Infected Developer Diary #2: Diagram of a Game Design

Planet Moon's Infected is a zombified PSP shooter with a sinister twist. Through the unique multiplayer mode, you can literally infect other people's games with your own custom-created character, effectively spreading your presence around the globe if you're good enough. The game will contain some rather unusual deathmatch modes, and here to tell us how one of the strangest ones came about is none other than the game's producer, Aaron Loeb.

Diagram of a Game Design

By Aaron Loeb, Producer, Planet Moon Studios

This week, I'd like to illustrate how one of our Infected multiplayer modes, Mad Cow, came into being.

One day, Rich Sun, our network engineer, said to us all, "Let's make a multiplayer game called Retarded Chicken." Apart from our general concern that, you know, that might be kinda offensive, we were all into the idea. In the middle of the map, there'd be a chicken. Everyone rushes toward it. First person to pick it up becomes the eponymous RC and runs around like...well, a chicken with its head cut off. The chicken is defenseless and tries to survive as long as it can. The longer a player is the chicken, the more points he gets.

This is the way game designs often come about. Someone trial balloons a nutty notion. Usually they get savagely shot down by everyone else in the office and mocked for weeks, told that all their ideas are dumb and get empty beer cans thrown at their head. This is called the Whitta principle, named after Gary Whitta (the legendary games journalist and writer), who once illustrated the creative process with the following diagram:

In the case of Rich's Retarded Chicken, however, everyone liked the idea and just wanted to massage it a little. We wanted a game mode more in the line of infections (given that our game is called Infected and features passing infections between players), so the idea of Mad Cow was born.

As you can see from the footage that's included with this diary, the Mad Cow mode is quite similar to the original notion, except for a couple of minor tweaks:

The chicken is now a cow.
In the grand scheme of things, this is not much of a change. Chickens and cows both are found on farms, and both are fun to blow up. Although, sadly, the change negated the "with its head cut off" metaphor, it did let us have a character model with a giant udder. Udders are good; this is a known fact and is incontestable by any rational person.

The cow is not defenseless.
Rich initially made it so that the person who becomes the cow had no weapons. For this he was yelled at, called names, had empty beer cans thrown at his head, and subjected to other such humiliations. He then gave the cow weapons, and that is what you see today. This decision was fortuitous. Running around as a cow with a chainsaw is good; this is another known fact, incontestable by any rational person.

The objective of the Mad Cow game remains intact from the initial premise. There is a cow on the map. You run to the cow. If you pick up the cow first, you become the cow. Everyone tries to turn you into pot roast. When you die, you drop the cow. The next person to pick it up becomes the cow. The person who was the Mad Cow for the longest time during the session wins.

Like the other multiplayer modes in Infected, Mad Cow can be played with up to eight players. The video demonstrates a four-player Mad Cow match being played by Kevin. A lot of people asked me after last week's diary who Kevin is; he's the guy playing the game in the video. He works at Majesco, in marketing. Kevin likes walks on the beach, candlelit dinners, and painting the streets of New York with zombie guts.

As you can see from the initial setup, the host has a number of gameplay details he can tweak. Kevin can choose the time limit and the score limit--in this case, he sets the time limit to 20 minutes and the score limit to 120, which means that the first person to accumulate a total of 120 seconds as a cow will win the session.

Kevin also opts to leave "allow upgrades" on "no." If he had selected "yes," this would be a competitive game in which each player would bring the upgrades they've purchased in single-player into the multiplayer game. This means that every player has an incentive to bring their best profile into the session, but risks getting that profile infected.

Usually, the allow upgrades option defaults to no, but when you play deathmatch in infrastructure, it is automatically set to yes. Did I say "deathmatch in infrastructure"? Why, yes I did...

We previously told the world that Infected would be ad hoc Wi-Fi only, meaning you could only play it against people in your immediate physical area. However, our whole goal with Infected is to let people "Infect the World" with their PSPs. The best way to do that is to let them play each other head-to-head across the Internet. So, I am pleased to announce here, exclusively on GameSpot, that working secretly in our Planet Moon laboratories, we have partnered with GameSpy to add infrastructure gameplay to Infected.

You can now automatch a one-on-one deathmatch game with another person across the Internet. I'll tell you all about it and show you a little video of infecting another player in next week's developer diary.

Until then: See the cow, be the cow.