaningful choices. I still believe that, but I think great games have a little something extra. They continually give the player a steady stream of small rewards, punctuating this stream with large rewards at regular intervals.

In MGS 3, every time you pick up a new weapon, item or food, you are rewarded twice. First with the object itself and second because you can then call your support team to ask them about the object. These conversations are always interesting and funny. And since you’re always coming across new stuff you get this steady stream of humor injected into the game from beginning to end. There are also hundreds of little secrets to discover in the game. One good one occurs if you save the game right after Snake gets tortured…he has a nightmare that you get to play through. Stuff like this also gives the game great replayability.

In Aria of Sorrow your character of Soma Cruz levels up as he fights monsters, but there’s an additional reward in that every time you kill a monster you have a chance to absorb that monster’s soul, giving you a new ability. The range of abilities is wide and you can equip up to three at once giving you a nice combinatorial explosion, amplified by the fact that some items you find make certain abilities more effective. Thus, there was never a time during the game when I got sick of fighting monsters (and this was aided by the fact that I rarely felt the need to grind levels during the game). Again you have this continual supply of interesting new abilities ensuring that the player never goes too long without being rewarded in some way.

Now, one of the things lots of people don’t like about RTS games is that when you’re playing through the campaign the game gradually reveals the tech tree and unit types, and it’s typically only in the very last mission that you’ve got the full compliment. Well, what’s the problem? Lots of games give you a progression of powers during the course of the game. The problem is that if you play a multiplayer game you get the full set right away so when you go back to campaign mode you feel like someone’s holding your elbows. It feels like a punishment to play the campaign. Perspective.

I’ll have to keep this in mind for Planitia.

Notes on the April Austin Game Developers Meeting

April 23, 2007 Anthony Salter

Cool People Friends Game Design Games The Game Biz

2 Comments

Okay, a bit of backstory. Austin Game Developers was a group that held monthly meetings for game developers in Austin, and I went to those meetings whenever possible for years. That’s where I heard that excellent talk by Phil Steinmeyer about his work on the Heroes of Might and Magic games and the Railroad Tycoon series and the subsequent creation of PopTop.

But about a year ago AGD lost it sponsor and could no longer hold meetings. Things looked bad for a while, but Austin Game Developers finally managed to respawn as the Austin chapter of the International Game Developers Association. And they just held their first meeting a month ago.

Unfortunately I didn’t know about it, so I missed a talk by one of my favorite programmers, Mike McShaffry. Grrr….

But the grapevine did its job and I heard about this month’s meeting, which would feature a three-person panel talking about how to make video games fun. The panel? Richard Garriott of NC Soft, Harvey Smith of Midway, and Chris Cao of Sony Online Entertainment.

(Yes, yes, I know, go ahead and make your “Sony Online? What the heck do they know about making games fun?” crack.)

The meeting was held at Midway’s Austin studio. Just getting to the front door of Midway is an epic-level challenge, as construction has turned the parking lot into a maze. But once inside I was greeted by a very nice-looking game development space. Clean and well-laid-out, with lots of big conference rooms (one of which sports a beautiful projection TV). Big lounge and kitchen space, big offices. But it doesn’t feel too corporate – it definitely feels like a game studio, with Xbox 360s in practically every room you visit and posters, concept art and toys all over the freakin’ place. The only exception – tiny, tiny cubes. It seems that Midway Austin is growing.

When I arrived the Mingling Period was well under way. I saw several friends of mine whom I hadn’t seen since…well, the last AGD meeting. One of them was the Fat Man; it was great seeing him again. And I discovered that several of my friends whose fate I lamented in one of my video blogs ended up at Midway and seem to be doing just fine.

Then they fed us. The food was good but too spicy for me. I got a free alcoholic beverage and asked for a rum-and-Coke, then I put another can of Coke into it and it was drinkable. (Not trying to slight the bartender; please recall that alcohol doesn’t taste very good to me.)

So there I was, drink in hand, listening to some very good game developers speak. Frankly it was the most fun I’ve had in months, and I’d forgotten how much I missed going to those meetings because I always feel recharged and excited about game development afterwards.

Each person on the panel gave a short presentation on what they thought “fun in games” meant and then the panel took questions from the audience. It was fascinating to see how different these three guys were in their philosophies.

Chris Cao was first. His presentation was shortest and highest-level. His basic message was that you can make fun games by having fun making games and fostering an environment where crazy thinking can happen. He said that one of the imagination-building exercises he used was having every member of his team – no matter what their actual duties – make a board or card game so that they all understood the entire game-making process.

Richard Garriott was next. His presentation could not have been more different than Cao’s; the first slide Richard presented said, “Research, research, research!” Richard’s point was that “fun” is hard to define and a real “lightning in a bottle” quality, so the best thing to do was use rigorous procedures and follow basic rules of software design so that the fun could come out unmarred, if it were there. He talked a lot about things like not obscuring what would have been a fun game by making the actual software too hard to use. He also talked about the tropes that gamers tend to respond well to and understand, like numerology and symbolism.

Harvey Smith was last. His talk was closer to Garriott’s than Cao’s, but he had some unique things to say. He didn’t shy completely away from defining “fun” like Garriott did. Instead he presented a concept by Marc LeBlanc, another designer, called The Eight Kinds of Fun. Harvey seems to definitely subscribe to this philosophy and says that the first step to making games fun is to define which of the eight types you’re going to try to provide for your player.

Once all the presentations were over, they took questions from the audience. Some questions drifted away from the topic but nobody seemed to mind. Richard Garriott got the biggest laugh of the night when he responded to a question about game development funding and return-on-investment by saying, “I made Akalabeth in six weeks after school. The cost of development was zero. It made me about $150,000. That’s effectively an infinite return-on-investment, and somehow it’s all been downhill from there.”

Afterwards we retired to the large conference room with the beautiful projection TV I mentioned earlier to play some Guitar Hero II. The Midway guys had completed the experience by decking the room out with disco balls and strobe lights. It was awesome. Fat challenged me to play a song competitively against him; I accepted, sure that I was going to go down to ignominous defeat. We played “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”, and to my great surprise I kicked his ass even though I’d never played the song before.

And he calls himself a musician…:)

Final note: the official wrap-up of this meeting on the IGDA Austin site is here, and you can download the slides for all three of the presentations from that page. You can also see me if you really really want to; I’m in the third picture. I’m sitting in the front row and wearing a black shirt. I am apparently amusing my friend Jamal Blackwell by doing the hand jive.

Eve Online

April 16, 2007 Anthony Salter

Game Design Games

8 Comments

At the behest of a friend, I tried Eve Online.

Eve is dense and slow. It feels like playing a spreadsheet from the get-go, as character creation is far more complex than someone who just started playing the game five minutes ago can possibly understand. What did my final stats mean? No idea! What were my final skills? No idea! What can they be used for? No idea!

It took about two and a half hours to get through the tutorial – and you must go through the tutorial. No, the game doesn’t make you, but if you don’t you won’t have any idea what the hell is going on.

Those two and a half hours were probably the least fun I have ever had playing something that presented itself as a “game”.

For one thing, you have no direct control over your ship. No joystick control here, no. No fancy flyin’, just right-click a point in space on the convenient list and choose “Approach” and you’ll fly there. That’s it.

Combat? As far as I can tell, it’s fully automated – and it’s standard MMO combat dressed up in sci-fi trappings. To fight you fly towards an enemy, lock on target and turn on your gun. If your ship and equipment is superior to his, you win. If not, you lose. That’s it.

Travel in the Eve universe is even worse. Imagine having to endure a gryphon ride in World of Warcraft every time you change zones. That’s how Eve is. I began to groan every time I was given a mission that required me to fly to a new solar system because I knew I’d be sitting there doing nothing for ten minutes while the autopilot flew the ship.

I gave this game two and a half hours to present me with something exciting or compelling and it completely failed. I’ve got thirteen days left on my trial, and I would rather work on Planitia than play this game again.

Dear God in heaven, first we lose Privateer Online for Earth & Beyond and now this? Can nobody make a real massively-multiplayer outer space combat/trading game? Is it just not possible?! That’s the MMO I really want and nobody will freakin’ make it! Why?

(Sorry Nathan.)

EDIT: Okay, what did I like about Eve?

I liked the fact that it wasn’t Yet Another Fantasy MMO.

I liked the fact that the entire game takes place on one server. When you meet another Eve player in real life you can actually find him in the game guaranteed because there’s only one server.

I liked the fact that the client is only about 700 megs in size and there’s no significant patching after installation before you can play.

The game is quite pretty.

Nathan pointed out to me that the density and pace of the game keeps out the 1337 kiddies, and this was borne out in my play experience last night. I didn’t see any chat in any of the channels that wasn’t mature and on-topic.

If everything took about half as long to do as it does in Eve then I would probably love it.

Coming to Grips

April 10, 2007 Anthony Salter

Game Design

3 Comments

All my games have been…”re-imaginings”, if you will, of games I’ve enjoyed in the past. The problem I had with Planitia is that it’s going to be so obvious that I’m drawing my inspiration directly from Populous II. But I just need to come to grips with the fact that I am not a brilliant designer, and the games I want to make tend to be similar to games I’ve played in the past and enjoyed but can no longer really enjoy, for one reason or another.

The interfaces for the early Ultimas frankly sucked, and getting them to run nowadays is a pain. I tried to fix that with Inaria.

Populous II had some problems with both its interface and how the player progressed through the game, and getting it to run nowadays is a pain. I’m trying to fix that with Planitia.

Ultima VII was a 3D game presented from a 2D standpoint, which created some design problems. Its inventory system was one of the worst I’ve ever seen and its combat was mediocre at best. And getting it to run nowadays…you see where I’m going. I’m going to try to fix all that with 3D RPG That Really Needs a Name.

And after that it’ll probably be an action game of some kind.

Populous: The Beginning

April 6, 2007 Anthony Salter

Game Design Games Planitia

4 Comments

This is another game I recently dug up and played as research for Planitia.

Now, when it first came out I actively hated it, but as I’ve played it more it’s grown on me.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its share of problems.

For starters, I actively hate hate hate the title, especially since it supplanted the clever, original title which was “Populous: The Third Coming”.

And then there’s the fact that Populous: The Beginning isn’t a Populous game. Not by a long shot. In Populous you play a god. In P:TB you play a shaman who wishes to become a god and can only do so by destroying all the other shaman god-candidates that stand in her way. P:TB’s gameplay is much closer to a traditional real-time strategy game than to a Populous game. In fact, the game it most closely resembles is not Populous, but Sacrifice.

P:TB’s gameplay seems to be simultaneously too slow and too fast. It takes forever to build your base and expand your population. On the other hand, combat is completely frenetic and is hampered by both UI issues and targeting issues. Nothing is more annoying than needing to kill a priest right now but not being able to because he’s surrounded by his warriors and thus you can’t properly target him with your Blast spell.

And as if that weren’t bad enough there are other control issues. Half the time when I try to drag a box around a group of units it doesn’t work. Why? Well, look at this screenshot:

See that sky? Looks nice, doesn’t it? But if you click a little too high and start your box in the sky area of the screen rather than the ground area of the screen, your selection box won’t draw and you won’t select anything.

So what does clicking on the sky do? Why, nothing, of course. P:TB borked itself from a playability standpoint solely so that the player can look at the sky, meriting a place alongside Ultima IX and Sacrifice in a category I call “What Price SKY? DUN-DUN-DUN!”

In the end, P:TB is not the terrible game I thought it was when I first played it but it’s certainly not great either. It’s certainly not worthy of the Populous name and I was unable to draw any inspiration from it.

Mighty Acorns

April 5, 2007 Anthony Salter

Cool People Game Design Game Programming Name That Game!

3 Comments

The screenshot I presented yesterday was a visual representation of the galaxy map of the original Elite. I generated it myself from the game data.

So why wasn’t such a map actually available inside the game itself? Surely providing such a map would have been very helpful to the player.

The answer is because in order to draw such a map and make it interactive, you would have to have the entire dataset for the galaxy in memory at once, and Elite couldn’t do that.

The designers of Elite, Ian Bell and David Braben, had a problem. The machines they were designing Elite for had at most 16k of RAM. One of the premises of Elite was that you were exploring a large section of the galaxy, one 256×256 units in area. This galactic sector had 256 star systems in it. Each star system would have data for its own unique name, tech level, economic level, government type, population level, productivity level, price for each trade good, and even a couple lines of text describing the most interesting aspects of the system. Each star system required four 16-bit values for this data. Thus, storing the entire galactic map would have required 2048 bytes of data – 2k, or 1/8 the amount of total space usable by the game. And when you’ve also got ship data to store and a 3D engine to run that’s just not good enough.

But Bell and Braben didn’t need access to the entire galactic data set at once. They typically only needed the data for the current star system the player was visiting.

Realizing this allowed them to solve the problem through the use of procedurally generated content. They started with three sixteen-bit numbers, which could range from 0 to 65535. These were called seed0, seed1, and seed2, and the values for the original Elite galaxy were 23114, 584 and 46931. These were not generated but were stored in code.

They then created a function called “tweakseed” that would create new numbers based on the existing ones. This function would also push the existing values “up”, getting rid of the oldest one and putting the new one into seed2. Here’s the C version of tweakseed from Bell’s Text Elite sources:

void tweakseed(seedtype *s)
{
    uint16 temp;
    temp = ((*s).w0)+((*s).w1)+((*s).w2); /* 2 byte aritmetic */
    (*s).w0 = (*s).w1;
    (*s).w1 = (*s).w2;
    (*s).w2 = temp;
}

Thus, before the first run of tweakseed, the seeds would have their initial values:

seed1 == 23114 seed2 == 584 seed3 == 46931

Running tweakseed once would generate a new seed, 5093, and the values would then look like this:

seed1 == 584 seed2 == 46931 seed3 == 5093

Since these values were generated by a function, they were predictable. They were random but in a controlled fashion. The game would use four seed values for each planetary system; thus, if the game needed the data for star system 113, it could just run tweakseed 448 times and then use the next four seeds as its data. The data would always be the same; thus, star systems would stay put. “Jumping” to a new star system was simply a matter of clearing out the data for the previous star system and replacing it with the generated data for the star system the player was jumping to.

Thus, these three numbers and this one small function represented an entire galaxy inside Elite. And as as if that weren’t enough, it didn’t just represent one galaxy. By changing the three starting seeds you change the entire galaxy. Since the three starting seeds could range from 0 to 65535 each, this formula could generate 281,474,976,710,656 galaxies. And initially Bell and Braben were going to allow the user to input their own seeds so that each player could play in his own private galaxy. They were overridden by the publisher, who felt that it was a bad idea to emphasize the fact that the galaxies were random. So Bell and Braben chose eight seed sets to represent the eight galaxies of the classic Elite Universe.

Procedurally generated content is all the rage nowadays, but it’s a very old concept. (As is sandbox gameplay, something Elite also pioneered decades before Grand Theft Auto III.) The interesting thing is that nowadays we are looking to generated content for exactly the opposite reason Bell and Braben did. Bell and Braben used generated content in Elite because they didn’t have the space to store their entire dataset at once. We are looking to generated content because we’ve got so much storage space that we can’t possibly hand-create enough content to fill it.

Viridian Games

Category: Game Design