Mass Effect Developer Diary: 15 Seconds of Fun
So for the past months, I've been working as a designer on the PC version of Mass Effect. Mass Effect is a BioWare RPG dressed up in some fancy new shooter pants. In addition to having neat combat sequences, it also features the RPG staples of exploration and loot collection. The player occasionally comes across a door or a container that is locked. In order to get past these obstacles, the characters must use their skills in electronics or decryption. The player controls this in the form of a minigame.
In the Xbox 360 version, the minigame used the classic whack-a-mole mechanic, but with GamePad buttons instead of small mammals. It did a good job of creating an engaging minigame that the player had to focus intently on, but many people felt that the "Push the blinking lights to unlock the door" interface broke the immersion a little bit. So, we decided to take another stab at it.
My first thought when I was designing the new minigame was that I wanted the analogy to be a little closer to what the characters in the game were doing. Whenever anyone does something technical in Mass Effect, they make a fist to bring up their omni-tool, the sweet holographic PDA gauntlet. When they use it, the holographic ring swivels around and they poke at buttons as they pass by. Swivel, Poke, Swivel, Poke. The game interface was basically already there.
So how elaborate should the mini-game be? If the game is too long and involved, it pulls people away from the game, and after they've completed it several times, it becomes an elaborate chore. If the game is too short and simple, then it is simply an annoying interruption in the flow of the game. To me, the minigame is like rolling the dice for a skill check in a pen and paper game. The advantage of the minigame over the dice roll however, is that the player is given the opportunity to sway their luck one way or the other. It is that brief moment of truth where the player anxiously determines if they have what it takes to open the chest, or in Mass Effect's case, hack the crate.
The original decryption minigame did a great job of maintaining that sense of tension as the player poised to press the buttons as they lit up, but ultimately it was purely a test of reflexes. In order to make the player feel like they were actually learning and reasoning their way through the game, I wanted to add an element of choice. So to combine tension and choice, our design was shaping up to be a string of quick choices the player would be forced to make. But what sort of choices?
The time had come to do a little research. So I sat down and spent some time playing flash games on the internet. I made a point to frequently scribble in my notebook and say "Hrmm, interesting" loud enough for nearby coworkers to hear so as to avoid any suspicion that I was just goofing off. A few hours later, I had not won any ipods, but I had reached a few conclusions. I wanted the player to be looking around the moving environment trying to calculate the best time and position to strike so as to gain the highest benefit. Move, Strike, Move, Strike.
Hacking into a computer has a lot of metaphors that have led to some interesting, if not particularly technically accurate metaphors over the years. So I decided to go with the metaphor of the "virus" trying to infect the "data", whilst trying to avoid "anti-virus" programs. The avatar would swing around a ring, and then, when they could find a spot that was relatively safe of the anti-virii, move one step closer to the final goal. The player would be balancing their resources of proximity to the center and safety, while their time resources were trickling away.
And so I ended up with something that looked like Frogger, but if you were trying to cross a rotary. Frogger is a classic game that has proven the strength of its mechanics again and again over the years and it helped me achieve the goals I had for the minigame.
1) Don't make it so elaborate that players feel they have to grind through it.
2) Don't make it so simple that it becomes a mindless speedbump in the gameplay.
3) Maintain Immersion in the Mass Effect Universe.
In the Xbox 360 version, the minigame used the classic whack-a-mole mechanic, but with GamePad buttons instead of small mammals. It did a good job of creating an engaging minigame that the player had to focus intently on, but many people felt that the "Push the blinking lights to unlock the door" interface broke the immersion a little bit. So, we decided to take another stab at it.My first thought when I was designing the new minigame was that I wanted the analogy to be a little closer to what the characters in the game were doing. Whenever anyone does something technical in Mass Effect, they make a fist to bring up their omni-tool, the sweet holographic PDA gauntlet. When they use it, the holographic ring swivels around and they poke at buttons as they pass by. Swivel, Poke, Swivel, Poke. The game interface was basically already there.
So how elaborate should the mini-game be? If the game is too long and involved, it pulls people away from the game, and after they've completed it several times, it becomes an elaborate chore. If the game is too short and simple, then it is simply an annoying interruption in the flow of the game. To me, the minigame is like rolling the dice for a skill check in a pen and paper game. The advantage of the minigame over the dice roll however, is that the player is given the opportunity to sway their luck one way or the other. It is that brief moment of truth where the player anxiously determines if they have what it takes to open the chest, or in Mass Effect's case, hack the crate.
The original decryption minigame did a great job of maintaining that sense of tension as the player poised to press the buttons as they lit up, but ultimately it was purely a test of reflexes. In order to make the player feel like they were actually learning and reasoning their way through the game, I wanted to add an element of choice. So to combine tension and choice, our design was shaping up to be a string of quick choices the player would be forced to make. But what sort of choices?
The time had come to do a little research. So I sat down and spent some time playing flash games on the internet. I made a point to frequently scribble in my notebook and say "Hrmm, interesting" loud enough for nearby coworkers to hear so as to avoid any suspicion that I was just goofing off. A few hours later, I had not won any ipods, but I had reached a few conclusions. I wanted the player to be looking around the moving environment trying to calculate the best time and position to strike so as to gain the highest benefit. Move, Strike, Move, Strike.
Hacking into a computer has a lot of metaphors that have led to some interesting, if not particularly technically accurate metaphors over the years. So I decided to go with the metaphor of the "virus" trying to infect the "data", whilst trying to avoid "anti-virus" programs. The avatar would swing around a ring, and then, when they could find a spot that was relatively safe of the anti-virii, move one step closer to the final goal. The player would be balancing their resources of proximity to the center and safety, while their time resources were trickling away.
And so I ended up with something that looked like Frogger, but if you were trying to cross a rotary. Frogger is a classic game that has proven the strength of its mechanics again and again over the years and it helped me achieve the goals I had for the minigame.
1) Don't make it so elaborate that players feel they have to grind through it.
2) Don't make it so simple that it becomes a mindless speedbump in the gameplay.
3) Maintain Immersion in the Mass Effect Universe.
posted by Dan Chretien at
5:15 PM
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