Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
92
U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
We still use boss actors, they’re just not necessarily at the far right-hand side of the
screen anymore! In 3-D games, we still use minibosses and bosses all the time.
Minibosses can be used to accent certain high-octane parts of a level or mission.
Maybe one level is a battle through an order of vampires in their infested lair, and defeating
their leader is a miniboss experience. Ultimate bosses are still used as an action
highpoint, a game climax, and the capstone to your experience in the game. They
are handled just like any other actor, except that they tend to be greater in size and
ability than anything you’ve seen previously in the game.
Making great boss actors that behave in interesting and challenging ways depends
on the power of your script pipeline. In other words, your script system must be dynamic
and powerful, and your game engine must be able to read and convert edited
scripts into action.
TYPES OF PROPS AND THEIR USE
Props are used functionally in many ways throughout our game scenes. Any item or
artifice that litters or populates your game environment is a prop. There are three basic
categories that props tend to fall into:
� Static props Props that don’t change and can’t be damaged, such as tables
or chairs in a bar scene, or cots, toilets, and sinks in a prison cell scene. They
just litter the world to make the game look (hopefully) more real in the ways
you want it to. Environments not only have furniture pieces, but also have
debris, clutter, and disarray.
� Damageable props Props that have multiple potential states in the
environment. They are not static; they change dependent on circumstances.
For example, a potential damageable prop is a ceiling support column. If it
can be destroyed and reduced to rubble (by a rocket, for example), you need
a particle effect (dust clouds), a destruction animation of the column collapsing,
and a new final state for the column (chunks of the column on the ground).
This prop, when shot, transforms from a solid state to a collapsed state. Think
of the hundreds of examples of damageable props in the games you’ve played:
boxes shredded to splinters, gas cans exploded, and so on.
� Scripted props The most complex props, since they generally require
everything damageable props require and more. Let’s say we’re going to
shoot an alien incubator with a gelatinous beast in it. We want this event
to provoke outrage and begin an attack on the shooter. We need everything
required for a damageable prop (glass explosion particle effect, broken
incubator, dead beast), and we also need to write a script to create the onset
of the resulting attack.