Deep Plaid

For a while now I’ve been observing and mulling over a particular problem with game design, and the gamer culture. A recent post by Damion Schubert on Zen of Design has brought it back to the forefront of my mind.

Why do game designers tend to ignore sports?

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I proposed that a new Heavy weapon be The Sandwich, and Valve did it!

Unfortunately they seemed to think that the whole “devouring your enemies alive/feeding on the corpses of the dead” element of it just wasn’t a direction they wanted to go. Cowards!

I meant to post about this a few months ago. As I have an XBox 360 Development Kit provided by my job, I have access to PartnerNet and can thus play many XBLA games for free, before they’re even released. A couple months ago I played a pre-release version of Braid… which has finally just been released.

Two words: Play Braid. It’s a contender for Game of the Year, and an absolute must-play.

I won’t even try to express what I loved about this game… yet. The important thing is that you load it up, start playing it, and slowly get your mind blown by the gameplay.

And as if the fantastic gameplay wasn’t enough (it is), it also has a haunting, thoughtful, and ambiguous backstory that slowly unfolds. Never have I played a game that felt so personal.

Braid is a watershed title that shows us the untapped diversity of what games can be; and more importantly it’s a very fun puzzler. The gameplay is fairly cerebral (it’s a puzzle platformer) and may not be for everyone…

But if you like games, or thinking, you should play Braid!

It took me a while to understand exactly what’s supposed to be going on in this link… but it has the potential to be something amazing.
It appears that they have a single powerful server which is raytracing a scene in realtime, and streaming the images down to a lightweight viewer like a web browser plug-in.

In other words, with this technology you could have one cluster of high-powered servers that just render ray-traced scenes; I could load up my browser and a plugin as simple as (or simpler than) a YouTube-like Flash player could take my input, send it to the server, and just display the rendered images in sequence like a live video feed.

In yet other words: Ten years ago the web allowed us to download a screenshots of amazing games easily. Now we can stream high-quality video of amazing games easily. Why not just stream down the entire visualization of the game in realtime? Let some uber-powerful machine somewhere else do the hard rendering work.

The big question is just how truly “real-time” and responsive it is, especially with average connection speeds. But theoretically you could say that this means that no home PC owner could play games with extremely high video quality – much better than what a current high-end PC is capable of – without these PC owners ever having to buy a video card. All they’d need is a lightweight PC that can show the stream of high-quality images that a farm of powerful remote PCs is rendering in response to their input.

Some have said that PC gaming is dead. These people seem to have forgotten that about 21% of human beings on the planet have internet access of one form or another. However, the complexity and visual appeal of “web games” has been limited by the fact that, without a video card, you could only render fairly simple graphics. And it didn’t look like this would get a lot better anytime soon.

Who knows how this technology could shake out. But if we could get truly interactive beautiful games that could be rendered on any PC anywhere, suddenly the potential audience of your game goes from “the number of people who own an XBox 360″ or “the number of people who own a high-end PC with an expensive video card”… to “the number of people who have access to the internet.” It could singlehandedly spark a renaissance in PC gaming, and in fact gaming as a whole.

I’m going to be watching this technology carefully… we’ll see if it can live up to its promises.

Are these top-secret leaked screenshots proof that Valve is implementing my Sandwich idea?

You be the judge!!!!

Hint: No.

Here’s another idea I think is a winner!

The fists for the Heavy should be replaced by two pieces of bread. When he attacks, the Heavy claps the two pieces of bread in front of him. This attack has an even longer delay than the fists.

If an enemy is caught in between the slices of bread, the Heavy proceeds to eat them.

While doing this, the Heavy must stand still for N seconds, where N is based on the max health of the enemy class. Scouts would be polished off in a couple of bites, while eating another Heavy would take nearly a full minute of cannibalism.

As the Heavy eats this unspeakable sandwich and both teammates and enemies alike look on in stunned horror at both his monstrous appetite and his unthinkable disregard for all human decency, the Heavy gains health points (the amount is again based on the health of whichever class he is messily devouring).

Players being eaten could continue to hit the WASD keys and wiggle the mouse, but these movements would only be manifested in-game as horrified facial expressions and the desperate flailing of arms and legs lashing out in a futile attempt to resist their horrific and inexorable fate.

The alt-fire could be used for the Heavy to eat them feetfirst rather than headfirst! This would allow the hilarious flailing of the devoured to continue longer (since the cannibalee usually stops moving after the first bite when the head is eaten; with this alternate technique, the victim’s consciousness would be unforgivably prolonged until at least the halfway mark).

Best of all, this isn’t limited to living bodies! Both friendly and enemy corpses can also be caught in the sandwich and devoured. These only provide 1/2 as much health however, as we all know it’s much more nutritious to gorge oneself on those whose blood is saturated with adrenaline from the fear of witnessing the gaping maw about to consume them in an abominable rite which flies in the face of the moral code of all decent human beings.

A Heavy who successfully finishes eating an enemy Heavy gets the “Cannibalism” achievement. If someone sees the Heavy doing this and then quits the game, uninstalls it, and deletes their Steam account, the Heavy gets the “Permanent Psychological Trauma” achievement. If the account belonged someone under the age of 13, the police may automatically be called, depending on the laws in that state.

I read this post on the TF2 blog and just had to take up the challenge; but it seemed that the only way to “respond” to it would be through the magic of the blogosphere. This seemed like the perfect excuse to start the game design blog I’d been thinking about doing for a while, so here’s my first post!

So here’s my thoughts on how to change the Heavy class in TF2 to make him more viable when he has no medic to pair with.

My qualifications

Although I think that ideas should stand on their own merit, it might be relevant for me to talk about my experience.

I’m a professional games programmer with 5 years experience in the industry, and an amateur game designer (with interest in being one professionally, except that I’m loathe to sacrifice my programmer salary

I’ve played multiplayer FPSes since 2000, including nearly all of Valve’s games and particularly a great deal of CS:S and BF2; and I’m currently an avid TF2 player. I was the Team Captain of the Midway Austin TF2 team, in a TF2 tournament against many other game development studios, and led our team in clawing our way to the middle. I’m not the best player, but I know and love this game.

The Vacuum Gun: New Mechanics

I may have subconsciously stolen this idea from reading this interesting article of TF2 unlockable ideas, which includes a Heavy gun that sucks up fallen weapons for ammo. But I propose a weapon which sucks up fallen weapons, and converts them into additional Health for the Heavy.

In more detail: this would be an alternate Primary Weapon similar to the current Minigun; but whenever you were spinning and firing the weapon, it would automatically cause any dropped weapons seen within the Heavy’s crosshair to fly toward him and “into” his gun; upon absorbing the dropped weapon, the Heavy receives a certain amount of health (say, 1/2 times the amount of Metal that the weapon would be worth). It would have no effect on ammo crates or medpaks.

This on its own would violate the constraint that the feature not have a cumulative effect with the medic’s healing: a Heavy with a Medic healing him and this gun is clearly much better off than a Heavy with only a Medic healing him.

So the mechanic that balances this is that when this gun is equipped, the Heavy cannot be overhealed. Normally a Medic’s healing gun can “overheal” any teammate’s health, buffing him up to 150% health; in the Heavy’s case this gives a big advantage, as they go from 300 to 450 HP (the largest amount of HP which it is possible to have in the game) when fully overhealed. This is a big reason that the Medic/Heavy combination is so powerful, and the reason that Heavies with Medics are so difficult to take down.

Taking the buff away makes things fairly even. With the Vacuum Gun, the Heavy is more independent when Medics don’t help him; but the Medics that do help him have less of an impact. If the player feels confident that they’ll have a Medic to help them, they may want to stick with the standard Minigun and get the advantage of being buffed up to 450 HP.

(Of course this idea will need to be tweaked: if playtests shows one weapon to be unbalanced relative to the other, things can be further balanced by tweaking the Vacuum Gun’s relative amount of ammo, and maybe even having it give the Heavy more - or less - HP, like the Pyro’s Backburner did. The Vacuum Gun’s disadvantage could be made even more pronounced by causing it to cap out the Medic’s healing at 75% of standard health; or less pronounced by allow it to overheal, but only to a smaller degree.)

Grenade-sucking
The Vacuum Gun could also have one more mechanic: it could suck in the Demoman’s grenades (both pipebombs and stickies). When it did so, the grenades would explode “inside” the gun, and the Heavy would take a certain amount of damage - perhaps 1/2 of the damage that the individual grenade would have done with a direct hit. (It could only suck up grenades that the Heavy had a clear line-of-sight to, of course.)

Bearing in mind that the Vacuum effect is “always on” when the Heavy is firing the Vacuum Gun (it’s not on when he’s only spinning the weapon), we can see some interesting dynamics that emerge from this mechanic:

1. Demomen could counter the Vacuum Gun: if they see an enemy Heavy using the Vacuum Gun, they would begin spamming grenades along his line of fire, and the Heavy would be likely to accidentally suck them up. (Though the grenades may do less damage than usual, they have a higher chance of hitting the Heavy as the Heavy is likely to accidentally vacuum them up.)
2. When the counter described above is used, the Heavy has to begin making interesting decisions as to whether he should contine firing/vacuuming. He can absorb a few grenades without dying, but not many - so he needs to gauge the chances of accidentally vacuuming grenades vs. the need to fire. In either case, the defending Demomen have improved the situation for their team by suppressing the Heavy - but a clever Heavy (especially one backed up with a Medic to heal the grenade damage) can still remain effective if he takes care with where and when he fires.
3. This also creates a new way to clear sticky-mine fields: if the team comes across five or six stickies on the ground that block their way (or that block a control point), the Heavy can choose to suck them up into his own gun to clear the way for his friends… but with the cost of the stickies damaging or even killing him. With a Medic there to heal him, this could be a good opportunity for teamwork; in addition, it will encourage Demomen to be more clever with their sticky placement, putting them in places where Heavies can’t see them. (Note that this doesn’t make a sticky field any less of a major obstacle: it just gives another way to deal with them, one with its own tradeoffs of the Heavy’s HP.)
4. The Heavy can suck up Demoman pipebombs as well: so if a Heavy and a few other players are moving down a narrow hallway and suddenly a couple of pipes drop in among them, the Heavy may fire up his gun and suck them in - though again he takes less damage than they would have inflicted, he takes it all upon himself, and will be injured or even killed for his teammates’ sake.
5. Heavies could have use sticky-sucking defensively: this gives them a new opportunity for teamwork play, particularly with the Engineers on their team, as they can suck away any sticky bombs that might be placed on a sentry.

Edge cases for Grenade-Sucking
Could the grenades detonate in midair while being vacuumed? Could they detonate by hitting something (a teammate) on their way flying toward the Heavy’s gun? To avoid potential griefing, and to generally make things simpler, some rules would need to be in place for grenade behavior once they began being sucked:

• They should never detonate in midair while vacuumed - even if the pipe’s timer runs down, or the demoman detonates the sticky - instead they should “wait” until they’re sucked up, then detonate inside the gun.
• They should go straight into the Heavy’s gun without intersecting anything on the way. (If the Heavy does not have line-of-sight to the grenade, then the sucking never even begins. If a teammate moves into its path, they are ignored and there is no collision.)
• If the Heavy stops vacuuming in the middle of a grenade’s flight through the air, the grenade continues flying into the gun and detonates anyway - the effect cannot be canceled once it has begun.
• If the Heavy dies while a grenade is in midair, the grenade ceases to exist. (Alternatively it could explode in midair - it doesn’t seem like it would be possible to use that to grief your own team.)
• The logical effect of an ubered Heavy vacuuming a sticky would be for the sticky to get vacuumed, but for it to deal no damage to the invincible Heavy.

Downsides to sticky-sucking
There are two possible negative effects that grenade-sucking could have on gameplay:

1. It could be eliminate the tactic of sticky-ing Sentries. This is one of the few reliable strategies for Sentry take-down, which is a pivotal element of the game on many maps. If a Heavy can suck away stickies as soon as they’re placed on a Sentry, then this one reliable strategy would be made much less reliable.
2. If we allow an ubered Heavy to suck up mines but take no damage from them, this could weaken one of the few effective counters to an ubercharge: “popping” them apart with sticky mines. (One solution here is to simply not allow ubered Heavies to suck up mines at all, but that seems like an unintuitive rule that might surprise and frustrate the player.)

A solution to both of these would be for stickies to not get sucked immediately, but require the Heavy to hold his crosshair on them and pull them continually for, say, 2 seconds before they finally detach and fly to him. This would give a quick-thinking demoman time to detonate stickies before they’re sucked up, and therefore still attack sentries with some effectiveness; and if an ubered heavy spent 2 seconds sucking up a sticky field to prevent the uber from being split apart, that’s still a big loss of time during the precious 10-second-long ubercharge.

Does it accomplish what we want?

At every point in the creative process I try to stop, often, and ask “What are we trying to accomplish?” This seemingly-obvious question can often cut a great deal of unnecessary complexity. Valve seems to have the same idea: let’s go over their checklist and see if my idea accomplishes their Goals without violating their Constraints.

Goal: Make the Heavy more viable when he has no Medic to pair with.

A Heavy with the Vacuum Gun equipped would have the ability to do for himself what the Medic should be doing for him: heal himself even as he lays down fire. The more enemies he kills, the more dropped weapons he can suck up to heal himself (though he’ll never be more efficient than he would be with a Medic working with him).

It shouldn’t have a cumulative effect when being healed by a Medic as well. Heavy/Medic pairs do pretty well as it is.

The “no buffing” limitation accomplishes this pretty effectively. A “Medic + Heavy w/ Vacuum” pair is not necessarily more effective than a regular Medic/Heavy pair, and may in fact be less effective.

(Side note: if two such teams were to fight head-to-head, the latter pair would usually win [since the Heavy in the latter pair is likely to be buffed to higher health, and the Heavy in the former pair is unlikely to find dropped weapons to be vacuumed during this encounter]. This seems appropriate, as the game should generally reward teamwork over “lone wolf” behavior - and picking the Vacuum Gun is a “lone wolf” choice in terms of wanting to depend on a Medic.)

It shouldn’t significantly change the Heavy’s role, relative to other classes. In particular, it shouldn’t significantly encroach on another class’s role.

The fact that the Heavy can heal himself encroaches somewhat on the Medic’s role; but it seems like there’s no way to accomplish the Goal without doing this to some extent, and this seems to be one of the, uh, less-encroachful ways to do it!

The grenade-sucking gives the Heavy a new role of “grenade-jumper-onner”. This meshes well with his existing role as “tank” or “damage sponge”; no class is more well-suited for this role than the Heavy. However, the fact that he may also become “sticky-cleaner” could be seen as encroaching on the Pyro’s role of cleaning stickies with his air blast.

It should be understandable for both the user and the player it’s being used on.

A huge cartoony vacuum cleaner the size of a jet engine that sucks in dropped weapons should be fairly understandable! Health “+” signs and muffled explosion effects emerging from the gun should clearly depict the effects of the Heavy sucking in weapons and grenades, respectively.

How much work is it? How many new models, sounds, effects, etc?

This seems no more difficult to implement than the previous unlockables probably were. The most difficult part would probably be programming: the line-of-sight checks to the dropped weapons and grenades; the delay while sucking stickies; and changing the grenade behavior while they’re being vacuumed (but even there I’ve simplified most of the edge cases).

Does it deepen the Heavy’s skill curve? Is it easy to learn? Hard to master?

It’s easy to learn that you can suck up weapons and that they heal you, and that you suck up grenades and they hurt you. The dynamics and strategies that emerges from those mechanics will be fairly deep and hard to master, but still intuitive natural extensions of those mechanics.

Is it an interesting tool to choose relative to the base Heavy weapon it’s replacing? What scenarios can you envision in which each is useful? What arguments can you raise for why each is better than the other?

This has mostly been answered - I think I’ve laid out a few example scenarios above. The health buff loss, and the chance of accidentally sucking up grenades, clearly makes it so that it’s not a “pure improvement” over the Minigun.

How often does the Heavy need to think about it? Is it something he uses once every 5 minutes, or is it something he needs to be constantly thinking about? A greater impact on player decision making is generally a good thing.

Whenever he is in a “laying down fire” scenario with this weapon, the Heavy will need to be keeping an eye out for dropped weapons that he can suck up, and watch out for grenades that he could accidentally suck up. His decision on when to fire will be made more complex as it becomes a “risk-vs.-reward” scenario: when there’s a high likelihood of absorbing grenades, firing becomes risky and he will need to hold off firing more.

Whether or not to intentionally suck up a grenade is an interesting decision that the Heavy will have to make constantly but which will often have a different answer, depending on many factors such as the Heavy’s health, whether he has a Medic or other capability to heal his damage, and whether the grenade is going to hurt a teammate.

Whether or not to be using this weapon at all is a higher-level decision the Heavy must make periodically ; the primary factors being how many Medics are on his team (with few, he’ll want to be more self-reliant and use the Vacuum) and perhaps how many enemy Demomen are present (with more, he may find the Vacuum a liability - or he may need to use it as tool to clear sticky mines).

How many other features of the game does it affect? Often, the best ideas are “economical”, with a small set of required actions, but a wide set of resulting effects.

I feel that it’s economical: a gun with one new ability that creates two new game mechanics and one other rule change (no buffs). It will affect enemy demoman strategy significantly, and friendly Medic strategy somewhat as well. Sentry take-down/defense strategy, and ubercharge strategy, could also be changed by the ability to suck up stickies.

Other, subtler effects on strategy could arise, such as players looking more for fallen weapons to deny them to enemy Heavies, and Engineers (on both sides) “competing” with a Heavy for the Metal in fallen weapons.

Finally, keep in mind the skillset required to be a good Heavy. … The ability to estimate the amount of damage he’s taking. It takes time for the minigun to spin down, so he needs to be able to know when it’s time to retreat several seconds before his health has run out.

The “Health resource management” is made more complex by the ability to heal yourself. The fact that continuing to fire can lead to opportunities to heal yourself makes the retreat choice more complex - an optimist may keep shooting a little longer in hope of killing someone and grabbing their weapon, etc.

…The ability to keep firing at a target while still keeping an eye out for other dangers, in particular Snipers & Spies.

Situational awareness while firing is even more important with the Vacuum Gun as it adds the need for the Heavy to watch for dropped weapons and for grenades.

Conclusion

I feel that this is a nearly ideal addition to TF2: it can be made quite understandable, it uses only 2 or 3 rather simple new rules, but it will make the tactical and strategic decisions in the game that much deeper. It feels well-balanced and as though there’s no obvious downsides - though the only way to be sure would be to see it being played!

I don’t know whether anyone from Valve will ever read this, but I found it a challenging and interesting exercise in flexing my “game designer” muscles!