Plan for the Year

I've always been an ideas person. Never been a great artist and I can’t stand using Maya (the mere thought of the camera makes my blood boil). The start of every game comes from its core mechanics and the relationship between them and the environments in which to use those mechanics. I’d like to explore those relationships and find out just what gamers respond to.

It took me a LONG time to get out of the mindset of making games for myself instead of from others and I think it’s key to expand on that idea this year. Communication is the absolute key to a designer, putting your thoughts and concepts into someone else’s mind is the biggest challenge I think any creative job requires. Causing a reaction when you’ve got your idea in someone is something else entirely...

I’ve always been fascinated how stories can have such a powerful effect on people, films, music, books and video games. Out of all those media forms video games, I’d say, have had the biggest impact on me. It wasn’t really till the late 90’s when games like Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII, Oddworld, Spyro, Ocarina of Time, these games all had a massive impact on me as a child. I was a slave to many of those games, offering up my social life in a heartbeat for just a few more minutes with them. They brought out a feeling in me nothing else ever has.

The question I ask myself is, why? Why did they make me feel like that? I’ve since made it life ambition to somehow find a way to create and give that amazing feeling to others. To this day I can’t work out what it was about those games which made them feel so special to me. Sure I was a kid and more easily impressed those days, in my age I've become more cynical and more difficult to please but I can still go back now, play those games and get that same magic feeling. At first I put it down to clear nostalgia. Memory is very unreliable and nostalgia allows me to overlook any flaws and chalk it down to ‘Well it IS 10 years old...’.  I wish I could play Metal Gear Solid or Resident Evil 2 in 2010 for the first time and see how I would react to it nostalgia free.

Saying that I still stand by the fact that Resident Evil 2 and Metal Gear Solid are excellent games even by today’s standards. People will whinge about the pre-rendered and fixed camera of Resident Evil or the lack of first person perspective in Metal Gear Solid but the point is those games were designed with those mechanics in mind.

It infuriates me to no end when people complain that a mechanic from one game isn’t present in another. The environments and obstacles in Metal Gear Solid were not designed for first person perspective shooting; introducing that mechanic on a whim would simply break the game. Funnily enough, that’s just what the Silicon’ Knights remake on the GameCube ‘Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes’ did. Keeping the environment and level designs 99% in tact from the original they implemented all the new mechanics from Metal Gear Solid 2; first person aiming, rolling, climbing, holding hostages etc. But really all this did for me was make the entire game feel shallow and empty. All these features had no place or actual use in the game.

The first boss against Revolver Ocelot is a battle of stamina and wit...- Oh wait, just hit L and shoot him in the head.

The Resident Evil remake on the GC on the other hand is a fantastic example of a remake done right. It didn't simply take the environments from the Playstation original and improve models/texture resolutions; it took the original game and added dozens of extra content and improvements to make use of the new mechanics and features created for the remake.

In the original, kill a zombie and it's body will disappear. In the remake, kill a zombie and it'll come back to life as a super zombie and rip your head off.

These games only highlight the importance of the relationship between the game design and the game mechanics. What's also important is the effect these games have on us and why they have that effect. I'm sure I'm not alone in experiencing the awe-inspiring moment you first sail the sea in Wind Waker, the terrifying tension whilst traversing Silent Hill or the sense of 'badassery' from ripping out a Cyclops eye in God of War. This year it will be my job of finding out how these feelings and effects can be applied through game mechanics and level design.