Design Pattern: Hidden Treasure

Overview

When a game has obscured goals or items that the player must find in order to use, but need not find in order to progress, the pattern in use is called Hidden Treasure. The treasure must at once provide an advantage and novelty; a weapon that differs only in that it is more powerful is just as unsatisfying as one that is only a re-skin of vanilla content.

Note again that Hidden Treasure is not required to progress; it can certainly make progression easier, but in order to qualify it cannot be strictly mandatory.

Hidden Treasure is a common feature of many games, but is prominent in any game within the RPG continuum as the pattern lends itself to quest systems.

Purpose

The Hidden Treasure pattern is put to use in three mutually independent ways.

• Encouraging exploration – The promise of an advantage and novelty gives the player reason to explore the game world, and thus Hidden Treasure can be used to get the player moving; only effective if the presence of the Hidden Treasure is made apparent early on.
• Creating replay value – Ubiquitous Hidden Treasure is most likely going to require multiple play-throughs in order discover all of it. If the Hidden Treasure is well-formed, then the advantage and novelty of the treasure will give life to the replay instead of playing solely to Skinner Box mechanics.
• Enthralling the player – The treasure becomes the object of the 'Just one more…' compulsion. Not necessarily a bad use, but Hidden Treasure should also provide something more than just a cheap way to keep the player playing.

Examples

Good

• Costume Quest – Peppered throughout the game are the materials and plans for new costumes; each costume provides a different set of attacks, spells, and over-world abilities to a party member. The costumes are not required to progress, but some costumes make the endgame easier. Searching for costumes will also reward you with more side quests, currency, and help uncover plot points.
• TESV: Skyrim – Most magical items fall into this category, and the Elder Scolls games in general blur the lines between 'required' and 'optional' treasure depending on how you play the game and what you personally see as the goal of playing it. Strongly geared towards replayability and enthralling the player.
• AOE II: Age of Kings – The Relics on the map are Hidden Treasure; their novel and powerful bonuses provide an incentive for players to explore the map as well as add flavor to warfare.

GalCivII: Appeal to Tradition

I hope you did not think I was done talking about GalCiv II.  Because I am not.  See?  Yeah.

I have gotten back to modding GalCiv II; I started with Tolmekian's TechTree Fixes and have systematically gone through and edited the thousands of lines of text to remove the corn from the poorly executed science fiction flavor.

It has not been pretty.  As I have already spoken about, Twilight of Arnor the was a rushed game, and the text of the game has never been particularly inspiring.  Apart from typographic and spelling errors, much of it is simply bad writing, and usually very conversational in tone.

You cannot blame them, of course: with no designated professional writer and what was clearly a habitually rushed and under-funded operation had no time for editorial duties.  Plus, the game still plays well.

What I wanted to get into today is the world-building traps that are easy to get oneself into when writing about fictional cultures.

Here is the text from a United Planets Council question:

"In a galaxy filled with different kinds of beings, it can be a challenge to get our civilians to see eye-to-eye. While many ideas have been brought to the table, the most obvious way to bring our people together is through a Galactic Olympiad. Next year, all attending races will come together to compete in different events. As the hosting race will see a 20 bc per week economic increase during the competition, we must vote on a venue."

The thing to notice here is the statement that an Olympiad is somehow the most self evident way to bring together a coalition of space fairing alien species in mutual respect and admiration.  And that is simply monumentally misinformed and ethnocentric.

Like much of GalCiv's flavor and fluff, it operates under the assumption that at the end of the day all the galactic species are basically humans: two legs, two arms, a head, bilateral symmetry, a sense of the individual and its accomplishments, and all of them no more than six to seven feet tall.  This would be acceptable if they had not already taken pains to subvert that trope.  The Arcean are twelve feet tall, and the Drath are ten feet tall.  The only entertainment mentioned of Drengin practice are blood sports.  Tori are implied to be semi-amphibious, and the Yor are a collective consciousness of robotic beings.

Even if they all do have a cultural tradition of sports, there is little hope that any particular species will have much skill in any sports that another species plays.  Disregarding physical attributes, species simply have different specializations.  The Korx are deceitful tradesmen; their sports might include mock UN style trade negotiations.  Drengin engineer their laborers, and would be completely within their rights to simply engineer the perfect players for every sport on the docket.  And let us not forget that the Thalan are from the future and are on a mission to save the universe; the very idea that they would waste time to foster interstellar dialogue is laughable.

Duncan Phyfe: Tear-Down Pt. 1

I am still developing the ability to do complicated projects in a rational order, so the table work jumps around a little bit.  I try to think ahead enough in order to avoid disaster, and some editing magic makes it seem like I do these things less sporadically than I do.  Still, this is all in a bit of a strange order of execution, complicated by the mess now resident in the workshop.

I left off talking about the stops on the under side of the wings, but that is going to be deeper in the post.  Before I elaborate on the project itself, I need to talk about tear-downs.  Restoration and repair work always brings with it the threat of the unknown; you never know what is hiding under the surface of the piece and it is more than likely that what you think you need to do is only a small part of what you will end up doing.  It that a professional opinion?  No, not really; it is merely what I have learned from the things we have had to fix over the years.  Okay, and a little bit of television.

If you can manage to disassemble the piece and know you can put it back together, then you know you have not missed anything that needs work.  That is a big if, though.  You need to be methodical and disciplined to pull it off, two traits my family is not know for, so I have to be extra careful.

The first trick I use for furniture is cardboard.  This style and age of table basically ensures that there are going to be a lot of screws and hardware in a tear-down.  The older furniture is, it is generally more likely that it is held together with purely wooden joints and animal glues.  But if there are going to be screws, cardboard is your best friend.

You cut out a piece of a cereal box and make a simple line drawing to indicate the piece somehow; for the wing hinges I drew the table top's shape when extended and the seams of the wings.  Then you punch holes through the cardboard in the pattern of the screws you are going to remove; as you remove them you place them on the diagram where they go.  Of course, find a way to unambiguously indicate the orientation of the piece relative to the drawing; masking tape and a soft, slightly dull pencil are a good choice.

This allows you keep track of the screws; you can know at a glance if one has fallen out or disappeared, and you can easily put them back precisely where they came from (which sometimes is important).  It also makes them far more portable and you will not confuse similar screws from different parts of the piece.

Now, on to the tear-down.  The first thing I did was experiment to see how easily the finish would come off.  I used a razor blade like a small cabinet scrapper; the finish popped off easily.  Then I removed the wings and set them aside.

Next, I needed to make a cabinet scraper.  I had been putting it off for ages, so now seemed like a good time to finally get it over with.  I have a saw or three I have acquired just for the purpose of being metal donors, and an old Keystone franeksteined with mismatched machine screws was first up.  I will talk about making those in a different post.

After getting the scraper all squared up and raising a burr, I laid into the table top's core carefully but forcefully.  It made quick work of the failed finish:

Why didn't I use sandpaper?  Funny thing about working wood with hand tools: sharpness maintenance matters a lot more.  Handplanes, hand saws, and chisels need to be very sharp, but they also need to be able to to be sharpened, so a hand saw tooth is not nearly as hard as a circular saw blade's carbide tooth, and a handplane iron is not nearly as hard as a power planer blade may be, because they are intended to be sharpened by the craftsperson, and often at that.

Sandpaper, however, is a literally disposable cutting device, although its action is more like shreading than cutting.  Sandpaper is indispensable in many situations, but if hand tools are going to get anywhere near the piece afterwards, you cannot use it.  The sandpaper will leave grit in the pores of the wood, and that grit will dull the blades of handplanes and saws.  The scraper will dull faster too, but of all my tools I am the least worried about the scraper in this situation.  It is only a piece of saw plate, after all.

Since I need to plane off a little bit of the surface to get through the Minwax and some water stains, I opted not to use sandpaper.  Also, this thing has already been finished twice; no need to raise the grain or risk scorping* the wood with over-zealous sanding to get it level all over again.  And the scraper leaves a silky smooth finish that sandpaper has a hard time matching in the same span of time.

Something to be careful of when using a cabinet scraper like this on boards: you are liable to gouge the edges if you use as much force and flection as you do on the middle of the board.  The scraper usually does not leave deep gouges, so they are easy to fix, but it of course is better if you manage to avoid them altogether.

You will notice a bottle of bleach: I went after the clearly visible black water stains.  Success?  Not especially.  I have some pictures, but it is nothing special.  Since I am going to plane off a little of the table top anyway, I will return to that subject later.

Next up are the wings, which are in four pieces.  The outer boards have those stops and thumb screws, you will remember, and the mysterious evidence of the stops having been on the other side of the wings at some point.  This is one of those places where the decay of knowledge comes in:

This is one of the previous locations of a stop, and it is clear that whoever moved them did not know how to treat animal based glues (which should surprise no one).  See that flaky film?  That is the glue that held the stop in place, while screws reinforce it against shearing.  It is britle now, but that is not evidence of the glue's weakness, because we must remember that the person who moved the stops left the residue.  They would have only done this if it was difficult (for them) to remove it in the first place.  Moisture has eroded the glue now, and it flakes cleanly off.

In order to facilitate refinishing the top, I need to remove the stops and the thumb screws so they lie flat.  Unlike our mystery repairer, I know that hide glues are easily reversed: all you need is a hot knife.

I have a small paring knife I keep around for odd tasks that need a knife but are too rough for a good one.  After removing the screws, I ran that over a propane torch a bit to heat it up until it just started to turn a shade blonde, turned off the torch, and then carefully cut around the stop and pried, slowly working into the glue.  Once you get enough leverage, it pops off:

There is a little heat blistering in the finish because of the knife, but the great thing about shellac finishes is that they can be repaired without any seams or threat of delamination.

The thumb screws have a threaded thumb bolt, a nut, and thread through a brass ring embedded in the wood.  When I get to repairing the aforementioned previous repairs I'll go into that more.

Next I stripped the wings with the scraper.  The square half of the wings were pretty easy to clamp on my (not so good) carpentry bench, but clamping the outer boards in the bench required a little trickery since the corners are broadly radiused:

While I pick on my factory-formed workbench, it manages to get things done (except flattening boards; not really sturdy enough for that).  The bench dogs have square heads but round shafts, a feature that is easier to manufacture and, despite confusing like three different ways a European workbench can work, has advantages, like swiveling bench dogs that still have a wide bearing face.

The white pieces of wood sit against one bench dog a piece and contact the radiused corners tangentially.  On the other side of the board are two bench dogs.  As I tightened the vice, it pushes the board forward, but the white wooden pieces force it to move to the right into the other bench dogs, clamping the board firmly in place with no special jig or vice.  This only works, of course, when the combined width of the white wood and board is greater than the space between the front and rear rows of bench dog mortices.

And that is where the table is right now.  The next task is to remove all the hardware and treat it with Evaporust and lacquer stripper, and to clean the mildew and mold caked onto the undercarriage.

*"scorp" is another word for an in-shave.  I use it as a verb to indicate the creation of shallow depressions in a wooden surface by power sanders or over-zealous scraping.

Credits:  I of course would be nowhere without the knowledge of Patrick Edwards concerning animal based glues; my credits list permanently includes Roy Underhill, Peter Follansbee, and Chris Schwarz, too.  But really, what hand-tooler doesn't?

Duncan Phyfe: Collecting Evidence

Woodworking is prominent among my many hobbies.  Well, at least at the moment it is.  It is a natural activity for me; my great great grandfather Henry H. was a carriage wright, his son Michael C. was a carpenter, great great (great?) uncle Sumner was...well they say he was a carpenter or handyman, but I think some of the Hopkins magic was lost on him.  My mother has pretty much always been in the habit of refinishing furniture, her father makes I think what would be called 'craftsman' furniture, and doll house furniture, and my father has worked on carpentry and, on occasion, refinishing.

And on top of that I have great great gramps' and great gramps' tools.  Most of them, anyway, but is a story for another time.  Or I already wrote about it; I do not remember.

My mother has collected a number or fine pieces of furniture over the years, and there is a lot of sad sad story that goes with them, but I will not dwell on that.  Because today I am talking about doing something about it: today I am talking about furniture restoration.

It is no surprise to most anyone that furniture is not as 'nice' as it used to be.  At least not here in the United States.  U.S. Americans* live fast paced lives and the economic-media complex continually fosters a culture of disposability.  Houses are not homes, they are investments, cars are not precious tools, they are merely a thing that gets you from point A to point B.  Combine that with an iconoclastic relationship with whatever the previous generation valued, and U.S. Americans have a generally cold attitude towards antiques and fine furniture these days.  There is ample evidence that this is changing, but for the moment it is a lonely world for furniture.  Consequently, the skills and knowledge needed to maintain fine furniture is lacking and the decay of that knowledge over the decades has not been kind to pieces.

Take my mother's Duncan Phyfe style dining table as an example.  It has spent about five or more years in a shipping container ("on-site storage unit"), which turned out to be a fantastic way to make sure all your cherished valuables are exposed to a high-humidity, moldy environment.  Family politics and a noted surplus of "stuff" means that, like it or not, this was pretty much unavoidable; oh well!

We got his table from a yard sale in very nice shape.  It is solid Mahogany through and through; the only part that is not Mahogany is the spar on the inside that serves to synchronize the two pieces of the table top as they separate; it is instead made of veneered Poplar (aka, Tulip Poplar, not to be confused with Tulipwood or the wood of actual poplars).

On to the damage.  The high humidity of the container has swollen the wood; luckily the table is solid Mahogany and not veneered (except for the Poplar spar on the inside).  I have a pile of veneered pieces that completely delaminated in the dampness; one piano bench completely fell apart.  Hardwoods have it easier, too, since they are less vascular.  The table did not swell as much as other pieces made of Pine or the like; some of those have changed dimensions so much that they have split stiles and rails.  How the joinery was designed helped a great deal; this is not a rigid box being forced into a shape but an elegant assemblage of pieces all connected so that they may move but not break.

The table is old enough to not only have been finished with a shellac, but also the glue used was clearly animal hide based; the ends of the wings have completely fallen off, cleanly, indicating it was not shearing that cracked a more modern glue (or, more likely, force the wood to crack instead), but moisture that degraded an organic glue.  This is a good thing: it makes the repairs easier, and animal glues are not weaker than modern glues, but they are reversible.

Most ferrous metallic hardware is rusted; after I got into the tear-down I found little evidence of rust so severe that threads eroded or screws seized in their holes.  The components of the table splitting sync mechanism are better off due to the amount of grease congealed on them.  All the brass hardware, which consists of the four leg tips and the threads for the thumb screws on the wings, are intact.  The leg tips had been lacquered some time before hand and the threads were tightly sealed by the thumb screws.

The previous owners said that they had paid for the table top to be refinished.  No one needed to be told that, of course, because whoever this mysterious refinisher was they failed to match the original finish of the rest of the table.  Instead of a gorgeous and deep burgundy shellac based finish, they instead used a similarly dark but distinctly more yellowy-brown modern finish in acrylic or urethane.  That would have been okay on an old Oak piece, but here it was jarring and the contrast only highlighted a sickly palor hidden in the color.

I can even tell you what color it is: along the edge of one wing there are four distinct splotches of what I readily recognize as a Minwax stain and finish; it is either Red Oak or Red Chestnut.  There are also three faint dart-shaped divets in the table top that still cling to the Minwax; clearly the table was very beaten up when it was refinished and the refinisher did not want to sand any further lest they end up with a 5/8" thick table top instead of a hair shy of 3/4".  On top of the Minwax stain the acrylic or urethane finish was applied.

After being put through the gauntlet of the storage unit, the results were predictable.  While the undercarriage looks like this:

The table top looks like this:

The shellac finish, though run throughout with fine cracks and some separation, is intact.  The table top, on the other hand, failed completely.  Moisture has swollen the wood, and the inelastic nature of the modern finish caused it to crackle and peel off.

But under closer investigation it is clear that this table has been repaired no fewer than three times before the table top was refinished.  The thumb screws thread into brass rings embedded in a circular blind mortise on the underside of the outer board of the wings; the size of the ring is such that it will eventually work loose.  This happened twice before, and the previous mortices are evident; they have been corked not with milled plugs but cut dowels.  Consequently the staining of the repair only highlights the contrast between end grain and long grain, not to mention the oval shape dowels take on when they dry.  Furthermore the slight overlap of the mortices ensures that the brass ring will work loose faster the next time.

The last repair, and this looks to be the only respectable previous repair, the top of one of the arching supports snapped off and was replaced skillfully with a clean cut and a new end.  The staining ended up much darker, but it does match the hue.

There is one anomaly in the history of the table, and that is the stops on the wings.  These small blocks of wood are on the underside to force the table top to stop rotating once it has done so through a right angle; the table top core also has two stops.

But on the wings, opposite their current location, there is clear evidence of the stops having been the other away 'round:

The only way this makes sense is if either the wings have been removed then swapped, or the entire table top has been removed then put back on 180 degrees contrary to how it originally was.  I have not yet encounter similar evidence of the core's stops being moved, so I assume the wings have been swapped.

I'll talk more about the stops in the next post about this table, where I go through some tear-down and initial treatments.

* Eww, that sounds almost wrong-er than "Americans", but I agree with friends that it is silly that U.S. citizens are referred to as "Americans" as if we own the continent.

How Chrono Should Have Worked

Last post (ages ago, as usual), I mentioned that at the time we couldn't figure out how to make the core idea of Chronoscient work; the shmup genre is usually formulated such that it already gives you information on the future by the use of pattern-driven enemies.  Shmups are known for frenetic gameplay and seemingly impossible situations that are only resolved by reflex and more reflex.

It would seem that someone finally did figure out an angle on the time theme that would have worked in Chrono.  Or rather, they probably came up with it at around the same time we were scratching our heads and having heated arguments over "'splosions" versus "tactical puzzle solving"*.  Super T.I.M.E. Force uses ghosts of your character from previous play-throughs as defenders.  You can even save your past self and this former-you can help defend...well you know, screw the fabric of time space.

*I was on the 'splosion side.

Design Pattern: Plot Mechanic

Overview

When the overarching theme of a game is driven by a unique mechanic, the game is using the Plot Mechanic pattern. It is the game design equivalent of a plot device in film and literature. TVTropes defines a plot device as "an object or character in the story whose purpose is purely to drive the plot or resolve situations." A Plot Mechanic is the same idea, but it renders it with gameplay instead of narrative.

Purpose

It may seem that any mechanic of a given game could be considered a Plot Mechanic, since game mechanics are the 'words' of the language of game design, but by that logic everything in a story would be a plot device. Thus, the Plot Mechanic has the same sort of central 'bigness' that a plot device has. It has to represent the agency of the player that facilitates gameplay; summoning demons, controlling time, transforming between different creatures.

Usage

As it is in film and literature, the Plot Mechanic can be a dangerous trap. Like plot devices, Plot Mechanics can come off as boring, stale, or simply lazy. You may find movie tie-ins can suffer from this: a fan-favorite element of the film is turned into a mechanic upon which and the whole enterprise is expected to rest, based solely on how well it sold on the silver screen.

It can be a great place to start, however, and it seems that often that is where we start. How often do we sit down and think, "I want to make a game where X can do Y"? Relying on the Plot Mechanic like this can be good for small games, experiments, and prototypes, but the larger the project the more thought and iteration it will require.

Examples

• The Darkness – The plot mechanic is the name of the game. 'Nough said.
• Braid – You can control and manipulate time in various ways; no one is going to argue this game didn't pull it off brilliantly. In fact, almost all of the mechanics in the entire game have to do with it.
• Banjo Kazooie: – You can flip between the two characters, as I remember, which leads to a whole bunch of great little abilities.

Counter Example

• Chronoscient – Chrono started with the idea by our lead for "a space shooter where you can see the future." Got a lot of cool words in there, and who doesn't love some good time-bending gameplay? But in the end, we found that we simply could not figure out how to get the idea to work. Space shooters are so fast and intense, how do you communicate the future without overloading the player? I think in retrospect, we did not understand that space shooters already gave you information about the future: the swarms of enemies and heavily deterministic behaviors give you all the info you need in order to predict what is going to happen. Maybe when we revisit it, we will be wiser and use the more generic statement "a space shooter where time is a dimension of gameplay".

Design Pattern: Progression Exhaustion

Overview

Progression Exhaustion is the inversion of the Progression Track; thus it employs the principle of Diminishing Returns instead of Thematic Capital. Improvement modeled with Progression Exhaustion grants more for less for sticking to a particular theme, you get less for more.

Purpose

The incentives are the opposite and the use is the opposite: encourage the player to branch out and not specialize their experience. Using both progression tracking and exhaustion together is an effective way to coax balance out of a player's development, especially in RPGs.

Example

• HERO System – HERO System uses 3d6 as the central gauge of success. The probabilities of rolling a number on the range [3,18] follow a pronounced bell curve. The modifier a Skills or Characteristic grants to a roll changes linearly with respect to the points spent, and the opposition value of rolls starts at 9-. The result is that each for additional point you spend on a skill you get less of an improvement to your rolls. At some point around a 85% success rate, it becomes better to start spending points elsewhere.
  
  In terms of gameplay, this means that players rarely improve a skill to 100% competency; they spend points more wisely and anything they do push to and beyond the max will be an essential, flavorful part of their character.