Stealth Game Theory

Game design is like that really awesome hobby that's hard to classify as work. The past few days I've been designing I've found that hours will pass without notice. I know that this won't be what daily life is like in the industry, but it makes me feel good that I'm getting into something that I know I love.

This week design has been focused a lot on Co-Signers. On Monday, I spent about 5 hours with Chris just talking about the game and determining how the game should work before we realized how much time had passed. Working on a design team of two is possibly the easiest design team to work on, as more people make it much harder to come to consensus with. I like graphs, so here's one depicting how easy it is working with more designers:

 Working alone is really hard because there's nobody to bounce ideas off of. With three designers, that 'bounce off' effect is still present, but you now have the burden of getting three people to agree on something and continue on and/or drop a topic completely and shift gears rapidly in your design discussion. By the time you get to about 5 designers working on the same problem, that burden increases so much that its almost worth it just to design on your own without anybody to think with.

That being said, just Chris and I had an awesome design pow-wow on Monday and worked out a lot of really cool things. The most important was the player reaction chart, which I'm more than happy to pictorally represent:



This chart represents the several states of emotional response during a stealth game. I spent some time last weekend playing stealth games like the Metal Gear Solid series and Monaco, and I noticed that all games have the option to quickly recover from being seen. To do this, it must be clear to the player that they were seen, and they should also be able to relatively quickly assess how to evade full suspicion of AI. The "seen" state is a high-adrenaline moment of fast reflexes and quick thinking to evade being chased, and relies on that person. If the player does not react quickly enough, a chase sequence occurs.

The chase is an inevitable part of any stealth game and must be accounted for. This is a higher-stress, longer sustained sequence than the "seen" state with one important distinction: the game is on the line. If the player retains the "chased" sequence for too long or makes enough mistakes here, the player has lost the game. It is this threat of failure that intensifies the chase sequence above the "seen" sequence, and why the chart branches off at this point. In the case of the Co-Signers, an additional distinction surfaces: where the "seen" state is a high-stress moment for one player, the "chase" sequence is a high-stress moment for both players, as one person losing will cause both to lose. The chase sequence demands the full attention of both players, where the "seen" sequence demands the full attention of only one player.

If the player manages to lose its captors, it does not immediately return to a normal state. There is a period where the AI continues to search for the player even though they are not seen, and this is the "hidden" state. Whats interesting is that this state retains a similar amount of stress as the "seen" state for the player, even though it may still require the attention of both players. A player will hide behind office furniture for a good 2 minutes hoping and praying that the guards don't look around this particular desk. Once the player has evaded detection for long enough in the hidden state, the guards give up and return to their normal routine.

That theory is enough for one post. I'll get to what we did with that information in the next post.