Age III Warchiefs New Map- Ozarks: Karen McMullan and Nick Currie have created this new map that will be released in a forthcoming patch. It is loosely based on the hilly terrain of the Ozark hills of Missouri and Arkansas. The key features are the hills spread around the map, especially down the middle. A Trade Route (TR) runs across the hills from east to west with the Trading Posts on top. The north and south faces of the hills are impassable cliffs giving access to the hill tops only on their east and west edges.
The design of the map creates north-south choke points along the TR that cross it where it comes down from the hills at low points between the cliff sides. To move north or south you have to pass through a gap between one of the Trading Post hills. We anticipate that these choke points will be a major focus of critical fighting. If one player can take possession of the entire TR and its posts, that would be a dominant and probably winning position. We can see walls being put up at the choke points to tie in with the cliff sides, creating a “great wall” defensive position across the map. The existence of these choke points will possibly allow a relatively secure build up, but players who sit back and let an opponent take total control of the center and the TR will probably lose.
Halo Wars Open House: This week the Halo Wars team hosted a late afternoon open house for all of ES to bring everyone up to speed on the game’s current state. It is being tested every day and cool art pieces get sent around for oohing and aahing, but this was a good chance for the rest of our group to see it running on screen and get some hands on time.
Producer Chris Rippy hosted the event and had it catered with light food and chilled beer. Then we got a chance to play. There were a series of 2v2 games going on our big screen setup and others going on the eight machines in our 16th floor test lab, which has been converted over to X360 development kits. (This was the lab where we did our internal testing for Age II and The Conquerors). Chris hopes to get some good feedback, for sure, but just as important was helping teams working in other parts of our building keep up with this major project. The event brought a work day to a nice end.
Halo Wars Design Tools: Real-time strategy games require tons of testing and one of the challenges in development is making these sessions efficient and extracting useful information out of them. The standard process at ES is to have one of the designers monitor the test and gather feedback from participants, which is collated and passed back to the team for consideration and possible action.
Karen Swanson has been using a tool from Tableau Software to improve our understanding of what is going on in a sample game. The software tool is used to analyze data captured in SQL tables. Shawn Halwes makes sure the SQL tables are populated with the data that Karen wants to analyze. From a recent test Karen was able to quickly extract a list of the units that each player built and plot a game map showing where each unit died. A second map plotted where each fighting building was placed.
We could see on cool color maps, easily and dramatically, the effect of defensive buildings. In this particular case buildings seemed too powerful as the player with fewest units by far was on the winning side. An opposing player commented that he felt he was fighting buildings all game, not another player. Dead enemy units were indeed piled up around the defensive building locations, supporting the losing player’s fedback. It looked liked the day after a World War I attack by infantry against machine gun emplacements.
In previous years we might have tasked a test team to play several more games recreating this situation to gather more data. Using the Tableau tool allows us to speed that process and skip those steps. The design team can make quicker judgments about the relationships between defensive buildings and mobile fighting units. This is a good example of how tools can improve the productivity of a whole team.
Development Conferences: We are in the time of the year for game development conferences and usually at least a few of us attend the better ones. Examples in our country are DICE (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain), GDC (Game Developers Conference), and the Austin GDC, all held in the US.
This year I attended the DICE event held in Las Vegas. It is put on by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, of which I am a charter member. This is a smaller conference (500 attendees, versus 10,000 plus at GDC) and it has a single track of speakers. I get to see a lot of friends here each year.
I was particularly impressed with the remarks of Doug Lowenstein, outgoing president of the Entertainment Software Association, about the work his group has done over the past 12 years (establishing the ESRB ratings, arguing for 1st amendment rights, fighting piracy, helping to move games into the cultural mainstream, gathering and sharing data, creating the E3 show). He also offered some useful criticism.
I was also impressed with Jordan Weisman’s presentation about alternative reality games (ARGs). He created the I Love Bees marketing campaign for Halo 2 as an alternative reality game. It was very interesting to hear how the gaming public got caught up in the puzzles, solved each in amazing time, and how difficult it was for the designers to keep ahead of them. When Jordan’s team set up phone calls to 500 pay phones around the world, including places like Mongolia, the internet players were there to answer each one and get the clues.
I’m not sure if this is the next big thing, but I thought it was very clever and innovative. Jordan is the serial entrepreneur who started FASA (Mech Warrior), Battletech, WizKids, and now his ARG company, 42 Entertainment.
Cool Age III Screenshot: Graham Somers sent this around. What people do with game tools can be amazing.http://wiki.heavengames.com/ageofwiki/images/b/b3/Screen181zr5.jpg
Bruce Shelley