The highlight of the adventure

I’ve never made a game (ok, I did dabble in Adventure Game Studio for a bit, but I’ll spare you the horror). If I ever made one, I think one of my questions would be… how do I tell people what can be interacted with?

This seems like a silly question, but knowing how to comunicate with the players can’t have always been easy. In the earliest days it was perhaps entirely unnecessary: here’s a line of aliens, shoot them all. But as new genres were introduced, especially adventure games, things got complicated. Sure it would have been nice if you could have used everything to do anything. But I’m afraid it wasn’t a time for Scribblenauts yet. So you had to somehow tell people what they could grab and what was nailed in place!

Ah, my favorite characters from The Hobbit: Gandalf, Thorin, and The Wooden Chest.

The earliest text adventures might have found their solution, but it was kinda conspicuous to tell people: “you are in a room. There’s all sorts of stuff in here. By the way, look at that piece of garlic on the table”. It makes sense, but why would your character’s eyes fall on the piece of garlic in particular? Maybe he’s hungry. As descriptions in adventure games got a little more flowerish, especially from Infocom, they also got a little better at hiding this practice. But in the end, you do what you gotta do. Things just had to wait until graphics arrived.

Excuse me if this super important key is the same color as the ground, we are working with 16 colors here. Besides, you might as well give up with all those enemies. Cauldron didn’t pull any punches.

Even so, for a while, I don’t think it was all that important to tell players what was interactive. After all, if you could see it, there were probably two results: either it was bad and you’d die upon touching it, or it was good and you needed to walk over it and get it. Whichever it was, people could (usually) tell by themselves. And if not, well, trial and error always worked.

Adventure games were once again out of luck, as the amount of details in the picture increased. Surely that flower pot is interactive? Nope. And that statue? Neither. But at least in Scumm games there was one concession: interactive items had a small description appear in the interface. At least you were able to finally work out somehow that the hamster could go in the microwave oven. That is probably one of the earliest forms of highlighting. It also resulted in a lot of pixel hunting. Wish they had thought about that.

A shovel from a sign. Right out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, that.

This wasn’t always possible, especially after The 7th Guest and Myst showed the world what you could do without, erm, much of an inventory or even HUD. Aside from underground mazes, I mean. Once again the problem was telling players what could be clicked safely. Why, that was easy: since it needs to be clicked, your cursor has to go upon it. So just change the shape of the cursor! Not you, Lighthouse. For some reason you didn’t wanna do this and I hate you.

When you are passing above an interactive object in Zork Nemesis, the cursor goes from yellow to… a different shade of yellow. Hope you are good with colors.

All of this is well and dandy with 2D. But what about 3D? No mouse means you have to find other ways. Well, the earliest 3D games perhaps didn’t need to: for example, in Alone in the Dark, you can be pretty sure that if something is in 3D, it can be interacted with. So that’s one way to do it. Just use common sense there. Although this wasn’t always so. I wonder how many people noticed the books hidden in the library background.

Yes, you can interact with the toy horse too. It’s spooky.

JRPGs have their own way of dealing with things. They still do today, for the most part. Vivi is puzzled, but at least we are not.

But one day, 3D just had to become ubiquitous. Now eveything was 3D. How do you deal with that? If everything is a model, what should the players check? And, as the amount of details increased, the issue just became bigger. This is the problem we face today: in a world full of details, what are the important details?

There have been a number of solutions so far. Here are some of the most common.

The techniques adopted by early 3D games are still valid today. Echo Night really wants you to know that you could look at highlighted stuff, and I mean literally highlighted. Too bad it did that with just about everything. Oh well.

When you are out of ideas, just have a button prompt appear on the screen. Can’t go wrong with that. Although in some cases it feels a bit patronizing. I could have probably told the big lone signpost stone was important by myself.

Let’s see now… that revolving item with sparkles coming out of it looks useful. And it is indeed, although a measly 1 armor doesn’t do much. But everything helps in Serious Sam.

A red outline for a health item. Did you know that in many shooters, red is both the color of health items but also of explosive barrels? Life and death in a single color. How peculiar, that.

Nowadays, the most common methods used are the highlight, the outline, and the button prompt (the revolving item style has mostly fallen in disuse as games strive for slightly more realism). I can’t quite tell which is the most elegant solution. Highlighted items can be kind of jarring in a dark, moody, survival horror game. And might be unnoticeable in a well lit game. Button prompts don’t help until you are very close to the item in question, besides nobody likes seeing half the screen covered. Flashing outlines, maybe? They are probably my favorite, although this might be just my Serious Sam bias speaking. But even I find them distracting sometimes.

Maybe there’s a better solution out there. After all, games have tried everything, not just the methods I’ve mentioned here. Manny in Grim Fandango tilted his head to any object that could be used or observed (but nobody liked this system). In Lunacy, you just press forward everywhere, and if it does something, good for you. The detective in 2Dark automatically uses any object in range. Not sure that’s very comfortable. Anyway, I know there must be other games out there that did their own thing. If you know of any other examples, drop me a line in the comments.

Who knows, maybe it won’t even be important anymore in the future. Maybe games will be streamlined to the point where the characters will just do whatever they need to do in cutscenes. And if that happens, maybe they won’t just put hamsters in microwave ovens anymore.

Boulders and pebbles and polygons

October has started, and the end of the year looms ever closer. Imagine, the end of 2020. As if an arbitrary change in number could make any difference! But well, people like to be hopeful anyway, and who am I to dash their dreams? So let’s focus on what we do best.

Enemy Zero used sound cues to great effects, to create a truly tense survival horror. Questionable design choices will always rear their ugly head though.

October is also a time for Halloween, which is always a good excuse to replay some horror-themed games. My choice for this year was… well, more than one. Call of Chtulhu ended up being better than I originally expected, but still somewhat average. Enemy Zero, which I’m playing again now, is always good for both tension and complete frustration at Laura’s slow pace. You’d think she would act with a bit more urgency, what with murderous aliens very keen on eating human heads roaming the space ship.

That is so reassuring.

Another game I finished is Echo Night. One of those titles dating back to a time when From Software still wasn’t solely as the Souls guys, it has both a certain charm and a certain jank to it. But there’s something else to it, an attempt to use polygons to do everything. And I do mean everything. The game looks quite ambitious, in spite of its obviously low budget, but sometimes ambitions can’t be matched by technology. In this case, we are talking about, what else, polygons? The PS1 was so good at those. But when you only have polygons, and only a few of them, issues arise.

It’s just a model.

What I’m thinking here is scale. Maybe it’s not something we think about today, since technology has come along to the point that we can reproduce every scene just about perfectly. Looking weird is not really an issue anymore, although uncanny valley might perhaps be. But in the past, how would one have dealt with the issue of giving the perception of scale?

Look at this screenshot: at first, you might be tempted to think it’s just an alley and you are merely a human walking in it. Look closely and you’ll find it’s not so. But you spend the entire game in first person perspective, so it’s hard to tell when things change.

You’d think first person games would be exempt from this problem: after all, we automatically assume that our point of view is a human-sized being, and perceive everything else starting from that point. Unfortunately, that only creates more problems when we are trying to show something that is, in truth, far bigger. While the solution is to simply put a few “known” objects in plain view, the illusion is nonetheless hard to dispel.

Showing a miniature road is always a good way to pretend that you are actually big. But cars don’t help the feeling of giantness when they look like Micromachines.

Even moreso because your smaller-looking object have to be done with very few polygons. You might well show a Lego-sized car next to the player character to indicate that you are actually piloting a giant mech, but due to the number of polygons and texture size you could use, the car is going to look like actual Lego, and that doesn’t help.

That might be a 20 meters, 500 tons mech. Or maybe it’s a toy. Kinda hard to say.

Another solution might be to rely on different known factors. For example, if you are on a giant mech, employing a mech-like HUD would help reinforce the illusion. Hell, just show the mech in its entirety! But we are just so used to games being human-sized that sometimes it doesn’t matter.

The more details you add, the easier it is to fool the player. Although, in the case of Slave Zero, being a human-shaped character will always leave a lingering taste of normality. Later in the levels, when cars disappear and you start going around giant sewers, it becomes harder to tell you are not just an armored person.

Especially in the past, enviroments were generally limited in what you could render. Oh, you in a city? Well, here’s a few buildings. In a canyon? Have some red rocks. We were so used to these things being in human scale, that when we see them in giant scale, we tend to perceive them as human sized all the same.

Today, we are able to show so many details that things finally work.

Malcolm said in Jurassic Park (the book, not the movie: he didn’t say much of anything in the movie, aside from some memetic lines) that things tend to be the same regardless of the scale factor: a boulder won’t be too different from a mountain, and so on. I think he used it to explain some kind of fractal theory. Well, I don’t know much about quantum maths, but I’d argue he was right. Those big environments don’t look very different from small ones. How we perceived them, however, is a different matter.