Memory Unlocked

I like the way Todd Howard thinks about game design. Yes, there are valid criticisms of his last decade of video games, but I sometimes listen to his DICE 2012 talk on road trips and other interviews of that kind. I’ve talked about Bethesda on my YouTube channel and probably in lots of other places before, so the reason for writing this now is that I had a memory unlocked while listening to one of these interviews. I specifically remember learning that the team traveled when they were concepting a game—for vibes, color palette, popular landmarks, etc. This was pre-photogrammetry in video games, so now more than ever it makes sense to travel in real life when you want to create a 3D environment. Pulling on that thread, it occurred to me that faraway places had much more mystique and awe for me when Skyrim came out. I had only really ever been to places in Texas prior to that, and ironically enough, I actually missed the launch of the game because I was on a trip to Taiwan with my parents. So I think: traveling, being able to do whatever you want, buy whatever you want, etc.—those things had way more appeal to me as a kid than they do now.

Another thing I think Bethesda does really well is tone, feeling, and conveying worldbuilding. Everything from inventing a Dragon language to the environmental detail of a skeleton corpse clutching something in its hands—all of it adds to the sense of place. Memory Unlock #2: I can actually remember my first time ever making it to Winterhold. I remember feeling like it took forever, and that a sabertooth tiger or a bear would keep killing me, so I had to be super careful. When I finally made it, I’m pretty sure I just saved and turned off the game. I was so relieved to have made it, which is kind of a weird feeling I don’t think I’ve had in a game since.

I was playing the Oblivion remake earlier this summer when it came out, which kind of felt like getting a new Elder Scrolls game in a weird way. One of the mechanics they did away with between Oblivion and Skyrim was leveling up on sleep. I think it’s so immersive and satisfying to level up in a dungeon somewhere and know, “Hey, I’m going to turn this quest in and then I need to find an inn and take a rest.” Something that stands out to me is that aside from the Dark Brotherhood questline, nothing else really capitalizes on the fact that the player is going to sleep at regular intervals. I think it would be cool to see a Scrolls-like game where the road is more treacherous at night, so you want to make camp or find an inn quickly when night falls. And no fast travel! I used to hear about no-fast-travel playthroughs and never really got the point until now. You miss so many vistas and points of interest if you just teleport from place to place. I really feel like open-world games as a whole could benefit from taking a more grounded approach to basic systems we just take for granted now, which do everything for you in the UI, without turning the game into a survival game.

What does this mean for G4G?

Naturally, while contemplating all this Elder Scrolls stuff (please just ESVI, good Bethesda!), I turned to the project I’m working on and started to think more critically about the atmosphere and experience I want to convey in my game. I don’t really have one. I’ve had this sinking feeling for the last few months that what I have so far is just a pretty basic horde shooter. To give an update: I actually had a lot of ideas I wanted to pursue that I just don’t think I can execute on, which has been really disappointing.

For example, I had this idea that the Droids in the game could be grapple-hooked down to surfaces or even lassoed by players and NPC characters. To do this, I needed a grapple gun. This is where everything kind of fell apart and where my summer went. I’m actually on my fifth character controller implementation. Each one took several weeks to get right and, of course, in an FPS game the character controller is hooked into everything: the UI, the enemies, the networking stack… all of it. It sits in the middle, takes input from the player, and does things to the world. If you think about it, the character controller is the video game, and everything else is just setting.

At the time I got started on the grapple gun, I just had one other assault rifle implemented into my v3 character controller, based on a Kinemation procedural FPS asset in Unity. The moment I went to add another gun, everything fell apart. I realized it would actually take a lot of work and one-off code to make this new gun even function, since it wasn’t like a normal bullet-shooting gun. And then, if I wanted ten guns, I’d have to do that nine more times, which just felt overwhelming. I skipped v4 of my character controller and jumped ahead to today, where I’m using another Kinemation asset pack that does all the FPS stuff for you and even comes with a bunch of guns. It just feels way better to play than anything I created myself from scratch, and I even created a whole slew of third-person animations to go with it. Now, when you look at the ground, you actually see a shadow of yourself, which hadn’t been in the game before. After all this effort to get v5 of the animation system up and running, I still couldn’t get the RPG to shoot a grapple hook. That crushed me when I finally admitted defeat after a few days of importing/exporting to and from Blender and writing custom systems.

But I’m not giving up on this project like I have in years past, and August actually marked one year of development—meaning September is now the longest I’ve worked on anything. So I started asking myself what I could execute on with the parts that I already have. I don’t want to commit to anything here and feel bad down the road if I change the concept again, but I do feel like I can share a few details without fully committing.

I’ve always liked Valorant since it came out, as well as NCAA Football—probably two of my most-played games alongside Skyrim. I’m playing with the idea that maybe this becomes more like a MOBA. But instead of destroying towers and titans like in Smite, you advance a ball into a goal. I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but I think a MOBA with Valorant-style combat could be interesting. I just worry about getting enough concurrent players to make matchmaking work. At least in a horde shooter you can solo it and not really feel like you’re wasting your time. In a sport, I feel like you’d want a real player on the other end. Then again, I did play a ton of NCAA Dynasty completely offline back in the day, so maybe this is overblown.