'The Door Problem' of Game Design

An anonymous reader writes "Game design is one of those jobs everybody thinks they can do. After all, they've played a few games, and they know what they liked and disliked, right? How hard could it be? Well, professional game designer Liz England has summed up the difficulty of the job and the breadth of knowledge needed to do it in what she calls 'the door problem.' Quoting: 'Premise: You are making a game. Are there doors in your game? Can the player open them? Can the player open every door in the game? What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open? What happens if there are two players? Does it only lock after both players pass through the door? What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time?' This is just a few of the questions that need answering. She then goes through how other employees in the company respond to the issue, often complicating it. 'Network Programmer: "Do all the players need to see the door open at the same time?" Release Engineer: "You need to get your doors in by 3pm if you want them on the disk." Producer: "Do we need to give everyone those doors or can we save them for a pre-order bonus?"'"

Comments

Will the door have windows?

[ciderbrew]

I'd like little windows so people can see into the next room. These are always missing in games.
ALSO, I want to shoot something through the doors and blow them up with things.
#FeatureCreep

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

The proper way to describe that you are describing feature creep is by using XML. Example:

        <featurecreep>idea</featurecreep>

Also, for additional geek points, you should make sure that your comment complies with a schema that you link to in your comment.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[ciderbrew]

I'm going for a manager vibe. I've read the word json somewhere and I think all company use of HTML should in the Json now. So if you could just implement that and fill out this TPS report that would be great.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[mrchaotica]

This is Slashdot. There is no schema (even in Beta)!

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Assmasher]

I love that "Feature Creep" is both adverbial and can be a noun. "Oh, look, it's the feature creep..." ;)

Re:Will the door have windows?

[ardor]

But you forgot to use an XML schema for validation, and XSL transformations to be able to automatically write a game out of the XML files!

Re:Will the door have windows?

[CastrTroy]

That has long been what many people wanted. Games that act like things in real life. Instead, we get things that look like real life, with high quality graphics, but think still don't act like real life. I'd rather have a game that didn't look as nice, but had things that reacted much more as they do in the real world. Breakable windows have been done, but doors and walls are usually completely solid, which, I guess, is usually why they don't put windows on them.

Personally, I really liked the way Metroid was done on the GameCube. The levels just went on and on forever, and you rarely had to wait for loading. When you did have to wait, you were in an elevator, and even then the loading times were relatively quick. That's something I really miss about the old cartridge systems. Everything was so instantaneous. I think that Nintendo is the only game make left who makes it a priority to have very low loading times.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[AlabamaCajun]

Try Minecraft! Yes you can see through all standard doors and hatches. The only question is can you get shot through the window? Skeletons and witches are the only above ground enemy that have weapons. You also have access to the bow and can throw things. So far I have not seen any projectile pass through.

if (door.state == HalfOpen)
{
Debug.WriteLine ("Can't determine what the door is doing, Try knocking on the door");
}

Re:Will the door have windows?

[CrimsonAvenger]

ALSO, I want to shoot something through the doors and blow them up with things.

Oh, Gawd, a believer in the Joe Biden School of Civilian Marksmanship....;-)

Re:Will the door have windows?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Why did they give you that proton torpedo? You make your own windows in doors. Also doors in walls.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[ildon]

Doors infrequently have windows in video games because they are used to block visual information from the renderer and gameplay information from the player. But doors with windows do exist. Even Half-Life 1 had some.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[nine-times]

I'd rather have a game that didn't look as nice, but had things that reacted much more as they do in the real world.

I sometimes wonder, what if, back in the days of text adventure games, video game designers had not put all the money and effort into graphics, but instead put it into natural language recognition, world models, and artificial intelligence? Like imagine the millions of dollars we put into graphics, instead going to make a super-advanced text-based adventures where you can really explore a world and do whatever you want.

Of course, knowing our civilization audience, those games would all be procedural military games anyway.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[ciderbrew]

If you're going to disprove my point with facts and logic that's unsportsmanlike.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Whorhay]

In earlier versions of Minecraft skeletons could actually shoot you through the doors. Although I was never completely sure if that was because they could shoot through the transparent bits of the door or if doors were just bugged. Anyways it meant you had to make sure your front door didn't have a direct line of sight to the main parts of your house/cave. Otherwise you could get sniped in the 'safety' of your own home.

The subject of unbreakable doors has always annoyed me in video games. Especially when the game seems to revolve around using violence to resolve every problem, why can't I just kick in a door or shoot out a lock.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[devman]

Original Diablo circa 1996: I can vanquish the Lord of Terror, but I am defeated by a locked chest. Damnit!

Re:Will the door have windows?

[BasilBrush]

I don't think so. What makes a good simulation of real life doesn't tend to make for a good game. Real life is mostly boring, which is why people turn to games in the first place.

There are categories where maximum reality is desirable, but they tend to have "simulator" in the name. Flight Sim, Formula One Sim, Train Sim, Theme Park Sim.

But what people usually want in games is problems to solve, and/or skills to develop, to make progress, all at a level that tests their ability at nearly all times, but doesn't overcome them. And trying to be more realistic only limits the amount to which you can do these things.

Take the article's example of a door, and the question of how you can tell if it's a locked door or not. In reality, you can't tell whether a door is locked without trying to turn the handle and push it. But in games it's usually better if you can tell by looking whether a door is unlocked and openable. There are plenty of games that go for the reality route, and you have to try to open all the doors to find the openable ones. And it's a tedious task that rarely adds anything to the gameplay.

Another example is the concept of health levels, multiple lives, and re-spawning. Remember the US army created a game of their own called "America's Army". It was as realistic as the could make it, including the fact that you get shot once, and you are dead, and you couldn't rejoin the multi-player game until it was over. And that made it a dull game, as you typically spent half the time waiting rather than playing.

As you say, you like Metroid (I guess Metroid Prime?) which was far from realistic. But yes, a great game.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[BasilBrush]

It's funny. In he intervening years, text adventure authoring has come a long way. It's now possible to create games in a near English functional programming language.
http://inform7.com/

BUT the games compile down to the age old Infocom game file format, and so are limited to the ancient concepts of wandering between rooms and manipulating objects. And whilst the range of user input that can be understood has expanded, it's still just combinations of "verbing" and "object" or moving by compass directions.

Still, some authors have managed to be creative even within this limited game engine, and create games that don't APPEAR to be simple rooms and objects games.

I wonder, would a truly unlimited interactive novel be fun to play? It could be tested out by a kind of Turing test scenario. Have a player play such a game, and have a real novelist provide the "game" text. Of course such a thing would entail the player waiting a considerable time between "moves". But it would mean that their input would be boundless, they could do anything in the "game".

Considering how hard it is for most authors to get things published and make a living whilst they are writing, this might even be a feasible real way of gaming, allowing authors to make a small income whilst doing their chosen activity. Though it would need to be a pay-per-move system.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Nygmus]

I believe that one of the higher-ups at Nintendo (possibly Miyamoto?) was quoted as hating load times, and was fairly influential in keeping the N64 as a cartridge-based system. This is also why they've worked to optimize them when possible. Metroid Prime was actually an interesting example, because those games got sneaky and hid the load times by preloading the next room when possible. Doors would pause after being shot before opening if the next room wasn't quite loaded yet, so instead of going to a loading screen and freezing, the game just has a sticky door. God of War did this too, with certain segments of areas that were basically long foot paths between chunks that needed to be loaded. If you replay GoW or GoW2 and encounter a long (10-15s, probably scenic) path without any obstacles to navigate or enemies to murder, that was almost certainly a load buffering section.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[radiumsoup]

well said :D

Re:Will the door have windows?

[nine-times]

I wonder, would a truly unlimited interactive novel be fun to play? It could be tested out by a kind of Turing test scenario. Have a player play such a game, and have a real novelist provide the "game" text. Of course such a thing would entail the player waiting a considerable time between "moves". But it would mean that their input would be boundless, they could do anything in the "game".

Well when I've thought about it in the past, I imagined it a bit like having an old-school D&D game with a dungeon master. Of course, that'd be a hard thing to do.

I always loved the old text adventures, but it's annoying that they were restricted to canned responses. You might come up with a great solution to a problem, but if it wasn't what the programmer had anticipated, you'll get get a message saying something like, "I'm sorry, but you can't do that." I would think coming up with something that allowed you more freedom would be an interesting problem to tackle and a good challenge for an AI researcher.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[TubeSteak]

Remember the US army created a game of their own called "America's Army". It was as realistic as the could make it, including the fact that you get shot once, and you are dead, and you couldn't rejoin the multi-player game until it was over. And that made it a dull game, as you typically spent half the time waiting rather than playing.

Funny you mention America's Army.
As "realistic" as it is, it's actually a toned down version of the real simulator they use to train soldiers.

Stuff like grenade fuse times and movement speed are what separate a simulator from a game.
It's all in the little details and America's Army fudges the details in order to turn a simulator into a game.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[CastrTroy]

You have to wonder what would have been different if the N64 went with discs. They may have been able to hold onto the Final Fantasy series instead of losing it to Sony. Then again, I really loved the N64 simply because it had some great games, and had no loading times. Whereas the original playstation had atrocious load times.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[BronsCon]

Webscale, baby!

Re:Will the door have windows?

[pedrop357]

Press X to Json.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Yakasha]

I love that "Feature Creep" is both adverbial and can be a noun. "Oh, look, it's the feature creep..." ;)

That sounds like something that walks near your red stone machine and adds worthless features to it.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[minstrelmike]

People play games to avoid real life because it is boring.
ditto for movies and books. The reason "literary" stuff is boring is because it's too much like real life where nothing interesting happens.
Books that sell are full of violence and sex.
If you want any excitement at all in real life, you've got to troll the slashdot comments.
And if you want sex, you need to learn to type one-handed ;-)

Re:Will the door have windows?

[internerdj]

We have a feature creep here. She creeps into your office and suggests features in your project and talks non-stop until she's pitched her whole idea and creeps back out.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[jellomizer]

Doors are often a convent method to block graphic rendering.
If you notice in a small room, you get more detail, then when you are outside in a wide area.

However growing up Playing Sierra 3d adventure games, if a building has a door on it, you try opening it in as many ways possible.
Oh the hours I have wasted in Quest For Glory building up my lock pick skills so I could break into the Barber Shop.
Back before people had internet. You really had to try everything.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Orestesx]

If you can shoot the lock or break down the door, then locked doors ceases to be a gameplay mechanic and just becomes another button that you have to click. Allowing the player to shoot the lock would make the game LESS interesting.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Orestesx]

A convent method...I didn't know there were game development nunneries.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Musc]

I see a common miscommunication going on here.

When people ask for games that let you do things more like real life, what they really mean is they want more freedom and flexibility to explore, play, and interact with the virtual world, and to advance the game through novel and clever mechanics that the developer might have thought of.

We are not asking for to be more like real life in the sense of being boring, painful, tedious, lots of hard work, etc.
Example: a first person shooter in an outdoor snowy scene. "More realistic" would not mean "slip and fall on the ice, breaking your neck, thereby ruining your fun".
Rather, "more realistic" would mean simulating the snow as a particle system so that the player could bend down, pick up the snow, form snowballs, build snow forts, and fun things like that. This requires a certain amount of real-world physics code.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[neonKow]

I think stuff like that has to be solved by things like physics engines. The difficulty of making a deep game that allows all interactions of the real world is that you need either a programmer to think of all these possibilities, or an engine sophisticated enough to deal with them. Since the first one gets impractical very quickly, you usually rely on the engine instead.

I would also like to point out that most games, even in real life, are pretty simple, as far as natural language descriptions go. Sports tend to boil down to "make ball fly in direction x using tool y" or "run/walk/climb faster than your opponent." Solutions to real life challenges tend to be very hard to input into a computer.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[CronoCloud]

IIRC, Diablo didn't have locked chests.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[devman]

Indeed. Diablo 2 had locked chests. My bad!

Re:Will the door have windows?

[mjwx]

I'd like little windows so people can see into the next room. These are always missing in games.
ALSO, I want to shoot something through the doors and blow them up with things.
#FeatureCreep

Stop playing games on a console. Both of these features have been available on PC games for over a decade.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Pseudonym]

This distinguishes it from Half-Life, where even though you're carrying enough ordnance to blow up a small suburb, you can't break that door or window.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[JasonGoatcher]

Holy shit, there's a programming concept kinda based on my name? That's so awesome. If I'm ever a manager, I'll make everybody use json. Because, since I'm awesome, this json thing MUST be awesome.

Seriously, though, never heard of it, gonna Google it just so I know what the heck it is.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[CptPicard]

There is also a legendary internet phenomenon with kinda your surname. I would not recommend googling for it.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Quirkz]

Good one. I'm stealing it and putting it in my novel about a parody dungeon crawler video game. I'd give you credit, but, frankly, "Thanks to Assmasher" isn't something I'm willing to put in print. Er, a second time, since I guess I just said it once.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Assmasher]

It really gives a resume that little extra something.

Btw, it comes from the name of a Dwarf's warhammer in a story in Dragon magazine.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[BasilBrush]

Right, better physics engines. Seems hard to argue with. But...

Take the Tomb raider series. Originally it was a map made of square columns. Sides of square columns for walls. Tops of square columns for floors. The square columns could have sloping tops. And there was the odd 3D model scenery for a statue. But apart from that, everything was square. And yet with this and textures they still managed to evoke different countries and environments.

The great thing was that you could nearly always see by looking which gaps you could leap from standing and which needed a running jump. Which ledges you could jump up to and which you couldn't. You could plan a route to solve a puzzle. And sliding block puzzles fitted in naturally.

As time went on they made the games of the series more realistic. And additions of motor vehicles sections did add fun activities. And higher resolutions made for better textures. But moving away from the square column architecture to arbitrary surfaces made the game worse. No longer was it clear which gaps you could jump, which ledges you could reach. And whilst there were still sliding block puzzles, each time you encountered one, it reminded you of the old square world and you wondered why the rest wasn't like that.

Essentially Tomb Raider is a 3D platformer. And it's just the same as with 2D platformers. Predictable blocks make for a predictable rules within which the game creator can make puzzles and the player can be expected to solve them by thinking or instinct, rather than trial and error. Make the environment more arbitrary and it tends to take away from the game.

Of course the are counter examples. Limbo is an incredibly good platformer that isn't built with blocks. But still, everything is predictable about a particular part of the environment. The giant spider doesn't ever behave differently it'll tap the ground X times. And then if you are past pixel Y, it will impale you.

Rather, "more realistic" would mean simulating the snow as a particle system so that the player could bend down, pick up the snow, form snowballs, build snow forts, and fun things like that.

You, like I, used that word "simulator" or a variant of it. For simulators, or toys, sure, lets simulate snow. But games are about stories and puzzles and progression. If that snow is part of the game, and enables you to progress, then great. But if it's just manipulating the scenery, what's the point?

Re:Will the door have windows?

[Druegan]

Except "you get shot once, and you are dead, and you couldn't rejoin the multi-player game until it was over" isn't realistic either, at least not according to the 55,000+ Purple Hearts awarded as of 2012 in Iraq and Afghanistan.. vs the 5200-ish combat deaths in those conflicts..

Apparently it is more "realistic" to be able to survive a bullet wound.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[BasilBrush]

Right. But not very realistic to have you fighting on.

But being realistic in this scenario would mean looking at a static picture of the sky, or the mud, or a black screen because you are unconscious.

The America's Army solution of switching you to impotent god mode, so you can at least watch the rest of the battle is slightly preferable to that.

Re:Will the door have windows?

[toddestan]

Well, if they overuse the concept, it could get old, but on the other hand it could be fun to smash a virtual door in occasionally. On the other hand, it could also work as part of a game dynamic - do I shoot out the lock, using up ammo and possibly alerting the enemies to my presence, or do I try to get the door open another way, or even bypass it entirely?

Re:Will the door have windows?

[MarbleMunkey]

Certainly not at work...

Article is empty

[Noughmad]

The article doesn't really say anything. For starters, it took me a while to realize she's talking only about computer games, and then even more specifically only about first person adventures / RPGs. From what I understood from the list of problems, I got that you decide on game mechanics and then generally boss people around.

Re:Article is empty

[Anonymous Coward]

What I got from it is that someone wanted to write a book for the $ake of writing a book.

And personally, fuck doors. Its a game....I deal with doors all day IRL and they suck too. Focus more on axes or sharks with laser beams.

Re:Article is empty

[SJHillman]

I love doors in video games as long as there is some way to completely and utterly destroy them. There's something very satisfying about wrecking a door to splinters that I don't get from my office day job.

Re:Article is empty

[GrumpySteen]

Bring an axe to work.

You may not keep your day job for long, but you can wreck the hell out of some doors and go out in a blaze of glory.

Re:Article is empty

[O('_')O_Bush]

I couldn't distinguish her "doors problem" from any other mundane problem in a complex system that some of us deal with every day.

Re:Article is empty

[tepples]

Perhaps the door analogy is her way of expressing what it's like to have a "mundane problem in a complex system" to someone who has never faced a system as complex as a video game.

Re:Article is empty

[joshuao3]

Which is the authors point. A programmer, not just a person who programs, has a special way of looking at the world and its systems. The conversation she's having with people is designed to separate those two kinds of people. Systems are generally more complex than they appear on first glance--and a real programmer is very able to visualize, define, and describe the system to whatever level of complexity is required. That being said, a GOOD programmer (and his manager) is able to keep feature creep in check by not getting distracted by out-of-spec parameters.

Re:Article is empty

[Boronx]

That's the point.

Re:Article is empty

[Dancindan84]

Maybe, but we all know she would have been better off with a car analogy.

Re:Article is empty

[Quirkz]

Focus more on axes or sharks with laser beams.

It seems like this has to exist by this point, but is there a game with a laser shark yet? Ideally maybe some sort of underwater "flight simulator" where you ride on the backs of large fish and shoot at each other.

Re:Article is empty

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

What I got from it is that someone wanted to write a book for the $ake of writing a book.

And personally, fuck doors. Its a game....I deal with doors all day IRL and they suck too. Focus more on axes or sharks with laser beams.

Roll a 10 sided die and be done with it! Oh, wait... wrong century...

Re:Article is empty

[suutar]

Maybe she meant car doors all along.

Re:Article is empty

[Black LED]

It's also addressing well understood problems. I designed quite a few levels in the various id Tech engines and what I would do for the fake vs real doors was to have some kind of indicator, perhaps a different colour light or design to distinguish them. For cases where the entire world shouldn't be drawn due to performance reasons, I would insert an antiportal into the doors, which would prevent anything behind the doors from being drawn until the door was actually opened. For the issue of having a door lock after a player passed through, I used a series of triggers.

Re:Article is empty

[bzipitidoo]

She skipped right past the first parts of game design to focus on minutae. Made good points, but about implementation details, not game design.

What game designers must do before worrying about doors is, well, design. What is the game about? Killing bad guys? Racing against competitors? Collecting money or points? Solving puzzles? Exploring worlds? Building things? The tricky part is picking the mechanisms. The question isn't which doors are supposed to open or have windows, it's whether doors are an appropriate and fun method to make reaching the goals, whatever they are, challenging without being impossible. Or they are a necessary evil to deal with limitations.

To find out if a game play element is possible and balanced and fun requires analysis and testing. It can be done in an agile way, making some elements, testing the game play, then making changes. For one example of unbalanced games, can look way back to the early Ultima games. In Ultima 2 and 3, the heroes were so powerful they could easily kill all the non-player characters in an entire city, without consequence, because to reduce memory usage on the computers of that era, the design simply loaded the initial state every time a city was entered. (Not that they couldn't have easily set aside just one bit, an "evil bit", to track whether the heroes were no longer heroes, but for whatever reason, they didn't.) Consequently, an easy way to get more money was kill the enitre town and take all the treasure, exit then reenter and do it all over again, until the player was satisified with the haul of loot. Tedious but effective. Not what the designers wanted, I'm sure, but they did go so far as to make the best of the problem by making a few towns especially juicy to loot. Ultima 3 especially was criticized for being too easy.

Or, design is often done in an ad hoc manner. As an example, many fantasy MMORPGs have a crafting system which the players can use to make equipment. These are a sideline to the main goals of progressing through the fantasy world, doing quests and gaining levels. The way MMORPGs implement it, crafting is dull, tedious, and limited. The players can't employ imagination to create novel items, they are restricted to a small set of fixed recipes. The game designers couldn't allow much latitude on crafting, or the players could and would make items so powerful that they completely unbalance the main game. It'd be rather like crafting and using machine guns, while the rest of the fantasy world continues to use swords and bows. Or the whole fanatsy world advances, and then it's not fantasy anymore. A crafting system that is just a little more realistic could inadvertently allow such things. After all, in real life, what stopped the people of the Middle Ages from having guns? Lack of knowledge, nothing more. The players will all know about modern technology, and will not be held back through ignorance, so the game designers have to resort to other methods. Science Fiction is not much help. A crafting system that allows novelty could likely still be used to break the game.

Re:Article is empty

[neonKow]

It's coming in Goat Simulator 2.0

Re:Article is empty

[Bensam123]

And this is why a lot of video games suck. You have someone on slashdot writing a post that better describes the issues then an 'established' video game designer.

I think video games is a lot like art and people like to pretend you can simply break things down into analogies and analyze them with the market. You can't. Time and time again it's shown that big winners are new and unique. You can't copy the crap out of everything and expect it to work, like a lot of video game designers do. 'We take a element from here, a little bit of this, a dash of this, oh this color was good in this video game' and all of a sudden you have a steaming PoS.

This is both good and bad. It means there will always be really bad video game designers (as artists, who never have a knack for it but try anyway), but at the same time there isn't any one easy way to quantify or point out a good artist... except by their sales (which is usually a bad way of quantifying art). Focusing way too much on a single problem, like the above video game designer did, will lead to a game just about doors that's not flushed out in any other way... and that's usually boring, unless it involves goats.

Re:Article is empty

[Dutch Gun]

Bring an axe to work.

You may not keep your day job for long, but you can wreck the hell out of some doors and go out in a blaze of glory.

Someone actually did that next door to where I work a few years ago. It was quite a sight to arrive at work in the morning only to see the office park swarming with police. I had accidentally allowed my car tabs to expire and hadn't renewed them yet, and all I could think of was "please don't look at my license plate... please don't look at my license plate..." as officers with their guns unholstered shoo'ed us away from the area. It was an interesting morning.

Re:Article is empty

[Quirkz]

The way MMORPGs implement it, crafting is dull, tedious, and limited. The players can't employ imagination to create novel items, they are restricted to a small set of fixed recipes. The game designers couldn't allow much latitude on crafting, or the players could and would make items so powerful that they completely unbalance the main game.

It's not just game balance, it's coding for the flexibility. It's one thing to code eight potions for eight reagents, with the restriction that each potion gets exactly one reagent, and another thing to code for roughly 100 different potions, if you free it up to allow each potion to have any combination of 1-8 reagents in it. What do all those potions do? What are they called? Can you even think up 100 different unique effects for them to have? And, ultimately, does it even add anything to the game to have a 100-potion exploration space (and do you give hints for recipes, or let players keep a cookbook to remember, or is discovery part of the game?) rather than just a simple setup of 8 obviously handy potions. Is the time required to allow this advanced crafting better spent on coding more spells, or another level, or doing more gameplay testing?

Re:Article is empty

[bzipitidoo]

I was thinking that a game element like crafting should be more "programmable". The range of possibily is not mere 100s of potion mixes that the designers can and maybe have to go through and work out beforehand. There would be far too many programs to exhaustively check them all, even for all the players. No one could be sure what the limits are, and that a still more efficient way to achieve some effect remains undiscovered.

Making a system that is too big to be exhaustively analyzed carries the unavoidable risk that it can unbalance the game. Game designers usually go for the conservative option, and settle for something that is safe and dull.

Re:Article is empty

[lonecrow]

Agreed. Also how is this different from programming a business app? Actually a business app is way harder. A game need only be internally consistent. But a business app needs to be consistent wit existing company procedures and vocabularies as well as comply with various regulations. By comparison real world apps are way harder then game apps. I have written both and real world business apps are way more 'hard'.

RPG Games

[fatp]

Most RPG Games I played have large number of fake doors.

Re:RPG Games

[ciderbrew]

A good thing. I'd have to open every door in the game. I don't have OCD. OCD.. OCD... O.C.D.

Re:RPG Games

[Anonymous Coward]

OC/DC

There. Fixed!

Re:RPG Games

[Anonymous Coward]

AC/DC
There. Made Awesome!

Re:RPG Games

[SJHillman]

It's A Long Way To The Top, If You Wanna Open Every Door

Re:RPG Games

[Remus Shepherd]

I spell it CDO, because it doesn't annoy me as much when it's in alphabetical order.

Re:RPG Games

[schlachter]

You: Walk to door.
Game: You arrive at the door. It looks heavy and old.
You: Open door.
Game: You can't, this is a fake door.

um

[Charliemopps]

Those issues sound like any feature in any other software project I've worked on...

Are there "Save" buttons in your application?
Can the user click them?
Can the user click every button in the application?
What tells a user a button is click-able?
What happens if there are two user?
Does it become read only after both users click it?
What if the UI is REALLY BIG and controls can't all exist at the same time?'
'Network Programmer: "Do all the users need to see the record save at the same time?
Release Engineer: "You need to get your buttons in by 3pm if you want them on the disk.
Producer: "Do we need to give everyone those buttons or can we save them for phase 2?

Re:um

[91degrees]

Not really. Not unless your application has hundreds of save buttons, some of which are purely there for decorative purposes. And most applications don't have multiple users sharing a UI.

For app design, all these are solved problems. The typical answers are "yes, usually, yes, unclickable buttons are faded, the first user has a lock on the file, no because that would be stupid, your UI is too complex, yes, ???, we need the save button in phase 1".

With a game, I've seen different answers for all of these.

Re:um

[mrchaotica]

What if the UI is REALLY BIG and controls can't all exist at the same time?'

your UI is too complex

So every app with more than one window (or mode) is too complex?

Re:um

[91degrees]

Fine. My solution here is incorrect.

Break down the UI into simpler components. Although to be fair to GGP, this does also apply to level design.

Re:um

[thesandtiger]

This article isn't for actual software engineers, but "idea guys" who think making games is easy and don't actually understand what goes into real game design.

I know a ton of people like that - they have an idea for some awesome next level stuff, but it's only a very vague idea with a few neat things in there, without any of the actual work that is needed to turn it into a game design, let alone a spec, let alone a game. Seriously, everyone I know who is a gamer and not an engineer is constantly babbling about how games should do X or Y or Z or whatever, but when you ask them questions about how any of it would actually work, they wave their hands and say it isn't important because the IDEA that they took a whole 30 seconds coming up with and articulating is somehow the hard part.

The idea is the easy part - I can toss out hundreds of ideas for games that would be amazing. Turning that amazing idea into anything resembling a useful thing is another kettle of fish entirely.

Re:um

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yeah, I agree. Its UX desgin. Which most programmers at small companies have to do themselves. It gets more complex in games, sure, but its not that different.

When ever I hear game designers try to explain what they do I always think of John Romero and ion storms issues with Daikatana. Too many game/level designers not enough engineering and art talent.

Re:um

[jafac]

(Windows 8 version): No save buttons, per se, see, because we've uncluttered the interface. Youve got to slide your mouse over to the left side of the screen there, see? And then, the "charms bar" will slide out of the edge. If you're in "save" mode, and if your user has admin privileges, you'll see a button that looks like a circle with a little box in it. That's the save button.

Everyone: "WTF?"

Re:um

[minstrelmike]

The article reminded me of the basic design decisions Joel Spolsky talked about simply putting a trash can on a street corner.
It's got to be big so it holds lot of garbage. It's got to be heavy so it doesn't blow away. It's got to be light enough to empty.
It's got about 20 conflicting real life counter-manding requirements.

She's whining about the folks who say writing a game ain't that hard. Ain't no harder than writing a novel. All you've got to do is type the right words that tell an interesting story. How hard can that be?
Harder than it looks.

Re:um

[minstrelmike]

If a button cannot be clicked, then you shouldn't be displaying the user a widget that affords clicking.

Hey dude, this is not the forum to be bashing Microsoft ;-)

Easy answers

[DeathToBill]

I'm not convinced by TFS. The answers are, roughly:

1. 1. Are there doors in your game? Let's say for the moment there are.
2. 2. Can the player open them? Yes. If you have doors in a 3D game and they don't behave like doors, you have failed.
3. 3. Can the player open every door in the game? Yes. See point 2.
4. 4. What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open? It's a door. It opens.
5. 5. What happens if there are two players? Doors behave the same for all players. It's a door. See point 2.
6. 6. Does it only lock after both players pass through the door? See point 5.
7. 7. What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time? Then your technology is not good enough to implement your vision and one or the other needs to change. See point 2.

Am I the only one who finds arbitrary restrictions in games, either because the technology couldn't cope, or because the game designer knows how you want to play better than you do, or just because, really annoying? If there's a door there, it should open. If it won't open, there shouldn't be a door there. How hard is this? Putting a door there that's never going to open just frustrates the player and destroys the suspension of disbelief. It reminds them that they're not really in this world they can see, they're in some arbitrarily limited construct devised by a "product manager" at some company to try to screw a few bob out of them. Of course there need to be some limits on the world, because the technology isn't infinite; good game design should make those limits look natural so that the player never even notices that the limit is there.

Tomb Raider games are amazingly annoying - some things you can jump and grab, some things you can't. The only way to tell is to jump and try grabbing it. If it doesn't work, maybe you can't jump and grab that thing, or maybe you just didn't quite get it right. I know, I know, this is not the point of Tomb Raider games, Lara is, but still...

Re:Easy answers

[mwvdlee]

I like your world where no locked doors exist; it's so very much like reality where I also need no keys to unlock doors.
Also in reality nobody can ever block a door. If somebody else (let's call him "player 2") blocks the door from opening, I'm still able to open the door. Because "It's a door. It opens", the door will magically pass right through the other person.
Also; what is behind every opened door? If there are doors behind an opened door, they should open too, right?

In my world, a locked door is normal. How can I see if a door is locked in real life? If it has a hole for a key and closed, it's probably locked.

Re:Easy answers

[Ardyvee]

If it is locked, then that implies that the door opens, but it's being blocked by a device (the lock). If the door wouldn't open (ever), then it's probably just a texture that looks like a door instead of an actual, in-game door that it's just locked.

I think it was in F.E.A.R. where there were doors whose sole purpose was to look pretty. They opened, except there were some boxes or stuff on the other side so you could never go through them. Perhaps you would go to the other side through another way, or perhaps you wouldn't. Either way, they behaved like doors instead of being just a texture on a wall that looks like a door.

Re:Easy answers

[91degrees]

Except it doesn't always work. Suppose you have a hotel room level or something. The hotel corridor will be lots of rooms that you don't need to open and wouldn't make sense from an immersion point of view if you could. So what's the solution here?

Re:Easy answers

[Culture20]

But there might be red herring doors which behave like all other locked doors, but which have no key available in the game or are (visibly?) blocked from behind or chained together. These doors will never open, and threads on Internet forums will be created about them detailing ways people will have tried to get through them. I appreciate painted-on 2d doors that let me know it's not a real door so I shouldn't even bother. I appreciate a complete world where every door can be unlocked or destroyed with powder kegs, but whole-world design is a lot tougher than level design. Even Origin had issues creating worlds after their buyout.

Re:Easy answers

[Drethon]

It has little to do with technology coping and how you implement these behaviors in code in a way that works smoothly and consistently.

So what I read is you think the "technology" should be able to implement reality? "Technology" does not exist, code written by humans does and writing this code takes time. Say it takes ten hours to implement code for a non realistic door to be coded up, a hundred hours for a fairly realistic door to be implemented and a thousand hours for a completely realistic door. Is the developer going to go with the simple door that cost $250 to implement and makes most users happy or the complex door that cost $25,000 to implement?

Now look at the fact that that door is 0.001% of the total complexity of the game. If the entire game is implemented with the same complexity, how many people have to buy this $2.5Bn game for it to be profitable?

5. What happens if there are two players? Doors behave the same for all players. It's a door. See point 2.

Great, it behaves the same for all players. Does that mean when one player unlocks the door it always remains unlocked for everyone or do we have a door that automatically relocks after it is closed? Say access to an area is restricted as part of a high level quest. When one player completes the quest after hours of questing and gains access to the special area we want all players, including those who just started the game, to be able to enter this hard to attain room?

It isn't just about making a door behave like a door, its a question of what does this door mean to the whole game, what does each door mean to the whole game?

Re:Easy answers

[Dan East]

If there's a door there, it should open. If it won't open, there shouldn't be a door there. How hard is this? Putting a door there that's never going to open just frustrates the player and destroys the suspension of disbelief. It reminds them that they're not really in this world they can see, they're in some arbitrarily limited construct devised by a "product manager" at some company to try to screw a few bob out of them.

What kind of world do you live in that you're able to open every single door you see? You actually believe that is realistic? Especially for games like the original Half Life, set in this huge commercial / industrial type top secret research setting. I would expect that EVERY door would be locked by default!

Re:Easy answers

[Sockatume]

Arbitrary restrictions are what differentiates game design from VR engineering.

Re:Easy answers

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not convinced by TFS. The answers are, roughly:

1. 1. Are there doors in your game? Let's say for the moment there are.
2. 2. Can the player open them? Yes. If you have doors in a 3D game and they don't behave like doors, you have failed.
3. 3. Can the player open every door in the game? Yes. See point 2.
4. 4. What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open? It's a door. It opens.
5. 5. What happens if there are two players? Doors behave the same for all players. It's a door. See point 2.
6. 6. Does it only lock after both players pass through the door? See point 5.
7. 7. What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time? Then your technology is not good enough to implement your vision and one or the other needs to change. See point 2.

As soon as you got to your step 2 and step 3 you just increased the programming load by a considerable amount. If you want all that you need to tell your VP that you need the funds to do it. If the answer is no, then your list just changed.

Re:Easy answers

[Thruen]

This is a huge problem for me in exactly those types of levels. I do want to open every door, every single one, and I very rarely can. Admittedly, my favorite games are open world games which shouldn't have many areas inaccessible to the player, but I also play shooters and want the same thing. Battlefield 4 is full of elevators that only go from the lobby to the top floor or roof, I want to get out on the 32nd floor and kick the door in to the corner suite and set up my rifle where I won't immediately be spotted, taking that option away never makes sense from an immersion point of view. It only makes sense from a technological point of view. Does it create the possibility that 64 players will be roaming room to room with silencers in a hotel while ignoring the rest of a large map? Yes, and that's perfect. The previous post is entirely correct, while doors are important these questions are easy to answer.

Don't get me wrong, I believe game design to be rather difficult, but this is a poor attempt at explaining why. "The Door Problem" is not nearly as difficult as budget problems, working within technological limitations, or keeping a coherent storyline while letting the player make meaningful decisions. I speak from years of experience, in unrelated fields but experience none the less!

Re:Easy answers

[FlyHelicopters]

In the world of Half Life where there is an emergency and aliens are invading and I have a gun, I can open more or less any door, one way or another.

Normally shooting open doors is frowned on in polite socity, but that same socity understands when shooting open doors during an alien invasion.

What is REALLY stupid is to give me a rocket launcher that can't destroy glass walls.

Re:Easy answers

[mooingyak]

If there's a door there, it should open. If it won't open, there shouldn't be a door there. How hard is this? Putting a door there that's never going to open just frustrates the player and destroys the suspension of disbelief. It reminds them that they're not really in this world they can see, they're in some arbitrarily limited construct devised by a "product manager" at some company to try to screw a few bob out of them.

What kind of world do you live in that you're able to open every single door you see? You actually believe that is realistic? Especially for games like the original Half Life, set in this huge commercial / industrial type top secret research setting. I would expect that EVERY door would be locked by default!

The complaint is more that IRL, there is *some way* of opening every door out there. Most of the time it's out of simple respect of what a locked door indicates that you don't even try. The rest of the time it's usually that the effort isn't worth it. But it's totally possible to open every single door in, say, a hotel. In many games, doors are just decorative, despite that there's an implication of something behind it.

Re:Easy answers

[atwupack]

1. Are there doors in your game? Let's say for the moment there are. OK

2. Can the player open them? Yes. If you have doors in a 3D game and they don't behave like doors, you have failed. Not every door can be opened in RL. Why should it be possible in a game?

3. Can the player open every door in the game? Yes. See point 2. Then you have to provide every possible room for a location even if it is not necessary for the game. Why should I be able to open every door of every house in a street only because there is one house I have to visit?

4. What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open? It's a door. It opens. Again, you have a street with houses. Why should it be possible for the player to enter each house on the street? You cannot do that in real life, can you?

5. What happens if there are two players? Doors behave the same for all players. It's a door. See point 2. No, because one player could be allowed to open the door as owner of the house, apartment. The second one is not allowed to open that door.

6. Does it only lock after both players pass through the door? See point 5. See, my reply to point 5. Who locks the door? Is it possible that the invited player enters the apartment and lock the owner out of his own place?

7. What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time? Then your technology is not good enough to implement your vision and one or the other needs to change. See point 2. This question is about the technology. What technology to chose to make doors in the huge world work. But because doors normally have only a local impact on the environment this is really not that difficult I would say.

Re:Easy answers

[Anonymous Coward]

If I'm armed like I would be in Battle of Duty or whatever, every single door.

Re:Easy answers

[mwvdlee]

3. Learn how to posit valid arguments.

Implied ad hominem attacks are not valid.

Why do you think I'm wrong and why do you feel my argument are incorrect?
I thought I made a decent case, using mild sarcasm, for not having every door be openable.

Re:Easy answers

[Derec01]

Let me guess, you only ever play sandbox games?

The summary questions are essential questions to answering what kind of game you want to design, and you explained the consequences of ignoring them perfectly in your commentary. A game is a combined experience and challenge. That experience needs to fundamentally be finite, if only because you have finite designer time. What you have to do is make the experience finite without throwing arbitrary restrictions at the player when possible. Yet I wouldn't want EVERY game to be set in a featureless canyon rather than a city just because I can't open every door.

Sandbox games aren't bad, per se; it's a good design challenge. Frankly though, I've never played a sandbox game that didn't feel a little soulless (Nethack, GTA, Minecraft, etc.). I prefer games with some narrative thread or plotline, and that inherently will mean balancing the experience and interactivity you want to provide. If I can't open a door that I think I should be able to open, that is a failure, but it's not simply that they shouldn't have put a door there or built a room.

Re:Easy answers

[mwvdlee]

But did the boxes behind the door behave like boxes? Could the boxes be opened, or shoved aside?
I'm perfectly used to encountering doors that I will never be able to unlock in real life.
When I walk to my own frontdoor (to which I do have the key) I encounter dozens of doors for which I have no key and which will remain forever locked to me.
Why couldn't this be true for a game as well?

Re:Easy answers

[war4peace]

It's why I stopped playing the last thief. Zounds of doors out of which 3 open, everything else is just there because... I have no idea why.
How to beat the ultimate thief: just place the loot behind one of those unopenable doors.

Re:Easy answers

[war4peace]

Because in real life those doors don't come in a package you bought.
You bought the game, therefore you bought all the doors within it. They should then have the ability to open and let you explore.

Re:Easy answers

[QuasiSteve]

As I have been playing this game lately (friend invite)

2. Can the player open them? Yes. If you have doors in a 3D game and they don't behave like doors, you have failed.

Or succeeded - not every door in real life can be opened.

3. Can the player open every door in the game? Yes. See point 2.

Not necessarily.

4. What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open? It's a door. It opens.

Unless the door knob is missing. Then it doesn't open - and every player realizes this visual cue pretty quickly.

5. What happens if there are two players? Doors behave the same for all players. It's a door. See point 2.

Agreed.

6. Does it only lock after both players pass through the door? See point 5.

Except for certain doors that require all players to have passed through. The door opens/closes just fine, but only locks if all players are either in the room, or outside the room but dead. How do players know? It's written on-screen - but after a while, people just know.

7. What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time? Then your technology is not good enough to implement your vision and one or the other needs to change. See point 2

Or you load/save as applicable and call each section stages/chapters.

The game? Left 4 Dead 2.

Now, should all games be designed that way? No. But it's certainly a solution to the problems put forth, and fits within the game's overall design.

Re:Easy answers

[kingramon0]

There is a difference between having a locked door that the player can find a key for and open, versus a door that can never be opened.

In real life, there is no such thing as a door that won't ever open, so if you put such a thing in a game, you have created something that the player should reasonably expect to be able to interact with (by finding a way to open the door) but can't because you only put it there for decoration or whatever. This will lead to frustration when the player wastes time trying to figure out how to open the door. Unless, you've made it obvious that the door will never open by making it look fake, but then you've broken the immersion.

Re:Easy answers

[tepples]

You didn't buy it; you licensed it. And you didn't license the ability to charm all NPCs into unlocking all doors for you.

Re:Easy answers

[91degrees]

I do agree that the writer makes this harder than it is. I guess the point is that it's not as eas as it seems, but the point has been oversold somewhat.

Re:Easy answers

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, DeathToBill, but you failed her test.You're making the classic wannabe game designer mistake of putting technical issues and your interpretation of realism above all else, because you don't like "arbitrary restrictions." So, so many games have failed because of designers who thought that way.

What you're saying is that you can't build a game with doors unless they're all openable and there's actual stuff behind them. For starters, that just blew your level design budget by 2x, so you need to trim somewhere else to make that back. Second, you don't want players getting bored walking into all these useless areas that you added just so there wouldn't be unopenable doors, and now you need to work that area into the game design itself. Your scripting budget has just gone up substantially.

While one person has a hang-up about doors, other people will be obsessed with arms clipping door frames (requiring some kind of IK solution), that you're putting things into a backpack that wouldn't fit in real life, and others will hate the fact that cars have infinite petrol. The end result is you make an unfun mess that a couple of purists praise as "realistic."

Re:Easy answers

[SirSlud]

For all practical purposes, you're probably within 40 feet of a door that can never be opened. Or let's go the other way - hey, given enough time, you could probably find a crane and a wrecking ball, and destroy the building you're sitting in. Therefore, games without fully destructible environments are frustrating to you, because in real life, you can destroy everything? That's a silly line of reasoning. You're marking the line between what is reasonable and unreasonable that is clearly out of whack with the majority of players who accept that some level of suspension of disbelief is required in order to enjoy a video game. Game design conventions and art design directly addresses the concerns you're laying out in the vast majority of games with visual cues as to which objects are interactive and which are not. Anybody can be obstinate about those conventions, but to argue the point without acknowledging that they are a standard part of game and art design is being utterly disingenuous.

Re:Easy answers

[ausekilis]

These answers are short-sighted and don't get to the real questions a game designer should be asking. Lets look a little bit closer:

1. Are there doors in your game? This is really asking about portals from one area to another. Do a web search for an analysis of the Doom 3 source code and you'll see what I mean. Is your game broken into logical sections and how do you navigate between them?
2. Can the player open them? This is really asking if there are restrictions in place to prohibit free movement in the game world. Doom had key cards and colored doors. Mario has Pipes, paintings and stars, etc... Zelda is famous for "soft locks", where you can see something, but you need a new ability to get there, like the hookshot or bow and arrow.
3. Can the player open every door in the game? This is more of a visual style question. Again with Doom and the doors, some did not open, such as the one you came through to get to the beginning of the level (the ugly flat silver doors). Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Resistance, and even Halo are intended to take place in a beleivable world. All of them have a point A, a point B, and a path between them (sometimes 2 or a really wide path). Would you honestly want to go into every single building, every single floor, every single room in Saints Row? Infamous? Crackdown? GTA? Assassins Creed? Do you have any idea how long the development time would be? How much storage space you'd need to store an entire city the size of Brooklyn?
4. What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open? This is a question about visual queueing. AVGN had an episode on Aliens that touched on this, the doors weren't distinguishable from ones that opened and ones that did not. Castlevania Simon's Quest was actually pretty good about it, open doors could be entered, closed doors could not. Gears of War had little green lights over doors that could open, particularly those that the player was supposed to go through.
5. What happens if there are two players? In Doom, if the door was open any player could pass. If they didn't have the key, the door didn't open. Simple. Resident Evil 5 allowed players to go through almost any door, only a few required teamwork.
6. Does it only lock after both players pass through the door? In Doom, no. In RE5, yes. In Gears of War, sometimes.
7. 7. What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time? This is really a question of separation of media within the game. How do you handle having too much for your 2GB of RAM? Do you simply crash and tell the user they need to buy more RAM? Do you detect that limit and begin streaming? Given that almost every PC is separate, distinct, and unique from almost every other PC, you can't possibly know exactly how much video RAM or system RAM a user may have. Best you can do is "minimum suggested", which in many cases is only going to store a fraction of a level. Castlevania SOTN did this very well, those odd rooms with no music were loading rooms. No loading progress bar, no "Please Wait". It would load a good portion (if not all) of the area (e.g. Marble Gallery) into memory and let the player muck around. In other games the loading may just be of the needed textures, while only loading the level geometry for the immediate large room. To say "Your technology is not good enough" is taking an elitist approach to design. An XBOX360 is not capable of loading the entirety of Gears of War 3 into RAM all at once. Most computers aren't capable of loading the entirety of Skyrim into RAM all at once. WoW is over 20GB, compressed. Uncompressed who knows, but Windows is not going to allocate that much RAM to a single process, not when you also have web browsers, music, youtube, netflix, whatever loaded too. The doors provide a logical separation of data, I believe that in many cases they are used to queue the game engine to drop one set of textures/geometry and load in another.

Re:Easy answers

[Ardyvee]

You do expect that all doors will behave like doors. If you try the handle (assuming nothing stops you from physically reaching the door), you'll either open them or fail because they are locked. If they are locked, they'll usually make a noise (either because you pull and the lock won't let it open, or because the handle will not continue down).

The main complain about the whole door thing is that you find games that have what looks like a door and isn't: you click your action key and it does nothing because what you are seeing looks only like a door. It'd be fine if it behaved like a locked door, but not even that. It simply ISN'T a door. It's just a painting of a door.

Also, all doors open. Whether you need to unlock/unblock them first or not is another thing. But doors open.

Re:Easy answers

[Chris Mattern]

In real life, there is no such thing as a door that won't ever open,

But as far as the game is concerned, a door that won't ever open is just a door that won't ever open *for you*, and the real world is full of those.

Re:Easy answers

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

Of course there need to be some limits on the world, because the technology isn't infinite; good game design should make those limits look natural so that the player never even notices that the limit is there.

So let's say for sake of argument that you're playing a first-person shooter set in a warehouse. Which is preferable:

1) Having a door to the outside world that is locked and never opens, because the game designers didn't want to model the entire planet or introduce a "You can't go that way" arbitrary boundary.
2) Having a warehouse with no doors to the outside world, because the game designers didn't want to model the entire planet or introduce a "You can't go that way" arbitrary boundary.

I suppose if your setting is either magical enough or science-fiction enough to have some form of teleportation, you can say "A wizard/Scotty gets people in and out of the warehouse." Between those extremes, unless your game's backstory is that the warehouse was built around the current occupants (or their ancestors) and that it's big enough to support the needs of those occupants (food, water, sanitation, breathable air, etc.) there needs to be some way to get in or out.

Re:Easy answers

[ildon]

First of all, you've failed to understand the premise of the article. The article is not intended to answer any of those questions, it's meant to communicate to the reader that these are all considerations that have to be made not just for a simple and seemingly obvious object like a door, but every single object and potential object in a video game.

As for your assertions:

> 2. Can the player open them? Yes. If you have doors in a 3D game and they don't behave like doors, you have failed.

False. When you walk down the street in your neighborhood, do you walk up to every single door trying to open it? No. You ignore 99% of the doors you pass in real life. They can usually be opened, but it's often not relevant or important to you that you open them. If a door is not relevant to gameplay, but your environment is one that in real life would contain a lot of irrelevant doors, then it's expected and correct to put a bunch of false, graphical-only doors to make the environment feel more familiar and natural. The important part, and what's alluded to in the article, is that you create a clear visual logic for the player so they can recognize which doors are important and openable vs. which ones are just there to make the environment look more interesting.

> 5. What happens if there are two players? Doors behave the same for all players. It's a door. See point 2.

Again, it's not about how it should work, but rather that you have to consider every possibility and account for it. If you create a door with a set of states and triggers, but only consider one player, then the second player could potentially cause problems with the state by triggering states out of order in a way that a single player could not. If, for gameplay reasons, you want the door to immediately lock behind the player to trap them, and you introduce a second player who does not pass through the door when the first does, you have now separated the players and potentially prevented one of them from participating in your gameplay encounter because you forgot to consider there might be a second player in your multiplayer game.

> 7. What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time? Then your technology is not good enough to implement your vision and one or the other needs to change. See point 2.

Most games these days stream level and texture data from disk rather than keep it all in memory. This allows more complex scenes in each area and disguises or obviates load screens. Doors can be a good way to section those areas off and control the flow so you can optimally stream that data from the disk without the player noticing. The scope of the project could be fine, but now the level designer has to design his levels with this aspect in mind. The design has to be understood all the way down the line, from project lead to engine programmer to level designer to quality assurance (so they can try to break it in a way a customer might accidentally break it) in order for the result to prevent this from becoming an issue in the final product.

It's not that hard to develop a visual language within your game to make it clear to the player which objects are interactive and which are not. That's why some of the questions in the original article are things like "Do you put rubble in front of a door to indicate that it won't open?" It becomes a clear visual metaphor for the player that doors with rubble in front do not open, and ones without rubble do (or at least can given proper conditions). For your ledge grabbing example, all you have to do is look at the Uncharted series. Climbable ledges in Uncharted have a distinct color and texture that makes them stand out from non-climbable ledges. This is *exactly* what the article is talking about. You didn't know which ledges in Tomb Raider were climbable because their visual metaphor failed to inform you of which ones were climbable and whi

Re:Easy answers

[nabsltd]

But there might be red herring doors which behave like all other locked doors, but which have no key available in the game or are (visibly?) blocked from behind or chained together.

The only place a door that can never open makes sense is at the edge of a level, since there is no "world" behind such a door. The solution is to simply design the levels so that there is nothing at the edge that contains a door.

Re:Easy answers

[DeathToBill]

Well, it seems others could read well enough to understand the argument. They've explained it in painful detail before I got a chance.

Re:Easy answers

[nine-times]

If there's a door there, it should open. If it won't open, there shouldn't be a door there. How hard is this? Putting a door there that's never going to open just frustrates the player and destroys the suspension of disbelief.

I don't know if I agree. Games are, in many ways, about presenting the player with illusions. If you have a big open world, you might put stars in the night sky with no way to reach them. The stars aren't really there, and you're artificially limited to traveling along the ground, but you're being presented with the illusion of being immersed in a complete world.

For another example, in the Grand Theft Auto games, there were many buildings that the player couldn't enter, but a few that he could. Should they have gotten rid of all the buildings that couldn't be entered? Then you have a big empty world.

With doors, I think it's often stupid to add doors that can't be opened, but sometimes that's part of the game-- to find out which doors can be opened. Sometimes it's just adding texture so that you can imagine that there are many things beyond those doors you can't open, adding to the realism and immersiveness of the game. If you're going to add doors that can't open, then the person designing the video game needs to make sure that they play the appropriate role in the game. If you're supposed to know that you can't open the doors, then there might be an appropriate visual cue. If you're supposed to try to open them, then you don't want an obvious cue, but you do want there to be something to indicate whether the player should give up or keep trying to open the door.

I think what's being pointed out is that there are many subtle decisions made by game developers that game players don't notice. It's not that they're necessarily hard decisions, but if you're presented with 100 of these decisions, it can be hard to have your choices result in a game that's both technically feasible and fun to play.

Re:Easy answers

[Drethon]

I was tempted to post a comment about this article going woosh over most everyone. Though I think its partially the fault of the article not explaining why this thinking is necessary rather than just explaining what the necessary thinking is.

Re:Easy answers

[nabsltd]

I thought I made a decent case, using mild sarcasm, for not having every door be openable.

You made a case for every door not being easy to open. But, the only reason to have a door that can never be opened is laziness on the part of the level designer.

Re:Easy answers

[nabsltd]

I'm perfectly used to encountering doors that I will never be able to unlock in real life.

There are very few doors in real life that can't be "unlocked" with the weapons available in most FPS games.

Re:Easy answers

[donscarletti]

Am I the only one who finds arbitrary restrictions in games, either because the technology couldn't cope, or because the game designer knows how you want to play better than you do, or just because, really annoying? If there's a door there, it should open. If it won't open, there shouldn't be a door there. How hard is this?

Easy answer, almost impossible.

Buildings have doors, how many buildings do you want in this game? Is this game set outdoors in a city how many doors can you see? Now, consider that on the other side of the door must now exist a room, for example a 20 floor building must have 20 individually created floors, devided into maybe 30 apartments for a residentual building or say 4 for a commercial building which are each going to need some their own assets or they are going to look the same. Lets say optimistically 200 man hours per floor to get it to fairly rough quality (skip concept art and iteration, re-use most assets), 20 floors per building, that's 4,000 man hours per building which at $30 an hour (average for 3d artists in US) is $120,000. One building, done poorly with absolutely nothing interesting inside.

So what do you want to do? Have a game with no buildings? But buildings work well in games and players play well in cities! Have no doors in buildings? But that would look strange! Have a game where all the buildings are the same inside? But that would defeat the purpose of having them, since players would have no reason to enter them!

One of the key thing about making a better game, nomatter from design, art, engineering is not adding more but working out clever ways of not doing things. Time and money are finite, GTA 5 cost $135 million to make, the vast majority of which was spent adding detail to the world, but most buildings are still empty shells. The key is to cue players to not notice what you don't have.

The problem you have with Tomb Raider is not a detail problem but a communication problem. From a design problem they have failed to communicate to you what can be grabbed and what cannot. Sure, they could have gone the Assassin's Creed route and procedually made everything grabbable, but Assassin's Creed's climbing wasn't much fun at all for that very reason, there was no searching and pondering aspect, you just push him in the general direction and he climbs. So it leaves you with the problem of making an attractive environment with a finite amount of interaction and they handled it, imperfectly, but as best they could.

The thing is, when making a game, adding more is not always possible. Skill in design means making the same amount seem like more.

Re:Easy answers

[ildon]

In real life, there are plenty of doors for which you will never find the key lying around. More importantly there, are millions (billions?) of doors that are of no interest to you, ever. In a video game, it would be very difficult to set up a series of long term societal detriments for going around trying to open every door, or to easily express to the player why the character they're playing has no interest in one door vs. another, or why what's behind most doors is not of interest to the gameplay or the plot of the game. But it'd also be extremely strange to walk down a city street environment and have there be no doors into any of the surrounding buildings. So we put up false doors as window dressing so the environment looks familiar, but then we build a visual metaphor that lets players see at a glance which doors are unimportant so they don't bother to try them. This can be by leaving them as a flat texture instead of modeled, making openable doors a different color or have specific lighting or highlights, making openable doors have handles and unopenable ones not have handles, or as the article suggests, putting rubble or something (depending on the context of the game) in front of unopenable doors. You can even make unopenable doors make a specific sound effect when approached, such as the sound of a handle jiggling on a locked door, or the sound of the character specifically saying "It won't open," etc. (although only communicating it once the door is approached can be tedious for the player).

Re:Easy answers

[PopeRatzo]

I've been playing the Rise of the Triad re-do lately, and I've noticed lots of doors. I mean a LOT of doors. I've also noticed that they all open. Either you can open it now or it's locked and you can open it later or it will open with a bad guy behind it and it's not for you to open at all because it opens from the other side, but dammit it will be opened at some point if you continue exploring.

The ease of movement of those old FPS games is a stunning contrast with the newer 3rd person shooter console games like Tomb Raider, which feel like you're controlling a marionette with rubberbands instead of strings and you're never sure if you're going to jump over that obstacle or use it for cover. The Mass Effect series is the same.

One third-person shooter that felt natural was Saints Row 3 and 4. But even there, as well-done as those games were, there would be some clumsiness. In an FPS like Half-Life 2, there was none of that.

Re:Easy answers

[rainmaestro]

Obligatory comic:

http://www.screencuisine.net/h...

Re:Easy answers

[ildon]

It's not just a technological or man power problem. Even if we create holodeck technology that can automatically generate realistic environments for those other 60 floors, the game designer is still only going to let you go straight to the roof, because that's the game experience they're trying to create. That's what they think will be fun for most people (and they're right, by the way).

For most people, a truly open game is not fun. They're not playing BF4 to kick over furniture. They're playing it to shoot bad guys. They're playing it to interact with the gameplay systems. If you put them in a building with 60 floors, but the bad guys are only on the roof, 59 of those floors are a waste of their time. Obviously there are some games where exploration is one of the primary gameplay systems, but BF4 is not one of them. It's your responsibility as a consumer to do your research and find out which games fit your tastes and buy games that cater to your tastes. Not to try and insist that every game that's released be specifically tailored to your tastes.

Re:Easy answers

[nabsltd]

As soon as you got to your step 2 and step 3 you just increased the programming load by a considerable amount.

It really isn't that hard to put "stock empty room #7" behind a door. And, if your level-design software is any good, you should be able to have random tweaks applied with the click of a mouse.

For the hotel example, you could have a template room that could then be changed (bed made/unmade, suitcase on the floor, chair starting position slightly different, etc.), perhaps using some random system (20% chance of unmade bed, etc.).

Re:Easy answers

[nabsltd]

Why should I be able to open every door of every house in a street only because there is one house I have to visit?

Because you have a rocket launcher.

5. What happens if there are two players? Doors behave the same for all players. It's a door. See point 2.

No, because one player could be allowed to open the door as owner of the house, apartment. The second one is not allowed to open that door.

You are conflating "open" with "unlock". If a door is locked, once player 1 unlocks the door, player 2 should be able to open the door.

In addition, you are conflating "permission" with "ability". Even if you give me permission to open your front door, I cannot do so if the door is locked and you did not give me the key (or I dropped the key you gave me). OTOH, I don't need your permission (or your keys) when I have a rocket launcher.

Re:Easy answers

[Culture20]

So then games should cost $120 because of all the level designers, or they should be procedurally generated or mostly empty space (aka boring)?

Re:Easy answers

[Whorhay]

I think one of the reasons that Skyrim appeals to so many people is because it models reality in a number of ways that people like. Doors being one of the best examples. I was thinking about it and I simply can't remember any doors that you couldn't open at all. I thought I found one once but it turned out you just had to initiate the Dark Brotherhood quest line to wind up inside that building. And there are a number of other doors that require some questing to enter, but the huge majority of doors can be opened at any point in the game. For games like Thief and Saints Row it would mean a little more development time designing some generic building interiors that you then use for all of those hundreds of unimportant doors to use.

Re:Easy answers

[Agent0013]

Does it create the possibility that 64 players will be roaming room to room with silencers in a hotel while ignoring the rest of a large map? Yes, and that's perfect.

So you think a perfect game will be one where the level is so large and with so many rooms and buildings with hundreds of floors that nobody ever spots anybody else. Basically you want to play Battlefield by yourself? That sounds pretty boring to most people who want to actually find other people so they can shoot at them.

Re:Easy answers

[91degrees]

Yes you can. Now, how does the scheduling of the lockpicking minigame fit in with the release schedule and all the other things we need to do?

Re:Easy answers

[Mikawo]

I think you mean this thread is filled with experienced software developers that, all the time, thoroughly go through multiple case scenarios and determine which ones are necessary. This is shit you intuitively know if you work with any kind of software (game or not).

Re:Easy answers

[StrangeBrew]

You are ignoring one of the goals associated with many RPG's and FPS's... gathering equipment and upgrades that give you an advantage over the foes in the game. Valuables are more likely to be behind locked doors than open ones. But in most games of this type, you start off with the weaponry that should allow you to get past the locked door, keys be damned. This is no different than the 'impassible' barricades that even a 5 year old could move out of the way, climb over, or climb under in real life. Designers should be tasked with coming up with more imaginative solutions to keeping the gamers out of areas that shouldn't be accessible without destroying the sense of immersion into a 'real' world. As to your example of doors within 40 feet that can't be opened. If it's a locked medical supply room that you know contains an epi-pen and a coworker is on the floor in a state of anaphylaxis, is that locked door going to stop you?

Re:Easy answers

[dywolf]

note that I dont disagree with your opinion on arbitrary restrictions, and the door problem is mostly handled by the level designer, and how much work/effort he wants to put into the level (assuming the engine and computer can handle anything he creates).

but in your haste to answer the questions, you're making design decisions on just one minor facet of the game while assuming infinite resources, in terms of what the computer can handle, and in terms of what you can actually create, in terms of money you have to spend, in terms of time you have to deliver a product. all while ignoring the larger point: there's a door. it opens. ok, what's on the other side? a mop closet. ok, now we gotta add a mop closet to the game. what's in the closet? brooms. just brooms? a mop bucket. and a sink. does the sink turn on? can the player grab the items? how much interactivity does the engine handle? how finely detailed are the textures we're going to use? are they unique to this closet or are we reusing from elsewhere? how much space on the media will it take up? how far down the rabbit hole are we going?

that's the author's point: just because you have played games doesnt mean you grasp the complexities of actually creating and managing a project. its like saying you can design an airplane because you're a pilot.

Re:Easy answers

[GuB-42]

Imagine a hotel with a hundred rooms. A murder has occurred in one of the rooms and you are here to investigate.
Modeling each room is easy, they are basically all the same, you can include a few random item and even characters for variety but chances are that you won't find anything interesting except in the room where the murder occurred. In fact, in real life, checking all the rooms is probably something you will try to avoid because it is time-consuming and boring.
But games, like movies, are supposed to be fun, not necessarily realistic. And it usually means that anything that does advance the story or character must be eliminated. So access to these useless rooms should be denied somehow and as you said, it's the job of the game designer is to do it the most natural way. But believe me, while unopeable doors and impassable waist height fences may be frustrating, really shitty games features unrestricted access to useless rooms. And that's true even with sandbox-style games like The Elder Scrolls or GTA.

Re:Easy answers

[dywolf]

we can go further: how much time and money and resources should we spend on a closet not even vital to the gameplay, or story, or that 99% of players wont even see or use? will players get tired of seeing the same bleach bottles that are inexplicably all over this world? ("boy, sure is a lot of Product X in this world"). is our goal a total open world (0% linear), or to essentially put the player on rails (100% linear)?

thats why they talk about feature creep, and design decisions and compromises.

its like the question in structural engineering of why we dont make buildings able to withstand X? because $$$. the more X you want to withstand, the more $$$ you require, usually with severe diminishing returns on the relations between $$$ and X.

Re:Easy answers

[war4peace]

Yeah, then I, as the customer, would tel you, the producer, to go suck your own cock and I'd take my money elsewhere.

Re:Easy answers

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Depends on the date of expiration on the epi pen, the door, the coworker, the time to the nearest hospital, any near by door destroying weaponry, and on how many appendages I have at the moment and their current status.

Re:Easy answers

[operagost]

No. He was saying that if a door exists, there must be some way of opening it. If it's locked, then it must be unlockable.

Re:Easy answers

[suutar]

without locking doors, portal would have been a lot faster. Less interesting, though.

Re:Easy answers

[Zalbik]

But if we extend this argument to other things, then you need to model the entire world.

I'm much happier seeing a door that never opens (i.e. you don't have the key, and never come across it), than arbitrary "oh, you can't get past those three piled up cars, even though they look easily climbable by anyone over the age of 6", or "no, chain link completely stops your 2000-pound vehicle"

Of the arbitrary boundaries I have seen, unopenable doors are the least annoying. Can you give a few examples of games (particularly first-person games) with boundary limits that are more natural than unopenable doors?

Re:Easy answers

[RobertLTux]

I would assume a valid epipen , most doors in jobs are sturdyish, lets just say you kind of maybe like said coworker I dunno what E-911 times are in your area, the maintenance closet has a 10 pound sledge , full set intact (unless otherwise is correct for you).

and how about a bit of a change Fred "KONG" Samson is coming up the hall.

Re:Easy answers

[Cederic]

7. What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time? Then your technology is not good enough to implement your vision and one or the other needs to change. See point 2.

The issue isn't whether you can work around the problem of large levels - you can, most MMOs have large open worlds which are one big level and seamlessly load them in the background.

One issue is how and whether you retain door state on the part of the level that isn't currently loaded, and making sure that this doesn't damage the gameplay.

Another issue is assuring that opening a door leads to instant visibility of whatever's behind it. When there are a lot of doors that's a lot of potential visibility and it's just inefficient to have it all loaded and available when the player is likely to ignore half the doors.

Re:Easy answers

[lister king of smeg]

procedurally generated does not mean boaring see minecraft for simple but compelling world that is procedurally generated

Re:Easy answers

[Richy_T]

Most doors that won't open in real life for me are locked more by social convention than physical devices. Typically in games, these social conventions are not in play.

I think the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief" applies though.

Re:Easy answers

[BergZ]

Agreed.
Here's what happens to me occasionally when doing a "fetch quest" in a video game: I can't find the last item needed to complete the quest. I got all the others, but the last one is hidden away somewhere and I can't move the game forward a single inch until I find that very last one.
So I ask myself "What rooms haven't I been in?", "What doors haven't I opened?", "What box/crate/container haven't I looked in?" etc.
... and off I go exhaustively searching for that very. last. one.

I would hate to have to go searching through hundreds of mundane "template rooms" & closets that contain nothing of interest.

Re:Easy answers

[kesuki]

"In my world, a locked door is normal."

i know a guy who never locks anything. his house, never locked. his car never locked. with the keys left in the visor in the closed position. so far he has never had a car broken into or a house burgled. the world is far safer than video games lead many to believe.

Re:Easy answers

[CronoCloud]

procedurally generated does not mean boaring see minecraft

Perhaps you didn't play Minecraft before they changed how oceans were generated. That was when huge expanses could be filled with nothing but ocean.

Re:Easy answers

[Black LED]

I challenge you to name one game where you can do everything that you should be able to do. Oh what, I can't travel to those mountains in the distance because it's just a skybox? Failure of a game. I can't jump in a jet and fly to another country? Failure of a game. I can't dig a hole in the ground as far as I want? Failure of a game.

Come on man.

Re:Easy answers

[Dutch Gun]

In real life, there are plenty of doors for which you will never find the key lying around. More importantly there, are millions (billions?) of doors that are of no interest to you, ever. In a video game, it would be very difficult to set up a series of long term societal detriments for going around trying to open every door, or to easily express to the player why the character they're playing has no interest in one door vs. another, or why what's behind most doors is not of interest to the gameplay or the plot of the game. But it'd also be extremely strange to walk down a city street environment and have there be no doors into any of the surrounding buildings. So we put up false doors as window dressing so the environment looks familiar, but then we build a visual metaphor that lets players see at a glance which doors are unimportant so they don't bother to try them. This can be by leaving them as a flat texture instead of modeled, making openable doors a different color or have specific lighting or highlights, making openable doors have handles and unopenable ones not have handles, or as the article suggests, putting rubble or something (depending on the context of the game) in front of unopenable doors. You can even make unopenable doors make a specific sound effect when approached, such as the sound of a handle jiggling on a locked door, or the sound of the character specifically saying "It won't open," etc. (although only communicating it once the door is approached can be tedious for the player).

You're exactly right. Game developers can either spend a nightmarish amount of time trying to solve the locked door "problem", or they could make it a static prop that plays a "jiggle the doorknob, but it's locked" sound effect and then put that saved time and effort into the actual gameplay and mechanics. People sometimes forget that game developers have to pick and choose their battles, and any time spent on non-gameplay fluff should never detract from rock-solid core game mechanics.

Re:Easy answers

[Simon Brooke]

OK, so, I'm a hero warrior with a really big battle axe. There's a flimsy door with a little lock on it...

Yes, locked doors can be useful and interesting parts of game puzzles, but make it believable, please! If your first person character is big, strong and well equipped, and you want to make it credible that he can't get through a door, the door also needs to be big, strong and well equipped.

Re:Easy answers

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

If its going to take less than a minute to break in, then yes. Other wise I'd throw the person in my car and drive them to the hospital less than a mile away.

I've done the whole "drive person experincing an anphalictic shock to the hospital" routine before.

Fallout 3 has the answer

[wjh31]

I believe fallout 3 handled the issue of too many doors and not enough resources to program a room on the other side quite nicely as demonstrated in this clip (possible NSFW) http://youtu.be/WGKs9-VLgsQ?t=...

Lol, yeah, that's real tough...

[Assmasher]

Compare that to "we need to store patient data..."

Do you know what HIPAA is?
Is this going to be accessible over networks/internet?
How are you planning for archive/restoration?
How will we handle auditing?
Should it be over web services or custom server?
How are we going to manage permissions?
How do we securely persist on the client side?

Seriously? The door exercise is strenuous mentally? Anybody with actual software engineering experience will tell you that ALL software features result in design complexities, and a door in a game is pretty simplistic one - whether networked or otherwise.

Re:Lol, yeah, that's real tough...

[Assmasher]

I should have added that the real challenge doesn't lie with the Game Designer, it lies with the Gameplay Engineer who has to correlate the design person's wishful thinking.

Re:Lol, yeah, that's real tough...

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

It's a microcosm of a bigger problem.

We like to think of doors as simple and easy to understand. That's why this example was picked. Imagine all of the other little things that we take for granted and it all stacks up.

Not to say that storing patient data or doing complex modeling or whatever isn't tough. But, it's an insight in the game development process.

Re:Lol, yeah, that's real tough...

[Culture20]

But implicit in the description is an argument between gamers if they like not knowing "the one true path" through the level (all locked doors look and act alike, but some have keys and some don't, which leads to many wasted hours trying to open doors), while other gamers enjoy seeing a door with a red light in the distance and instantly knowing it will never open; it's just decoration. As a designer, you have to know what your demographic wants. Puzzle solvers and first person shooter fans have vastly different desires, and that's just with visible doors. Wait until you get to secret doors, flower pots, and cooking utensils, etc.

Re:Lol, yeah, that's real tough...

[Assmasher]

I understand, but trying to make a door sound complicated as opposed to trivially simple is a bit too far (imho.)

The issue is that Game Design isn't difficult from the technical point of view, it is difficult from the creative point of view.
Game Implementation is difficult from the technical point of view.

Anywho, I know what you mean, but it still seems a rather egregious example. ;)

Re:Lol, yeah, that's real tough...

[Drethon]

In medical and avionics the designers are forced to take regulations and certification into account because failure can have sever consequences (injury or death). This (hopefully) means the design process will get things more things right before development starts and everything right before the application is released.

In computer game and basic application development these regulations don't exist. This means that either the designers use the same amount of discipline used up front in critical application development, or they take a lot more time later when the software ends up not working as intended (if they decide to fix the issues anyway).

Ultimately development of non critical (games, windows apps that do not affect life and limb) or critical (medical, avionics, etc) applications is the same. Both take inputs, process them and produce outputs. Both have the same immediate consequences if not coded correctly, the wrong outputs for a given set of inputs. It is only the impact of using those outputs that has differing levels of consequence, ex annoyance, injury, death.

Re:Lol, yeah, that's real tough...

[Assmasher]

Yes, and a Game Designer will know who the target audience is, the genre, and the platform (important.) It doesn't make a door any harder to design, it does make it harder to implement.

It's clear that the Game Designer was trying to say "It's not as simple as saying we have doors in the game", but it sounds a lot like someone saying (and I'm ripping off another poster here) "Being a model is like, super hard... You have to stand around all day, and then they expect you to walk... It's not like we just show up and they pay us..."

Re:Lol, yeah, that's real tough...

[Drethon]

Agreed, the summary (and the article too) seems to cover the what of the thought process when I think why this is complex is probably more interesting. They why this is necessary is the consequences when these items are not thought out.

One example I can think of off the top of my head is, a door that is being used to prevent access to a special area in an MMO. If it isn't designed to restrict access appropriately, it devalues that room. Another question comes in when you consider if you actually need a door preventing access or if some other method would be more appropriate.

I think this article would be far more interesting with examples of real life systems showing the consequences of not fully thinking out the design of something simple. Why was the chosen design implemented and why did it turn out not to the be best decision when that part of the game was played?

Re:Lol, yeah, that's real tough...

[Junior J. Junior III]

It's not really a strenuous activity. But it is a mental activity which most people don't normally do, because most people take real-life doors for granted. Of course programmer geeks talking on slashdot are used to thinking this way about the problem spaces that they deal with when they are programming something, so to us it's nothing new. But for someone who hasn't programmed before, or designed a rules system for how virtual stuff should work in the context of a game before, it is.

Re:Lol, yeah, that's real tough...

[Assmasher]

I agree.

My issue isn't that there aren't lots of implementation detail to seemingly obvious logical manifestations of everyday objects, my issue is that the game designer is trying to make it sound like that aspect of their job is difficult. It isn't. It's possibly tedious, but it's not hard.

Now, that aside, being a GREAT game designer IS hard because the creativity necessary isn't something that can really be taught - but again, this isn't what the person in the article was referring to.

Re:Lol, yeah, that's real tough...

[ildon]

It's not meant to be strenuous mentally on its own. It's meant to demonstrate the kind of detail and tedium required to be a game designer, because most people think it's all just goofing off and playing games. Extrapolate those questions to every single object and system in a game, from doors, to trash cans, to lamp posts, to ammo boxes, power-ups, enemies, weapons, equipment, etc. Someone has to make a decision about which ones will be in the game, what they will do, how they will behave, how users will interact with them, whether users even can interact with them, edge cases, exceptions, unexpected behavior, etc.

Re:Answers:

[Goaway]

Well, thanks for demonstrating the point.

Back in the day...

[TheRealHocusLocus]

We'd call 'em overlays.

One project I did, a series of mods c.1981 to bring real POS invoicing to an early version of Peachtree Accounting, was a BEAR. It was written in MBASIC running under CP/M -- Interpreted tokenized BASIC running on a machine that started with a 64k transient program area. No extended memory then!

Minus OS call kernel, COMMAND.COM, minus BASIC interpreter, your program was born with ~32k to use in its lifetime. So 32k minus the size of the program itself left you with a memory heap for variables. The heap grew downward with every string assignment and when it bumped into the code there would be this pause for "garbage collection" while the heap was de-fragged and re-written to the top of memory again.

No comments, too much room! No long var names! You'd use CHAIN to jump to another program leaving vars in memory. But if you your were clever you'd carve out line number ranges and place temporary functions into 'overlays' that loaded over existing portions. When you did a MERGE no p-code optimization or block was going on here, any load command did its work line by line, it was like a really fast monkey typing in the program code.

So in place of Peachtree's default invoice which was clunky and required lots of input steps (mostly useless for cash sales) to implement a streamlined invoice was difficult. They use lots of strings. My first attempt worked great --- but every couple of line items the heap would touch and trigger global garbage collection -- ~3 to 5 seconds where the machine would be unresponsive. In those THREADLESS 8-bit days when garbage collection began your keyboard controller would save ONE keystroke but the rest would be LOST. This is a total wash. Clearly it needed a whole re-write.

The only way I could make the entry portion useable was to throw out the programming concepts that made things 'easy' (yet caused heap movement). Don't assemble a string of spaces, use a loop to emit them one CHR$() at a time. Don't assign to strings, pre-allocate a number of strings of reasonable length and use MID$() to replace its contents, keep a separate string length var so you can only emit the portion of the string that was being used.

It was sorta like coding in C, in BASIC. That was kind of a 'door' problem. But it worked. Then the world went CBASIC and all our problems magically vanished.

Re:Back in the day...

[OzPeter]

I know what you mean. Back in the day I wrote a "multi-tasking" program in TI-Basic(*) that simultaneously handled operator keystrokes as well as performing "real-time" calculations. And disk I/O meant overlaying disk sectors (from the 8" floppies) onto arrays of variables in memory from where the program could access them.

* One thing that annoyed me about that system was the operator stations were programmed in TI-Basic, but the control sections could be programmed in genuine MS-Basic, which was a hell of a lot more mature and had a much richer syntax.

Re:Back in the day...

[Samizdata]

Heh. Back in the day, I used to run a WWIV BBS in TurboPascal/DOS. For most people the admin interface was just about unusable, since I had to keep inside the 64K memory space and I just kept reducing the admin side text strings to make new space for modifications.

What door problem?

[DrXym]

The majority of games in existence nails doors and windows shut. Without bothering to justify why they're shut, or by throwing in a generic "door is locked" animation when the character tries to open them, or by stacking up debris / chairs against the door to justify why it can't be opened. First person shooters are the lamest at doing this - Call of Duty etc. where a heavily armed, fit man can't even knock a pane of glass in or kick / shoot a door open or climb over a modest obstacle. Why? Because fuck you for asking that's why.

More likely it's because their lame engine or AI cannot cope with a dynamic environment properly, or their collision detection / physics get all confused by someone shooting through a door or window, or simply because they can't be bothered to make it work properly.

I don't see it as the problem of a new designer to solve, so much as the entire industry, particularly those who produce tools & middleware for physics, collisions and destructible environments. If the likes of Unreal Engine allows a building to collapse or take damage (e.g. a tank putting a hole in a wall) or to kick open a door then it is likely that many games would make use of that.

Re:What door problem?

[Sockatume]

You're the kind of guy who plays chess and gets really angry that a bishop can capture a knight, aren't you?

Re:What door problem?

[shadowrat]

You're the kind of guy who plays chess and gets really angry that a bishop can capture a knight, aren't you?

i don't have have room to worry about that, i'm consumed with rage over the guys in the front line who can't move backwards!

A similar piece from Clint Hocking

[Sockatume]

Clint Hocking (of Far Cry 2) wrote a similar article last month, using the design of reload systems as an example:

http://www.edge-online.com/fea...

My favorite one:

[argStyopa]

What happens when alleged game designers (and/or producers, etc) get bogged down arguing about the minutiae of the actions/responses of doors, to the point that it takes more than 30 seconds to resolve 'challenging' questions like: Do all players need to be able to operate the door? Does it lock behind a player? Must they all see the door open/closed? Can the door be optional DLC?"?

Answer, you shouldn't be surprised that your project can't meet its deadlines or budget.

Re:My favorite one:

[narcc]

Do you know how I know that you didn't read the article?

Re:Answers:

[91degrees]

> Are there doors in your game?

Probably.

Not the case for every game ever. Maybe not even a majority

> Can the player open them?

Some way or another, yes.

Do we even want access to every single room? We may want to illustrate that we're in a corridor. It would make no sense to be able to open all the doors and it would requitre a lot of level design time and memory space to have something on the other side of each door.

> Can the player open every door in the game?

Unlikely. Some doors will be locked, if only to remove the expectation that doors are no obstacle.

If no doors are locked then why do we need to remove this this expectation?

> What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open?

A locked door conventionally makes a distinctive thud sound when the player tries to open it. If there needs to be an indication that the door will never open, those doors don't make a sound (and typically have artwork indicating that they're not really usable doors.) There may be visual indications of a lock status (keypad, etc, with display, red=locked, green=unlocked) nearby.

This is one solution. Should we have a message saying the door is locked? If so, what message? Should all doors make the same thud? Does that make sense for a metal door? If we go for different thuds, is the inconsistency too jarring? How much space do the thus assets take up? Is a keypad the correct design given the setting of the current level?

> What happens if there are two players? Does it only lock after both players pass through the door?

Depends on the kind of event that you want the player to believe is the cause of the locking.

So which events will cause the door to unlock or lock for both players and which will cause the door to lock or unlock for only one?

> What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time?

Does a tree make a sound if there is nobody near to hear it?

Yes. Now, how do you propose we deal with the memory issue created here?

> Do all the players need to see the door open at the same time?

Yes, if they can see it and the status of the door is relevant to the game mechanics.

What if the door is only usable by players with a certain key or character type?

> You need to get your doors in by 3pm if you want them on the disk.

What's the question?

It's not a question.

> Do we need to give everyone those doors or can we save them for a pre-order bonus?

Yes.

Sucks for those who didn't pre-order. We're now the subject of an internet hate capaign because our game is broken. Or, we don't get as many pre-orders as we otherwise would have.

Every one of these questions is a decision that has to be made. The decision depends on the type of game, the resoucrces avalable (both in terms of hardware and developers), and all the decisions you'e made already.

And the point is, this is just doors. You have a similar lot of questions for any other item in your game.

Re:Walls, Hills etc

[Culture20]

Whilst we're sorting out the doors, I'd also like to be able to lift my feet a bit higher and climb over small walls, rocks etc.

Hear, Hear!

Re:Answers:

[SJHillman]

"A locked door conventionally makes a distinctive thud sound when the player tries to open it."

I usually play with game sound off so I can have Nertflix on another monitor (at least until more games embrace multi-monitor gaming) or Pandora in the background. If a game doesn't support subtitles (that include all relevant in-game sounds), then it better be 100% playable with the sound off.

Inspired by this comic, apparently.

[Dr. Manhattan]

Seems entirely too coincidental.

Re:Ridiculous

[Assmasher]

Made me laugh, and I used your analogy in another post...

Re:Walls, Hills etc

[91degrees]

This is sort of the point...

Sure, we can do that. What height is the limit for climbing over, and do we need to make climbable items distinguishable from climbable items that are marginally taller? Some objects need a more complex bounding objects so we need to find the resources to handle that. There are decisions to make here.

And now you can't simply pile up some small rocks to block a door, so you need to revisit the decisions you made on how to prevent access to a door.

Why is this even an issue?

[skovnymfe]

If the game design document says "All doors should be openable, provided the door is unlocked, the player has the key or the player is willing to take a reputation hit by breaking and entering", then your job as a game developer is to implement doors as specified in the game design document.

If the game design document says "Doors are graphic inserts for effect only", then your job as a game developer is to implement the doors as specified in the game design document.

If the game design document doesn't say how to handle doors before people start building the game, then the game design document is incomplete.

Incomplete game design documents, like incomplete architect blueprints, lead to stupid things like what you get by googling "architecture fails".

Re:Why is this even an issue?

[bluefoxlucid]

What strikes me is the producer question. "Are we trying to make a good title, or are we going to bait customers with exclusive content so we get millions of people to buy our game before the reviews pour onto Amazon that it's garbage not worth playing?"

Re:Why is this even an issue?

[91degrees]

If you're the game designer, you're the one deciding what the document says.

Re:Why is this even an issue?

[shadowrat]

If the game design document says "All doors should be openable, provided the door is unlocked, the player has the key or the player is willing to take a reputation hit by breaking and entering", then your job as a game developer is to implement doors as specified in the game design document.

If the game design document says "Doors are graphic inserts for effect only", then your job as a game developer is to implement the doors as specified in the game design document.

If the game design document doesn't say how to handle doors before people start building the game, then the game design document is incomplete.

Incomplete game design documents, like incomplete architect blueprints, lead to stupid things like what you get by googling "architecture fails".

Where did the game design document come from though?

Re:Why is this even an issue?

[skovnymfe]

It comes from the game designer(s) and lead developers, who sat down before launching the project to decide on things like how doors should work. At least I hope that's how they do it. I can't imagine anyone would launch any kind of project without first having a document stating exactly what the project should be about. Especially not when money is involved.

Re:Answers:

[91degrees]

The point is, most people don't realise just how much minutae you have to deal with in game design, and the job isn't as easy as a lot of people who want to work in games seem to think.

Most people think "Hey, wouldn't it be awesome if we ha could blow holes in all the walls and just kick down every door and we have an entire hotel toplay in with hundreds of rooms.

Yes, it would. But there are other things to consider that people don't think about.

Re:Actually

[Drethon]

You mean they didn't want to spend exorbitant money to implement that vision.

Door problem

[kelemvor4]

What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open?

Why include a door in a game at all if it will never open. Isn't that really more of a "wall?"

Re:Door problem

[91degrees]

To visually represent a scenario that typically has lots of doors (a hotel, for example), or as an entrypoint to the location you've just left.

Yes, it's a wall as far as level design and internal game logic is conerned. It's a door as far as visual cues are concerned.

Re:Door problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if you've got something that looks like a building, it's expensive to design an interior, but it looks dopey if a building is a box with no apparent doors!

Painting a "fake door" on the wall makes the building look realistic from the outside, without having to pay a level designer to lay out an interior for a building that is irrelevant to the gameplay/plot/etc of your game, or an engineer to do some "autogenerate us building layouts that don't suck" code (which really, nobody has ever been able to do well). So, it makes the city look "more realistic" quite cheaply.

Moreover, even if you did have the budget to make a city where every building has an interior so "every door opens! this game is so realistic", that actually likely makes your gameplay worse -- if you ever send a player off to, say "search for evidence of a crime", you want to limit the search space they have, so that they don't get annoyed before they find the widget (or if they're trying to find an enemy player to shoot them, or ten rats to kill, you similarly need to restrict the number of hiding places for them.). Again, painting "fake doors" around makes an urban (or village) environment "look reasonable" at first glance while you are running through it searching/hunting/exploring, without detracting from the game in some other way.

You can dress it up by making the doors appear to be locked, made of unbreakable steel, or whatever, but fundamentally those fake doors are made of "design and budget decisions".

Drop to PS1/N64/DS graphics

[tepples]

Budget problems? For parts of a map that need to look plausible but whose precise arrangement isn't critically important to the story, try something procedural. Don't design a hotel room; make a program that designs hotel rooms. It worked for the space trading sim Elite, the shooter .kkrieger, roguelikes, graphical dungeon crawlers inspired by roguelikes, and Orteil's Nested tech demo.

Tech limits? Why can't the game just drop everyone to 1997-class graphics when it detects that what the players have chosen to do has hit fundamental limits of popular video gaming platforms? If it was good enough for GoldenEye...

Re:Drop to PS1/N64/DS graphics

[Sockatume]

This (low-res graphics) is actually how Bluepoint were able to fit Titanfall into the Xbox 360. The engine requires that the whole game world fit into RAM, and while on the newer hardware that includes the textures, the 360 version can only make do with N64-grade texturing that way. So they do N64-grade texturing... and stream in whatever high-resolution assets they can (from disk and HDD simultaneously!) for the immediate area around the player.

And that's for an arena shooter. By all accounts, it's one of the biggest achievements in Bluepoint's long line of great technical achievements. That's what the article is trying to say: you have to decide all this stuff, and it all affects everything else.

Re:Drop to PS1/N64/DS graphics

[91degrees]

Sure, you can add procedural rooms, but it still requires programming resources for something not relevant to gameplay.

You can drop the graphical detail, but then that's a compromise. It might be better to split up the level into smaller chunks and make it into 2 or more levels. Or perhaps you can't.

Buy an axe.

[khasim]

When I walk to my own frontdoor (to which I do have the key) I encounter dozens of doors for which I have no key and which will remain forever locked to me.
Why couldn't this be true for a game as well?

You stated that incorrectly.

Those doors are locked but can be opened. Usually with equipment that an RPG character carries around "in-game". Whether that equipment is "lock picks" or "an axe" or "a rocket launcher".

What stops you from opening them is that you do not try to. Why you do not try to is because you do not want to go to jail.

Criminals "open" doors you consider to be "locked" in the real-world all the time.

A great fail example... RAGE

[Lumpy]

90% of the doors in the game are fake and you can not get into them. Honestly, all that does it make players think the developers just half assed the game, and in RAGE's instance it is... 2 full DVD's and it has a shorter single player game than most of the War games that are designed to be not single player.

It's a solved problem

[gonnagetya]

Teach the player early on what the difference is between a openable door and a purely aesthetic door. Some games (particularly ones with a sci-fi aesthetic) often use doors with green accents to represent openable doors and red accents for permanently closed doors. Some games like Deus Ex often have the door slightly depressed into the wall to signify a usable door, whereas purely aesthetic (closed) doors are generally flush with the wall.

Provide a different set of door types very early on in the game and the player will learn very quickly which doors to try and use. After a while it becomes automatic. To be honest I'm surprised this is seen as a problem anymore - I've never really thought about it for years. Maybe the next generation of game developers don't know much from history.

Re:It's a solved problem

[dywolf]

they arent looking for a solution to the door problem.

theyre using it to illustrate the kind of minutae and detail required for even an incosequential aspect of the game the most players arent even going to notice but simply take for granted.

What feet?

[tepples]

I'd also like to be able to lift my feet a bit higher and climb over small walls, rocks etc.

Climbing I'll give you, but what feet?

More Door Problems

[nitehawk214]

Will there be door prizes?
Will Jim Morrison be a playable character?
Were you born in a barn? (Shut the door!)

Manager vibe, you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

In games industry it's more like this: "I don't like the main character, change it to something more contemporary, a special-ops operative maybe? I don't care it doesn't fit with your theme of magic unicorn land, make the other magical creatures into taliban and we're sorted, right? Well then make it an FPS, no one plays plaforming games any more anyway. Oh, and throw in some realistic explosions, fancy mo-cap and destructible environment. No, you can't have more money. Just make sure the story is coherent and up-to-date. I don't know, look at the last 3 CoD titles' storylines and mix it up a bit. Heck, I DON'T NEED TO TELL YOU WHAT TO DO - YOU'RE THE DESIGNER HERE! NOW MAKE IT HAPPEN! And fix me up with a Gantt chart so that I have something to fiddle with while I'm talking to you next time..."

Will there be public restrooms

[Grey Geezer]

in your game? Will the stalls have doors? Can the user open the stall doors? Can the user close the stall doors for privacy? Will users be able to leave the restroom without first washing their hands?

Re:Will there be public restrooms

[MiSaunaSnob]

If they are on the clock they will have to wash there hands before returning to work, be it flipping burgers or killing terrorists. If they are not on the clock its really personal choice but some of the NPC's might look at you like you are gross if they see you leave without washing them.

Re:Answers:

[ildon]

Woosh.

The point of the article is that these are questions a designer has to consider for every single object and system in the game, interactable or not. There are no obvious answers because the answers will be different depending on the nature of the game one is trying to design. Some of the questions aren't even relevant to most games (which is intentional on the part of the author). The point is that designing video games is not just coming up with fun gameplay, but handling a lot of tedious and mundane details for a complex interactive system, and coming up with answers and solutions for things that most players will never even think about (until it breaks).

Also the second set of lines are demonstrations of how a person from that area of production might influence or interact with the design of a game system or object, not questions to be answered.

Re:Answers:

[91degrees]

And also that many people who think game design is easy don't realise this.

You already realise this. Good for you. You don't need to read the article. If you work in any creative industry, you'll encounter a lot of people who have a "brilliant idea for a game" (or whatever) and are completely unaware of just how much goes into the simplest aspect of design.

This is daft

[folderol]

It all depends on how much real imagination you've got. I designed a text adventure many years ago for the BBC Model B. Doors were based on reality. Some opened inwards, some outwards, some had locks (and you had to get the right key). The nasty ones would swing shut behind you and you'd find there was no handle on the inside.

There were, of course a host of appropriate messages :)

What is far more important is that you have a game plan, room list, alternative routes/actions, and most important of all an objective.

Re:This is daft

[aaronb1138]

This is exactly what I was thinking. Such questions only sound interesting if you are dumb enough to do half the coding and artwork before figuring out the basic mechanics, plot, and gameplay.

Killer doors

[DarwinSurvivor]

How did they forget the most important question? "If the door opens towards you, does it crush you into the wall?"

Re:Answers:

[dywolf]

mod up

Hmm, interesting article. Thanks.

[Gasicme]

Hmm, interesting article. Thanks.

Re:Answers:

[dywolf]

bingo.

its like the difference between drawing a really cool airplane...
and actually designing the thing so it can function.

drawing a shape is easy.
drawing one that will fly, not really much harder (unless you get really carried away with cool factor stuff).
deciding where to route the miles of electrical wiring and plumbing, where to place the holes in the structural bulkheads for them pass through, how much space to leave between the inner skin and outer skin for them to be routed, where to place the systems the wiring/plumbing connects to, keeping everything balanced so the craft is stable, how much clearance around moving parts (like control or action rods) within the skin is required, where access panels should be located for maintenance, which panels need welded, which riveted, which screwed in, which are accessible....and this is just a short list focused on wiring and panel accessibility.

As a game developer...

[sstamps]

I don't think she does a very good job of explaining why good game design is difficult.

It's not that game design itself is difficult, it is that GOOD (ie, fun) game design is difficult. She's basically addressing the wrong problem set. What she is describing is simply software design and engineering issues, which boils down to 3 real categories:

1. Functional / feature design: the rules which govern whether they exist and how they can function. AKA "business rules" in normal software development.
2. User Interface design: how the user (player) interacts with it.
3. Engineering/Implementation issues: how do you make 1 & 2 real and work, while reducing undesired side-effects.

1 & 2 generally form a specification for the feature's design, and 3 is the specification for how to implement it.

This is not unlike many common design and implementation processes for standard software design and engineering of complex systems. The real difference is that, while a software system designed and implemented correctly may fulfill all the intended design objectives, there is an additional objective which games add to the mix that is not generally present in normal business applications: fun. Unfortunately, it is not an objective criteria, and requires "play-testing" to discern whether a particular design is fun or not. It is very difficult to design-in "fun" from the very start of a project.

That said, with the advent of Serious Games, adding the "is it fun?" criteria to real-world business applications is happening more often.

Lastly, as a game developer, the single greatest challenge I have encountered is simply to keep going through the "hard times". Like any difficult software development project, there are times when things get dark and depressing for whatever reason, and there is difficulty keeping motivated to continue, but you have to bear down and power through the hard parts. The reason most game development projects fail that I have seen is that people don't really understand how hard it can be at times, and give up when the going gets tough. To me, this is a more difficult hurdle than in typical business application development, because many people get into the development of games with an incorrect level of expectation about said difficulty.

Missing the point

[KalvinB]

The parents point is that all doors need to behave the same way. If one door can be locked, they all can be locked. The question is not "can a door be locked" but "should this door be locked so the player has to find a key?" If a player can block one door, they all need to be blockable. There should not be two doors that look identical but one will swing through a player, and the other will be blocked by the player.

It's about consistency of behavior. If one door behaves differently than another door then it needs to look different. If a door cannot be locked, then it shouldn't have a key hole. Any door with a keyhole should have a key somewhere in the level and it should be able to be locked and unlocked with that key. The only question is the starting state of the door and how many copies of the key there are.

It's not really a hard concept. It's about consistency of behavior.

Re:Missing the point

[mwvdlee]

If that was the parents' point, then why didn't he say so?
Not all door can be locked in real life (indoor doors), but if they look the same, I agree they should behave the same. That doesn't mean that all locked doors need to have a key that opens it in the game. It's perfectly okay to have a street of locked houses where only one house (the one that's part of the script) has a matching key.

Also, neither of us were talking about blocking/non-blocking doors; that would obviously be inconsistant physical behaviour.

IMHO, a locked door that has no key in the game, is perfectly consistant. The problem is not so much the individual door, but rather that the world (i.e. the "room") behind the door should be modeled as well. Would you rather have a cheat like F.E.A.R., where the room is filled with boxes? How realistic is it to have a room that is filled upto the doorway with impossible to move boxes? It's trading a minor inconsistancy (a locked door for which you can't obtain the key for a variety of reasons) for a major inconsistancy (a street with all box-filled houses).

If the demand is for every room behind every door to be accessible and fully modelled (no silly cheats), then that practically prohibits large scale city scenes, simpy because of the practical limitations of developing such a world.

Make your own.

[DMJC]

Game design explained in one post: Make a loop, inside that loop, put graphics in it's own loop, input handling in a loop, sound in a loop and networking in a loop. Start writing your game. Seriously fuck these people who say you can't do it. Fuck the courses and training. Just make a game. features, and what you want to put in it, are a matter of what you choose to throw in and what things you like. Commercial game development is different, but then it always has been. Still the indie scene seems to work well for a lot of people these days. If you want tp make games, there's nothing stopping anyone. The instructions are on google. How to program linux games by Loki software is a great intro. They designed it around 2d games, but the theory is exactly the same for 3d. You just have a 3d graphics loop rather than a 2d graphics one. I recommend the OpenAL,OpenGL and SDL tutorials and books.

I thought

[terrywirth5]

that this door issue was handled in Doom. Don't have the key? Circle back, lock and load and hope for the best. Incremental saves are a plus.

Compromise: lower LOD through a window

[tepples]

I imagine that a renderer could use a window in a door as a cue to use a lower level of texture and geometry detail, especially if the window is tinted.

Re:Compromise: lower LOD through a window

[ildon]

Half-life 2 actually has a flag you can set on windows so that at a distance they're opaque and as you approach them they become transparent.

Re:Compromise: lower LOD through a window

[ildon]

No. HL2 actually hides the inside of the building as long as the entire vis area is properly blocked off. It's a shame you're posting AC so you won't be notified of my reply and probably never see it.

http://www.optimization.interl...

Sorry, but..

[Ol Olsoc]

The door is a lie.

Answer: Critical Path

[DiEx-15]

I'm not convinced by TFS. The answers are, roughly:

1. 1. Are there doors in your game? Let's say for the moment there are.
2. 2. Can the player open them? Yes. If you have doors in a 3D game and they don't behave like doors, you have failed.
3. 3. Can the player open every door in the game? Yes. See point 2.
4. 4. What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open? It's a door. It opens.
5. 5. What happens if there are two players? Doors behave the same for all players. It's a door. See point 2.
6. 6. Does it only lock after both players pass through the door? See point 5.
7. 7. What if the level is REALLY BIG and can't all exist at the same time? Then your technology is not good enough to implement your vision and one or the other needs to change. See point 2.

Am I the only one who finds arbitrary restrictions in games, either because the technology couldn't cope, or because the game designer knows how you want to play better than you do, or just because, really annoying? If there's a door there, it should open. If it won't open, there shouldn't be a door there. How hard is this? Putting a door there that's never going to open just frustrates the player and destroys the suspension of disbelief. It reminds them that they're not really in this world they can see, they're in some arbitrarily limited construct devised by a "product manager" at some company to try to screw a few bob out of them. Of course there need to be some limits on the world, because the technology isn't infinite; good game design should make those limits look natural so that the player never even notices that the limit is there.

Tomb Raider games are amazingly annoying - some things you can jump and grab, some things you can't. The only way to tell is to jump and try grabbing it. If it doesn't work, maybe you can't jump and grab that thing, or maybe you just didn't quite get it right. I know, I know, this is not the point of Tomb Raider games, Lara is, but still...

It's called Critical Path. The path the game designer needs/encourages you to go to "win" the level. With the exception of sports games, simulations, and sand box games: There is always a Path, even if it looks like you are not following one. A good game designer knows all possible ways to go from Point A to Point B and either rewards you or obstructs you from going that particular way.

The whole experiment with the door is to demonstrate how different players in the design process view something like a door in a game. This is to be expected though. Each person in the development process has a different view of what would happen in the world they are creating. This also demonstrates the concept of Critical Path being key to a good designed level/game world.

As for doors opening/locked: The only way I see it breaking the suspension of disbelief is if doors that normally were always closed suddenly became operable near the end of the game without explanation or doors that were open-able become disabled even though they are clearly marked as open-able.. Marking them? At first that might break the perverbable "4th wall", but if they get immersed into the world all the signs and indicators become second nature and no longer have that much impact. It becomes "normal" to press a button to open a door even with a mysterious floating text there to indicate it. They don't even read it: They just instinctively realize that door is open-able because the indicator is there.

Re:Ridiculous

[Samizdata]

And you forget the issues if you are not an ambiturner.

Time as in elapsed time vs other references.

[cboslin]

I would like a game that does not penalize a player for having a life away from the computer.

Imagine a game where someone who logs in a few times per week, can still enjoy as much as someone who has no life and plays for 8 hours (or more) straight and you get the idea.

Also prefer games where you have a mission and are flying/driving a tank, plane and/or spaceship more than the personal shooter games. The Activision Battlezone and Wing Commander games for the PC come to mind, they were excellent! Would love to get those running on my Linux boxes, even if I had to slow down (or ignore) clock cycles to get it to run right. Loved those.

The First person shooters make me yawn.