Games * Design * Art * Culture. Saturday, January 31, 2004 Interviewing at Avalon Hill In 1983, I was sharing a roach-infested hovel on Amsterdam Avenue with my friend Tom Gould. Since I'd graduated from college, about 18 months previously, I'd basically been screwing around--sponging off my Dad, playing a lot of games and reading science fiction, writing for fanzines, and working on the occasional boardgame design. I'd also started work on an Apple II game based on Poul Anderson's Flandry series (under license from Poul; it was to be published by Jim Baen of Baen Books, but was cancelled when the Atari crash hit, and Baen decided to pull out of software publishing). I decided, though, that I wasn't going to go back to grad school, and it was time to get more serious. Thus, I sent off my resume to a bunch of places--Sir Tech, Sierra Online, Coleco, Atari--and Avalon Hill. Back at the offices, Dott showed me around. I am not making this up. By passing through a doorway, you went from the past to the future.
Calculator Camera. Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment - Gameontology. Game Matters: Auto-dynamic difficulty. There is a zone beyond that which is known to game designers. It is a place as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between boredom and frustration, between easy and hard, and it lies between the tips of our fingers, and the sparks within our CPUs. This is the dimension of pleasure. It is an area which we call... THE FUN ZONE. (Forgive me, Rod!) Okay, that out of the way, I'm going to start off with an actual, complete email I sent to the project leader of Max Payne a few months before the initial release of that game in mid-2001, almost three years ago: From: "Scott Miller" To: "....... .......
" As can be gathered in this email, it's my opinion that games should only rarely allow players to set their own difficulty level. One of the key challenges developers must overcome in broadening the appeal of our games is making our games less hardcore in nature. Sequels, especially, are a breeding ground for ramped up game difficulty. Starcraft: Bot Fight. I’m not sure who will find this interesting.
This is an AI analysis of a ten year old videogame. This entire endeavor will sound absurd to people familiar with the game in question, and hopelessly esoteric to those that aren’t. Still, I’m putting this up in case there is someone else out there who is just as peculiar as I am, in that I find this sort of thing intensely compelling. About a month ago I wrote a Starcraft scenario which allowed you to observe a game between AI players. I’ve been curious about the quirks in the Starcraft AI and I’ve wanted a chance to see them do their thing in a deterministic environment.
I learned some surprising things about this ten-year-old gem. The setup is this: Seven AI players. I’d usually let the game run overnight and check on the results in the morning. At first I just set the difficulty to “normal”, but I found that the computer players were far too likely to consume all the resources on the map, go broke, and then just sit there. The Results.