I’m going to talk about a format-related topic that isn’t strictly related to BARfly. It deals with the formatting of early video games with randomly set-up designs, and how they were able to accomplish lots of replay value with “a different style of game every time you play.”
To design a game to be more enjoyable, you try to make the experience as unique as possible whenever the game is played or replayed. One of the ways you do this is to randomize some parts of a game. Mainly, the map design, the character placement, the protagonist’s starting position, and the order of appearance of items or other objects.
But why did some games employ this and not others? And why is randomization mostly a thing of past games and not more modern ones?
In part it’s because the programming and design effort necessary for a quality-controlled, randomized game environment requires more time and resources, but this isn’t a huge issue for the most part. The real reason so many early games had randomization was because of compression. You don’t have a lot of memory to store your map and character data–let’s see, how do we best represent a level design with less?
The answer was often to just remix the level differently every time, because that way, you don’t require a lot of memory to store static designs. I’ve already mentioned Diablo, Kroz, and Vintage Hyperactive, all games with randomizations. But I’d like to talk about some games that came out even earlier, with far less obvious implementations of randomization.
The first example is Impossible Mission. Below are screenshots of the game, which, by themselves, are static, meaning they look the same every time you play the game. But the rooms, as they appear in the overall map, are in different locations in the game each time you play. Think of each room as a very large “brick” that can be “moved around” at will.
There are other randomizations, too, like robot AI, puzzle piece locations, and puzzle piece appearance and interlock abilities. I’ve talked in depth about this game on my Impossible Mission tribute site, so I won’t repeat too much. But I will say that the Commodore 64 developer, lacking a whole lot of memory with which to store maps, would have had an incentive to make an algorithm for level generation instead of a static map, which takes up more memory.
The next example is far less obvious. This is Tarzan, for the ColecoVision. You might think, do entire screens get moved around like “bricks” like in Impossible Mission? Well, no. It’s a lot more subtle than that.
The top (trees and vine background) and bottom (jungle floor and rivers) each have a set of “lanes” that can feature a sequence of individual background terrain segments. It’s not a total mishmash of disparate terrains, of course: quality steps are implemented to ensure that smooth transitions between ground, water, and tree are always present.
It certainly doesn’t LOOK like randomly generated terrain. But each conventional screen is different, every time you play the game. The basic “appearance” of the terrain doesn’t change much, but each screen is unique save a handful of scripted screens, which are statically put together.
When such quality games have random level generation, it inevitably makes me wonder why some of the most impressive games with level design out there did NOT have random designs. In particular, I would have loved to see randomization in the maps for games like Metroid or Zelda. After all, these games also had to compress data, and it should come as no surprise that they employed some of the same compression strategies.
But you can’t always get what you want. Budgets and deadlines often determine what a software developer is allowed to do, and static design allows for more consistent human-supervised quality control.
Of course, game design has gotten so advanced anymore, and there are such incredible tools at the developer’s disposal, that it’s a wonder that randomization is not more standard fare these days. Budgets are bigger; teams are larger. Maybe starting with my planned game Brian’s Journey, we can trend towards randomization?