Freedom Force Designer Diary #7

Entry #7 - 07/17/01

In this diary I want to touch on one of the most important elements of game design--the interface. Paradoxically, building a good game interface is usually rewarded by people not noticing what you have done. Interface is one of those things that you've generally screwed up if people pay attention to it.

Freedom Force's interface is very streamlined.

The interface really should be a seamless connection between you, the game player, and the game. It should be there when you want it, serving you up whatever information you want, and it should get out of your way when you don't want it. It should also somehow allow you to directly connect to and control the game without having to think about what you are doing.

A great example of a good control interface is that of a modern car. When you drive a car, you are largely or completely unaware of what you are actually doing--pressing the brake pedal, shifting gears, and so on. Instead, you are thinking about slowing down, turning, speeding up--pretty much just as you do when you walk or run. In many ways, the car becomes an extension of your body in the same way that a prosthetic arm or leg would. A game interface is really no different--or at least a good one isn't.

The game's AI will control the camera for the player.

Bad game interfaces are ones that require you to do extra work, don't provide you sufficient information to play the game properly, or overload you with too much information. Striking the right balance is hard.

In Freedom Force we have a bunch of things that make it hard to make a good interface. Firstly we are setting you, the player, up with quite a difficult task--controlling up to four heroes in real time in a fully 3D environment. To add to the difficulty, that 3D environment is often a city with tall buildings that obscure your view. We think we've come up with solutions to most of these problems, and I'll talk through some of those in this column. In particular, I am going to concentrate on the display interface--how we present information to you both through the rendered world and the other onscreen dialogues and menus.

So how do we show you the world and your characters in it so that it looks good and so that you have enough information to plan your actions properly? One of the biggest challenges in the Freedom Force display from day one has been camera positioning. Naturally, since this is a 3D game, people expect to be able to freely rotate and zoom the camera. Naturally also, since this is a game about larger-than-life characters, people expect to see those characters at a decent size onscreen. But these desires fight against some important gameplay elements.

In my opinion, camera zoom and rotation should not be handled by the player. Why? Because most games aren't about flying a camera around. Freedom Force, for example, is about controlling a team of superpowered heroes, not about controlling a camera. If the game was about filming the exploits of a superteam, then we might require the player to fly the camera around constantly. Otherwise, the camera controls are really a distraction from the rest of the gameplay.