Game Design Observations

Game Design Observations

My game is going to be large and open for the player to go in whatever direction they want. I've been playing Destiny 2 pretty heavily the last week and thought I'd look at some popular games and make some observations.

Here are 5 games that I think are worth evaluating:

Destiny:

Diablo:

Zelda:

Pokemon Go:

Skyrim:

What drives you to explore?
Destiny: Search for better loot.
Diablo: Search for better loot.
Zelda: Search for better loot & Story
Pokemon Go: Find rare Pokemon
Skyrim: Quests. Loot is mostly irrelevant.

How does your character level up?
Destiny: Items (Light Level)
Diablo: Experience & items
Zelda: Experience

Pokemon Go: Not relevant

Skyrim: Using the ability you want to level up

What keeps you playing?
Destiny: loot and friends playing together
Diablo: trying to reach highest greater rift

Zelda: end of story

Pokemon Go: Find rare pokemon and level up existing ones

Skyrim: Completing quests, finding new areas, raising character level

What sucks?

Destiny: Once you hit 260 light, it becomes a grind. You are often forced to use weapons you hate.
Diablo: Once you reach Torment 10 or so, it becomes a grind. Power level has gotten out of control.
Zelda: Weapons break.
Pokemon Go: It is hard to find rare Pokemon
Skyrim: Everything starts to look the same

What 1 improvement would I add?
Destiny: A wider range of improvements on the high end. Light level should keep going to 400+ with high level content available to dedicated players.
Diablo: Fix legendary gems. They are a storage nightmare.
Zelda: I didn't finish it. It really didn't like constantly breaking weapons. This felt like Halo.
Pokemon Go: Make the Pokemon locator work again... idiots.
Skyrim: Make loot more valuable

Reflections on how to design my game:
1. There needs to be something happening around you constantly.
2. Enemies need to be frequent, varied
3. Events should occur that you can find and complete
4. You can find items/enemies via a locator
5. Character level should be unlimited and driven off gear.
6. Gear can be upgraded without a great hassle.
7. There needs to be quests to complete with rewards.
8. Areas of the game get harder as you go further driving you to improve your gear.

Destiny 2 Graphics

Destiny 2 Graphics

I've played a lot of Destiny over the last few years. Yesterday I got the itch to play again so I picked up Destiny 2 ... and ... played it for most of the day.

Man... that game's graphics are amazing. I am officially intimidated by it.
But again... they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it so I expect it but still...

I think what they do is build the scene with a multi-texture material. When they are all done, anything that is static is converted into a single landscape mesh using that material. The result is stunning.

Working on Urban Layout

Working on Urban Layout

I've been working on an urban layout now that I know the scale I need to construct the world.

Here is a sample I put together yesterday:

You can teleport in all directions forever and it will continue to build a random city with no stutter. This is obviously very primitive but I was more concerned with performance and how things looked at this scale and whether it would continue to look vast (it does).

Next I am going add elevations for the urban layout and see what that looks like.

Just for a bit of fun, I adjusted the layout to not have a road :)

Augmented vs Virtual Reality

Augmented vs Virtual Reality

I think there is a recent misconception that being able to walk around your house via inside-out tracking is the next big thing.

In my mind, augmented and pure virtual experiences are different beasts. I think both are valid applications but a pure virtual experience is not going to have you walking around your house. You are going to need to be in a space that allows some freedom of movement but you are going to need to teleport around the virtual world for it to be immense.

I am tired of virtual experiences that confine me to a space. I feel like I am on a stage and it breaks the immersion. The next generation of virtual reality experiences need to allow you to go in all directions indefinitely and not have crappy/low-res graphics.

Having a world that unfolds infinitely in all directions allowing unlimited freedom of movement is the primary design decision for my upcoming game. That is what I want from virtual reality and so that is what I am going to deliver.

It isn't easy. No it is not... but... my latest experiments show it is possible if you build a reality creation frameworks specifically for the needs of VR.

Distance Resolved

I have basic elevation working and have resolved the distance rendering issue so that the world looks immense.

Elevation is Working

Elevation is Working

Elevation is hard. Really hard.

I got the basic framework for it working today. It works surprisingly well. I have a long way to go, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. I added an elevation that goes up and to the right indefinitely. I teleported around about 1/2 a mile up and it kept working like a champ.

Foliage Lag

Foliage Lag

I have foliage working again. I have disabled deletion of foliage for the moment but I have a plan on how to efficiently manage rebuilding foliage indexing if it is needed. The basic framework is in place for it.

My bigger concern is trying to determine the most effective use of foliage.

I made all my props foliage and noticed that large foliage objects (walls) create lag where non-foliage actors do not. This means foliage works best for smaller objects. It may be that foliage comes into play for an actor when it is further away from the player. That would be painful to implement so I'm just going to stick with foliage for small objects like grass for now.

Foliage for grass did improve performance so it is working as expected.

Today's task is fading the camera in and out for teleportation when I know it require significant adjustments to the scene. Knowing unreal, this will be a herculean task. It looks simple but I'm sure it is going to suck for some unforeseen reason.

------------- UPDATE -------------

I got the teleport fade out implemented in about an hour. It works very well. I only need to do it when I know a lot of processing is about to occur.

After some experimentation, I have decided foliage is bad for performance. Frame rate starts out great and you think foliage is helping. But... I started getting low frame rates after teleporting around a while. I removed the foliage and voila, frame rate never went low again.

This is really unfortunate. I probably spent several weeks carefully incorporating foliage into my framework. Oh well.

Distributing Processing Over Time

Distributing Processing Over Time

Since the game now adjusts its quality automatically, I can try out different strategies and see which ones improve game quality.

My first change was to distribute load over time. I changed my world generation logic to queue changes instead of processing them all at once. About 10% of the queue is then processed every frame/tick.

This had an amazing improvement in performance. It improved quality by a factor of 4!

This evening I will changing my foliage logic and see how that changes the quality.

Automatic Quality Adjustment

Automatic Quality Adjustment

Everything in my game is dynamically added as the player moves around the world. I've been thinking about how to automatically improve FPS (Frames Per Second) by adding logic to the game mode tick.

I did that today and it works amazingly well. The game now monitors FPS and if it dips below 80, it slowly reduces game quality settings until it is at least 80 FPS. I also have it automatically improve quality if FPS goes above 85.

I teleported around the world for several minutes and there was no stutter. It was interesting to see what settings the game settled on versus what I thought was acceptable. It was much lower but my FPS stabilized at 85. I know 85 is below the recommended 90, but 85 looks fine to me.

This means the game will automatically adjust itself based on the player's graphics card without them having to adjust any settings.

Next I will rewrite my foliage logic and see what quality settings the games adjusts itself to. I expect it to get better.