cloudy mountain (aka “ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS cartridge”) for the intellivision is a pack of neat little ideas. today an ad&d-licensed game would probably involve talking to bartenders in rural towns to take quests to go investigate a cave and kill blork the orc and bring back his stolen magic sigil, bringing you one half-step toward your ultimate goal of reaching the ancient temple and banishing the mad god. it would probably look a lot like the new elder scrolls game, basically. but in 1982 tom loughry of mattel’s “blue sky rangers” had to choose just one aspect of the dungeons & dragons experience to focus on. he chose the suspense of navigating an unknown cave system while a trecherous dungeon master springs traps and monsters on you every time you discover a new room.
what aids the sense of suspense and strategy in cloudy mountain is the limited stock of arrows the player has with which to slay enemies. she starts the game with three, and she can pick up more in the caves but they can be hard to find. the player needs to be careful in choosing which monsters to kill, which to avoid, and which to try and lure away from the treasures they’e guarding. the player can’t see into the next chamber until she enters it, but there are visual and audio clues to whether a monster is lurking in the next chamber, and what kind. a cow skull in a room, for example, indicates a dangerous monster laired in one of the adjacent chambers. standing near the doorway, the player can hear the flapping of bat wings, the snoring of a dragon, or the slurping of a slime.
this kind of clue is distinctive of cloudy mountain’s approach to design, which is to convey as much information as possible through the game world itself, rather than say a list of numbers on a status screen, like an elder scrolls game might. for example, the protagonist’s health – the number of monster attacks she can withstand before dying – is represented by the color of the protagonist on the screen, changing from black to warmer colors as she approaches death. the player’s remaining lives are represented by the number of dots that make up her adventuring party as she wanders around the map screen. the only other number to track is the number of arrows the player has in her quiver, and the game does something pretty clever to keep this off the screen.
(the player also accumulates a few tools, an axe, a boat and a key, but these are one-time use items that require work to obtain so relying on the player to remember she has them isn’t asking too much.)
one of the buttons on the controller is a “count arrows” button (the intellevision controller has a grid of buttons and an overlay to slide over them, specific to the game, to remind you what they are). when the player presses the count arrows button, the game plays a series of audio ticks – one tick for each arrow left in her quiver. if she’s only got, say, five or fewer, then the ticks are easy to count, and the number of arrows available to her is important. if the player has too many to easily count, then the specific number’s not important: it’s clear she’s got a lot, and she’s safe for a while.
using an audio reminder is super smart in a game that already places such importance on having the sound up and listening for the telltale sounds that convey information, and forcing the player to stop and take count of her arrows makes sense in a game that emphasizes planning over panic. and it lets the game cut out a level of abstraction, of distance, that having a big number plastered on every screen would create. as a similar example, look at the brilliant nes game AIR FORTRESS, and how it uses audio and visual tells, not a clock on the screen, to indicate how close a fortress is to self-destructing.
here’s a video of cloudy mountain (or rather its unlicensed prototype, “adventure”). notice how clean the game is, and how much the audio tells us about what’s going on. when you hear a series of rapid-fire ticks, that’s the player checking her arrows.
19 comments
This is a wonderful discovery, this game sounds so elegant. And listen to the insight in this comment on the youtube video!
“this game is basically the first survival horror game.”
From here the game seems like a streamlining of the survival horror genre…
Being able to get hints about monsters outside of sight is one of the little clever things that really thoughtful RPGs will do. It’s one of the reasons that one of the most useful potions in Rogue is Detect Monster; if you know where the monsters are, you can usually ensure that you stay out of their sight, which is very important in a game where even single monsters are difficult opponents near the end.
Air Fortress is greatly underrated, yes.
> to convey as much information as possible through the game world itself, rather than say a list of numbers on a status screen, like an elder scrolls game might.
Man! I’ve been saying since forever that all RPGs should do that. Especially systems related to magic would gain much by hiding their numbers. The visible statistics seem to me a leftover from mechanical necessities of tabletop RPGs that not many tried to analyze from a design POV.
Roguelike Radio interviewed the creators of Dungeons of Dredmor recently, and they described a protracted internal battle between members of the team over the question of whether to include numbers in the user interface of Dungeons of Dredmor. Apparently several major revisions and a lot of development time went into number-free versions of the game, but eventually the main proponent of avoiding them had to capitulate: in his words, they ran out of ways to convey “bonus” or “progress” to the player without displaying numbers.
Dungeons of Dredmor, however, has a pretty recondite (some might say incondite), system. You can’t have numberless gameplay, perhaps, without it constraining, in a way, the complexity, if not the depth, of the game. After all, the visual and auditory channels are somewhat sparse if symbolic communication is restricted.
That podcast is here, by the way: http://roguelikeradio.blogspot.com/2011/10/interview-with-gaslamp-games-developers.html
I played this game so much when I was younger, and there were few more terrifying things than the sound of monsters lurking in the shadows, and only hearing a mere three ticks when hitting the count arrows button. Intellivision games in general had a way of communicating so much with so little, especially in the sound department.
Making the complexity hidden doesn’t mean it goes away or that depth is restricted. It just means a few obsessed nerds will keep track of the hidden numbers with gamefaqs and romhacks, while the rest of us will enjoy the thrill of not knowing (like, say, Pokémon EVs/IVs).
As I hinted, I find this technique would be particularly relevant for magic in a fantasy setting. I find magic in videogames to be distinctly unmagical. If we are to even approach the æsthetic appeal of magical thinking (as featured, say, on Tolkien’s books (but not movies), or The Last Unicorn, or Le Guin, or folktales etc), I think a good start would be to make all the numbers and mechanics hidden and unpredictable (which does not mean having less parameters—on the contrary, more parameters would be better). If you can see the inner workings of the occult, it’s by definition not “occult” at all; it’s just sci-fi superpowers.
I think my disagreement steems perhaps from this notion of a necessity of conveying “bonus or progress”. What I consider a good videogame is probably very different from the goal of the Dredmor guys. Then again, I was one of the few persons on Earth who enjoyed the desert scene in Breath of Fire III.
(But I’m not saying this kind of technique would be good only for atmosphere in plot-driven fantasy RPGs. In Brazilian arcades we used to tape over the lifebars on Street Fighter II, to great effect.)
Hiding the numbers is all well and good. Most people will end up with a fairly accurate system of estimates fairly quickly. What interests me most about this design is the multiple sources of indirect hinting. Basically, if you are looking right at the monster, it is already too late. It also strikes me as being like Minesweeper: The RPG
I’ve known enough deaf gamers- and spent enough time as a teenager gaming with the volume down- that I think I’d be awfully hesitant in this day and age to design a game that relies so heavily on auditory cues without corresponding visual cues as well.
I wonder how visual indications could be worked into the game as well? In a hypothetical modern remake, I can see different floor tiles being used as clues for the sharp-eyed player to indicate what was in upcoming rooms (webs on the walls to indicate the presence of a giant spider, etc), but I’m not sure what I’d do to communicate arrow count- perhaps have a visible quiver with an appropriate number of arrows in it onscreen? A quiver that changed shape or color as you gathered arrows?
- HC
theres a skull to let u know theres a monster nearby and your guy turns red when he’s almost dead holy shit this game from 1800 is better than skyrim
I think audience matters a lot with the count arrows thing. If you’re doing an iPhone or Android game, people aren’t going to have headphones on and they’re probably going to have their phone on mute, especially if they’re just getting a few rounds in on the subway. (Also, Flash games are popular to play at work / school, and players often have sound muted on those too.)
I think a high-budget game like Skyrim is oddly enough the only venue where there’s guaranteed to be sound, the valid concerns about deaf gamers notwithstanding.
Re: jabs at Skyrim: Never change, Anna.
Re: post: Many of the innovations you describe really more of a result of limitations of contemporary technology. Further the numerology and visual references in games reflect an appreciation of how we store data in our brains. No one (in this culture) holds *boop boop boop* arrows, we hold three arrows. Adding the additional step to convert auditory values to breaks immersion, because we’re busy translating a different reality into one that matches our internal one. While I agree that this game is clever in stretching its boundaries, it’s unfair to imply that numbers are necessarily abstractions.
Games are made of numbers, you know.
if you want to play the IT’S NOT LIKE REAL LIFE card, seanbaby, someone would have to STOP and COUNT her arrows, she wouldn’t have a number floating in front of her face. and having to stop and count fits really well into the pacing of this game: sneak around, stumble on a monster, run away firing hours, remember to stop to breathe and check your arrow count.
games, or at least digital games, are made of numbers, but as computer-mediated experiences, digital games also have a tremendous capacity for withholding information. and what information is allowed to the player and how it is presented has a tremendous affect on how a game is experienced. cloudy mountain is suspenseful. elder scrolls: oblivion feels like a spreadsheet sometimes.
Regarding this not being very friendly for hearing-impaired gamers, I agree, but a modern reinterpretation could substitute a transitory visual cue for the audio cue. At the time, they probably were limited by what they could display and so couldn’t.
@Failrate: Oh, I agree- I’m not criticizing the game. In retrospect, my previous post probably came across as more Why Won’t Somebody Think Of The… than I had really intended… What I was getting at was really just that I generally think that designing interfaces dependent on audio cues alone isn’t a good idea.
- HC
@Strider, definitely, although an interesting thought would be to make a version of this game that is entirely audio for gamers with vision impairments (or possibly to help simulate a sepulchurally dark environment for fully vision enabled gamers). I know that audio Doom is available for the vision-impaired.
Man, that is the first and hopefully the last time someone calls me seanbaby.
I don’t think games really need to keep secrets to be suspenseful, but I think that’s the line where we differ.
I see the issue of deaf gamers has been raised, and I think this is a small part of a fascinating subject in interface design: the interplay between elegance/efficiency and accessibility. An efficient interface uses all the resources at its disposal, but for every resource, there is a person who lacks it: language excludes those who don’t speak it, text excludes the illiterate, visuals exclude the blind, sound excludes the deaf, and so on. For another example relevant to Cloudy Mountain, the use of colour to signify health may be difficult for people with certain forms of colour-blindness.
This is an interesting topic to me because there are no easy answers — adding accessibility comes at a cost, and many people have needs that are mutually exclusive in any event. You see it discussed a lot in software design and especially in web design, but it doesn’t seem to be something that game designers are cognizant of as a whole.
The nice thing about the small-games renaissance is that there’s room for experimentation and niche products. I hope we see more of both games that explore the possibilities of UI, like this one, and games that target people with special needs.
In a situation like this, why not have a little box that displays every arrow, in something like a pile? If you can’t tell how many there are in the pile, you don’t need to know.
I mean, I know why THIS GAME didn’t have that; I’m speaking in general for games now. Just saying.
did you play pine, my aborted attempt at a cloudy mountain-inspired game? it does exactly what you described.
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