I already talked about Garry Ware in a previous blog post. But there, I will write its own post.
How I thought of it
I was frustrated by Fretta. The cycling gamemodes concept is a great idea for Garry’s Mod. But each gamemode was frustrating for various reasons.
For those who don’t know, Fretta is a base gamemode where coders can append their own gamemode if they adapt it on Fretta’s system. Players vote for the gamemode they want to play at any time, and are forced to vote after a certain timelimit in the gamemode.
An outdated concept where everything orbits
Bomb Tag is a great gamemode, but it lacked (at that time) player action. I use to play Team Fortress 2 because of its constant action, because you don’t need to wait to play unlike CS:S. Bomb Tag draws players into inactivity after they get killed. It had various problems because of players joining in the middle of a game, or given the item while they haven’t spawned yet.
Laser Dance was quite pity for me, mostly because of the poor gameplay, and because when playing with HDR on, there’s no way to target the enemies.
If we look from far, all gamemodes require the players to kill each other. I mean, the concept is very old. That’s one point, I wanted to make a game where you didn’t need to kill anyone.
A flaw because we are in Garry’s Mod
The second thing was, we are in Garry’s Mod. Anyone can program it’s own legal cheat script because Garry’s Mod allows you to freely code any script. So in Sniper Wars for example, or Laser Dance, cheaters pretty won at all games because an aimbot is easy to code or to obtain. It was litteraly « who has the best aimbot ? » match. So that’s the second point : Players wouldn’t possibly cheat by scripting.
First Person Shooter
One idea came into mind. I had two DS games, well actually, one DS game and one GBA special cartridge to plug in a Nintendo DS. It was WarioWare : Touched ! and WarioWare : Twisted ! . Those games were basically frenetic minigames where you had to perform an unforeseen quick action in a short timelapse, over and over. It utilizes the Stylus and Microphone, or the 1-axis Accelerometer. In the case of WarioWare : Smooth Moves, it uses the Wiimote.
Note that WarioWare : Myself wasn’t announced when I made Garry Ware !
The problem was, we are in a multiplayer environment, and a First Person Shooter. How could I make that playable ?
Everything was based either on :
- Either do I need skill or practice to win that game (Calculate, Get to the top, Shoot in the right order) …
- Or would it be Musical Chairs, so we have an objective but not enough for everyone (Break one chair, Listen up) …
- Finally, would I take the right decision to avoid being ejected or of the ring (Don’t touch the sky, Don’t move, Avoid the balls).
It hold itself together. Technically, every player would have what I did call when I made that game, an « achieved » state and a « destiny » state. Players would start in a certain achieved state, that could be changed at any time, but would be validated as soon as the destiny state is applied.
For example, in the game Work as a team, Break all crates, players would start with an unachieved state. Then when they will break a crate, they will go on an achieved state, to indicate that they have contributed to the objective. Then, if all crates are broken, everyone gets their achieved states validated. But, if time runs out and crates remain, then, everyone’s achieved state are reverted to unachieved and they are validated, indicating everyone lost, because the objective was to break all crates.
Kilburn’s contribution
The original Garry Ware suffered from flaws. Especially, the map size was either too small or too big because of the numbers of players in the server. Kilburn addressed that problem by creating rooms for minigames.
Basically, the main map is meant to contain a room with boxes, and a flat checkerboard room. Kilburn allowed the minigames to use either those two rooms according to the minigame’s needs. Then, the game will choose which room size to use according to the number of players.
He also made making minigames alot easier thenks to a flourish of functions that help us getting a table of all possible landmarks in a certain room, and to choose a certain number amongst them, along with making hooks easier to put in place.
Several very complex and elaborate minigames are his.
Conclusion
The concept hold itself. Players have a tendency to always want to aim at other player’s heads in gamemodes. What if they use their own head ? I don’t think it’s a bad idea to put IQ-based minigames in a first person shooter. It is itself hard because you need to think about the answer, but put yourself in the right 3D position in order to announce your answer easily when you’ll get to aim at the answer to validate it.
The game suffers from flaws at this time. The problem currently is due to the way I knew tables at this time. I didn’t know about Garbage Collector, and it seems that the game stutters in some cases because of the way I manage tables.
I am also amazed at how gamemodes in Fretta become popular very easily. While elaborate gamemodes fail because of advertisement, the Fretta base gamemode pretty encourages coders to adapt their lone gamemode for it, just because it becomes easily popular when distributed through the official Garry’s Mod Beta SVN, or if a Fretta server with this gamemode on is popular.
Garry’s Mod is a great opportunity to create your own game. I have a tendency to hate mods on Source Engine because you need to install then, and in the end, not much players are on the servers … while there are many players on this officially distributed third party mod. Things spread fast.
