AUTHOR’S NOTE: This started off as a reply to teh_leet_haxor’s article from earlier this week. It is an unwritten rule with the RCM Creative team that if one’s reply post starts acquiring its own footnotes, it’s usually best to spin off onto it’s own seperate (but connected) article piece. Due to a combination of sleep deprivation and genuine interest in the original topics, the following post grew to do just that. That said, if you haven’t read Experimental game development concepts yet, you need to read that first in order for the following to make any sense.
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As I was reading through your article this evening, my interest was piqued on a number of things, not the least of which was what in the hell a cloudy lemon was (because it sounded new and delicious and I immediately wanted one). Alas, as with my adventures in finding a proper crumpet, Google informed me that this was not only something I already consume regularly under a different name, but something I actually had in my hand at that very moment, sipping on while I was reading. That minor disappointment aside, here are my thoughts/ideas/suggestions regarding the other things that caught my interest, as well as specific scenarios where some of your ideas could be implemented:
1. Regarding your idea for reverse levelling/character regression – I can think of a lot of scenarios where this could be an excellent game dynamic, but in particular I’m thinking of one of the many iterations of the sadly-still-fictional RCM: The Game. I don’t remember if you were in the original conversation or not, but the idea was that you play a “typical day” in the life of an RCM staffer. Which staff character you pick will determine what quests are available to you, how you interact with different objects in the game, and what each character’s levels would look like. So for example, if you played as Varyar, one level would be spent brokering deals at the sports store (smoking cigarettes between customers replenishes your calm, but be careful- you only have half a pack!), another would be spent traversing the grocery store while your friends are providing color commentary in TeamSpeak, another where you’re yelling at hippies, etc1. In this sort of gameplay, the character regression would make a lot of sense because the beginning of your game would be the beginning of the character’s day – they’d have higher energy as they’d just woken up/infused with caffeine, they’d be calmer, they could have more resources at their disposal, etc. As the day goes on, that changes – they get tired, they have to consume resources and decide what to use when, they have to deal with other characters (NPC’s generally, though not always, sap their calm and/or mood). It would make sense in this case for them to “reverse level” as the game progressed. (It should be noted that The Sims does this as well, but I always picture RCM: The Game as more of an 8-bit old school brand of awesome with a bit simpler mechanics than what goes into the current Sims iterations.)
2. I am all for the idea of slow time events as well, in my case mainly because my playing of console games is about as frequent as Pluto’s completing a traverse around our sun – it does happen, there’s just a really, really long time between those instances. The result is that I don’t have a natural feel for the controls (actual dialogue exchange: “Um, you’re holding the controller upside down.” “DON’T TELL ME HOW TO LIVE MY LIFE!”2) and it therefore takes me a bit longer to figure out where the button is that I need to hit when those stupid quick-time things come up. It’s stressful. Fun should not be stressful. This is why on console I prefer to stick with games that either a) allow me to set fire to sheep and watch them turn into butterflies3, or b) steal cars and run people over while laughing maniacally, because this is for some reason frowned upon in real life.4
3. And for those who enjoy the thrill of quickly pushing the buttons, might I propose RCM expands her horizons a bit with the creation of a new RCM/Bippy Industries collaboration. The game would be called “Button Mash 20XD,” where the sole purpose is to correctly press the appropriate button that shows up on screen as quickly as you can. But watch out – because I’m involved in the creative development, if the player presses an incorrect button, they get shocked through their controller (not a game where the player would want to implement your max difficulty scaling idea).
4. Excepting music and certain books, I already do a kind of “late access” for most of my media consumption5. This is partially to let developers work all the bugs out (in games), partially for the cost factor, and primarily because I’m always busy doing things, so when I make a purchase it’s apt to sit in my inventory for some time until I actually get around to it. It’s not exactly the pay-ahead-of-time idea you referred to, but for certain things, I’d be amenable to that idea. So as an aside to Baron – see, honey, it’s not laziness, it’s late accessing!
I think I need to sleep now.
1 For this post I was referring specifically to the PC version, but there had been talk that in the Wii version of RCM: The Game, there would be an entire special level for V where the screen is just an American flag and you have to hold the Wiimote over your heart and sing the Star Spangled Banner. Sayo suggested at the end there be a fly-by and maybe some digital fireworks exploding in the background. I may have, again, suggested some sort of zapping mechanism for the controller that activates when someone screws up the words to the song – COME ON PEOPLE IT SHOULDN’T BE THAT DIFFICULT.
2 The reason I was holding the controller upside down was the cat knocked a water glass over next to said controller when Baron had left the room, and I was making sure no liquid got into the charge connection. This is what I get for being considerate.
3 Spyro the Dragon. There’s another level where you go through a portal to a nighttime world, and when you set fire to frogs, they turn into fireflies. Don’t judge me.
4 GTA (obviously), but while we’re on the topic I think there should be some sort of certification course where one could take like a precision driving training and “level up” their driver’s license. I imagine the exchange with the cops to go something like this:
COP: “Ma’am, you ran four stop lights before jumping the sidewalk and fishtailing around the public fountain with all your windows down, yelling ‘wheeeee.’ What do you have to say for yourself?”
ME: *flashes special uber-license*
COP: “Oh, I’m terribly sorry for stopping you. I should have known by the way you sassily slid on your sunglasses with one hand while maneuvering your vehicle with the other. It was very impressive how you missed all pedestrians, with the exception of that fugitive purse-snatcher.”
ME: “Just doing my part to be a good citizen, Officer.” *peels out as epic movie music plays*
5 And thanks to the draconian foolishness of international copyright law, even my books are often subject to the late access policy. Not because I don’t want them three months before the publication date, but because UK authors tend to publish in the UK first and then, if I’m lucky, American publishers will pick it up for sale in the US roughly seventeen years later. I did, for a very brief period of time in college, manage to trick Amazon into letting me have an AmazonUK account (which was f**king AMAZING), but now have to resort to an elaborate network of totally awesome British persons to acquire and export my fix.
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