Game Design : Game of the Week 6 – Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic ~ Decisions

This week there was no in class lecture but instead we listened to an audio lecture to learn about a subject that I’ve already known about but my knowledge about the subject increased and was reinforced by the lesson. That subject in question is decisions, and a secondary lesson was the idea of flow theory and fun. However I would like to focus on flow theory and fun another time, I will focus instead on decisions for this post. I know that I covered “choices in games” in my Catherine blog, but this particular game of the week was the one I remember the most for it’s decision making. Not to mention I’ve learned new things about the decision making process so I wanted to share those.

Decisions are constantly present in all the games we play, though it may not seem like it at first. Decisions don’t always have to put right to “moral choices” in games like Mass Effect, they can be simple things like “Do I want to attack that person? Do I want to run away because it’s dangerous?”. You can still make complex decisions in real time, most obviously in Real Time Strategy Games or MOBA games. They do not even have to be so complex, as the examples I showed just earlier, those are simple actions that you make naturally, you hardly notice but you are still making them. Pretty much every game has them (except ones that are completely automated) and several other factors which I will describe.

Before I get into all of those things though, let’s talk about the game of the week and we’ll get into them after that.

This week’s game of the week is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It is one of Bioware’s (Creators of Mass Effect) most successful games and certainly one of its most well-known. The game, obviously takes place in the Star Wars Galaxy, but thousands of years behind the events of the movie saga occur. The game takes place in a time where the jedi are much more numerous in number and not too long ago an army lead by a former Jedi, Revan and his apprentice Malak waged war against the Galactic Republic. I won’t delve too deeply into the story but the characters and stories are one of the game’s strongest points for sure.

Combat in KOTOR (Knights of the Old Republic)

Gameplay uses turn based combat (though disguised as real time combat) for the majority of it’s gameplay. You create your character from a set of faces to choose from and your gender, then you’You control  a party of up to 3 characters at once, though many will join you in your journey. In battle you can pause the game, ordering individual party members to use queue up a series of attacks on a desired target. You can only control one character at a time, but you can switch to them on the fly though. Use of pause is essentially to attempt to control your entire party at once. Since the game is actually turned based, then the characters will just use the abilities you commanded them to do in the order you queued them up.

Using the "Force Lightning" ability

The game itself is an RPG, so you collect items (Yay lightsabers), weapons, armor, gain levels from defeating enemies and completing quests and becoming a more powerful character overall. You gain access to abilities that are similar in nature to some dungeons and dragons games. (Flurry attack to deal double hits, I’ve seen that around a lot. Same icon, same name, same use in other games). But like the dungeons and dragons series, the gameplay is strong still and feels rewarding as there are a vast array of items to collect that can in the end make you quite powerful.

Every character has multiple dialogue "Trees" to interact with

Now there isn’t anything too ground breaking in terms of the actual combat. What made this game ground breaking though was decisions, though more specifically they were actually story decisions. In the game based on your choices, you would become either light side, or dark side, essentially good and evil. It was pretty obvious most of the time what decisions would lead to which side but the fact you even had these varied decisions that could affect the story and characters you encountered significantly was truly a wonderful experience. It’s hard to make every decision count in a game of this scale, but Bioware had a lot of good decisions, even for little side quests, most of them had a variety of choices that could end them differently. Which meant, different rewards, different dialogue and ending of the sidequest. There were of course large scale decisions that also affected the ending too. The reasons these sorts of decisions succeeded in engaging the player was because and dialogue were all so strong anyways, not to mention every character was voiced to bring further immersion.

Decisions

Now let’s take a closer look at what I learned about decisions and apply it to Knights of the Old Republic. First off, there are decisions that are actually useless, let’s go over these quickly.

Meaningless Decisions – You have a choice, but it doesn’t change anything at all or leads to the same outcome right away. You do not get a different experience in the slightest. Nothing changes. Now in KOTOR (knights of the old republic) I can’t recall many decisions that were remotely like this. Pretty much all of them lead to something different, including dialogue choices. It’s not like there was a dialogue choice that was completely the same as another, that both lead to the same reaction. There was at least different information that was provided which made them different. KOTOR lacks these kinds of decisions or at least they are not so obvious if they are.

Not all choices have a major impact but they all provide you with different information

Obvious Decisions – Decisions where there is one VERY obvious choice, who would choose the other? The choice other choice besides the obvious would lead to you losing or some negative effect that wouldn’t enhance the experience so why bother? In KOTOR, I don’t recall any of these, which is a good thing. They avoided them by providing moral grey ground, good or evil decisions. None of them were obvious.

Blind Decisions – Decisions with no idea what the consequences could be. Something like that could be in Battleship (the board game) where you fire blindly into other person’s territory. Though it changes once you actually hit something. In KOTOR, you always have information of some sort to make a decisions. Your decision can lead to unexpected circumstances but they are never blind decisions. You almost always have information to make the decision,  and you’ll get something in return that relates to that decision.

Now that we’ve looked at the bad decisions and how KOTOR lacks them, lets see what makes a good decision?

Involve some sort of trade off - Resource trades – Use of value judgement, what can you trade to get something in return? In KOTOR, it’s a simple thing like selling items for credits or selling credits for items. You could be trying to purchase powerful items to help you in return for emptying your wallet.

Decisions to trade your credits for some valuable items

Risk versus Reward – What are the pay offs of making that decision? KOTOR has these in abundance, there are plenty of decisions that lead to these sorts of risks versus rewards. It can be something as simple as, deciding to engage a set of powerful enemies. The risk is obviously you die and have to restart, the potential reward is loot that they may be guarding.

Short term and long term decisions – Self explanatory, do you decide to make a decision to make a quick buck right away? Or choose a harder decision that leads to a reward further down the road. In KOTOR, these are present all the time. If you are playing a light side character, you may see a potential benefit of doing a dark side action that could get you an item right away, but in the end that person that you decide to kill would actually have given you something greater much further down the road. Not to mention you become more evil, staying super good has benefits (like +4 to wisdom or something like that).

Being a fully light side character gives you bonuses to your stats

Social Information – This relates more to multiplayer games but it’s honest or dishonest play. Do you decide to tell a person the truth or lie to them. This obviously effects people’s perception of you in a real world setting. This can partially apply to KOTOR because I recall lying to NPCs as an option to gain rewards and dark side points, though I am not certain it would fully count since it’s not interacting with real players. For the sake of the blog and to give KOTOR the benefit of the doubt, let’s say they fulfill this though.

Dilemmas – Make the decision have a dilemma, now this relates to pretty much the whole risk versus reward thing. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be the same thing. But it relates to all of the other things I have discussed. Since short term and long term decisions can create a dilemma or sorts for a player to weigh. For the sake of giving this category a bit of difference, let’s say that we have a dilemma between choosing who will leave and who will die. There is no benefit, you simply have to give one of them up. This classifies more as a dilemma and is different from all of the other categories we just talked about. Now in KOTOR, we have many dilemmas in some of the dialogue options. I can’t remember specifically where and when but I know they are in the game.

We also have emotional decisions. This relates to the moral choices in the game, whether to go good  or evil, light or dark side. You might also gain an emotional attachment to the characters in the game as well, so if there is a decision to choose between saving or killing that character, it is definitely an emotional decision. This example is specifically in the game in the end dungeon.

Transition from neutral to dark side

Besides these thought provoking decisions, we also have decisions in combat. They can be tactical decisions that require thought on how you are going to best defeat your enemy. Which can be achieved when you press the pause button and plan out your attacks. They can also be much quicker, which are broken down into simpler decisions, such as I am going to mash the attack button on this one enemy and take him down.

Conclusion

So we can see that decisions were a vital part of KOTOR, it was absolutely essential to immersing the player in the story. Besides some shocking revelations in the story that weren’t quite controlled by decisions, decisions were a very important part of the story and how it concluded. Decisions were always present in the combat and in a rather tactical sense too, not like a game considered to be a “button masher”. Decisions were all around Bioware’s epic and they managed to avoid the bad decisions while maintaining the good ones in their story. I know this first hand and if any of you haven’t you should. The game is fantastic, one of my favourites and one I will remember for years to come. The story and decisions were the main driving point for me to play the game and finish it all the way to it’s epic conclusion. 

Game Design: Homework Part 3 - Ultra Qix

Ultra Qix

Qix is a very old video game, the point of the game being territotiral acquisition. You control your character by moving around, all the while automatically drawing a line behind you. If you connect the edges of the line with other edges, it can form squares or other shapes that when fully connected will give you points. Our original homework long ago was to make a board game version of this, and I will detail how this board game version works. I made this with Mike Antonakes, Naeem Moosajee and Branden Schroeder.

In this particular assignment we had to change the rules to become either entirely luck based or strategy based. I opted to make it as luck based as possible. Now let`s see how the original board game worked.

The board game rules

Our board game layout

Setup

• Board size of 10 x 10
• 2 to 4 players (each a different color)
• Players start on edges

Objective

• Gain the most amount of territories to win the game
• The game ends when all territories have been filled
• Rules

Player take’s their turn

• Move one position on any adjacent line
• At end of round turn (all players went), two die (each die with the same number as the size of the board) are rolled to determine ‘Qix’ position on the board.
• The Qix is a threat to all players, if it touches a player it forces them back to their starting position

Capturing Territories

• Capture by closing at least 3 sides of a square on the edge
• Player’s are able to steal others boxes

Summary

Basically in order to win, you gain the most territories, moving only one space per turn. It is entirely based on your skills and decisions in the game. You want to gain the most territory while, trying to out smart other players taking other routes around the board. There is no luck in deciding your movement.  The only luck based factor goes with the position of the Qix that might be able to make you restart if you are unlucky. This is the only luck factor.

Also the cool thing about this board game is that you can simply use graph paper and pencil so essentially you can play this game anywhere. Graph paper for the grid, pencil to present the lines of each player, erase them if needed, etc.

An example of how the gameplay looked in the board game

Ultra Qix! - The changes

The first change will be to change the size of the grid to 20 x 20 now for the other changes that are going to be made. The main change to be made will be the change of movement. Where everyone was on even ground before now we will add a lot more chance with dice rolls.

We will use a 6 sided die which designates how far you can move in your turn. This means you move at whatever pace that luck dictates. This changes the gameplay significantly, though you still make certain choices as to where exactly you will move your token.

Also the Qix position will change every player turn (instead of waiting for all players to go), so that means there is more chance it will come and land on someone to force them back to their starting position.

With these changes it makes the game much more luck based, the only slight choice you have is the direction you move you position. But for the most part it’s all luck.

Playtesting

The original game was much slower paced, and felt less dynamic. Moving every only once every turn was much slower than anticipated though turns did progress fast. If you got hit by the Qix by chance though, you felt much farther behind if you were hit.

On the other hand with the new rule changes, the pace was much quicker, as some players could get a big head start and move around capturing territories at a much faster rate due to dice rolls. The game ended much quicker, almost too quick. It didn’t take very long at all to fill the board because everyone had the potential to move at 6 times the speed. In order to fully accommodate the games increased pace, we changed it to 20 x 20. After that it didn’t end nearly as fast since 10 x 10 was too small. Also, if you were hit by the Qix, being reset to your respawn wasn’t nearly as traumatizing as it was with the original game since you could catch up to your original position more easily.

The original concept was to be rather simple and accessible so I didn’t want to add too many new rules to make it too complicated. This added luck factor greatly helps to change the pace of the gameplay, pretty much chance being the main factor of winning. You have a little bit of choice in the direction you might want to gain territory, but it’s all about the luck of the die roll for your movement and for the Qix coming to destroy you.

Game Design: Homework 5 Part 2- Super Tic Tac Toe

Creation of Super Tic Tac Toe 

In the second part of our homework assignment we were to create a modification of tic tac toe to change the gameplay from completion choice based, to much more luck based. I am sure we ALL know the rules of tic tac toe but for completeness sake I will list the rules.

Tic Tac Toe original Rules

•  Players : 2
• Materials needed: Any piece of paper
• Setup: Make a 3 x 3 Grid

Super Tic Tac Toe - New Rules changes

For materials required, the difference between the old tic tac toe is that while the other one used a 3 x 3 grid, this one uses a 5 x 5 grid. Also a deck of “Tic Tac Toe” cards are provided, more on those later. This deck of cards is the key to making Super Tic Tac Toe into a much more chance based game.

Objective

Instead of winning by filling up a line of 3 in a row, you must fill up a line of 4 in a row. This means that you don’t have to fill up a line, edge to edge on the grid to gain a line.  The game also doesn’t end when this happens, instead you will keep a tally of how many line’s you’ve filled up by the end of the game. The winner is declared with however has the most when the board is filled up. A tie is also possible but is settled by rock paper scissors.

Player Turns

You start the turn by picking from a deck of cards. This deck contains cards with a variety of effects, which will change how you handle your turn. The list card effects are as follows…

• Place your token (X or O) as normal
• Remove one enemy token 
• Remove your own token
• Replace enemy token with your own token
• Place two tokens
• Clear the edges of the board
• Cannot place your token next to any of your other tokens
• Place token only on Edge
• Place token not on edge

You must play the card you have picked up right away and do whatever it says. From this list of cards you still have some choice in where you can place your token depending on the card in particular. Others are very luck based, giving you a significant advantage or disadvantage such as removing an enemy token for an advantage of removing your own token as a disadvantage.

This adds a lot more luck but a lot more dynamic play in the game as the game can change very quickly with the various cards that can be used. You will never be certain on how the next turn can progress and it can either make the game go much quicker or last longer depending on which cards are picked up by whom.

For example, you could have a line connecting four tokens together, however  your opponent could pick up a card that removes one of your tokens from the board, taking down that line. In your turn though, you get a card that replaces your enemy’s token with your own, so you’re able to get it back. This shows how dynamic the game play with this luck based factor.

Play Testing

With the added randomness and expanded grid, it made the game a lot more varied and interesting. Though you still had control, the randomness of the cards that could change the game made it feel a bit out of hand, but that was the point of the rule change. There was an earlier version where there was a card to clear the board entirely but this was removed because it wasn’t balanced, it just reset the game as though nothing ever happened. Since you can’t hold the cards in your hand and play them at any time, it made it worthless so it was replaced with the card that removes only edge spaces. It delayed the end of the game but it was a lot more balanced and it would only ever be drawn once. The other cards to remove other player’s cards, replace them, etc, also made the game much more interesting.

Game Design: Homework 5 Part 1 - Pok-War!

The creation of Pok-War!

The purpose of this homework assignment was to create a variation of the card game "War" and modify it to have less luck and more strategy. Here is what I was able to come up with. Note that Pok-War has no affiliation wit pokemon.

War's Original Rules

• Players : 2
• Materials needed: One standard 52-card deck
• Setup: Shuffle the deck of cards and deal out half to each player. Players take their cards in a single face-down stack

Pok-War! The rule changes

All materials required for the game remain the same, the main change in this version of War is that instead of randomly flipping the top card of your deck and comparing it to the value of your opponents, you will instead compare poker hands to declare the winner.

Player Turn

Every turn, players must pick up a hand of five cards instead of just a single card from their own decks.

Battles

In order to win a battle, instead of simply winning by the higher value, you use Poker hand strength instead to determine the winner. If you set of 5 cards in a poker hand fashion is stronger than the opponent’s, you get their entire hand. Place your winnings into your “discard” pile.

The poker hand strengths in order of most powerful from top left, to least powerful bottom right

Two Piles

There is the draw pile which holds the cards you can draw. There is the discard pile holds any cards you’ve won or were discarded to you (more on that in a bit). These cannot be drawn but once you run out of cards in your draw pile then you can shuffle the discard pile and turn it into your draw pile. This is to make sure cards are properly shuffled.

Drawing cards

The catch is that, though you pick up 5 cards from your draw pile, you can also choose to discard some cards after they are picked up. You can choose to discard as many as you would like, the first 2 can be exchanged with your own deck, discarded back into your discard pile. On the third card this card and any other cards discarded afterwards are given to the opponent in their discard pile. In place of the ones you discarded, you can draw a new card from your own deck in its place. This way you can try and form a stronger hand at the risk of giving your opponent more cards.

With these rule changes, players are given much more control on how powerful their “hands” are rather than relying on the luck of the draw. There is still luck in the drawing of the cards but you have complete control over how your hand is decided.

Play Testing

In playing this, it turned war from a completely boring, luck based game to a much more dynamic and involved game. Players might carefully try and build a stronger hand by sacrificing some cards to the other player or go with the cards they have and hope for the best. There is still some flexibility to change your hand, but to change it more requires more risk. This gave a lot of risk and reward choices to make the game more exciting and the choices were meaningful whenever you decided to risk changing your hand.

Tunes of the Week 5 - Heroes of Might and Magic III

One of my favourtie turn based strategies games, Heroes of Might and Magic III was the pinnacle of the Heroes of Might and Magic series in my eyes. The art style, battles, factions to play as were among my favourites and I've played it for many years. What made the game so endearing was the music that was present during the game as well. Every theme that represented each of the factions was great and I liked every one of them, though of course I had some favorites.


Though the series has continued to have sequels, Heroes of Might and Magic III still hasn't been topped, to me this game has become an ageless classic and so has it's music.

The Inferno - faction theme

Fortress - Faction theme

The Tower - Faction Theme

Graphics in Games Week 5: Environments of Final Fantasy XIII-2

Back in 2010, Final Fantasy XIII was released after years of waiting. The game was both scorned and praised. It was scorned for its linear paths for most of the game, taking a long time to wait before becoming free world and the fact that it’s “auto-battle” AI was too smart and took away a lot of control for the player. It was also praised by different people for the auto battle mechanic and other gameplay elements but it was most widely praised for its graphics. The game was stunning, its environments and character models were of a very high class. Particularly the environments which should many varied, lush, vibrant colors and effects to truly make each area a wonder to move in, despite the fact the paths in them were linear.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is the sequel to Final Fantasy XIII, released on January First 2012 which improves upon the first in many aspects, mostly game play wise. It made the game much more open world, instead of the linear path that the original was panned for, and added various other gameplay elements such as collecting monsters and time travel to revisit areas. Much like its predecessor, Final Fantasy XIII-2 maintains the same high quality graphics, perhaps even more so though it’s hard to tell since they both look very good.

Models and textures

Protagonists Serah (front) and Noel (back) are both exquisitedly modelled

The models in Final Fantasy XIII-2 are of a very high quality. Particular focus was put on the character’s faces, which is very apparent due to the amount of dialogue in the game. All the main characters or any important NPCs that talk can talk while providing very realistic emotion in their faces. This is where the most “vertexes” are located in the model since the Final Fantasy series has always been about cutscenes, and they aim to provide the best viewing experience during these cutscenes. The detail drops off at the hands since they aren’t seen close as much, but every now and then a cutscene may show then in their lower detail in terms of bump mapping and texture.

A look at some of the ground textures

In general, the texture is great all over, however due to the sheer size of the game, on the Xbox 360 version some of the textures have been compressed in order to fit onto a single disc. The textures would otherwise be much larger and would improve greatly in quality if they had decided to try and fit it onto 2 discs. I am not fully sure of the difference in quality between the PS3 version (Since it uses Blu Ray) and 360 version since I have not taken a microscope to the PS3 yet.

The grass flows in a realistic way like the hair does

To go with the realistic characters, Square Enix has worked hard to make the physics of hair very good. Hair flows with wind or bobs around realistically when characters move around. They aren’t static in the slightest, they are some of the best hair physics I have seen.

Particles

A crazy amount of particle effects on screen when many spells were used at once

Final Fantasy has always had magic in the series in various forms, which means particle effects are sure to be used to great effect with them. In every battle you encounter during the game there will constantly be a variety of particle effects. Fire, ice, lightning, strange energies, etc. Every blow unleashes particle effects of some sort and the flashiest spells are combined with cinematic camera views which make the action even more exciting. I can’t even count the number of particles present in this game, it’s abundant with them constantly. Whether in or out of battle, there are constantly amazing particle effects (which of course light up the scene) all over the game. Watch any gameplay and you will see it all over.

Blurring and other effects

Just to note, we also learned about a variety of effects in Computer Graphics, many of them related to blurring effects that are applied after a scene is render. This is known as post-process effects. Basically it would end up blurring a scene by taking the pixels on the screen and average out their values so that pixels would end up meshing together. Pixels contain information about color, so basically nearby pixels would be averaging out the color between them. Looking far away from the screen and at the image as a whole, it makes the image look blurred.

A Blurring and particle effect that occurs whenever you enter batle

The reason I wanted to mention this is because Final Fantasy XIII-2 also uses this, all the time. The particle effects constantly use this, to give the appearance of distortions happening all around. Also used to blur the particle effects of combat spells to give them more of a “powerful” appearance and also because if you take a look at fire for example, the extreme heat causes a blurring effect in real life. FFXIII-2 does this as well and for many different spells.

A bloom effect, which blurs the area from the light of the sun

When running around, if there happens to be a sun in that environment, a blurring effect will also happen should you look in that direction to help invoke a more realistic appearance to looking at the sun. Since in real life we would be wincing a lot of otherwise burning our retinas.

Lighting

Use of lighting in one of the city areas 

The lighting is absolutely fantastic in FFXIII-2, I can’t deny it. The use of lighting in many environments lights up the characters just right, maintaining their realism and never making them too dark or glow in strange ways. They always look good and the environments all look good. Not to mention the particles frequently count as lighting sources too.

Environments of Final Fantasy XIII-2 - Featured Video

The environments of Final Fantasy XIII-2 are what truly make the game a really engaging experience. Every locale looks beautiful, with the right amount of lighting and atmosphere that each place sticks out. They choose the appropriate lighting effects in different areas to truly give the correct feeling to every area. This really helped immerse me in the game, probably the major factor for why I was so immersed, the game is just breath taking. This here is the reason why I will relate this post to Game Design as well, since in game Design, the aesthetics are important in immersing the player in the experience. And like I said, this is what the environments did for me.

I know that this blog has been shorter than the usual but that’s because I have focused the effort for this blog post on a video instead. I wanted to showcase the environments of Final Fantasy XIII-2 first hand rather than simply talk about them. Seeing it all in action is much better than simply reading about it. 

The Environments of Final Fantasy XIII-2

Games of the Week 5 : Art and Games – feat. Forza Motorsport 3 & Soul Calibur 5

Update: POLL on right side about using creation tools in games


Well this week was an interesting lesson, we learned something else. It was not so much a new lesson, more of a discussion than anything else. It was how can video games be art? This turned into a discussion regarding what exactly art is and how video games could pertain to that. In a nutshell, the lesson was that art is created not for reproduction or survival, but to express an idea or message to a person. Of course there are all sorts of interpretations for art, and what I just said is simply one form of art. What a person can consider art is up to that person’s judgement. Now I haven’t played many of the games considered “games as art” such as Braid or Limbo. The only one that I can think of that was considered to be a great helper in the debate of “Games are Art” is Bioshock.

Games making Art?

But instead of focusing on Bioshock and how that is art, I wanted to instead explore, how can we use games to create art instead? The best thing that can to mind for me was the tools that the developpers provide games for players to create their own experiences. What I mean by that is things such as level editors, character customization, etc. Some of the tools in games that contain these are very deep and can provide a near limitless amount of possibilities for you to use them and create all sorts of neat and interesting designs. For this particular Games of the Week, I am going to focus on two games instead of one, both of them containing an editor tool of some sort that is very deep. These games in particular are Forza Motorsport 3 and Soul Calibur V.

Rather than delve too deeply into the aspect of each game, I will instead focus on the creation tools that these two games have and how players can “Create art” in the games.

Forza Motorsport 3

Forza Motorsport 3 is a driving simulator, with a focus on real world cars and trying to provide a realistic driving experience. It is available on the Xbox 360, and is a rival to competitor driving simulator, Gran Turismo. The game’s been very successful and the development team has been able to complete the sequels in the Forza series much quicker than Gran Turismo has.

In Forza 3, you can race in any of the available courses with hundreds of exquisitely modelled cars that are comparable to their real counterparts in many real life racing circuits. There is an expansive career mode where you start off with lower cars, earning credits by winning races and advancing up the ranks to participate in various other events and racing circuits with specific classes of cars. For example, a lower end card would be rank D, and only cars that fit within the rank D range can participate in those particular races. Cars such as formula one racers are automatically in the F (For Formula, NOT for failure) rank.

Formula 1 racers in Forza 3

Cars can be improved up to higher ranks and some cars are classified as much higher ranks due to their already superior nature. Besides simply improving parts (which provide non aesthetic changes), you can customize your cars with different paint jobs, and the most important thing, being able to have full control of exactly what that paint job looks like. You’d be surprised with the sorts of things people can come up with this system, but for now let’s explain how it works.

Paint job customization

In Forza 3’s customization system, all tools that you need to create the perfect paint job are laid in front of you right from the start. No need to unlock any specific tools to upgrade the system, everything you need you will have right away. Now for every car, you’re what are known as “decals”. These are basically shapes of various sorts, many of them being just regular geometric shapes but these are a lot of different ones such as arrows, clouds, etc. You are able to manipulate these decals by shaping their size and color, but you won’t be able to complete distort and stretch the shape in crazy ways. Now you may think, that sounds way too simplistic, how on earth could you make something complicated just with this?

Well the true depth comes next from the fact that there are layers. You can have as many decals as you want on a specific layer, the same as you might see in photoshop or other image editing software. With these basic shapes in mind and the fact that you have a limitless amount of layers to work with and that’s where it truly shines. Even with basic shapes, though it will take dedicated time and effort, you can create some truly amazing pieces of work on you car. Since your tools are limited in a sense, you truly have to think outside the box on how you will want ot create your work. Personally I was rather terrible as this, I could only make a basic staff or magic wand, something of that sort. However there are some masters of this craft who, despite having limited tools could still create some truly awe inspiring works.

Here are just some examples of some of the work by some talented folks

 From the anime series, Evangelion

From the anime and manga series, Gundam

From Epic Mickey on the Wii

Captain America

Source: http://www.1up.com/news/forza-3-livery-internet

To be fairly honest I myself haven’t explained and probably won’t understand the true depth of this system, but I know that really anything is possible in what you can create on the surface of these cars. If look at this link here, this is a tutorial just on making fonts out of decals. A tutorial on fonts! There are many other tutorials out there by forza community members on how to create your own fantastic creations, it’s really awesome how out of these tools that seem so simply at first, that you could create some jaw dropping paint jobs.

As can be seen, Forza 3 definetely provides the tools for an artist. It many not be “Games as Art” but it’s a Game that creates art for sure.

Soul Calibur 5

By Namco Bandai, the same company that brought the Tekken series to the scene, Soul Calibur 5 is the newest entry, only released a week ago, it’s not the best in the series (in terms of content) but brings exciting new gameplay additions to the base fighting system. The game takes place in 1607 AD, so that means all the characters have weapons of some sort and the style is obviously… that of 1607 AD so no modern clothes.

The game works similar as Tekken, fighting in a 3D plane rather than 2D and winning the battle by beating your opponent 3 out of 5 rounds by depleting their life. Of course it’s not exactly the same as Tekken and a very different type of play but I won’t delve too deeply into it. The basics of mixing up your opponent and using mind games to keep them second guessing or taking opportunities of their mistakes is key like any other game. Of course most character’s reach in this game is much larger due to their possession of weapons. What makes this game at it’s best is the depth of it, which is what every fighting game strives for.

The small number of options in single player

Unfortunately unlike previous Soul Calibur games, the amount of single player content was cut significantly. There was only a story mode, arcade mode, legendary souls (BRUTALLY HARD arcade mode) and quick battle to earn titles to your name. Multiplayer mode consisted of a fair number of cool new options. Of course there was the usual ranked matches to increase rank and status, player matches for fun, and the new Global Colisseo, a large lobby where you can go to talk to others, challenge them to matches or join tournaments. I Haven’t seen anything like that in a fighting game before. Anyways the problem is the lack of single player, there used to a more modes such as survival, longer “adventure modes”, towers with unique challenges to help change up the gameplay. However the one redeeming feature that applies for both single player and multiplayer is the game’s in depth customization mode!

Create a Soul – Character creation

Also known as create a soul in some games, character creation mode has been in the Soul Calibur series since the third game. Over the course of the 3^rd, 4^th and finally 5^th game, the options for customization have expanded over and over. I’ll explain some of the options you have and which ones weren’t available in the older games.

Trailer for character creation, see what I am talking about in action

Body

Adjusting body proportions – A feature only available in Soul Calibur 5, you can adjust the size of biceps, thighs, hips, waist, arms, umm… chest, etc. You can even adjust the height of your character as well (though it won’t affect gameplay for balance reasons). In SC IV, you could only adjust overall size, even big strong person or thinner person. You now have full control of the size of your character.

A few of the options you have to change the size of a character's proportions

Changing your Head – You have the option to choose from a wide array of different faces (You can’t make one unfortunately). The number of options you have has expanded considerably from SC IV, almost tripling in the number. You are also now able to choose eyebrows as well, a SC V only feature. You can choose from different hairstyles, all games had this but of course SC V has many more available and also more realistic hair physics doesn’t hurt either.

Options to select from for faces

Hairstyle choices

Changing muscle tone – A feature available in SC V and IV, you can change how muscular your character looks. It’s simply a change in texture however but it helps to define the look of your character even more.

You also can fully change the color of hair, body and eyes, so you could make someone hulk green and in fact make the hulk if you wanted. You can also apply a face paint on the character’s face, ranging from a wide variety of different paints but the most obvious one is to make someone into a nightmare clown.


I'll be showing this all in my video down below.

Equipment

That’s pretty much it in terms of the character’s actual body, the fun part is dressing them up. You have access to a wide range of equipment on different areas of the body. You have headgear, face gear (such as eyepatches, glasses, etc), undergarments (undershirt, chainmail, etc. Apparently I just unlocked chest hair for males as well), upper body equipment, upper body covering (covers upper body equipment, will usually show the upper body equipment still), lower body equipment, hip equipment (same as upper body covering for lower equipment), neck and back equipment, arm equipment, shoulder equipment, ankle equipment, feet equipment, and specialized equipment that can be put anywhere.

Here is just some of the equipment you can get.

 Extra equipment to be placed anywhere

Lower body equipment

 Upper body equipment

Head equipment

There are a TON of different equipment parts for each section so you have a wide variety of different ways to create your character. The specialized equipment is the only one you can move to any location (beware of people who will create characters that try to make characters look “Rated M for mature”). You have the ability to full edit the color of the equipment and you can even make patterns to define the look of equipment even more (patterns are new to SC V).

More editing options!

Further for editing you can add decals (just like Forza 3!) onto your character’s bodies or equipment. You have access to wide variety of different shapes, however you don’t have many layers to work with, having only up to four but we will see if anyone can come up with anything very nice looking.

Decal placement

You have to choose a base fighting style from the existing characters however, so your character will possess that characters weapons and stance. So any animations that character has, your newly created character will possess. You also have the ability to fully customize any existing characters to nearly the same extent (with the exception of Ezio Auditore, the guest character of Soul Calibur V). The only thing you can't change is their face and eye color.

Let's create something!

Now these are a lot of features and people can really go all out to try and create some of their favourite characters. They could try and create neat looking original characters but I have seen a lot of people trying to recreate all sorts of characters so I thought, why don’t I do this for the blog too?

I decided to try Albert Wesker (from Resident Evil) , here are the results in 9 mins. Not too hard to make him, there are of course much harder characters to try and make and there are others out there who could make a better looking Wesker than I can but that just to give you a taste of what can be done

Albert Wesker in Resident Evil 5

Creation of Albert Wesker in 9 minutes

The game only came out so there is still a lot of potential for people to make unique characters or paying homage to existing characters in such an easy manner. It was not hard at all to make my Hulk and Wesker.

Conclusion

So when I say, Games can create art, I mean it when people are able to freely make their own creations to their hearts whim, using tools that the game has provided. I feel like Forza 3 definetely has more potential than Soul Calibur V for artistic creations but that doesn’t mean Soul Calibur V created characters can’t have some artistic merit to them. We still have yet to see the best characters.


Point is, both games allow the creation of whatever ideas come to peoples minds. Plenty of other games have these sorts of features too. I believe that games can create art and there are games with even more tools to show this.