Back in the day my favorite Warcraft III custom maps were the Hero Sieges: 1-8 players select from a huge cast of powerful heroes, who are tasked with defending a single point from an onslaught of thousands of enemies. Heavy Metal Marauders is my take on the old school hero sieges, but with a much more polarized combat system, gigantic maps (no more lanes), multiple defensive AND offensive objectives, in-depth character builds, all set within a universe inspired by the most elemental of all music: Metal.
The game features 4 characters, each a Chieftain of a tribal Metal clan who constantly war with one-another over whose genre of Metal is king: Power, Death, Thrash and Black. Players choose a Chieftain, and set forth to reclaim lost Ancestral Relics back from the foreign hordes using the power of their Metal.
The biggest gameplay feature is the "Riffs", which serves as the games' spell casting system. Upon activating a Riff, the Chieftain flips his Axe around and begins to play as a Guitar-Hero style tab chart pops up, requiring players to hit all the notes correctly in order to cast the ability. Its similar to the system from Brutal Legend, but is much more active: players can (and are expected to) move around as they try to hit the notes, and isn't so much of a "key" or "do this Chord in order to proceed" as in BL; Riffs are more like using spells/abilities in an MMO. They kill baddies good, save your beleathered butt, or help you move across the map.
Speaking of...Brutal Legend (while fantastic, go buy it now) is more of a game about Metal: it has all the wonderful cameos from Ozzy, Lemmy and Halford, it has forests built out of Judas Priest-esque bike tailpipes and engine blocks, its all very "Hey that's metal because it reference things from metal bands!"
HMM on the other hand is metal because its just really, really ...metal: The Black Metal Chieftain can summon gigantic demon-mouths from the ground and chomp enemies in half, he can turn enemies inside out by pointing at them and laughing, he can unleash a Metal wail (think intro to Immortal - Hordes to War) that destroys the souls of his enemies, leaving lifeless husks shuffling about in his wake, PLUS he rides around the battlefield on a goddamn flying Metal throne.
We also have the Death Metal Chieftain who wields these immense blood-fueled CHAINSAWRITARS: a guitar with a motor for a body, tanks of blood on his back, and chainsaw teeth all along the neck; you think he gives a shit if it shreds into his fret hand? Hell no! He's WAY too metal to let that stop him from busting out sick riffs that summon rain blood storms, build huge 300-style corpse walls, and rock so hard that the intensity randomly severs limbs of those who approach the madness.
Here's a video of my ongoing proof-of-concept. This is a small map for the game; its more of just a testing ground, but it shows the basic elements of gameplay.
Shipped Titles
Product Manager @ Southpeak Interactive (May 2011 - October 2012)
Cargo Commander (PC, Mac - Digital)
Dementium II (PC, Mac port from DS)
Stronghold 3 and Blackstaff DLC (PC, Mac - Digital, Retail)
Kung Fu Strike: The Warrior's Rise (360, PC - Digital)
Phantom Breaker (360 - Retail)
Minute to Win It (Kinect - Retail)
Minor Lords: Archibald & Remus (iOS, Android)
Monster Madness: Grave Danger (Android)
4 in 1 Action Pack (PS3 - Retail)
Personal Projects
Student @ University of Texas at Dallas (ATEC: Game Design, August 2006-2011)
Emotional AI and the "Soul Map" - Senior Capstone Project with professor Adam Brackin (Analog)
For my capstone project I wanted to try to tackle one of the major problems in the games industry. Artificial Intelligence is processor-heavy (good ones anyway), so most games make do with scripts instead. This works well for most titles, but it leaves one to wonder what it would be like to interact with truly realistic AI.
The best AI we have seen in a commercial release is Steve Grand's Creatures. I set out to take the behaviorism philosophy employed in Creatures to the next level: emotions. I want players to build relationships with NPCs. I want NPCs to display love, hate, fear, envy in true behaviorism fashion. Bioware's fantastic RPGs try to emulate this, but the results are the same every time, which makes the relationships feel canned or scripted; I can get a character to fall in love with me by following a strict series of steps. True emotional AI must be procedural, it must be built from values that change based on actions performed and decisions made. Enter the "Soul Map".
The Soul Map is a massive chart of broad emotional traits that make up a human's personality. I built it from personality tests, a boatload of research, many nagging emails to psychology department heads, and a few working psychologists in the DFW area. Since I only had 6 months to pen this thing out and get a working analog prototype/example-of-theory, I had to downsize my list by about 80%. The result was a chart built from a mere 17 traits. Each trait was ranged from -4 to +4, so 136 values. An action in the game changed the traits's value based on what was done/said (or not done/said). NPCs then react to each other based on their Soul Map.
The funny thing is with all of this is that the Player is capable of acting independently of their Soul Map. The Player can do whatever the hell they want at any time. The Soul Map just tells the world how to treat the Player, not the other way around. So in a way, the Player is the only character with free will. Free will is not something that I could tackle in the scope of this project for my NPCs. Instead, they acted based on the values in their Soul Map: if they had high Generosity, they did Generous things and were treated/taken advantage of by others accordingly. Their level of Generosity would only change as they were affected by other spiteful NPCs. An NPC left in isolation did not grow (negatively or positively) at all, they remained stagnant. All in all, working on this project was not only a big step in the massive undertaking of creating such a huge AI, but was also an interesting journey in the Behaviorism versus Free Will debate. It was also, of course, a whole lot of fun.Balls to the Walls (Analog)
A unique feature of MMORPGs have is that the players are able to interact with oneanother, but keep their true identity hidden. How does this impact gameplay? How does it affect how players...play? What changes does it have on formed relationships?
With Balls to the Walls my team and I created a turn-based, hexgrid, "hold on to the ball" style game, with an awesome 80's metal themed board and pieces; think Smash TV + Running Man. To explore the anonymity of MMOs in an analog game, turns are handled by movement sheets that are filled out, handed to the designated GM, shuffled, then executed in the order that they are drawn. Players have 3 moves they can do per turn: move a space, build a wall, or sacrifice a move to move to the front of the draw. If a player moves on top of another, they are "stomped" and sent back to their spawn point. If the stomped player was holding the ball, the stomping player gets it.
This is by far my favorite game I worked on. The mad sprint to the center at the start, the tactful sprinting and stomping in mid-game, and then the late-game wall fest all led to both alliances forming and mortal enemies created, exacerbated by the anonymity.Vikings Vs. Zombies (Analog)
Throughout the course of studying game design one thing becomes clear: Dungeons & Dragons is to modern gaming as Kevin Bacon is to movies. Pretty much every game can trace a mechanic or element back to D&D.
Vikings Vs. Zombies is a tribute to the pervasiveness of D&D: a hexgrid, analog team-based RTS where each player controls a hero with a custom skill loadout, as well as being able to summon units. Super technical, it plays like a smaller version of Footman Arena, the famous WC3 custom game. Heroes range from Zombie Amelia Earhart, and Zombie Tutankhamun to Odin, Thor, and Freyja. Each team mirrors the other in terms of stats/gameplay: some are heavy slow melees, others are fast ranged.
The goal of the game is to capture a set amount of resources the other team creates and places on the board. This resource unit increases the amount of units a team can spawn. Is it worth it to create more units, but run the risk of having more nodes to defend?
No comments:
Post a Comment