Verifying the Integrity of Patch 1.1...
Project: ShadowMancer Patch 1.1 Design Analysis
This long post is a write-up of some of the changes that are in patch 1.1 for Project: ShadowMancer Ep. 1 - The Screaming Fist. If you only want to know what the major changes in Patch 1.1 are, you can check them out here. However, there are some pretty pictures in here that you might not want to miss!
While porting ShadowMancer from Shadowrun Returns to Shadowrun Dragonfall, I’ve been gathering player feedback, and it’s been fairly positive. However, one common thread that I heard from players was that the titular scene, “The Screaming Fist”,  was missing something. Some of the suggestions to fix this were to:
add more enemies
add more dialogue
add some more points of interaction
While the suggestions were not inherently wrong, or bad, I didn't feel that they would adequately solve whatever underlying issue there was. They just sounded like adding empty features to make something better. After analysing the suggestions more, there were two things that I noticed:
Almost all of the feedback wanted to ADD something to ShadowMancer, not to REMOVE something.
After digging into the reasons for the suggested changes, I started to notice a common idea that was never said explicitly, but had started to become apparent: "The Screaming Fist’ needs to be more engaging.”
One thing that I learned from Mark Rosewater, the lead designer of Magic: The Gathering, during one of the episodes of his "Drive to Work" podcast was the quote from Antoine de Saint Exupéry, a 20th century French writer, poet and aviator:
"It seems that perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away."
This idea about game design is something that I really gravitated toward. It's exceedingly easy to try to add something in order to improve a product. However, almost no one tries to first remove something in order to improve it. The Screaming Fist scene seemed like a perfect opportunity to put this design philosophy to the test. So I devised 3 ways to improve the "The Screaming Fist" scene, but with a couple constraints. Firstly, one improvement had to involve removing something(s). The other constraint was that all three ways had to directly improve the overall excitement level of the players.
As shown in the first image, the first way that I tackled this goal was by reducing the number of enemies on the map, and instead, making them tougher. Plus, while I was deleting stuff, I deleted some unnecessary assets to reduce memory usage and improve performance. In this Case, removing some things was the correct improvement to make. The second image shows how I changed the enemy character models in the second “reinforcement” wave of this scene to the ESP models because they look more intimidating. Also, it should communicate to the player that security has been beefed up in response to their intrusion. The third way I improved the combat in this scene was to give the player full control of Jake Armitage, the Mole 1.0 ICE, and give the player more programs to fight with. Combat now feels more like something you’d encounter in Dragonfall proper, and I think that’s a good thing. In this Case, adding something was the right thing to do.
The Chase
"The Chase" is a fairly simple scene in comparison to "The Screaming Fist." The Chase has two goals: introduce the player to Molly, and to add a small climactic set piece to up the excitement. When introducing Molly, I wanted to establish her as a formidable NPC. This is because I want the player to be excited to use her when you do get the chance to in the later episode. Adding another small bump in the excitement curve is the other goal of The Chase. The concept of an “experience curve” as experience design in video games was introduced to me, I think, by the excellent folks at Extra Credits. I can’t recall which exact video, but I will update this post when I find the source video. Anyway, below is an example of an experience curve, and below that is the same curve, but with the different scenes of Project: ShadowMancer Ep. 1.
One issue that was apparent with the previous version of The Chase was that it just wasn't exciting enough. In order to make The Chase scene more exciting, I needed to identify what makes a good “chase scene,” like the ones you see in movies. Here’s what I got:
The chaser is more powerful than the chased.
The chased must be able to maintain distance from the chaser.
The chaser grazes/hurts the chased a little bit to remind them why they are running.
Sometimes the chased will fight back, only to find it to not be very effective. Identifying the chaser as near invincible.
However, all of the above points can be further summed up into the following phrase:
“The Chased needs to feel threatened by the Chaser”
So, how did I act on this idea? Two ways: I played with some numbers, and I made Molly more aggressive. Making Molly more aggressive was the easy part. Initially, I had her "seek and destroy" the player, but she didn't seem to pursue once the player broke line of sight. However, simply changing her to "hunt and destroy" made her a much more persistant pursuer. Playing with numbers was slightly more involved. In the previous version, it was quite easy to outrun Molly. In an exciting chase scene, you can never have the one being chased be able to fully outrun, and lose the chaser. So, I lowered Case's movement speed from 9 to 5, which is 1 above Molly's movement speed. Also, I noticed that Molly seemed to only have just enough AP to keep up with Case. During playtesting, I discovered that Molly tended to throw a grenade in the beginning "arcade" leg of The Chase scene. This led to some visible tension in the players, and I wanted to expand on that. I noticed that, during a majority of The Chase, Molly only has just enough AP to keep up with Case. What I wanted her to do was to keep up with Case, then attack when she was in range. All I needed to do to achieve this was give her 1 extra AP to use per turn. Now, Molly tends to use 2 AP to catch up to Case and get in range, then use her last AP to take a shot at him. Speaking of weapons, Case now has a weapon to use during The Chase. One complaint that I repeatedly got about ShadowMancer was that players expected to be able to use The Cobra after buying it from the shop. Also, since I started working on The Chase scene after fixing up The Screaming Fist scene, Case now has the same basic attack that he has in the matrix in meatspace, too! My initial reaction was to fix it and remove it because it didn't maske sense. Then I thought, maybe I could use this as a way to show the player that Case really does see this chase as a run in the matrix, as it says in the loading screen description to The Chase scene. Of course, the matrix attack does nothing to Molly in meatspace (because I made her uninjurable), but that's the point. What Case is "shooting" isn't real. So, what I initially thought was a mistake actually killed two birds with one stone. The Chase scene now matches up with the player's expectation of being able to attack Molly after buying the Cobra. Also, it brought an idea that was, previously, just told to the player into the gameplay itself, thus allowing mechanics to help tell the story. The epitome of the idea:
Show, don't tell. And if you can, Do, don't show.
Thanks for reading! I'm planning on doing more of these longform, and in depth posts in the future, so let me know what you think by using the "STATE YOUR QUERY" link at the top of this page, or rebloggin with a comment!