Game Design-Vania

Welcome to my game design blog, Jim Howard’s blog that is. Game Design-Vania is my first serious entry into the two things; blogging my thoughts and sharing criticism of all things games (mostly digital) with the internets. The blog’s title is a bit curious as it birthed from a current obsession with Castlevania, particularly Symphony of the Night and Harmony of Despair both on Xbox Live Arcade; the word or name “Vania” has a meaning of its own.

From thinkbabynames.com -

“The girl’s name Vania \v(a)-

nia\ is pronounced VAHN-yah. It is ofLatin origin, and the meaning of Vania is “brings good news”. Short form ofEvangelina; variant of Ivana. See alsoVanna.”

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Google returned the above definition as the first and best result to “define vania” so I’ll accept it for now. The plan is to deliver my own thoughts on games providing opinions and analysis that may be useful to those in the games industry or to entertain interested parties. Useful things are always good so I just looped back to the original meaning, “to bring good news”.

Facebook was actually the reason that I finally picked up the motivation to start a tumblr. The original status update was to be this:

“played a ton of Castlevania: Harmony of Despair last night into the morning. Castlevania HoD takes the level navigation components of the franchise and combines them with a timer and the ability to play cooperatively or competitively with friends; this fast paced title lacks the depth of the previous titles. That’s not a bad thing but it makes me think of a Castlevania title that can be played in turns for 15-20 min intervals like HoD (30 min levels) and I know there’s the puzzle game on iPhone. So I condense it, Castleville, “Hey! Jim Howard needs more blood so that he can feed his vampire sheep! Can you help him?” No, that would be terrible. I wonder if the crazy whip-toting designer behind the franchise, Igarashi, would mind a tactics-vania? My final thought is that I need to play Vagrant Story. Dammit.”

Due to the character limitations I yielded and summoned tumblr. I apologize for the wall of text but this helps me keep my thoughts focused if the genesis of the post is left untampered with. Just kidding. Let’s actually analyze what I said there and the meaning.

“Castlevania HoD takes the level navigation components of the franchise and combines them with a timer and the ability to play cooperatively or competitively with friends; this fast paced titles lacks the depth of the previous titles.”

What a purist! Oh, that’s me up there. In comparison Symphony of the night (a predecessor) to Harmony of Despair was the first in the Castlevania series to integrate stat building elements found in role-playing titles and a heavier emphasis on equipment and usable items. This formula is very similar to the structure of Metroid.

In the original Metroid the one key piece of equipment or quest item is the morph-ball which allowed the main player to access new areas using the abilities of the ball. Items that granted you access to new areas are what drove the constant progression in Metroid and the same set of goals are applied to Castlevania: SotN.

Going one layer back up, my original quote was the concern for the lack of depth in Castlevania: HoD and this can be explained effectively in the screenshots to follow.

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What you are seeing is the fully explored and revealed in-game map for SotN. It may not make a whole lot of sense to the unfamiliar reader but let’s look at the map for HoD.

There’s reasons for the difference in size, complexity and number of rooms in the maps for the two Castlevania games. Each game serves a different purpose, the former, a huge step in the evolution of the series and then the most recent an experiment and marketing device to keep the name alive and fresh for the upcoming retail release of Lords of Shadow.

SotN was designed with the core Metroid formula in mind and was modified to include character stat building elements to accommodate the less determined players. This meant that even when you acquired the newest “morph-ball” and still had difficulty overcoming the boss that happens to block the only door left unexplored you could grind for a bit and level yourself up.

If it came down to playing the game as a role-playing title the saving grace was that extra time spent leveling was rewarded with gold and gems of value to sell in exchange for new equipment; simply put, it worked nicely as a method to balance the game.

HoD takes what made SotN so great and strips a great majority of the balanced system yet finds room to expand, and update the old yet robust design that’s still used in games today e.g. Shadow Complex, Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Instead of spending hours navigating and discovering one side of the Castle to the other like in SotN it is only mere minutes that pass when you have already made it halfway through the first map in HoD. This is because the the entire layout of the Castle is already revealed to you both on the pre-game mini-map and further assisted with the ability to zoom out of your character’s camera to see the entire Castle with all of the mechanics at work.

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The idea for this feature is to get the player(s) thinking and planning their navigation and important questions arise in the process. How long will it take to reach the boss? Should we loot all of the common treasures, rare treasures? What monsters should we avoid? What switches need to be accessed to open what areas? Is the pizza done?

All of these decisions and then some must be made, put into action and successfully executed along with the victory condition, defeat the boss, within a thirty minute limit. I won’t dive too far into what the risk and rewards are because at that point I may as well write a review but I had an intimate discovery while writing this entry. Playing through these HoD levels are quick, decisive and sometimes even irrational but are immensely enjoyable and a test of teamwork, if playing multi-player, furthermore skill-based.

Looking back on those feelings of what it felt to traverse and win and fail the levels have led me to one overwhelming thought; I’m navigating a meta castle. This isn’t mind blowing and if my intended audience is reading then it should not be. My brain tickles at the thought of meta design because then HoD is not just a stripped down lite version of SotN because perhaps it could exist to be a castle within a castle.

Stick with me here. The basic components that make up a labyrinth, specifically of the Castlevania variety were built into HoD. Although, what if instead of spending ten hours exploring a Transylvania mansion with over 200 rooms I’m only spending ten minutes reaching my planned destination maybe going through twenty openly lit rooms? The possibility that the twenty room maze could exist as a part of the larger castle speaks of meta design to me.

Before I even reached half of this post maybe my initial thoughts were a longing for HoD to be more like SotN. I wanted a more epic experience in having the ability to take my friends on a quest to explore Dracula’s humble yet eerie abode with his extraneous room and boarding space, ceiling high libraries, depressingly damp torture chambers and unwanted guests of the demon, ghost and Lovecratian variety just to name a few.

But. After spending almost ten hours with HoD in a multi-player setting it appears strongly that meta was best. Simple was the idea yet when it came to the design phase, a smaller component of the larger base was the construct. For me, HoD works because it is a meta experience and one impressively so because of my time spent with previous Castlevania titles.

The change of pace is appreciated and the design works in a profound way that with less space your decisions must be made faster and the planning becomes much stronger and thought-out. SotN and Metroid are mazes that require careful steps along the way and a deep exploration of an undiscovered space for the player. HoD is a meta maze, similar to the ones that Ariaddne draws up for Cobb in Inception and the constricting boundaries seem to work for me.

I heard one of my game design professors, Dr. Howard, on a podcast reference another scholar’s (Jesse Schell) thoughts on level design. “That not only does the designer create the space that the player navigates and how they traverse it but the encompassing labyrinth determines the time allocated and set to escape or conquer the maze.”

After all, what’s the point of a maze if one could just sit in the middle and just chill, not get lost just knowingly pop a squat?

In a way I see that timer at the top of the screen in HoD a bit of a blooper, like something that should have been taken out for the final version of the product. The designers of the game created the mazes and in doing so set the countdown but shouldn’t we, the players, choosing to navigate the maze be aware that we only have so much time to find our way out after we so eagerly have jumped in?