Paying to sit next to your children

Apparently, British Airways will now introduce a fee that allows you to specify your preferred seat on a flight in advance. This will be the only way you can be assured of sitting next to your family. Hmm. You know, normally when you set a price it is for something valuable. I have often fantasised about what might happen if I couldn't sit next to my children on a flight. Sure, they might be traumatised but still ...

Anyhow, guilt (particularly the costs on airline staff) has always kept those fantasies from becoming reality. But if the airlines are making it difficult with a charge, then surely all bets are off. Oh dear, I forgot to pay the fee. I guess you'll just have to take care of my child. Hard to imagine paying to stop that!

Parallax trix

Since many seemed to enjoy the parallax mapping showed off in the material editor, I just wanted to show off the more advanced way of doing it and also giving some explanations.

No Parallax
This is when no parallax effect is added, just boring and flat. What happens is that the engine simple interpolates the uv-coordinate (the position on the texture map) according to the vertices (the points) of the model.

Offset Parallax

This technique is really just a cheap trick and as seen in the picture it fails at steep angles. Despite this, as the material editor video showed, it still gives a good effect in most cases! The way it works is by adding an offset to the uv coordinate depending on the height of the height map and of the angle of the eye (compared to position of the pixel). The biggest problem with this is that a pixel can never occlude (be in front of) another.

Relief mapping
This algorithm is a lot more accurate than offset mapping, but also a lot more expensive. This is no longer a cheap trick and works by casting a ray from the position of the eye and into the height map. It is then computed where the ray first hit something and the uv coordinate of that point is used. This sort of ray casting is used in all advanced parallax techniques, but is implemented differently. In relief mapping, one first steps along the ray at certain intervals and looks for an intersection. When one is found a binary search is used between the intersection and the eye position to pin point the exact intersection point. The binary search means that the distance between eye and the first found position is halved over and over, locking in on the intersection.

Other techniques such a cone step mapping give even better results but require the height map to be set up with certain extra data that is calculated before the rendering starts. There are also techniques for letting the height map not only occlude itself but also the other objects in the scene. It can even carve the actual model to better fit the height map, see "Relief Maps with Silhouttes" here for an example. This really takes the technique to new heights (ha..ha...) and it is really cool how much can be done with what starts out as a flat surface!

I'm a Material Boy

Sorry for the long period with no tool show off. Blogging sure takes time :P

Here's the HPL Material Editor, our latest addition to the tool suite. This is what we use to create, edit and preview materials with. In a nutshell, a material is what's gonna determine how an object is going to look like in the engine. As of now, we have three basic types of materials:
- SolidDiffuse, which we use to model solid surfaces. Take a bit of a bump map, and another bit of a heightmap and you will have a more than convincing rock like material for example :)
- Translucent, to create a "glass like" look - Windows, ice... transparent stuff falls in this material type.
- Water, the most bleeding edge feature in the engine right now, used to simulate "liquid objects". Just like water in Penumbra, but now with more Reflection(tm).

Of course, it wouldn't be a HPL2 tool if it hadn't a realtime preview window, which is what really makes the tool worth it. In the good old Penumbra days, one would have to edit the material using the HPLHelper app, but then testing how the material looked meant having to start an independent viewer program, a bit of a pain if you ask me. The preview window features cubemapped and flat colored background, different preview models (ie cube, cylinder, sphere and plane), and lighting with customizable colors.

And last, but not least, here's a little video showing the Material Editor in action, in standalone mode (yeah it is also integrated in the other editors)

By the way, that "blackness" artifact at the edges of the water plane are caused by the current preview window setup. Looks like I'm gonna need to fix that... :P

Puzzles in horror games. Part 5.

Due to illness and an unhealthy obsession in making rendered water look nice this post is a little late. Hopefully no harm has been caused :)

Figuring out a good puzzle is often a hard and tricky process. Sometimes a puzzles presents itself from story and environment naturally, but more often it is put in just to add some gameplay and/or slow the player down. This means first coming up with some kind of obstacle and then designing some sort of solution for overcoming it. During this process, and especially when "forcing" a puzzles into the game, one has to consider a couple of things. The most important of these are:

Enjoyment
How fun a puzzle is to solve and how unique is it both determine the level of enjoyment a player gets from trying to figure and actually solving a puzzle. Solving the same kind of puzzles over and over is never fun and any appearance of a sliding puzzle is bound to bring forward feelings of unhappiness.

Cleverness
While a bit related to Enjoyment, a clever puzzles does not really need to be fun, it just needs to have a solution that makes the player think out of the box. A clever puzzles often includes using something in a non-obvious way and/or piecing together several fragments of information. If a game mainly relies on solving puzzles (such as Professor Layton), having clever solutions becomes extra important.

World Coherence
This means how well the puzzle fits with the story/world and is often the hardest part to accomplish. A puzzle with good world coherence adds realism and immersion to the game, while a bad one pulls the player out of the experience. In order to obtain high coherence a puzzle must fit with the story and also suite the world and not feel out-of-place.

When designing puzzles for Penumbra and our upcoming game, it is always a balance between these. Sometimes a puzzle might fit perfectly with the story but just be really dull and sometimes a fun puzzle does not fit at all with the game world. It is almost impossible to come up with a puzzle that "score" high in all the above criteria, so one has to concentrate on something.

In horror games, where immersion is key, it is probably best to always make sure that no puzzle feels out of place. For some reason many action based horror games seem to forget this and are filled with mood breaking puzzles. In Penumbra we did our best to have as high world-coherence and often had to sacrifice other criteria in order to do so. This is one of the reasons why Requiem contains so little story, we wanted for once to concentrate on the making fun and clever puzzles.

Most (at least we hope so!) puzzles in Penumbra where not dull and stupid, but often we concentrated on either making it clever or fun. In the cryo-chamber, getting the head out of the jar was not a very rewarding puzzles to solve, but the main idea there was to let the player do something fun (who does not like playing around with severed head?), instead of teasing the player's brain. Figuring out how to enter the cryo-chamber was instead an attempt at making a clever puzzles and required several pieces of information to be linked.

By trying to vary puzzles like this we hope to have made the experience more interesting. As discussed earlier, games does not need focus on creating joyful feelings all the time. By letting the player sweat over a more complicated task, more emotions can be added to the game and end up being a more rewarding experience. Adding instances of more fun and simple puzzle in between breaks things up and make the brain-teasing parts stand out more.

This brings me to the final issues one has to consider. Difficulty. I did not include it in the list above because, while an important thing to ponder, it is quite a different beast. The main problem lies in that when a solution is known it is no longer hard to solve, and thus it can be hard for designer to now the difficulty of a problem. Even so, it is a very important part of the gameplay and the time spent pondering a puzzle plays a large role in the gameplay flow. At times it might be fitting to throw a harder challenge at the player and other times the player should be able to solve it quickly. Especially when a situation is meant to be frightening, having the player scribbling on a note in the "real world" is not good for the mood.

Pretty much the only thing that can be used to test difficulty is extensive play testing, but this being time consuming and expensive (especially since the same person can not reliably test something twice) other methods are needed. I usually try to "wipe" my mind, think myself in the situation of the first time player and imagine the moves she would make. This is actually not far from the tactic used when designing scary situations, something that also greatly relies on an unknowing player. Designing puzzles is actually kind of related to creating a horror atmosphere in that one has to try mess with another person's mind and supply hints, confuse, etc in order to create a satisfying experience. This is yet another reasons why horror games and puzzles are such a good fit.

What do you think is most important criteria for a good puzzles? As always we are also eager to hear feedback on puzzles present in Penumbra with the above in mind!

Up with Pixar

You know when we take the kids to see an animated movie, I'm not expecting to have my emotions manipulated. A few chuckles is a good outcome. A plot that makes sense leaves me satisfied. And avoiding of positions or morals that make me cringe can top it off. I am not looking for anything more.

Well, Up! -- this year's Pixar flick -- finally arrived in Australia this weekend and I can only warn parents out there: don't expect to come out of it with your emotions unscathed. It has sad, dare I say it, tear jerking moments, that make Bambi's mother getting shot a comparatively delightful event. You can't walk out of the theatre and leave this movie behind.

That said, apparently that view of the movie kicks in at around age 9. In our family discussion thereafter as to whether the movie was happy or sad (overall), the 5 and 8 year old saw it as completely happy while the 10, 39 and 41 year old called it anything but an upper. So this is a rare movie that gives adults and adult-response and leaves children thinking that it was just another, albeit very amusing -- let's face it, talking dogs are always going to be a winner -- animated movie. How Pixar did it, I have no idea. But I won't be going into any of their films so unprepared again.

The class matching problem

In Slate, Emily Bazelon talks about the class assignment problem. This is the annual task schools face in allocating students to classes. They need to do it on the basis of getting a good mix on classes and avoiding relationships with problematic external effects; for instance, separating out would-be bullies. The problem is that parental (and indirectly, child) preferences intervene. They have preferences for friends but also, and this is where it gets much stickier, for teachers. And that makes the whole class assignment problem far more complex.

Bazelon examines the moral issues here -- should a parent engage in what is essentially a zero-sum game? If you push to have your child in a class with a particular teacher, that pushes another out.

The school rules evolve as a response to this. One of my favourite games, is to "guess the incentive problem" when I see some sort of rule. For instance, in our school, class assignments for the next year are sent out on December 23rd (this is Australia, so the school year is the calendar year). This makes it impossible for anyone to actually receive them until well into the summer holidays when there is no one to complain to. Why this policy? It is clearly designed to put a lid on parental complaints and also it prevents aggregation of information as to who got into other classes.

But this is not to say that there is no input of parental and child preferences. This occurs earlier where children are invited to list four others they would like to be in a class with next year. They must include at least one child outside of their current class. They are not allowed to place a preference for children they would like to avoid. And then the list is sent home and must be signed off by their parent. This system is fine with us and we have not engaged in 'out of the game' lobbying.

I have long tried to implement a scheme when allocating students to syndicate groups for assignments. It looks pretty much like the one my school uses but on a smaller scale. I hadn't thought of getting parental sign-off for MBAs though. Next time perhaps.

It is interesting to see the diversity of approaches that are put in place across schools. For instance, from Slate,

At Orangewood Elementary, a public school in Phoenix, Ariz., parents are invited to request a class assignment ahead of time, so long as they follow an established set of rules. The principal, Andree Charlson, explained to me that she asks parents first to sit in on the class they think they want, to see whether the teacher's instructional method really appeals to them rather than going on vague hearsay. She honors requests only when they jibe with her own and her teachers' sense of what makes for a good class mix. That includes balancing the number of boys and girls, including a range of ability levels, and not putting too many kids with behavioral problems in the same classroom.

Ha! They impose signaling costs on the parents as to how serious they are. Not a bad approach but it is costly on the school too.

One suspects that there might be an actual solution to the class assignment problem. In economics, Al Roth and others have studied matching problems -- for instance, how interns are allocated to hospitals when the interns and hospitals have their own rankings. And New York schools are trying to work this out with respect to getting siblings into the same school. My guess is that this might be of use in coming up with a mechanism for class assignment.

Puzzles in horror games. Part 4.

Quick note: Due to me being caught up in a lot of technical work this blog entry is a lil bit late and I also missed a horror tip last week. Gonna try and be better in the future! :)

The fourth part in the puzzle series will be about a specific "feature" that I am sure you are all aware of. Backtracking. This is often to considered to be a big problem in adventure games and seem to especially plague survival horror like Resident Evil. It is often blamed for being a product of bad design, and it can often be very annoying. Backtracking does not always need to be bad though and might actually be a part in increasing the immersion.

To start up, I would like to define the different kinds of backtracking:

Compulsory backtracking
In some games, the design forces the player to do backtracking and games like Resident Evil and the newer Castlevania are full of this. After collecting a certain item, the player needs to backtrack to a location far back where the item is to be used. Sometimes the location is known (for example highlighted on a map) and other times it is up to player to figure out where to use the item. To make the journey back more fun, some games add new enemies, obstacles and/or change the environment. Other times the player simple needs to grind their way back. Especially when the target location is unknown it can be a very frustrating experience and I know of times in Castlevania where I pretty much searched through the entire game before finding out where the newly found item was to be used.

Forgotten item backtracking
Adventure games are often based around the player exploring environments and when much searching is needed, chances are something will be missed. This can lead to the player not having picked up an important item, done a certain task, etc and when arriving at an obstacle one needs to backtrack to find out what was missed. This type is different from the compulsory backtracking in that it is not explicitly designed, but stems from the fact a player has not been successful when searching. This situation can be very annoying to end up in as it might not be obvious where to look for the missing item/event. In many adventure games the player is some kind of scrap-collector and the usability of an item is not obvious until collected (if even then...). Thus it is hard to get any hints from the examining obstacle one is stuck at.

In my opinion the forgotten item type of backtracking is the most annoying and not always predictable from a design standpoint. Because of that I am going to discuss how to go around solving this first, and will be using Braid as an example. In Braid it is always possible to solve a puzzle when encountered as no items or upgrades are needed in order to find the correct solution. Instead the player needs to come up ingenious ways of using the game mechanics and sometimes simpler puzzles need to be solved in order figure a harder one out. When encountering a puzzle the player is always certain that a puzzle can be solved and can never be missing any special item or triggered event. This approach is a an "extreme" way of solving the missing item problem in that it never relies on previous areas (note: Braid does rely on it in on a single occasion).

But what if one wants to pick up items and such as part of the gameplay? A way to solving this is either to let force-feed the player with items, placing them in such obvious location that they are impossible to use and/or have sub obstacles that require the a certain event to be triggered for the player to continue. Many action adventure games uses this approach. Another way to deal with it is to always place the items close to the obstacle and removing the need to do any backtracking. This approach is what we used a lot in the Penumbra games and it requires that the player knows that items are always close (something we did not totally succeed with) . If the player still thinks that the needed item might be anywhere, then it does not matter that it in reality is very close. Also, this approach requires 100% consistency and if some puzzle suddenly requires an item way back, the player will still assume it is nearby and never go searching far enough. Finally making the puzzle solutions more "realistic" and intuitive will also improve the situation as the player can then easier figure out what might be needed for overcoming the obstacle.

Although there exist solutions for the forgotten item backtracking problem, they are not without flaws. On the other hand, with the compulsory backtracking it is easy to fix. Just remove the need of backtracking, right? On closer inspection, it turns out that it is not that easy. First of all, in open ended games there is a need to spread out puzzles and will therefore always be some kind of backtracking. The problem of not knowing where to go can still be addressed though and many open ended games has a map with blinking hot spots, arrows, etc indicating where the player should go. However, sometimes this is not wanted either and the enjoyment of the game might come from exploring the game without being spoon-fed the next action all the time.

Going back to Braid, which even though it does not have the forgotten item problem, still has some compulsory backtracking. Unless the player solves all of the puzzles in linear fashion, there is a need to go back through levels and find the last puzzle pieces needed. Now Braid could have let the player instantly teleport through some menu to each location, but in my opinion that would ruin the game. By being forced to traverse the world one is more immersed in the game world and even though the activity is not fun in itself, it still enhances the experience. To be fair, Braid has very minor backtracking compared to other games, but I still think it is an important observation.

Back to the forgotten item backtracking. Is this really always a bad thing? As mentioned in the solutions for overcoming it, a remedy mostly means limiting the player somehow and forcing one through the game. Limits can be a good thing, but if a game should give the player a feeling of exploration then it is almost impossible to remove it. Having some type of frustration is most likely essential in order to provide the right experience. The problem does not lie in removing the frustration, but rather limiting and managing it.

To sum things up: the problem of backtracking that at first glance just seems like an annoyance, might actually be a very important part of making a game. A designer should not try and remove the frustration caused by backtracking, but instead limit it and use it to improve the player experience. Frustration is a large part of life and just trying to remove it from a game will only result a brainless and less satisfying experience.

As always we are very curious to know what you think about all this!

Fairy Tale Economics

Ed Glaeser contemplates what fairy tales can teach children about economics. It turns out that they are not likely interested in economic nuance as opposed to what the authors likely intended.

Anyhow, if you want books where an economic message is tied in more explicitly, go no further than Anno's Magic Seeds. This book teaches the value of saving and compound interest without the need for subtlety.