Suspiciously Spherical is a stealth puzzle game. You are an anthropomorphised rolling ball, in a place where it is not good to be an anthropomorphised rolling ball. You must escape detection by the sentries, and make your way to the exit.
Be warned this is far from a complete game, and is more of a prototype. It consists of a short tutorial-style opening, and an abrupt end. Play it if you’re interested in seeing what I was up to over the new year. Don’t play it if you’re expecting something awesome that will change the face of gaming. I’ll make one of those later.
Download link: Click here to download Suspiciously Spherical
Version: 1.01a
Size: 1.66MB
Controls:
Use the arrow keys to move
Below, you can read some of the thoughts that went into making this little practice piece.
This was made for an assignment on my game development university course. We were given a couple of months to familiarise ourselves with Game Studio’s 3D engine and world editor, and make a game with it. There were a few game design goals I set for myself in addition to the assignment requirements.
I wanted to try my hand at Valve’s methods for what they call ‘player training’, which they describe in the developer commentaries of their games, and elsewhere. To make a game which had no explicit instructions or explanations of the game mechanics, but instead taught them to the player through the level design itself.
“Training is one of the fundamental tenets of our design philosophy. Before the player is required to utilise some new game mechanic, or new weapon, or face a new monster under pressure in a dangerous situation, we always introduce the concept in a relatively calm but still entertaining way.”
“The light bridge ball sockets are a clear example of our training approach to new gameplay elements. We train the players with a leading example, confirm they understand the concept, then switch up the problem set and make them use it in a new way. The first bridge shows players the solution, the second one confirms they understand it, and the third, knowing they understand the gameplay mechanic, challenges them in a new way using that mechanism.”
- Scott Dalton, Valve Software (Valve Software, 2007)
I attempted to follow that in my room designs. I organised them into two ’sets’, one for teaching the core goal of getting to the exit without being seen, and one for teaching that the player cannot be seen when hiding behind an object, in shadow. This second one was particularly necessary as Game Studio’s 3D engine was incapable of casting real-time shadows from dynamic lights, so the spotlight that the sentries cast to indicate their field of view appears to pass through objects into the shadow behind. The player had to be taught that this didn’t mean the sentries could see through objects.
Unfortunately, I didn’t fully implement the entire Valve sequence of training. By the quote above, I should have had an interesting challenge using the mechanics learnt so far at the end of each room set. But I ran out of time to implement those before the due date of the assignment.
Some of you may recognise the game mechanics of this as being inspired by Beyond Good & Evil’s stealth sections. I always thought BG&E’s stealth puzzles were underappreciated. I saw some really clever bits of design going on in those, so I was using this as an opportunity to demonstrate some of them and test them out for myself.
Stealth as a game genre, or stealth elements in a more varied game, are usually all about tension. The thrill of not being seen enhanced by never quite being sure if that’s going to continue. BG&E rejected all that, and used the idea of sneaking around and not being seen but removed all of the ambiguity and vagueness of it, and made it absolutely clear what was happening at all times, which made it into more of a puzzle.
The use of light was the thing I liked the most about it. There’s no light detection used by BG&E, as there is in Thief or Splinter Cell. But all of the light sources in the world are placed near the guard’s sentry positions or patrol routes. Therefore wherever a light doesn’t shine is a spot that the enemies will never see. The shadows themselves didn’t conceal you – they were merely a visual marker to communicate safe places to the player. I used this in Suspiciously Spherical, and I think it worked well.
What I think didn’t work so well was my attempt to replicate BG&E’s enemy suspicion mode. BG&E communicated the state of the guards with bright clear colours. An enemy had a green light from his visor when nothing was wrong, red when he was chasing you, but purple when he had only just spotted you. This was a vital moment when you were given the opportunity to recover from your mistake. If you had exited cover in the belief you were safe, and the nearby guard’s visor went purple and he started looking around, you could quickly return to your hiding place and wait for him to forget about it in his cute cartoony way. The game didn’t want you to fail just because it had failed to communicate the boundaries of safety to you.
I tried to do this ’suspicion mode’ in Suspiciously Spherical, but the physics-based movement I had used for the player’s avatar meant they were unable to rapidly change direction. The stationary nature of the sentries that I had chosen due to my programming/scripting inexperience meant that lengthening the suspicion period would allow the player to dash across a sentry’s field of view without raising the alert. So in the end, my suspicion mode has no real gameplay function, and is mostly just a visual effect.
The status screens on the walls that show random messages came about from thinking about narrative and setting in games. In the same way that I didn’t want to stop the game to explain the controls or goals to the player, I didn’t want to have to interrupt the player to present a crappy games design student’s story to them either. Simple games like this shouldn’t need a plot or narrative to be enjoyed.
But games often do have some kind of background story attached, even the simplest ones. I think the reason for this ties back into the subject of training the player and doing away with detailed instruction. The reason games so often depict familiar things rather than new and abstract situations is to reduce the amount that needs to be explained. If you’re making a game featuring shooting, and you present two of your weapons to be named and modelled after a rifle and a shotgun, most players will already understand that one is a long-ranged weapon, and the other is a short-ranged weapon, even if the game is a strange far-future space RPG.
So by presenting a small amount of background setting, possibly something that evokes existing knowledge or experience in the player, I could help them understand what’s going on in my game that is, by technical necessity, otherwise visually simple and abstract.
But I still didn’t want to have to prevent the player from playing while I forced them to read or watch some introduction that explained things. So I went for a systemic method of presenting it.
While the primary purpose of the status screens is to communicate to the player whether they have been spotted or if the alert has been raised, some of the messages that the screens rotate through subtly suggest the kind of world the player is in, why there are sentries, and why they are looking for the player. As the player will see the status screens before they enter the areas with sentries, they should have time to see these messages, think about them, and hopefully better understand what their aim in the game is once they start interacting with the game elements.
If you’ve read all the way through these thoughts of mine, thank you for taking an interest, and I welcome any comments you have. If you’re a game developer type and would be interested in seeing the design document I made for this, send me an email at roburky at roburky.co.uk
What are you going to school to become exactly?
I downloaded it on to my computer, but have nothing to open it with [I'm assuming it's because I have a mac?]
I downloaded it, extracted the file to my desktop, but it won’t work. Any advice?
I just get the messages ‘pathway not found’ or ‘unable to locate component’, there doesn’t seem to be an installation file as such…?
Rebecca: Extracting the zip file should give you a folder containing another folder and a shortcut labelled ‘Play Suspiciously Spherical’, and running that shortcut should be all that is necessary.
This is the first time I’ve packaged up something made using Game Studio for distribution, and the process wasn’t very intuitive. It works when I download and test it, but it is still possible I’ve messed something up.
Has anyone else managed to get this to work?
roBurky,
I think that I have found the problem with your shortcut: if you check the target of your shortcut you will see that it has kept the settings from your computer.
When I manually changed the ‘Target’ and ‘Start in’ fields to where I put Suspiciously Spherical the icon changed to the lite-C A7.ico and the program ran fine.
As for the game, I can see that you didn’t get the time to finish it to your liking but the little bits of story in the messages were amusing to watch. I nearly got caught while trying to read them all. I think that reducing the time between changes would let me read them all while moving along the safer upper section.
The difference between the safe (dark) and dangerous (light) areas is vey clear but the fact that the dynamic lights clip through the walls spoils the effect a little.
Apart from those minor complaints, I do like this twist on the rolling marble games. It reminds me of the Metal Gear Solid VR mission game for the original Playstation (a blatant and utterly terrible cash-in on the popularity of that game…)
One quick question: did you find it easy to work with the Game Studio software and would you recommend it for a basic 2D game?
Ego-food: I like your work (Rest to Reset got me into Trash80) so please continue to share things like this with the intarwebs
A quick workaround for the shortcut problem:
I made a really basic batch file that should run the SuspiciouslySpherical.exe from wherever the folder is.
Code (Notepad):
cd Stuff
start SuspiciouslySpherical.exe
exit
**Save as play.bat**
HTH
- L
I have not, but I assume the shortcut leads to the file SuspiciouslySpherical in the Stuff folder (I can’t test it myself because when opening that I get a d3dx9_30.dll is missing error so I’m attempting to fix that on my end as that is not your fault).
Doh. That’s a pretty stupid mistake. I thought it was probably something to do with only have tested it on the computers I actually worked on the game with.
Thanks for that Laurence, I’m going to borrow that. Fixed zip file will be up soon.
In regard to your question about Game Studio: I don’t recommend it at all. I found it very difficult to work with, and that’s the reason I haven’t continued this project beyond the coursework deadline. I admittedly haven’t tried many alternatives, though. the only other environments I have used are Game Maker and Flash Actionscript 3, but I much prefer them to Game Studio.
Shortcut should be fixed now. Redownload if you had trouble before.
After giving it a couple of play throughs here are my initial thoughts:
1. Ball moves a little too slowly for the physics to work to it’s fullest potential. In this game it’s not a big problem (if the ball were moving any faster the sentries would pose no obstacle), but if you were to develop the idea further it might hinder the puzzle complexity. Plus I think speed and momentum itself is something that the player should be forced to keep in balance, lest they lose control, in a physics game.
2. I agree with Laurence that the light clipping though the walls spoiled the suspense a little.
I did have one question. How long did you spend designing this?
I really enjoy the little projects you post here and can’t wait to see more. Keep it up
Sorry to rain on your parade again Robin, but I downloaded the .zip again and the shortcut still has these parameters under ‘Target’ and ‘Start in’:
“C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\My Documents\2008-09 Sem1\Introduction to Computer Gaming\3D Game Studio\Assignment\Spherical1.01\Stuff\SuspiciouslySpherical.exe”
“C:\Users\[user]\Documents\2008-09 Sem1\Introduction to Computer Gaming\3D Game Studio\Assignment\Spherical1.01\Stuff”
The problem here is that Windows (I think you are using Vista, but XP too) does not let you use relative shortcuts. If you could pack the entire game into an .exe this would solve the problem, or just leave it and let people fix the shortcut themselves.
- L
I think it’s a browsing history thing. It’s very definitely the new version with a .bat in place of the shortcut on the ftp server, but I also got the old version when trying to download again just now, until I cleared my cache/history/cookies etc.
I’ll change the link to a seperate copy of the file for now to make sure nobody else gets caught by that.
Tuuvan: Thanks for playing and leaving comments.
I agree that the ball movement ought to be faster for a better feel. I ended up at that speed mianly for the purposes of the puzzle. I wanted you to have an entire room visible on screen at once, and also to have the suspicion period last long enough for someone to read the text on the screen. Trying to get the suspicion mode to be useful to the player also meant I had to reduce the effect of momentum.
I also had great difficulty with the ball speed and framerate. Unlike all of the other game mechanics, the amount of force added to the ball each frame isn’t affected by the frame rate. So when frame rate is really low, the ball moves slower. Every attempt to fix that just made the physics cause even worse problems.
I think the compromise I ended up with between physics and stealth possibly didn’t really work, and I should have embraced one or the other more fully. Either abandon suspicion mode, and give better feeling rolling physics movement, or abandoned the physics movement and given the player fine control over their avatar’s movement.
On the light clipping through objects: Yeah. This concept does really need dynamic shadows of some kind, and if I wanted to do this concept seriously, I’d be looking for that foremost in the engine or dev environment that I chose.
I started experimenting in Game Studio with this game idea in mind at the end of October, finished the game by the new year, and handed the assignment in in January. Most of my time was spent learning how to do the scripting for it.
That’s a really nice game. I really enjoyed it. The ball was a bit slow and didn’t seem to speed up when going down a hill, but the cameras and barriers were really cool. I really liked the way the messages on the walls changed depending on what you did. The little passages you could use to get past the cameras were a nice addition, I always get frustrated when it’s only about timing.
It reminded me slightly of simplified puzzle games used in RPGs where you have to go round activating pads in different areas to open to door.
The stealth aspect came over really well, despite the speed of the ball. Felt like an exciting escape from a prison. I can see why you slowed down the momentum, but I think the fact that the messages change colour is enough to get the player to notice them.
The stealth and physics worked well together. In my opinion that’s what made it different. The physics was a bit sketchy. And as it was a university project, that is to be expected. Especially if you have to learn to script it as well!
Are you going to continue to do something with the concept?
I played this short game and was just starting to really enjoy it and understand it when it ended, haha. After reaching “The End” square I sort of expected it to close on its own or something (which wasn’t really a problem at all just sort of a “oh duh, click the x button” moment) but other then that I can’t add much more then already said. I personally am not a game designer and although I play video games I wouldn’t consider myself a gamer even. I enjoy games like this though, something of a puzzle. I’d really be interested in seeing it further developed or even seeing what can be done with it using a different software.
I got to the end and nothing happened. What’s wrong?
I have found that if someone has Vista with DEP it will not allow the program to run until an exception is made with DEP in the systems settings. That is simple enough though so no big deal really.
wow thats fun but kinda hard… nice graphics and good job.
I loved this game. The sentries with the colored light like that reminded me of cameras in Deus Ex: Invisible War where the cameras had colored light shining out of them. I hope you make more of this game, it was suspiciously fun.
I played your game (having only today read your hilarious Arthur Stone and Alice and Kev stories), and I have to say, the thing that most struck me was the atmosphere.
Using such simple concepts and graphics, with such a brief play time, you seemed to convey a lot of subtext that most big games seem to present to me. It’s relative to your resources (I think if you took that approach in a bigger project, it would be a better affect, but less suprising given this games simplicity).
I also found myself willing the ball to increase momentum, but I’ve read above why this was set low. I would have been doing that regardless – I became pretty immersed. I don’t think I can contribute any more in the way of constuctive criticism that hasn’t already been mentioned.
Doh. *Many big games fail to present that level atmosphere and subtext, especially relative to the resources used to make them.
That’s what I meant.