Games Module Discussions

October 7th, 2008

Without giving too much away about our Design for Entertainment Systems intentions, I’ve decided to write a little about a topic that came up in our discussions today. Basically, my feelings are that if you want to help give a game that little bit more longevity, the environment or map or whatever should be flexible enough to change randomly every time a player uses it, so that there is never the element of repetativeness. And yet the player is still free to master techniques at achieving their objectives and the designer is still free to control what fundamental elements and challenges exist in the level.

Lots of the best Real-time Strategy games such as the Age of Empires series feature this ability in their multiplayer maps, where water, features and resources are placed at random but still form a coherent and playable map. But none of them utilise this concept quite as deeply as Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim.

About Majesty

Basically every map in the campaign is generated with the player’s buildings, enemies and objective always starting in different places, but the challenge somehow maintaining perfect consistency. Presumably for each level, the designers set a number of variables telling the map generator which buildings to start the player with, as well as defining the sort of enemy/other player buildings and how far apart things should roughly be placed.

Indeed there are elements of Majesty that aren’t done as well, and it does have its own unique and quirky style of game-play where direct interaction with your kingdom’s inhabitants is impossible. In particular here I am thinking of the lack of any linear plot, by all means not the worst problem a game could have, but it is something I certainly appreciate when I can see a great deal of care has been taken to develop a narrative that both takes a player through the features of the game, while manipulating a need to further a storyline. But that’s for discussion later in my game critique part of this module.

Add some Flash

I have seen and played a bit with Actionscript that can actually generate classical mazes and the likes where there is always one real path from start to finish, completely randomly.